Back in day, ‘Black Hand’ terrorized Ohio cities

TJoe Blundo

he Society of the Banana might sound funny, but Ohioans weren’t laughing in the early 20th century.

Columbus, Marion, and Bellefontaine – not exactly known as organized-crime hotbeds – were among the cities where Italian immigrants were terrorized by extortionists and kidnappers, most of them Italian immigrants themselves. They used knives, guns and bombs to punish resisters.

“Ohio’s Black Hand Syndicate: The Birth of Organized Crime in America” — by Columbus residents David Meyers and Elise Meyers Walker, his daughter, recounts the history.

Black Hand is an umbrella term for criminal gangs, many from Sicily, that threatened to kill merchants and their families if they refused to hand over cash.

I remember my Italianimmigrant grandmother mentioning the Black Hand with disgust when I was a kid.

The Society of the Banana was one such criminal syndicate operating in Ohio, western Pennsylvania and maybe elsewhere. (The amount of coordination between Black Hand groups was always a matter of debate.)

The book credits John Amicon, an Italian immigrant who built a thriving fruit business in Columbus with brother Charles, for dealing the society a major defeat.

Despite a stream of letters containing lurid threats, a bomb left on his doorstep and the death