Editing Black Hand (extortion) (section)

==Method==
A proposed derivation from Spain's ''Mano Negra'' is uncertain, and Lombardo found little evidence that the American practice was an imported organization already operating in Sicily or southern Italy. In New York's Italian-American crime reporting, historian Humbert Nelli dates the label's important emergence to the 1903 Cappiello extortion case. Afterward, the ''New York Herald'' and other papers generalized “Black Hand” to Italian-colony blackmail and then to other crimes.<ref>Humbert S. Nelli, [https://books.google.com/books?id=OSqBs8QgxZIC&pg=PA71 ''The Business of Crime: Italians and Syndicate Crime in the United States''] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 71–100.</ref>

A typical Black Hand episode began with anonymous letters demanding money and directing the victim to a delivery point. The letters threatened assault, kidnapping, arson, bombing or murder if the demand was refused or reported to police. Some carried a black-hand emblem or drawings of daggers, guns, skulls, coffins or blood; others omitted the famous symbol entirely.<ref name="Critchley" />

Repeated letters could be followed by warning violence against property or relatives. Offenders benefited from knowledge of the victim's language, family, business and neighborhood, while fear of retaliation discouraged cooperation with police. The targets were often immigrants and business owners believed to have savings but limited trust in American authorities.<ref>Thomas Monroe Pitkin, [https://archive.org/details/blackhandchapter0000pitk ''The Black Hand: A Chapter in Ethnic Crime''] (Totowa, New Jersey: Littlefield, Adams, 1977).</ref>

Black Hand methods were not uniquely Sicilian or Mafioso. Sicilian Mafia members, Neapolitan Camorristi, Calabrian criminals and unaffiliated imitators all used them. Critchley concludes that extortion was generally decentralized: offenders worked alone, in small partnerships or through local groups connected only loosely, if at all, to similar operators elsewhere. He also rejects Black Hand as a developmental “stage” or training ground through which the later Prohibition-era Mafia necessarily evolved.<ref name="Critchley" />