person to his New Orleans victims. They all paid, trembling in fear. All, that is, save a grocer named Pietro Pepitone. After Di Cristina visited Pepitone he sent his enforcers around later to collect. Pepitone announced he would not pay. For such effrontery Di Cristina sent word he'd come personally to collect his money. When Di Cristina strutted toward the grocer's store, Pepitone wordlessly picked up a shotgun, came out to the sidewalk and blew the Black Hander away.
In 1908 New York police estimated that for every Black Hand extortion they heard about at least 250 went unreported. If that was accurate, Black Hand depradations were truly staggering since there were 424 Black Hand offenses reported that year. Yet as big an industry as Black Handing was in New York, activities were undoubtedly greater in Chicago where it was estimated that upward of 80 different gangs operated, all unrelated to each other.
By about 1920 the Black Hand operators disappeared. Lupo the Wolf was in prison, albeit for counterfeiting, his second favorite pastime. Many members of the Sam Cardinella Black Hand ring in Chicago went to prison with Sam and his top aides were executed. The Di Giovanni mob in Kansas City suffered a number of convictions as did extortionists in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Some credit for the decline in Black Handing is given to federal officials who from 1915 started enforcing the laws prohibiting the use of the U.S. mail to defraud, but this came about only after considerable newspaper pressure. The extortionists shifted to private delivery of their notes.
However, by 1920 the exodus from the profession was enormous. Frankie Yale in Brooklyn, Scarface Di Giovanni in Kansas City, Vincenzo Cosmanno and the Genna brothers in Chicago all quit. They entered the much more profitable booze game, which writer Edward Dean Sullivan described as "No work—slight risk—vast remuneration." By comparison Black Hand setups were penny ante. Only a few unimaginative criminals kept at extortion and they were soon caught by the police, who suddenly got a steady flow of complaints from residents in Little Italies.
Bootlegging had turned the Italian communities into massive moonshine factories, with most families producing liquor for the bootleg gangs to sell. As these cottage industries developed, the Italian immigrants lost their fear of the police and saw they were actually in partnership with them, both being paid off by the bootleg gangs. And when you have a partner, you don't hesitate to ask a favor of him, such as taking care of this Black Hander who is bothering you.
See also: Cardinella, Salvatore "Sam"; Lupo the Wolf; Shotgun Man; White Hand Society.
Black Mafia One of the myths gaining currency about syndicate crime in America is that other ethnic groups will take over the basically Italian-Jewish combination that has ruled the underworld for well over half a century. This overlooks the fact that the development of organized crime (actually "syndicated crime," since any crime involving a gang of two or more members is "organized") was in fact an aberration due to a confluence of socioeconomic forces not likely to be repeated.
According to the "take-over" theory and what Ralph Salerno, former head of the organized crime intelligence squad in New York City, calls the Black Mafia, the members of syndicated crime have become upwardly mobile and will be replaced by those of lower-class status. It is a theory easily made but difficult to prove.
Crime springs from ghettos and the current occupants of ghettos are increasingly black and Hispanic, thus giving rise to speculation about a Black Mafia and a Cuban, or Latin, Mafia. There is no doubt that, as today's ghetto occupants, these ethnic groups have become the prime criminals—in terms of ordinary crime—that the Jews and Italians were before them and the Irish before that.
However, fundamental differences exist. The 19th-century Irish criminals, the largest such group by far at the time, were "organized" in the sense of having enormous gangs. But these Irish gangs were not syndicated. The Dead Rabbits gang in New York, for instance, did not have any special relationship with the Bloody Tubs in Philadelphia—no special working arrangements dividing up crime territories and activities. They did not sit in council as Angelo Bruno of Philadelphia's 20th-century crime family parleyed with Joe Bonnano of New York or Joe Zerilli of Detroit. The Irish gangs were organized, but there were no special arrangements that a New York gangster had to make with the Bloody Tubs before he killed someone in Philadelphia or Baltimore (to where the Tubs' influence extended).
The Jewish-Italian crime syndicate came about because of very special socioeconomic conditions in the United States. Surely Prohibition and the Great Depression help explain why organized syndicate crime developed in this country, and in a form that is unique throughout the world. Syndicate crime in the United States, in operation, was and is more pervasive than organized criminal activities anywhere in the world, including the Mafia's homeland of Sicily.
Why was this aberration possible only in the United States? Firstly, there was Prohibition, probably the most sweeping social experiment of the 20th century short of social revolution. Without Prohibition the upward mobility of Jewish and Italian gangsters would have
