LOCK HAVEN - Like your history with some action to it?
How about duels to the death, vendettas and Mafia-style executions?
Jack Weaver of the Howard area gives readers all that and more in his historical novel "Omerta: Code of Silence."
He will sign copies of his new book Saturday from 10 a.m. to noon at D. Dashem Books, 109 E. Main St.
The book store will host a double-header that morning - Judith Redline Coopey of the Altoona region also will sign copies of her novel "Redfield Farm" about the Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania.
Weaver, who is retired from the Game Commission, said he came upon the true story of how The Black Hand - the old-fashioned mafia that ruled the Newcastle, Pa. region with an iron fist - was infiltrated by a young detective who rose in the organization and helped take it down.
Sounds like fiction? Truth often is more compelling than tales of the imagination.
Weaver, a 40-year employee of the state Game Commission, came upon it "in some old dusty files in the back room" at the Harrisburg offices, he said. "I opened them up, literally blew off the dust, and found a big stack of mimeographed papers. They were the operative's personal notes on the mission."
Weaver was chronicling the state agency's history for the Pennsylvania Game News in the 1990s when he came across the Pinkerton detective's reports from a century ago.
A retired wildlife conservation information supervisor, Weaver also spent years in the field as a game protector, some of them in northern Centre County. At one time he was based at Bellefonte and tasked with collecting old-timers' stories.
He knows a good story when he sees it, and the rookie detective's reports told a great one from around the turn of the last century when fear, poverty and death ruled the community known as "bloody Hillsville," near Newcastle.
When Game Warden Seeley Houk shot a dog belonging to The Black Hand's head man, he was publicly marked for death, swiftly assassinated and sent to sleep with the fishes of the Mahoning River.
Weaver said he learned that historic fact during his training with the state agency, more than six decades after the murder.
It was just one of many outrages the Black Hand committed, but attacking outside law enforcement proved to be a fatal mistake. As explosions and gun battles escalated, the rule of violence at Hillsville became so savage, according to Weaver, that the dirt-poor Italian immigrant families the Black Hand enslaved risked everything to slip away.
The loss of workers endangered limestone quarry production that fed the Pittsburgh steel mills, the author said. Steel barons brought in the Pinkertons to put a stop to the local arm of organized crime that law enforcement had pretty much ignored up to that point. The slaying of the game warden became a key event that lead to the breaking of the Black Hand's code of silence.
Weaver sat in that dusty back room and read the accounts filed by "Operative No. 89" of Black Hand initiation rites, secret codes, vendettas, stiletto fights and more.
Weaver penned an article for The Game News but knew he could do more.
"I saw the novel in it," he said.
He and a Game Commission photographer visited Hillsville, which the author describes as "a little town with hardly anything there anymore," just a Catholic church, one large quarry and a few houses.
The shanties fell down long ago, but descendants of Black Hand members, their prey, and opposing "White Hand" members still live in the region, Weaver said. He changed many of the names in his novel.
Houk is a real name, though. So are a handful of others that were documented by the news media of the day.
"A lot of the action scenes actually happened," Weaver said. "It was fun to write."
He gave a talk for the historical society at Newcastle, he recalled, and the place was packed. It became an emotional event when people stood up and told how their own families had roles in, or under, the reign of terror, the author said.
Weaver grew up in another community with a significant Italian-American subculture - Renovo. He graduated from high school there in 1962. He had many Italian-American friends but recalled that he didn't have a hope of dating the girls since he was neither Italian nor Catholic and their fathers simply would not allow it.
Still, he said, the community of his childhood was much more open and cordial than in the old days when the Italian immigrants were hated for coming to town - any town, not just Renovo - and actually getting work.
"They did the jobs nobody else wanted to do," Weaver said. "They dug the logging railroads up troughs in the hollows, and when that was done, they tried to get other work."
At Hillsville, they had to pay the quarry owners for everything, even the dynamite they used to do their jobs, Weaver said. The Black Hand demanded protection money on top of that. The head man ran their lives, decreeing who could get married and who not, he said. And the outside, "American" world turned its back, he said.
"What really drove me to write the book was to show the plight of the Italian Americans of the day," Weaver said. "They celebrated the Fourth of July... but these people were in basic captivity."
This is his third book - "Phantoms of the Woods" was published in 1992 and "Hunting: Have Fun, Be Smart" came out in 2000.
Gone are the days, he lamented, when he could publish a book and sell copies out of the pack on his motorcycle, traveling from one book store after another. Today's serious authors must advertise, he said.
He published "Omerta: Code of Silence" this spring through Trafford Publishing, in both hard back and soft cover editions. The novel is available on the Internet at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com as well as at D. Dashem Books and from Weaver directly.
"I'd be glad to speak on this topic to any group," he said. "I think it's a part of our history and we need to talk about it. It isn't just their culture anymore, it's our culture too. It's American culture... after all, we are a melting pot."
