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Dec 31,2006 - Jan7,2006 |
Extortion and racketeering
Part 2 - The rise of organized crime in Canada and the hold of Mano Nera
By Antonio Nicaso
Originally Published: 2001-06-24
Toronto — During the first years of the 20th century Canada didn’t have a courageous police detective like Joe Petrosino, or a powerful Mafioso like Vito Cascio Ferro. But it did have the Mano Nera (Black Hand), an organization which supposedly was originally born to protect immigrants and which turned into a terrible gang of thugs who would squeeze money out of small entrepreneurs in the neighbourhoods of North America’s various Little Italy’s.
The extortion racket had been invented by don Vito Cascio Ferro*, a Sicilian boss who emigrated to the United States in 1901. "Let us wet u pizzu" — the beak — said extortionists to designated victims when demanding money. In 1903 the New York Herald was the first newspaper to publish the news of an extortion letter received by a shopkeeper and signed with the imprint of a black hand (mano nera). (No one knows how long the racket had been in operation before it came to the Herald’s attention.) According to the Herald the organization, which was bleeding small Brooklyn shopkeepers dry, was controlled by Annunziato Cappiello, an immigrant of Calabrian origin.
The early 1900s saw several similar organizations take their first steps in Canada. In 1908 the police came into possession of a letter signed by this sinister organization. It happened in Fort Frances, a small town in northwestern Ontario, just 220 miles southeast of Winnipeg. But this wasn’t an isolated example. On December 7, 1908, Nicholas Bessanti and a fellow Italian who went by the name of Joe Ross (Italians at the time anglicized their names in order to avoid incidents of bigotry), sent an extortion letter, written with red ink and in Italian, to a local baker, Louis Belluz.
The outcome was an unhappy one for the extortionists. Bessanti told the investigators he had been forced to join the Mano Nera. "I took an oath of allegiance and obedience to the association," were his words.
He told the police that the pact included theft, arson and murder as ordered by the leader of the gang. Most importantly the gang members protected one another to avoid police investigations. Bessanti explained that they would meet every Saturday night when they would decide on what their next move should be. "Who disobeyed the laws of the Mano Nera was punished, and in extreme cases even with death," he said.
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