Mariano Alioto

Mariano is the son of Giuseppe Alioto and Stefana Balestrieri Alioto. Mariano was born in 1894 in 

Sant' Elia and died in San Francisco in 1917.

Wedding Picture of Mariano Alioto and Angelina Ingrassia. In 1917, shortly after this wedding photo was taken, Mariano was killed by the LaFata gang on Columbus Avenue in San Francisco. Mariano's father-in-law was also gunned down. Mariano was gunned down due to testifying against the Pedone gang. It is believed that Ignacio, Giuseppe, and Francesco sought revenge for the attacks. After this horrible situation for the family and the murder of Rosalino LaFata in 1924, the Alioto family of San Francisco and the "mafia" had severed any and all connections. 

Another Article about the killing of Mariano Alioto first ran in the San Francisco Examiner of November 29, 1917

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The Black Hand

On Thanksgiving Day 1916, Gaetano Ingrassia, a successful masonry contractor, left his home at 1622 Powell Street to take a walk through his North Beach neighborhood following the family’s holiday meal. It was a calculated risk. Ingrassia had recently received several threatening letters from Black Hand gangsters demanding that he pay them $2,000 under threat that his family home would be bombed.

Ingrassia reported the threats to the police who gave him a permit to carry a firearm for his protection, but suggested that he keep his head down while they worked the case. Not one to be cowed, Ingrassia went for his regular post-prandial stroll that night, armed with two loaded revolvers. As he passed the Buena Vista Ice Cream Parlor at 735 Columbus Street, Ingrassia was confronted by Joseph and Antonio Pedona,

             Both sides began blazing away at each other with firearms from opposite sides of a pile of crates stacked on the sidewalk. In all, 20 shots were exchanged. Antonio Pedona was struck in the ankle by one of the nine shots fired by Ingrassia, and his brother Joseph was hit in the chest, though the bullet was deflected by a religious amulet he wore. Ingrassia, hit in the chin and neck, also fell to the pavement

A nephew of the Pedonas, seeing his uncles engaged in a shootout, ran around the corner to the family’s Scotland Street home, where he armed himself with a rifle. Returning to the scene, he dispatched Ingrassia with a coup de grace to the head, and fled the scene.  All three Pedonas  were promptly arrested; tried; convicted; and sentenced to terms of imprisonment at San Quentin.   

Americans had been concerned about the arrival of Black Hand—or, as they thought, Mafia—gangsters since the large influx of immigrants from Southern Italy in the late nineteenth century.  National attention was drawn to the situation with the murder of New Orleans police chief David Hennessy in 1892 by Italian gangsters when he sided with one faction against the other.  A number of Italians were arrested in the case. Their acquittal at trial outraged the citizenry who went to the jail and lynched 11 Sicilian prisoners being held there

Beginning in the 1890s, accounts of Italian homicides in San Francisco were increasingly associated with suspicions that a Mafia was involved. When Antonio Lalla was arrested for slashing a woman’s throat on 1st Street in 1892, he was identified in the press as one of the Mafia men who had been involved in the assassination of New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessey.  In another case, the 1899 killing of Joseph Sierro by Filipo Fertita in a dispute between fishermen, newspapers speculated that the killer was involved with the Mafia.

Actually, the term “Mafia” was a misnomer for the activity taking place. As depicted in any number of pot-boiler books and films, the term “Mafia” conjures up images of highly centralized and organized groups with ties to gangs in Sicily and southern Italy. The Black Hand was indeed rooted in the southern Italian criminal tradition but it lacked the organizational cohesion usually attributed to organized crime. The Black Hand was a process rather than an organization.  It was a technique used by any number of small groups in the immigrant community who oppressed their own people, extorting money from them, fully confident that their victims would not involve the American authorities.

The Black Handers would single out one of their countrymen who had made an economic success in the new world and demand tribute by means of  anonymous letters bearing a drawing of a black hand, under  threat of doing harm to the victims or their families. One of the letters written in Italian to Ingrassia was typical:

Dear Friend, Some of our friends in our society want you to carry $2,000 in gold. Then we want you to go fromSan Francisco by the electric cars to San Mateo on a Saturday afternoon. When you get there, walk on the railroad track and some good friend is going to approach you. He is our friend and you will give him the money. Otherwise it will be very bad for you.

 The final letter received by Ingrassia, just before his death, threatened to blow up his home with his family inside.

The second decade of the 20th Century was the heyday of the Black hand bombers. On April 22, 1911, a bomb exploded on the threshold of a baker named Cassou, who had previously ignored a demand for $2,000. In 1914, there were several Black Hand incidents. In September 1915, two officials of the Unione Siciliane were arrested for trying to extort money from the president of the Western Fish Company and an agent for the Alaska Packing Company. Two months later, Black Handers tried to extort money from Achille Paladini, President of the Fish Trust. In October 1916, Frank Palozotta's home at 628 Chenery Street in the quiet Glen Park district was bombed. Just a few months before the Ingrassia killing, Antonoio Pedona had been implicated in a Black Hand killing  inMartinez, but had been released for lack of evidence when a critical witness died suddenly.

If things were troubling in San Francisco, conditions were even worse elsewhere. Between January 1, 1910, and March 26, 1911—during which period there were three homicides committed by Italians in San Francisco—Chicagosuffered 38 unsolved Italian killings. In one three-month period in 1913, according to a contemporary newspaper account, there were 55 bombings in Chicago’s “spaghetti zone,” compared to 14 in the San Francisco Bay Area for an entire four-year period about the same time. Part of the disparity had to do with the rapid growth of Chicago’s Italian community. By 1910, Chicago’s Italian population, which had been approximately the same size as that in San Francisco in 1890, grew to be three times larger.  More significant was the nature of the newcomers.  The older, established Italian communities in both cities tended to originate in northern Italy; the newcomers came from the South.

One aspect of the immigration story generally is how earlier arrivals smoothed the way for later arrivals, either by informal means or by the formation of immigrant aid societies. A less familiar part of the story is that older immigrants, having partially assimilated, sometimes distanced themselves from the embarrassing crudities of the later arrivals. It is a common occurrence. “Lace curtain” Nineteenth Century Irish looked down on shanty-dwelling Irish newcomers. Turn-of-the-twentieth century New York German Jews often shunned their more exotic co-religionists newly arrived fromPoland and Russia. More recently, it was the treatment of the ABCs [American born Chinese] of the FOBs [Fresh off the Boat] Chinese that fostered the growth of Chinese youth gangs in the late Twentieth Century San Francisco.

It was the same with turn-of-the-Twentieth Century Italians. To some extent in San Francisco, says historian Deanna Gumina, “The pioneers, the Genoese, Tuscans and others who could have served as guides to those who came later, rather shunned the [southerners] and kept to themselves.” The divide was even more pronounced in Chicago where the relatively small Northern Italian community was overwhelmed by newcomers from the South who took low-paying jobs in the burgeoning economy. In addition to the endemic hostility between north and south, any community resources to aid the newcomers in Chicago were taxed beyond their limits. The community “lost much of its original solidarity and became increasingly racked by strife,” says Sebastian Fichera, chronicler of San Francisco’s Italian community. Instead of hanging together to fight common problems, the Italian community in Chicago fragmented and withdrew inside itself

One result was that Italians had a different experience with criminal violence in the two cities. In 1907 Chicago, respectable Italians formed a “White Hand society,” which identified Blackhanders to the police and helped convict them. “A large number of criminals apprehended through its efforts went free,” reports Fichera, “some escaped conviction altogether; others sent to prison were being released after one or two years.” And the upshot was that “the few witnesses who had risked their lives by giving testimony against the gangsters, soon found themselves at the mercy of the ex-convicts.” “Both the paroled convicts and the witnesses were now residents of the same neighborhoods,” he says, and “not surprisingly,” the program failed.

“In North Beach, on the other hand,” Fichera continues, “the community’s strength was the underworld’s weakness for the gangsters never found the kind of cover to which they were accustomed in Chicago.” On evidence of witnesses, the gangsters were sent to prison. More to the point, unlike in Chicago, they remained in jail. In San Francisco, as seen in the case of the killing of Ingrassia, justice was swift and certain. “[Ingrassia’s] death was not in vain,” reports Fichera, “for others took up the battle where he left off; the police made arrests, witnesses testified, juries convicted. With the cooperation of North Beach residents, the relevant institutions worked in the way they were meant and the problem, if not solved, was certainly brought under control.” One result of these differences, claims Fichera, was a disparate incidence of criminal violence.

Differing police capabilities seems to have something to do with the different rates of crime by Italians in San Francisco and Chicago as well. Writing about Chicago at about the same time, Herbert Asbury reports that the police were “demoralized and helpless and the whole machinery of law-enforcement [was] in a condition of collapse.” In San Francisco, on the other hand, enforcement efforts were supported by the general public and the press.

“If, as alleged, there is a ‘Forty Strong Gang’ on North Beach,” reported a contemporary newspaper, “it should be included in the ‘clean up’ now under way.”

It is well known that there is among the Sicilians a very turbulent element which is accustomed to act together in rather loose organizations for all sorts of criminal enterprises and it is evident that some of that element has immigrated to this country, of which some have found their way to the city and theNorth Beach. They all have revolvers and never hesitate to use them. And they use knives as readily as revolvers. As they must be known, one way to deal with them is to search every one of them as a known criminal whenever he appears on the street, confiscate all deadly weapons of every kind and send them to jail for carrying them concealed.

It might not have seemed right away that things were improving. A year after Ingrassia’s killing, in November 1917, Ingrassia’s son-in-law, Mario Alioto, uncle of the future mayor Joseph Alioto, was killed on the same spot by Antonio Lipari, a friend of the Pedonas. Giuseppe and Ignacio Alioto armed themselves and went to Hall of Justice atKearny and Washington to exact vengeance on Lipari, who, they claimed, was a Black Hander. Police deflected their attempt.

              But no longer would prominent members of the city’s Italian community be terrorized by anonymous letters bearing the stamp of the Black Hand

But the writing was on the wall. By the 1920s, Black Hand extortion was effectively ended in San Francisco. It would be disingenuous to suggest that there was no more criminal violence in San Francisco’s Italian community. There was more than enough to hog headlines during the Prohibition Era. (Indeed, the illegal liquor business provided an alternative—and less risky— revenue source for those inclined to make a quick buck.) And in 1947 the murdered body of a Chicago gangster, Nick DeJohn, was found in the trunk of a Chrysler Town and Country in San Francisco’s Marina District, giving rise to ruminations about Italian organized crime in San Francisco.

http://www.sanfranciscohomicide.com/Stories/black_hand.htm

THE HEAD OF THE "BLACK HAND" IN SAN FRANCISCO, ROSALINO LAFATA (1885 - 1924), WHO IS BELIEVED 

TO HAVE ORDERED THE HIT ON INGRASSIA AND ALIOTO

It is believed that Rosolino was gunned down in retaliation for the murder of Mariano Alioto. 

Rocco Russo was arrested some time later in New York, however it is believed he was paid off for the LaFata murder by 

Frank Lanza, Mafia boss of San Francisco.

The Websites below shows the Find-A-Grave of Mariano Alioto and Gaetano Ingrassia

The article below is about the murder of Gaetano Ingrassia that first ran in the San Jose Mercury on December 2, 1916

The article below is about the murder of Gaetano Ingrassia that first ran in the San Francisco Examiner on December 10, 1916

Story from the San Francisco Examiner about the murder of Mariano "Mario" Alioto in 1917