Antonio Mirabito

Mirabito was born on July 1, 1886, in Malfa, Province of Messina in the region of Sicily, in Southern Italy. He spent his childhood there, and immigrated to the United States at the age of 16. He arrived in New York, and swiftly moved into the Greater Boston area. His life would not be well documented until his early twenties, when his Black Hand activity was discovered. However, earlier accounts of his interactions with the law can help provide some information. ==Early crime==

As a teenager, Antonio Mirabito was known for committing various forms of petty theft. He was “well known” for this in his communities within both Boston and Watertown, and received his first criminal sentencing on May 10, 1905, for the larceny of a bicycle. ==Black hand conviction==

In 1908, at age 22, Mirabito's leading role in the Northeast's Black Hand operations became exposed through police intervention into one of his attempted extortions. Tracked mail The first letter in the series of correspondence that resulted in Antonio Mirabito's arrest was sent around December 1907 to Benjamin Piscopo, a hotel owner in the Italian neighborhood of Boston's North End. It was part of a group of three letters, sent and received over the course of three months, demanding that $1000 (nearly $30,000 in today's money) be forfeited in the form of a certified check. This method of payment was chosen to allow Mirabito to cash the check anywhere, with little ties to the banking process. An investigation was made into Mirabito's business and home, during which police found the stamp press and the same style of paper used in the Black Hand letters. Concetto Rizzo Rizzo was a 27 year old Italian immigrant who lived at the fruit store Antonio owned. Working against Mirabito were both the Massachusetts assistant district attorney and police chief Watts. After a little over a week of proceedings, Mirabito was indicted by a jury on April 3 for the charge of attempted extortion as a result of the letters sent to Piscopo. The court refused a retrial of the case, stating they had seen enough evidence to know Mirabito had committed the crime. Mirabito was assigned a sentence of 6 to 10 years in prison, and was recommended to receive a harsher sentence due to severity of his Black Hand organization's impact on the region. Connection to Boston As a result of his crime, Antonio Mirabito became well known in the Northeastern Region of the United States. Elite individuals throughout the area had consistently been terrorized by his demands. His arrest landed him on the front page of the Boston's leading newspapers, and was reported across all of the Northeast. Mirabito's case was the first Black Hand conviction in Massachusetts, and all of New England. With his removal from the Black Hand crime scene, officials were hopeful that his branch of the organization would dissolve and the extortion tactic would end. However, it survived Mirabito and eventually became the Mafia. ==Family life, death==

After he got out of prison, Antonio Mirabito never got reinvolved with crime. He met and established a legitimate marriage with Concettina Natoli, who would be his wife until her death 63 years later. Together, they had nine children. They were killed in what was determined by police to be a murder-suicide, with Felisco being the aggressor. However, police could not at all determine why it was committed, so other forms of crime could not be ruled out. ==References==