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This man might interest some of you. There's little to no information on the fellow that I can find beyond a few scraps of oral history from acquaintances in Chicago, but the few facts I can ascertain are this:
The man was an assassin for the 'Black Hand' - which didn't actually exist in any coherent form, as an actual organization, but instead was the name given by the press to numerous proto-mafia groups around the nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (so named because of the colorful drawings of hands held up 'in warning' on many extortion letters from such groups). Shotgun Man appears to have been more appropriately a mob hitman than a serial killer, but in truth there was little to no distinction at this time - some of the murders committed by the Morello Family in New York very closely resemble the general type of body-fixated morbidity we see in the Thames Torso and Ripper killings, in fact - and is probably closer to a spree killer like Charles Whitman than anything else. This man seems to have no qualms at all with gunning down victims in full view of "dozens" of on-lookers, and, given the rapidity with which he acted, killing four victims in public in a seventy-two hour period at one point, may have had only the most tenuous of motivations relatable to organized crime.
(I rather suspect many of the very early mafiosi were more or less indistinguishable pathologically from serial killers, and that this would only have filtered out into a more definite 'mobster' psychological type after 1912, when Black Hand activities seem to have ceased. Some of the younger Ripper suspects could have ended up in these groups had they been Sicilian. Hell, there are times I wonder about Sicilians in Whitechapel in 1888...)
This space reserved for future discoveries.
The man was an assassin for the 'Black Hand' - which didn't actually exist in any coherent form, as an actual organization, but instead was the name given by the press to numerous proto-mafia groups around the nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (so named because of the colorful drawings of hands held up 'in warning' on many extortion letters from such groups). Shotgun Man appears to have been more appropriately a mob hitman than a serial killer, but in truth there was little to no distinction at this time - some of the murders committed by the Morello Family in New York very closely resemble the general type of body-fixated morbidity we see in the Thames Torso and Ripper killings, in fact - and is probably closer to a spree killer like Charles Whitman than anything else. This man seems to have no qualms at all with gunning down victims in full view of "dozens" of on-lookers, and, given the rapidity with which he acted, killing four victims in public in a seventy-two hour period at one point, may have had only the most tenuous of motivations relatable to organized crime.
(I rather suspect many of the very early mafiosi were more or less indistinguishable pathologically from serial killers, and that this would only have filtered out into a more definite 'mobster' psychological type after 1912, when Black Hand activities seem to have ceased. Some of the younger Ripper suspects could have ended up in these groups had they been Sicilian. Hell, there are times I wonder about Sicilians in Whitechapel in 1888...)
This space reserved for future discoveries.
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