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1900s in organized crime

events of the 1900s in organized crime

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 12, 2026
Entity authorityQ123914196 ↗
Source-derived summary

This is a list of organized crime in the 1900s, arranged chronologically.

1900

Events

Monk Eastman claims New York's East Side for the Eastman Gang, now numbering an estimated 1,100. This eventually begins a gang war between the Eastmans and Paul Kelly's Five Points Gang.

Evidence of La Mano Nera (The Black Hand), an Italian extortionist organization, is seen in Brooklyn, New York.

Sicilian Mafia Don Vito Cascio Ferro [Cascioferro] arrives in New York to become a major leader of La Mano Nera (The Black Hand).

A gang war begins between Tom Lee's On Leong Tong and an alliance of Wong Gets Hip Sings and Mock Duck's Four Brothers over gambling interests in New York's Chinatown. The war continues until a peace treaty is signed in 1909.

Births

January 7 – Simone Scozzari, underboss of the Los Angeles crime family

January 16 - Richard Lonergan, final leader of the White Hand Gang

March 18 – Ferdinand Boccia, New York City mobster

June 28 – Sam Mesi, Chicago (West Side) mobster and operator of three off-track betting operations

July 2 – Michael "Trigger Mike" Coppola, caporegime of the 116th Street Crew

October 12 – William Morris Bioff, Mafia extortionist

1901

Events

The Olympis Café, a dive bar in Chicago's Whiskey Row vice district, is opened by Sime Tuckhorn and quickly becomes frequented by the city's white slavery traders.

Summer – Monk Eastman, while traveling through the Bowery, is attacked near Chatham Square by several members of the Five Points Gang. Eastman, armed only with brass knuckles and a slingshot, manages to fight them off knocking out three of the attackers before being shot twice in the stomach by the fourth member.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “1900s in organized crime” is events of the 1900s in organized crime. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through 1900s, organized and crime, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1900, 1909, 1901—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, 1900s, organized and crime is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “events of the 1900s in organized crime” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q123914196. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1900, 1909 and 1901.

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This entry incorporates text from “1900s in organized crime” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.