Inspector Oldfield and the Black Hand Society

Original Gangsters “Inspector Oldfield and the Black Hand Society” by William Oldfield and Victoria Bruce

Long before Don Corleone and Tony Soprano became pop-culture icons of organized crime in America, the Black Hand Society terrorized fellow Sicilian immigrants in the Western Reserve of the early 20th century. At the time, the U.S. Post Office Inspection Service was the most powerful federal law enforcement agency in the country — the Federal Bureau of Investigations would not be formed until 1908.

By 1909, Post Office Inspector Frank Oldfield culminated 10 years of investigation by taking down Salvatore “Sam” Lima and his ring of Black Hand Society thugs in the first-ever organized crime bust in the U.S.

Almost immediately, the story went underground. With the FBI finding its footing, World War I looming and rival factions within the Post Office playing politics, the story of Frank and the Black Hand Society seemed lost to history.

But now, readers can finally learn about this thrilling episode in the history of organized crime in the new book, “Inspector Oldfield and the Black Hand Society: America’s Original Gangsters and the U.S. Postal Detective Who Brought Them to Justice” (Touchstone, $26), co-authored by Frank’s great-grandson and Akron native, William Oldfield.

As a teen in the 1970s, William had heard lots of family stories about his great-grandfather heroically foiling the Sicilian mob. But it was all hush-hush lore that was never to be discussed with outsiders. Then an uncle came to visit and brought a big box of photos, clippings and weapons that made those stories spring to life for young William and his sister. “It was very exciting,” he says. “We got to see all the scary pictures.”

Then it was all packed up and tucked away in the attic, with the strict admonishment that it never, ever be mentioned. “Cleveland had had over 100 bombings, mainly mafia-related, in the ‘70s,” William says. “A lot of the people had no idea they were even descendants of these people. My mother was involved in the community and interfacing with [them] all the time.” Even decades after the fact, the fear of retribution for Frank’s work was very real.

Years went by. When William’s father died in 1989, his mother still insisted the box of secrets remain hidden. “She highly recommended that I just throw it away and get on with my life,” says William, who now lives in Maryland.

Once William’s mother died in 2002, he was free to act. He took his box of hidden treasures to the Postal Inspection Service, whose modern-day employees had never heard about Frank’s story. That led him to collaborate on a Smithsonian exhibit about his great-grandfather, but there wasn’t much interest in it otherwise.

Then William approached a writer in an Annapolis, Maryland, coffee shop in 2012. She turned out to be Victoria Bruce, a nonfiction writer and documentarian whose forte is crafting cohesive narrative from historic fact. “Bill started talking about this story, and literally my mouth was hanging open, and I’m drooling wanting to get my chance to write this book with him,” she says.

Part of Bruce’s methodology was to interview William repeatedly, attempting to line up his family’s lore with corroborative fact she found in newspaper articles and court documents. “In some cases, they weren’t true, and I was the one that had to come back to Bill and say so,” Bruce says. One family tale cast Frank as the hero who saved a man from being lynched, but the truth was he tried and failed — the man was, indeed, lynched. “I was a little worried when I first came to Bill: Was he going to want to paint a picture that’s more like family lore, or does he want the real story?” she says. “He was 100 percent fine with the real story.”

Compiled together over about a year and three months, the book with an extensive bibliography and footnoting throughout testifies to the diligence Bruce and William employed to tell the accurate story. But William’s insistence on truth goes deeper than the potential for lawsuits.

“When you have a mother and a father who taught you to be true to your word,” William says, “and one of her dying wishes was to make sure that you tell the truth because it’s going to reflect on you and the family — and on the other descendants that have nothing to do with the past of their family — for eternity, they would probably appreciate some truth.”

While researching the book, Bruce and William discovered a stranger-than-fact element to the story: The great-granddaughter of a mafia boss that Frank foiled lives in Canal Fulton and harbors no resentment. She provided insightful research assistance and will join the two authors on some of their speaking engagements, like the Buckeye Book Fair Nov. 3 in Wooster. “You’ve got the great-granddaughter of the guy that Frank put away and Frank’s great-grandson on a panel together talking about the story,” says Bruce. “This entire book is full of stories you’ve never heard before, and that’s rare these days. It’s a wild ride from the first chapter.”