The gripping true story of the origins of the Mafia in America - and the
brilliant Italian-born detective who gave his life to stop it.
Film rights optioned by Paramount Studios, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
Beginning in the summer of 1903, an insidious crime wave filled New York
City, and then the entire country, with fear. The children of Italian
immigrants were kidnapped, and dozens of innocent victims were gunned
down. Bombs tore apart tenement buildings. Judges, senators,
Rockefellers, and society matrons were threatened with gruesome deaths.
The perpetrators seemed both omnipresent and invisible. Their only
calling card: the symbol of a black hand.
The crimes whipped up the slavering tabloid press and heated ethnic
tensions to the boiling point. Standing between the American public and
the Black Hand's lawlessness was Joseph Petrosino. Dubbed the "Italian
Sherlock Holmes," he was a famously dogged and ingenious detective and a
master of disguise. As the crimes grew ever more bizarre and the Black
Hand's activities spread far beyond New York's borders, Petrosino and
the all-Italian police squad he assembled raced to capture members of
the secret criminal society before the country's anti-immigrant tremors
exploded into catastrophe. Petrosino's quest to root out the source of
the Black Hand's power would take him all the way to Sicily - but at a
terrible cost.
Unfolding a story rich with resonance in our own era, The Black Hand
is fast-paced narrative history at its very best.
