BLACK HAND SOCIETY.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3184, 8 May 1909, Page 3

BLACK HAND SOCIETY.

The cables recently have reported several outrages by the Bla.ck Hand Society in America, the outrage last week, that of setting fire to a tenenent in New York whereby eight Italian ir.mates were bunned to death, being a dastardly one. i Towards the end of the last century the Sicilian gangs which made their living by blackmail became aware that not a few Italians who had left ( their home country as peasants had acquired wealth across the Atlantic. Even the ordinary workman, they learnt, who could gain only 40 cents a,day in Sicily, could make tour timed" that wage in New York. Accordingly they hastened to exploit by their familiar methods the rich fields of the Italian co'ony in that city. It was not long before the American police found themselves faced by an elaborate machinery of crime far more ingenious and complicated than anything with which they had previously to deal. The tflack Hand, as the society called itself, proceeded normally to extort what "it wanted by frank demands and threats, and it did not hesitate at kidnapping, outrage and murder when these means seemed necessary to its ends. A\few specimen cases will illustrate the activities of this organisation. There was ."the murder, a couple of years ago, of Deranimo, an ex-policeman from Italy, through whose efforts a number of of the Mafia had been arrested. He had been pursued by of his enemies from city to city, until he was lured one day into the hallway 'of a tenement building in J New York, and shot dead. Then there was Ithe slaying or. Salvature Bossotto, , the son iof an Italian restaurant-keeper. lYoung Bossotto had called in the polite to arrest a Sicilian for attempting .to defraud of their money a party of Italian miners. One morning he found on the glass of the front door the sign of the "bridge of death" —a perpendicular line, crossed at regular intervals by three horizontal lines, with small crosses in the two spaces at the right hand.' !The prediction was fulfilled shortly after, 'when the accused Sicilian shoe Bossotto in his own restaurant. Last year there were several cases of-the dynamiting of stores in New York owned by Italians who had refused tribute to the Black Hand. It needed a body ,of State troopers to root out gangs ,of the Black Hand that had made "dens" in the Westmoreland, Fayette, and Washington counties. In one case the troopers could 'only , succeed in their attempt by blowing fup the house, gang and all. g'.t The very terrorism , inspired by*these criminals is, of course, their greatest protection. In too many cases the police hear nothing of the sending of the threats until the threats themselves are fulfilled.