Post Office album (1916), volume 2: St. Louis black-hand letter sentences of 3 July 1912

Three entries in the 1916 Post Office album record sentences passed at St. Louis on 3 July 1912, of eighteen months, two years and five years at Leavenworth, for mailing black-hand letters at St. Louis in January and February 1912.

Date

1912-07-03

Kind

case-file

Source

Internet Archive (digitised copy)

Retrieved

2026-10-12

Rights

Published by the Post Office Department, Office of the Chief Inspector, and printed by the Government Printing Office in 1916. A United States government work, public domain in the United States under 17 U.S.C. § 105. The Internet Archive record reads "Not in copyright. The Library knows of no copyright restrictions on this item."

Three entries in volume 2 of the Post Office Department’s 1916 album (printed pages about 319 to 321) record sentences passed at St. Louis on 3 July 1912, of eighteen months, two years and five years at Leavenworth, for mailing black-hand letters at St. Louis during January and February 1912 (History file 20608). One entry says the man was reported to be a member of “a band of Sicilian black handers which had been mailing black-hand letters to various Italians at St. Louis.”

That phrase is the Post Office Department’s own wording in an internal album of 1916. It is quoted as the record’s words and flagged: it is a characterisation in the entry, not the charge. An entry for Cincinnati on printed page 329 records a sentence of 16 April 1912, of one year and a day, for mailing letters in January 1912 “demanding money under penalty of death.”

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.