Originally posted by Nuge20
If I remember correctly their plan to assassinate the guy failed, and one of the members of the black hand was going to get a sandwich when he saw the guys coach/car/buggy/etc going by and shot him and his wife (archduke)
This is what was intended for the team (mafia). There was no ill intentions when created...
Black Hand
The roots of the Black Hand can be traced to Sicily and throughout the rest of Kingdom of Naples as early as the 1750s. However, the term as normally used in English specifically refers to the organization established by Italian immigrants in the United States during the 1880s who though fluent in their Southern Italian regional languages, had no access to Standard Italian or even a grammar school education. A minority of the immigrants formed criminal syndicates, living alongside each other. By 1900, Black Hand operations were firmly established in the Italian-American communities of major cities including New York, New Orleans, Chicago, and San Francisco. Although more successful immigrants were usually targeted, possibly as many as 90% of Italian immigrants in New York were threatened.
Typical Black Hand tactics involved sending a letter to a victim threatening bodily harm, kidnapping, arson, or murder. The letter demanded a specified amount of money to be delivered to a specific place. It was decorated with threatening symbols like a smoking gun or hangman's noose and signed with a hand imprinted in black ink; hence the Sicilian name 'A Manu Neura (The Black Hand) which was readily adopted by the American press as "The Black Hand Society".