MURDER SOCIETIES.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2089, 25 May 1907, Page 4

MURDER SOCIETIES.

NEAV YORK “BLACK HAND” AND THE MAFIA..

Mysterious kidnapping and murders by the “Black Hand” in New York have just been unravelled at Palermo, Sicily, in the course of police investigations into a crime committed near that city, through the agency of the dreaded Sicilian “Mafia,” on July 13, 1906. On that date a rich and respected merchant, named Marchese, was found done to death by dagger wounds at Partinico. In his office were a quantity of blackmailing letters with threats of death from the Mafia in case of - non-compliance. Baffled while the police were finally put upon the track of a man of 80, named Nunzio Minore, who shortly before the crime in question had returned from New York to his wire and family. Then came informers to testify that Minore was one of the four assassins hired from the Mafia by the relatives of the murdered man, through over-anxiety to inherit his property. Simultaneously with his capture, Minore’s cottage, and also his sister’s house, not far away, were surrounded by carabinieri. Minore’s wife hastily hurled out of a back window into a ditch a bundle of incriminating documents which fell booty to the soldiery below. The raid on his sistetr Giuseppa’s dwelling led to other packets of correspondence being sequestrated from beneath the floor and behind the walls. But the evidence thus obtained of Minore’s complicity in the Marchese murder paled into significance beside the sensational revelations of his criminal connections with the “Black Hand” gang

in New York, who, in fact, had sent j him back to Sicily awhile, after vio-, loneo.- Hero is a characteristic case. In March, 1900, tho 14-year old son j of Antony Bozzuffi, a Now York banker, was kidnapped into a house in Fifty-iiinth-streot, Brooklyn. Twenty thousand dollars ranson was demanded of his father. Tho lad, however, escaped with tho connivance of a compassionate member of the “Black Hand,” named Salvatore Lungo, who had been told , off to guard him. Lungo, some mornings after, waß picked up a corpse, with stillotto and bullet wounds all over his body. Minora wit 3 convicted as tho author of the kidnapping; but the New York courts acquitted him of assassinating Lungo, or of belonging to the “Black Hand,” for want of evidence. The Palermo police have now been ablo to communicate tho missing, proofs to tho Now York Criminal Department, together wtili tho secret societies in the United. States. On their part, the Now York authorities have writton to the King’s Procurator-General at Palermo, stating that. the photographs sent liavo been easily identified, while they consider, tho proofs final. The Marcliese murder trial about to begin at Palonno will revoal some astounding connections bdtweon tho New York “Black Hand” and tho Sicilian Mafia.