Inspector Oldfield and the Black Hand Society by William Oldfield & Victoria Bruce

Author:William Oldfield & Victoria Bruce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

Outside Lima’s store at daybreak, the inspectors waited. The Sicilians emerged from the shop one or two at a time. Some came out bleary-eyed. Some looked just as dapper as they had the night before. Over the next few days, without any clue they were being watched at every turn, the Society of the Banana began its new reign of terror: an all-out assault on forty-three victims all at once. Within a week of the meeting, the post office clerks and postmasters in Marion, Cincinnati, Columbus, and a half-dozen other cities were tracking letters sent to a half-dozen states. Every post office where the letters left the hands of Society members was watched. Oldfield engaged local policemen, federal marshals, Secret Service, and Pinkertons to help investigate the letters’ final recipients. Frank and his fellow inspectors were completely overwhelmed. It was a tornado of activity on the part of the Society of the Banana that Oldfield didn’t have the manpower to match.

Still, they tried. Oldfield, Pate, Hutches, Hosford, and another inspector from Canton, Ohio, named A. P. Owen went city to city, knocking on doors. Terrified Italians and Sicilians answered, wide-eyed and stuttering. “We know you just got a letter. What did it say?” the detectives asked. The inspectors were in plain clothes but had the unmistakable look of lawmen. Time and again, the immigrants denied that they had received a letter. Many said they didn’t speak English and gestured that they had no idea what was being asked of them. In one case, Hosford got information that a certain victim paid off The Black Hand with a check. “Can we have the endorsed check?” Oldfield asked him after tracking him down at home. The canceled check bearing the endorsement of one of the blackmailers would be critical evidence. The victim shook as though breaking a fever, and flatly refused to give it up.3

Two weeks went by and the Black Hand case wasn’t getting anywhere even though Frank was blowing through an enormous amount of resources. With his army engaged all across Ohio and into Pennsylvania, travel expenses piled up. The inspectors were given promissory notes that paid for hotels, meals, travel, and other necessities. Oldfield hired dozens of private detectives from the Pinkerton bureau in Cleveland. Their expenses went on the Black Hand case tab as well as their contracted salaries. There were two translators working nonstop, charging by the hour, and Frank was about to hire more.4 Local police and sheriffs’ departments billed Oldfield for their man-hours, including document retrievals, copies of documents, mug shots, and time on the streets. The team sent hundreds of telegrams, and there were dozens of long-distance phone calls to pay for. There were freelance camera operators hired for stakeouts and camera equipment for inspectors. And there was one line item in Oldfield’s budget with a significant cash outlay: informant. No name given. Inspector-in-Charge Holmes grumbled about Oldfield’s endless spending to the higher-ups in Washington, especially with the money going out to some unnamed source.

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