MURDER SOCIETIES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 13491, 18 May 1907, Page 2 (Supplement)

MURDER SOCIETIES.

NEW YORK "BLACK HAND" AND

". THE MAFIA. ! Mysterious kidnappings and murders by ' the " Black Hand" in New York have just been . unravelled at Palermo, Sicily, in the course of police investigations into a crime ; ; committed Hear that city, through the 1 agency of the dreaded "Sicilian "Mafia,"! lon July 13, 1906. On that date. a rich 'and respected merchant, named Marchese,i was found done to death by dagger wounds; at Partinico. In his office were a quantity j ' of blackmailing letters with threats of j death from the Mafia in case of non-com- ] 1 pliance. Baffled awhile the police were! finally put upon the track of a man of 30, 1 named Nunzio Minore, who shortly before j the crime in question had returned from New York to his wife and family. Then came informers to testify that Minore was one of the four assassins hired from the j i Mafia, by the relatives of the murdered man, through over-anxiety to inherit his l '. property. Simultaneously with his cap-! ture, Minore s cottage, and also his sister's house, not far away, were surrounded by ; carabinieri. Minore's wife hastily hurled out of a back window into a ditch a buadle of incriminating documents, which fell j booty to the soldiery below. The raid on his sister Giuseppa's dwelling led to other packets of correspondence being se- , questrated from beneath the floor and behind the walls. But the evidence thus obtained of Minore's complicity in the Marchese murder paled into significance . beside the sensational revelations of his ' •criminal connections with the " Black | ' Hand" gang in New York, who, in fact, , had sent him back to Sicily awhile, after violence. Here is a characteristic case. ' In. March, 1906, the 14-year-old son of Antony Bozzuffi, a New York banker, was kidnapped into a house in Fifty-ninth-street, Brooklyn. Twenty thousand dollars' ransom was demanded of his father. Tbe , lad, however,, escaped with the connivance of a compassionate member of the Black Hand," named Salvatore Lungo, who had been told off to guard him. Lungo, some mornings after, was picked up, a corpse, with stiletto and bullet wounds all over his body. Minore was convicted as the author of the kidnapping ; but the New York Courts acquitted him of assassinating Lungo, or of belonging to, the '" Black Hand" for want of evidence. The Palermo police have now been able to communicate the missing proofs to the | New York Criminal Department, together | with a mass of j facts and names of persons allied with the secret societies in the j United States. On their part, the New York authorities have written to the King's Procurator-General at Palermo,! stating that the photographs sent have been easily. identified, while they consider the proofs -final. The Marchese murder, trial about, to begin at Palermo will reveal some astounding connections between: the New York " Black Hand" and the ! Sicilian Mafia. - !