Gaetano Costa, a male Italian butcher and merchant, was working out of his shop at Thirty-second Street and Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn when an extortion demand—framed in the familiar menace of the Black Hand—came his way. The note insisted he hand over $1,000, hidden inside a loaf of bread, to a man who would step up like any ordinary customer and signal himself by pulling out a red handkerchief. Costa refused to be shepherded into that ritual. He ignored the handkerchief, and in the small, e
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