BLACK HAND

Italian Mano Nera, any of several extortion rackets run by immigrant Sicilian and Italian gangsters in the Italian communities of New York City, Chicago, New Orleans, Kansas City, and other U.S. cities from about 1890 to 1920. It consisted of sending threatening notes to local merchants and other well-to-do personsnotes printed with black hands, daggers, or other menacing symbols and extorting money on pain of death or destruction of property. The Black Hand declined with the entry of Prohibition and big-moneyed bootlegging. Among the most notorious of Black Handers was Ignazio Saietta, known to residents of Manhattan's Little Italy as Lupo (the Wolf); in 1920 he was finally apprehended by federal authorities for counterfeiting and was sent to prison for 30 years. The most noted foe of the Black Hand was Lieut. Joseph Petrosino (18601909) of the New York Police Department, who had hundreds of gang members arrested, imprisoned, or deported before he was gunned down in Palermo on a visit to Sicily in 1909. byname of Ujedinjenje Ili Smrt (Serbo-Croatian: Union or Death), secret Serbian society of the early 20th century that used terrorist methods to promote the liberation of Serbs outside Serbia from Habsburg or Ottoman rule and was instrumental in planning the assassination of the Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand (1914), precipitating the outbreak of World War I. The society was formed (1911) and led by Col. Dragutin Dimitrijevic; its members were primarily army officers with some government officials. Operating from Belgrade, it conducted propaganda campaigns, organized armed bands in Macedonia (before the Balkan Wars, 191213), and established a network of revolutionary cells throughout Bosnia. Within Serbia it dominated the army and wielded tremendous influence over the government by terrorizing officials; it became so powerful that its authority challenged that of the government. In order to eliminate this rival, Prince Alexander, commander in chief of the expatriate Serbian Army, brought the leaders of the Black Hand to trial on dubious charges at Salonika in 1917. Dimitrijevic and two others were executed, and more than 200 were imprisoned.