Look up Black Hand in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Black Hand or The Black Hand may refer to:
Black Hand or The Black Hand may refer to:
Unification or Death, popularly known as the Black Hand, was a secret military society formed in May 1911 by officers in the Army of the Kingdom of Serbia. It gained a reputation for its alleged involvement in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 and for the earlier assassination of the Serbian royal couple in 1903, under the aegis of Captain Dragutin Dimitrijević.
A secret society is an organization about which the activities, events, inner functioning, or membership are concealed. The society may or may not attempt to conceal its existence. The term usually excludes covert groups, such as intelligence agencies or guerrilla warfare insurgencies, that hide their activities and memberships but maintain a public presence.
Black Hand was a type of Italian extortion racket. Originally developed in the eighteenth century, Black Hand extortion was exported to the United States in the later nineteenth century with Italian immigrants.
Giuseppe "Joe the Boss" Masseria was an Italian-American Mafia boss in New York City. He was boss of what is now called the Genovese crime family, one of the New York City Mafia's Five Families, from 1922 to 1931. In 1930, he battled in the Castellammarese War to take over the criminal activities in New York City. The war ended with his murder on April 15, 1931, in a hit ordered by his own lieutenant, Charles "Lucky" Luciano, in an agreement with rival faction head Salvatore Maranzano.
"Mafia", as an informal or general term, is often used to describe criminal organizations that bear a strong similarity to the original Mafia in Sicily, to the Italian-American Mafia, or to other organized crime groups from Italy. The central activity of such an organization would be the arbitration of disputes between criminals, as well as the organization and enforcement of illicit agreements between criminals through the use of threat or violence. Mafias often engage in secondary activities such as gambling, loan sharking, drug-trafficking, prostitution, and fraud.
A protection racket is a type of racket and a scheme of organized crime perpetrated by a potentially hazardous organized crime group that generally guarantees protection outside the sanction of the law to another entity or individual from violence, robbery, ransacking, arson, vandalism, and other such threats, in exchange for payments at regular intervals. Each payment is called "protection money" or a "protection fee". An organized crime group determines an affordable or reasonable fee by negotiating with each of its payers, to ensure that each payer can pay the fee on a regular basis and on time. Protections rackets can vary in terms of their levels of sophistication or organization; it is not uncommon for their operations to emulate the structures or methods used by tax authorities within legitimate governments to collect taxes from taxpayers.
Manfredi "Al" or "Alfred" Mineo was an Italian American mobster, who headed a strong American Mafia crime family during the Castellammarese War. Mineo's organization would eventually become the present-day Gambino crime family.
Ignazio Lupo, also known as Ignazio Saietta and Lupo the Wolf, was a Sicilian American Black Hand leader in New York City during the early 1900s. His business was centered in Little Italy, Manhattan, where he ran large extortion operations and committed other crimes including robberies, loan-sharking, and murder. By the start of the 20th century, Lupo merged his crew with others in the South Bronx and East Harlem to form the Morello crime family, which became the leading Mafia family in New York City.
Racketeering is a type of organized crime in which the perpetrators set up a coercive, fraudulent, extortionary, or otherwise illegal coordinated scheme or operation to repeatedly or consistently collect a profit. The term "racketeering" was coined by the Employers' Association of Chicago in June 1927 in a statement about the influence of organized crime in the Teamsters Union. Specifically, a racket was defined by this coinage as being a service that calls forth its own demand, and would not have been needed otherwise. Narrowly, it means coercive or fraudulent business practices; broadly, it can mean any criminal scheme or operation with ongoing or reoccurring profit, as defined in the 1970 U.S. RICO Act, which aimed to curtail the power of the Mafia and other organized crime.
Shotgun Man is an alleged assassin and serial killer active in Chicago, Illinois in the 1910s, to whom murders by Black Hand extortionists were attributed. Most notably, Shotgun Man killed 15 Italian immigrants from January 1, 1910, to March 26, 1911, at "Death Corner," a notoriously violent Italian immigrant neighborhood at the intersection of Oak Street and Milton Avenue in what was then Chicago's Little Sicily. The area was notorious for violence committed by Italian immigrants and Italian-Americans, both independently and as a result of Italian gangs, the Mafia, and Black Hand feuding and vendettas. In March 1911, the so-called Shotgun Man reportedly murdered four people within 72 hours.
The 116th Street Crew, also known as the Uptown Crew, is a faction of the Genovese crime family. In the early 1960s, Anthony Salerno became the caporegime of the 116th Street Crew and one of the most powerful captains in the Genovese family. Salerno based the crew in the Palma Boys Social Club located at 416 East 115th Street in East Harlem, Manhattan. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the 116th Street Crew had absorbed and initiated many former members of the vicious East Harlem Purple Gang, an Italian-American murder for hire and drug trafficking gang operating in 1970s Italian Harlem and acting generally independently of the Mafia.
Jesús Reza Rosales is a Mexican Luchador, or professional wrestler, best known under the ring name Mano Negra. Mano Negra is Spanish for "The Black Hand" and is taken from the Spanish anarchist organisation La Mano Negra. Rosales is a former two time holder of the NWA World Welterweight Championship, two time holder of the NWA World Light Heavyweight Championship, and the Mexican National Light Heavyweight Championship while working for Empresa Mexicana de Lucha Libre (EMLL). He also worked for the Universal Wrestling Association (UWA) where he held the UWA World Junior Light Heavyweight Championship and for the World Wrestling Association (WWA) where he held the WWA Lightweight Championship. Mano Negra was originally an Enmascarado, or masked wrestler, but lost a Lucha de Apuesta, bet match, to Atlantis in the main event of CMLL's 60th Anniversary Show and was forced to unmask.
Black Hand extortion was a criminal tactic used by gangsters based in major cities in the United States. In Chicago, Black Hand extortion began around 1900 and had all but faded away by 1970, replaced by the Mafia. The Mafia was initially organized by Johnny Torrio and further organized by Al Capone into the extant Chicago Outfit sometime later. Black Handers in Chicago were mostly Italian men from Calabria and Sicily who would send anonymous extortion notes to their victims emblazoned with a feared old country symbol: the "Black Hand". The Black Hand was a precursor of organized crime, although it is still a tactic practiced by the Mafia and used in organized crime to this day. The Black Hand gangsters of this time period differed from the Mafia by lacking formally structured hierarchies and codes of conduct, and many were essentially one-man operations. Black Hand blackmail was also common in New York, Boston, and New Orleans. Victims would be threatened with being beaten, shot, or have their place of business bombed if they did not pay. Starting around 1909, Black Hand activity was causing difficulties for mob boss Big Jim Colosimo, a former Black Hand gangster and owner of brothels throughout Chicago. Colosimo's life was being threatened with demands for cash to ensure his physical safety. In an effort to fix the problem, he recruited Johnny Torrio, who was a member of New York's Five Points Gang at the time, to come to Chicago. Torrio would later become the famous successor to Big Jim Colosimo and mentor Al Capone as the organized crime ruler of Chicago.
Armenian Power 13, also known as AP, the Armenian Mob, or Armenian Mafia is an Armenian criminal organization and street gang founded and currently based in Los Angeles County, California. They are involved in drug trafficking, murder, assault, fraud, identity theft, illegal gambling, kidnapping, racketeering, robbery and extortion. They are believed to have around 200 members and hundreds of associates, according to the U.S. attorney’s office. They are also well known for their connections with the Mexican Mafia.
The Romanian mafia or Romanian organized crime is the category of organized crime groups whose members are citizens of Romania or living abroad in the Romanian diaspora. In recent years they have expanded their criminal activities in the European Union, reads a Europol report on EU organized crime, being active mostly in Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. The Romanian Mafia is composed of several major organized groups, which in turn have wider networks throughout Europe and have even reached as far as North and Central America.
The Brooklyn Camorra or New York Camorra was a loose grouping of early-20th-century organized crime gangs that formed among Italian immigrants originating in Naples and the surrounding Campania region living in Greater New York, particularly in Brooklyn. In the early 20th century, the criminal underworld of New York City consisted largely of Italian Harlem-based Sicilians and groups of Neapolitans from Brooklyn, sometimes referred to as the Brooklyn Camorra, as Neapolitan organized crime is referred to as the Camorra.
Black Hand is a 1950 American film noir directed by Richard Thorpe and starring Gene Kelly as an Italian immigrant fighting against the Black Hand extortion racket in New York City in the first decade of the 20th century.
A mafia is an ethnic, family or culture-based organized crime enterprise.
The Black Hand was a presumed secret, anarchist organization based in the Andalusian region of Spain and best known as the perpetrators of murders, arson, and crop fires in the early 1880s. The events associated with the Black Hand took place in 1882 and 1883 amidst class struggle in the Andalusian countryside, the spread of anarcho-communism distinct from collectivist anarchism, and differences between legalists and illegalists in the Federación de Trabajadores de la Región Española.
The Cesarano clan is a Camorra clan from the town of Castellammare di Stabia, in the Metropolitan City of Naples.