"BLACK HAND" SOCIETY.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8248, 1 October 1906, Page 5

"BLACK HAND" SOCIETY.

NEW YORK, September 28. The Italian "Black Hand" Society in New York dynamited an Italian banker's tenement house. One hundred people were sleeping on the premises. They had a marvellous escape from death. A GREAT CRIMINAL ORGANISATION. DIABOLICAL PROCESSES. It was announced last month that the "Black Hand" had seoured a firm footing in the United States, where numerous orimes had been traced to its members. A terrible picture of the doings of the society was given in a recent issue of the New York Sunday Magazine, by Mr B. Brandenburg. The old Mafia, he writes, is dead, but from its ashes has arisen a hydra-headed anomaly that is the Attn curse of Southern Italy. In the United States the transplanted see'ls have sprouted into a flourishing institution, that bids fair to become the greatest criminal organisation of the world's history, the sporadic) expression of a great criminal condition, rather than a more or less extended group of outbreaks inspired by some organised and governed society. Ihe''.'Blaok Hand" is a gigantic menace to law and order, to the safety of life and property. There are chocking things yet to result from it. It is not an organised society,'with an individual head or a governing board, a roll of members, a treasury, a common oalabisjio'code, etc. It is the popular name of a body of about 25,000 Italian criminals, organised in gangs, wherever there is much Italian population. There may be one gang in a colony, or there may be twenty. The objeot of each gang is its own immediate [benefit, financially, politically and otherwise, and the only national form of organisation is the acquaintanceship and freemasonry among the leaders. The prinopal man in each gang, the capo, has usually been in a gang in Italy or in New York at some time previous, and the members of that gang are now heads of murderous groups else--where, the same as he is. The older criminals thus keep the newer gangs in touch with each other; and there is a dreadful day coming when some one, perhaps several, masterminds, such as the great Mussolino, will arise, and weld the hundreds of scattered gangs into a new Mafia, as organised in detail for campaigns of crime, as an army is organised for war. This is the status of the "Black Hand" tc-day—a large body of criminals .formed in gangs, the majority of tho leaders of which know each other, and exchange courtesies in the way of mailing threatening letters, pursuing a victim, shielding a and driving the stiletto into the heart of some condemned unfortunate. There are these distinct and diabolical prooesses wnich are a heritage from the old Mafia, and which every Italian un-derstands.—-(.I). The scroooo letter, tee anonymous thieatening letter, sometimes illiterate, sometimes scholarly, with a meaning ail the more terrible because it is veiled. (2). The omerta, the enforcement of silence among witnesses, «tn. (3). The coltello, or tbe kuife; in other words, secret, swift murder. Each gang has its sign, one leaving a blue sash on the otirpse; another leaving thirteen wounds; a'third twenty-one, the accepted number of tho New York Black Hand; a fourth a row of wounds on the body. Many gangs slash a man's face, as a seooad warning. (4) The sequestrazione or kidnapping of relatives of reluctant victims. 5. The surveillance di mori, oi the watch of death. This is more terriblegthan death itself. The victim is constantly doaged by the band; the shadow of death hangs over him wherever he goes, whatever he does; and with the Italian temperament the victim usually commits suicide or goes 'insane. After each outbreak of publio ;indignatiou, the leading Italians make speeches and write letters declaring there is no "Blaok llaiiri." To the writer's mind, a Hat of tho crimes it has com mitted is proof enough.