Between 1900 and 1925, a conflict raged along the New York harbors, a war between Irish and Italian gangs to control the lucrative rackets along the busy, expanding waterfront wharves and warehouses.
This was the battle between the Italian Sicilian Black Hand Gang and a combination of Irish street gangs that would eventually become known as The White Hand Gang. This vicious conflict would come to a bloody conclusion on Christmas night 1925 at the Adonis Social Club, an Italian-owned speakeasy in Brooklyn, when Al Capone settled his long-standing feud with the Irish Mob.
As a young man, Al Capone had left New York for Chicago to escape the Irish White Hand Gang. Their power was so fierce and their reputation so all-encompassing in Brooklyn that a young Al Capone was sent to Chicago, as many sources confirm, because the White Hand Gang had him on a shortlist of those who needed to be killed. The Mafia could not afford to lose one of its rising stars…