A few weeks later, as the festival was about to begin, Grace was visited by Michael Pirolla again. He shut the door behind him and had his hat in his hand. In a sheepish voice, he informed Grace that after the festival planners had heard Commissioner Hayes’s answer, someone had secretly done something. Grace pressed him, and Pirolla confessed that the planners had passed a resolution through the Board of Aldermen that would permit the acetylene lighting after all. They had gone over Hayes’s head.
Grace went right to Hayes. She didn’t like being used. The fire commissioner glowered at her and asked her to find out who did this. Hayes gathered up some men and went down to the festival, which was in the final stages of setting up. Hayes saw the new acetylene lights, clear and bright, and ordered them brought down immediately. He could sense the anger of the workers as they glared at him and slowly unwound the lights.
When the festival officially opened, booths and wagons were piled up tight against the street selling yellow wax candles that measured from six inches tall to six feet in diameter. Stray firecrackers jumped and snapped in bursts of light in the streets as children scattered under parents and horsecarts. From above, the procession, nearly five hundred Catholics strong, started to make its way through the cross-streets between 100th and 115th along First and Second Avenues. The mass of people was like some dense, moving serpent. People marched behind the banners of the Societies of Saint Antonio and of Mount Carmel. Many men and women were in their bare feet, holding the yellow candles, doing penance for their own unemployment. Frequently, the parade would stop, and men and women would run out from the crowd to pin paper money and jewelry to the banners. When the procession finally reached the Church of Our Lady at Mount Carmel, the banners, heavy with money, were donated to the church. The marchers carried their candles and left them on the altar. After one hour, the altar was so filled with waves of flickering light that the candles had to be carried to another room. The massive church on East 115th Street held Mass—in the chapel and the basement—nonstop from four in the morning until eleven at night. High Mass was celebrated at eleven o’clock.
As nightfall came, crowds of between fifty and seventy-five thousand people paraded the streets. They were singing, shouting, and banging tambourines past the cafes and stores. Hayes, Grace, and some men walked the streets to see if the Italians had complied. The display was not nearly as brilliant as it would have been with the carbide lighting, but his order had been obeyed—above him was a beautiful constellation composed entirely of candles. For the entire festival, there were only six arrests, all for the usual reasons involving drunkenness. Even the massive celebratory fireworks proceeded safely. A few days later, however, Michael Cica, an eleven-year-old boy in the neighborhood, placed a leftover firework in a tin can. He and his friends put a match to it, then turned, running at top speed and laughing. The explosion caused the tin can to be driven through his body, killing him instantly.
A few days later, the phone rang for Grace at the People’s Law Firm. The voice on the other end said that if she ever appeared near the church again, she would be murdered. A few hours later, there came the same message, but in a different voice. This was repeated all day long. Later that day, while walking to court characteristically late—possibly with a shopping bag from Thurn’s under her arm—Grace was startled by a dark man hiding behind a column. He whispered to her. “Don’t even go to Harlem,” he said, in a thick Italian accent. She could barely understand him. “Your life is in danger,” he said, “and so is that of Commissioner Hayes.” The man disappeared quickly, leaving Grace stunned. She knew that this was retaliation for the acetylene lanterns, but she wasn’t going to let idle threats stop her, especially in Little Italy. So later that day, Grace went to see a client, Gaetaro Ligmanti, on Grand Street. An hour after, she was called to the phone. She sighed, preparing herself for the usual threat, when a new voice told her that this client’s life was not worth a penny, as he had been named a victim of the Black Hand.
Grace clicked the phone and hurriedly asked to be connected to the nearest station house. She repeated what the man had said. The station cop promised her immediate police protection. A cop was stationed outside her office on 156 Leonard Street, and a plainclothes man followed her when she traveled to certain sections of the city. She had heard the three-word name that was among the most ominous in the city: the Black Hand.
*
Every New Yorker had read of or knew someone who had opened a letter with no return address, only to find it covered inside with primitive drawings of black crosses, daggers, and skulls, all dripping with black ink meant to look like dripping blood. There would usually be a simple, ungrammatical message asking for money—or sometimes worse: a note claiming the abduction of one’s son or daughter. These letters were almost always signed the same way: with the ink-bloody imprint of a black hand.
The Black Hand was understood to be a secret criminal organization or, possibly, a loose collection of individual criminals—bombers, kidnappers, murderers, and extortionists—that the police believed was largely Italian. The public feared them. Newspapers ran accounts of the Black Hand’s criminal exploits almost daily. Everyone knew the process: if you received a Black Hand letter, you were instructed to hand over money or suffer the consequences. The letters would say ominous things like, “We have you.” Once you paid, you were usually left alone.
There were many stories about the origins of the Black Hand. The papers reported on a similarly named vigilante group active at the turn of the century. This group would also send strange, threatening letters, but only to people who took advantage of the weak or downtrodden. Different rumors based the origin of the organization in Sicily and claimed it had links to a centuries-old mixture of Catholicism and witchcraft. Black Handers were said to subject new members to elaborate occult rituals. Magazines ran exposés of Black Hand societies and their mysterious membership manuals, though there were clearly more mysteries than facts.
The majority of Black Hand letters asked for small sums, and they were usually targeted at successful Italian business owners. If someone didn’t pay, they would usually just move on to the next mark. But sometimes their violence would escalate beyond all reason. The Black Hand frequently used dynamite, usually to blow up the doors of people who would not pay. Photographs of these ruined thresholds appeared on front pages across the city. Black Handers were also known to kidnap people, especially young children, and hold them for ransom. There were many stories of toddlers who, once their parents had finally saved enough to free them, no longer recognized their own parents. No one was immune. Some said the whole thing was just newspaper-driven nonsense. The others just locked their doors.