Photographs, Descriptions and Records of Persons Charged with Violation of the Postal Laws, volume 1 (Post Office Department, 1916)

Volume 1 of the Post Office Department’s album opens with a note that it is for the confidential and official use of post-office inspectors; the OCR of its title page is damaged. Only the entries that mention black-hand letters were read.

They include a Wisconsin man indicted in 1914 for burglarising a post office and for “the mailing of black-hand letters,” whose letter charges were dismissed; a Philadelphia sentence of 1914, of eight years, for two black-hand letters addressed to a New York firm, where the entry says the defendant was reported to be a leader among Armenians and a member of a scheme to blackmail wealthy Armenians; and a San Jose, California, man held in 1915 and 1916 for black-hand letters, charged with “Using the mails in the furtherance of a scheme to defraud.”

These entries show that the Post Office used “black-hand letter” for a kind of anonymous threatening letter, whoever wrote it. The album prints a photograph, Bertillon measurements and a physical description of each person. This archive does not reproduce or summarise those, and names no one from the album who is not already the subject of a court file filed here. Printed page numbers were read from the Internet Archive’s OCR text and should be checked against the scan before they are cited.