The Black Hand’s Vancouver Connection

Joe Ricci’s story is in Sensational Vancouver

Joe was a kick-arse Italian cop who worked for the Vancouver Police Department between 1912 and 1928 and didn’t get bogged down in the details. He’d kick down the doors of opium dens, shoot first and ask questions later, and not worry too much about legal things like warrants and warnings.

The Black Hand (La Mano Nera) was an extortion racket, a sort of early form of the Mafia, that was well established in major Italian communities in American cities in the early part of last century.

Typically, a member of the Black Hand Society would send a letter to a target threatening violence, kidnapping, arson or even murder if they didn’t pay protection money. The letter was often decorated with a smoking gun, a noose or a knife dripping with blood, and accompanied with the message: “held up in the universal gesture of warning” drawn in thick black ink.

In November 1923, Joe was flipping through the circulars and pictures of wanted criminals, when he stopped at one, sat back and whistled softly. Starring back at him was the face of Dominic Delfino, a lieutenant and hit man for the Black Hand Society who was wanted by every police department in the U.S. after his escape from jail several years before.

Just a few hours earlier one of Joe’s informants had tipped him off that a “very bad Italian—maybe a murderer” was being held in a jail cell in Nelson, BC, on an immigration charge. The prisoner had boasted: “I shot my way out of the death house, and they’ll never hold me very long.”

Delfino had been held in a county jail in Pennsylvania charged with multiple murders. Before he could be transferred to his execution in New York, two of his colleagues disguised as nuns managed to smuggle in a saw and a revolver. Delfino escaped, murdering four guards on the way out.

Joe decided to play a hunch and went to Nelson to see for himself. Delfino wouldn’t talk, but the detective identified him from the mug shot. Delfino was sent back to the States and electrocuted. Ricci received front page headlines and collected a $500 reward.

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