Mob FilesPublic-domain archive of American organized crime
Typed indictment page numbered 4, naming the sixteen defendants and alleging they were members of an organization 'known and designated as "The Black-Hand"'.
Open the full imageJPG, 1300 × 1682 px, 0.2 MB

Indictment, United States v. Salvatore Lima et al.: the 'Black-Hand' averment (file page 5)

A page of the 1909 Marion, Ohio, indictment charging that the defendants were members of an organisation 'known and designated as "The Black-Hand"' and would send anonymous letters 'written in a Sicilian dialect of the Italian language' demanding money under threat. The government's charge, quoted as the record's words.

Date
1909-12-11
Kind
case-file
Source
National Archives Catalog
Retrieved
2026-10-12
NAID
219793790
Rights
A record of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, Western Division, held by the National Archives at Chicago in Record Group 21. A United States government work, public domain in the United States under 17 U.S.C. § 105. The National Archives catalog lists access and use as unrestricted.

This is file page 5 of the case file NAID 219793790, numbered 4 at its foot. It sets out the scheme the grand jury charged. The defendants, it says, “by means of anonymous letters and communications to be written in a Sicilian dialect of the Italian language,” to be sent by mail to the persons they intended to defraud, “would represent and claim” to them “that they … were members of an organization, sect and society known and designated as ‘The Black-Hand’; that said ‘The Black-Hand’ organization, sect and society was composed of a number of persons who were bound together and had an arrangement, by and under solemn promises, covenants and agreements between themselves, to do bodily injury to and even to assassinate and kill any person and also the members of the family of any” person who did not pay.

Read closely, the indictment charges that the defendants would claim membership in such a society in their letters to frighten the people they wrote to. It is the grand jury’s charge, and its wording about language and origin is quoted as the record’s words, not as this archive’s description. The jury’s guilty verdict of 29 January 1910 is recorded in the companion file (NAID 219793791). The page names two men to whom letters were to be sent; their names are not repeated here.

itemUnited States v. Salvatore Lima et al.: the Marion, Ohio, Black Hand indictment, December 1909 (case file)National Archives case file for the federal indictment of sixteen men in the Northern District of Ohio, filed 11 December 1909, charging a conspiracy begun at Marion, Ohio, to use the mails to defraud by threatening letters as members of an organisation the indictment calls 'The Black-Hand'.itemIndictment, United States v. Salvatore Lima et al., first page of text (Northern District of Ohio, December Term 1909)Typed first page of the federal grand-jury indictment naming sixteen defendants and charging that on 3 November 1908, at Marion, Ohio, they conspired to violate section 5480 of the Revised Statutes, the mail-fraud statute.itemUnited States v. Salvatore Lima et al.: trial file with the verdict of 29 January 1910Companion National Archives file to the Marion, Ohio, Black Hand indictment: the catalog note says it holds the indictment, the threatening letters in Italian with translations, other filings, and the verdict of 29 January 1910 finding the defendants guilty.itemPost Office album (1916), volume 2: the Marion, Ohio, black-hand letter conspiracy, sentences of 29 January 1910 at ToledoEntries in the 1916 Post Office album record sentences passed at Toledo on 29 January 1910, from two to ten years, for 'conspiring, with others, to obtain $10,000 by means of black-hand letter mailed at Marion, Ohio, June 7, 1909'.