Black Hand (extortion)

Black Hand was a method of extortion practiced by Italian immigrant gangsters of the Camorra and the Mafia, especially in the United States in Italian-American ghettos or neighborhoods.

American newspapers in the first half of the twentieth century sometimes made reference to an organized "Black Hand Society", a criminal enterprise composed of Italians, mainly Neapolitan and Sicilian immigrants.

[citation needed] The first use of the term "Black Hand" to describe Italian-on-Italian crime in the United States was in a 1903 Brooklyn, NY extortion case.

It was decorated with threatening symbols such as a smoking gun, hangman's noose, skull, or knife dripping with blood or piercing a human heart, and was frequently signed with a hand, "held up in the universal gesture of warning", imprinted or drawn in thick black ink.

[9] Author Mike Dash states "it was this last feature that inspired a journalist writing for The New York Herald to refer to the communications as 'Black Hand' letters – a name that stuck, and indeed, soon became synonymous with crime in Little Italy.