{"id":23527,"date":"2019-04-11T20:48:07","date_gmt":"2019-04-12T00:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=23527"},"modified":"2019-04-11T20:48:16","modified_gmt":"2019-04-12T00:48:16","slug":"time-travellers-diary-black-hand-grips-aurora","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/time-travellers-diary-black-hand-grips-aurora\/","title":{"rendered":"TIME TRAVELLER’S DIARY: “Black Hand” grips Aurora"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Jacqueline Stuart<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the very early morning of an April day\nin 1909 fire broke out in one of Aurora\u2019s oldest houses. Later that day the\nTime Traveller slipped in to Town and caught up with the gossip about the\nevent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The home belonged to Mr. Frank Cook, a\nrelative newcomer, and was at the north end of Aurora on the east side of Yonge\nStreet, just south of Mark. The house might well have dated back to the 1840s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The buzz around Aurora, and quickly\npicked up by the Toronto papers, was that the house fire was arson, and that\nthe Black Hand was responsible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Black Hand was not an organization\nbut a form of extortion which appeared in Italian-American communities in the\nUnited States in the first decade or so of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A victim would receive a letter\ndemanding money, with threats of damage to property or to persons, even going\nas far as murder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those attacked were usually wealthy\nItalian-Americans, not the middle classes of small-town Ontario, but the method\nwas adopted by other criminals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Cook had received such a letter and\nhad followed its instruction to put up a notice in the post office indicating,\nin language dictated by the Black Hand, that he would pay up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Cook, his father, and the police all\nkept an eye on the notice to see who paid attention to it, but no one was\nidentified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Cook received a second letter,\nmocking the attempt at entrapment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frank Cook was not the only Auroran to\nbe threatened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another was a widow living at the south\nend of town, Mrs. Young. After she reported the letter to the police, chief\nconstable Petch arranged for a young constable to dress up as woman and go to the\npre-arranged meeting place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA long skirt disguised his manly frame,\nwhile round his masculine throat feminine furs clustered. As the shades of\nevening were falling, Hiram minced along the deserted street\u2026but although Hiram\nheld his skirt coquettishly in one of his hands, while in the other he bore a\nsatchel apparently loaded down with money, the sly blackmailers came not.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or so reported the Toronto Daily Star. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At one point there was a report of\nseveral armed men lurking in a wooded area of Town, but they turned out to be a\ngroup of eager citizens on the hunt for the Black Hand perpetrator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A fire inspector came from Toronto to\nexamine the damage at Frank Cook\u2019s house. Probably to the disappointment of\nsome local people he concluded that the fire was caused not by arson, but by\naccident.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Time Traveller was as intrigued as\neveryone else by the possibility of a Black Hand crime, and he was puzzled by\nthe fact that he was learning about it only from town gossip and the Toronto\npapers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The local paper reported the fire, of\ncourse, and mentioned the possibility of arson, but said nothing about the\nBlack Hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the weekly\u2019s next report, following\nthe official investigation, editor Sylvester Lundy tersely scolded the Toronto\npress for their exaggerated stories, and that was the end of that.<\/p>\n\r\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jacqueline Stuart In the very early morning of an April day in 1909 fire broke out in one of Aurora\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[29,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns","category-opinion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-67t","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-15 15:12:04","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23527\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}