Black Hand

Black Hand, symbol and name for a criminal and terroristic secret society, and especially associated with the Mafia and the Camorra. The Black Hand flourished in Sicily in the late 19th cent., and in the United States it was especially active in New York City at the beginning of the 20th cent. It is estimated that at one time 90% of New York City's Italian population was blackmailed by letters threatening death and marked with a black hand. Famous incidents associated with the Black Hand include the murder (1890) in New Orleans of chief of police Daniel Hennessy and the shooting (1909), in Palermo, Italy, of Lt. Joseph Petrosino of the New York City police.

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Black Hand

Secret Serbian society formed in 1911 primarily by army officers, which used terrorist methods to promote the liberation of Serbs outside Serbia from Habsburg or Ottoman rule. It conducted propaganda campaigns, organized armed bands in Macedonia, and established revolutionary cells throughout Bosnia. Within Serbia it dominated the army and wielded tremendous influence over the government. It gained its greatest notoriety with the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in 1914. After a trial in 1917, three leaders were executed and more than 200 were imprisoned. The name also referred to several extortion rackets run by immigrant Sicilian and Italian gangsters in the Italian communities of many large U.S. cities c. 1890–1920. Local merchants and wealthy individuals would receive threatening notes printed with black hands, daggers, or other menacing symbols that demanded money on pain of death or destruction of property. It declined with the beginning of Prohibition and large-scale bootlegging.

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Black Hand,

the sobriquet for the Mafia. [Am. Hist.: NCE, 1657]

See : Gangsterism