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Title: TIME TRAVELLER'S DIARY: "Black Hand" grips Aurora

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By Jacqueline Stuart



In the very early morning of an April day
in 1909 fire broke out in one of Aurora's oldest houses. Later that day the
Time Traveller slipped in to Town and caught up with the gossip about the
event.



The home belonged to Mr. Frank Cook, a
relative newcomer, and was at the north end of Aurora on the east side of Yonge
Street, just south of Mark. The house might well have dated back to the 1840s.



The buzz around Aurora, and quickly
picked up by the Toronto papers, was that the house fire was arson, and that
the Black Hand was responsible.



The Black Hand was not an organization
but a form of extortion which appeared in Italian-American communities in the
United States in the first decade or so of the twentieth century.



A victim would receive a letter
demanding money, with threats of damage to property or to persons, even going
as far as murder.



Those attacked were usually wealthy
Italian-Americans, not the middle classes of small-town Ontario, but the method
was adopted by other criminals. 



Mr. Cook had received such a letter and
had followed its instruction to put up a notice in the post office indicating,
in language dictated by the Black Hand, that he would pay up.



Mr. Cook, his father, and the police all
kept an eye on the notice to see who paid attention to it, but no one was
identified.



Mr. Cook received a second letter,
mocking the attempt at entrapment.



Frank Cook was not the only Auroran to
be threatened.



Another was a widow living at the south
end of town, Mrs. Young. After she reported the letter to the police, chief
constable Petch arranged for a young constable to dress up as woman and go to the
pre-arranged meeting place.



“A long skirt disguised his manly frame,
while round his masculine throat feminine furs clustered. As the shades of
evening were falling, Hiram minced along the deserted street…but although Hiram
held his skirt coquettishly in one of his hands, while in the other he bore a
satchel apparently loaded down with money, the sly blackmailers came not.”



Or so reported the Toronto Daily Star. 



At one point there was a report of
several armed men lurking in a wooded area of Town, but they turned out to be a
group of eager citizens on the hunt for the Black Hand perpetrator.



A fire inspector came from Toronto to
examine the damage at Frank Cook's house. Probably to the disappointment of
some local people he concluded that the fire was caused not by arson, but by
accident.



The Time Traveller was as intrigued as
everyone else by the possibility of a Black Hand crime, and he was puzzled by
the fact that he was learning about it only from town gossip and the Toronto
papers.



The local paper reported the fire, of
course, and mentioned the possibility of arson, but said nothing about the
Black Hand.



In the weekly's next report, following
the official investigation, editor Sylvester Lundy tersely scolded the Toronto
press for their exaggerated stories, and that was the end of that.


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Post date: 2019-04-11 20:48:07

Post date GMT: 2019-04-12 00:48:07

Post modified date: 2019-04-11 20:48:16

Post modified date GMT: 2019-04-12 00:48:16



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