90: Frank Oldfield vs. the Black Hand w/ William Oldfield and Victoria Bruce - A True Crime History Podcast

Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast

Erik Rivenes

True Crime, History, Education

4.7 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 22 August 2018

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the early 1900s police were stymied by a series of murders of Italian grocers and fruit vendors in midwest America. Witnesses refused to cooperate, which made the crimes impossible to solve. Enter the United States Postal Service. Postal Inspector Frank Oldfield finds a man willing to testify, and suddenly the organization is knee-deep in a massive investigation which leads them to one of the first crime rings of Sicilian gangsters in American history. For the first time, law enforcement agencies realize that an organized mafia (known as the Black Hand) exists in the United States. My guests are William Oldfield and Victoria Bruce, authors of "Inspector Oldfield and the Black Hand Society", and share some of the most interesting details from their book on this episode.

More information at the publisher page: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Inspector-Oldfield-and-the-Black-Hand-Society/William-Oldfield/9781501171215

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Transcript

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0:00.0	So after getting numerous emails about this over the last couple of years from listeners,
0:03.9	I'm finally making the move to Patreon. Many of you have requested a way to donate directly to me,
0:09.2	and Patreon is a great way to do it. The place to go is patreon.com slash most notorious.
0:16.0	That's p-a-t-r-e-o-n dot com slash most notorious, and you'll be able to both contribute to the show,
0:24.6	and receive some cool perks as well. One of those perks I've been going through all of my old podcast
0:31.2	episodes recently scrubbing them clean of all advertisements and uploading them one by one,
0:37.6	and there are 90 plus total episodes. So a bunch of them are already there, and I'll keep adding
0:42.8	to them over the next week or two until the entire catalog will be available ad-free.
0:48.2	And all new episodes, of course, as well. And this won't be just for my regular most notorious
0:52.8	podcast, my new one tentatively titled Minisotus Most Notorious, where Blood Runs Cold
1:00.6	will run ad-free there too. Plus I'll be adding a bunch of bonus material, extra bits of interviews,
1:07.8	secret bonus episodes, videos of me visiting the actual crime sites from my new podcast,
1:14.6	monthly chats, discussions, and more. So again, go to patreon.com slash most notorious. Check it out,
1:22.0	donate if you feel moved to, and keep this all going. I'll see you there now onto the episode.
1:52.6	Welcome to the Most Notorious Podcast, I'm Eric Rivenes. I've done a few episodes in the past on
2:18.9	the Mafia. They're consistently some of the highest listened to episodes, but because we focus on
2:25.2	older history here, I tend to shy away from it. Plus there are other podcasts that concentrate almost
2:31.3	exclusively on the subject and are able to paint a broad history of the mob from its origins
2:37.1	all the way to its current incarnations better than I am able to do in this format. But there is
2:43.6	something about the Black Hand that mysterious affiliation of Sicilian gangsters in America,
2:51.3	especially at the turn of the century, just fascinates me to no end. And its structure and methods
2:58.6	have always been of great interest to me. We touched on it in our Axeman of New Orleans episode,
	...

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