Leonardo DiCaprio to Headline The Black Hand

Leonardo DiCaprio will headline the true organized crime tale The Black Hand

Leonardo DiCaprio has a new historical tale in development with The Black Hand, based on author Stephan Talty‘s upcoming nonfiction account of the rise of organized crime in America and one man’s personal battle to bring it down. Deadline has the news, reporting that DiCaprio will both headline as NYPD Lt. Joe Petrosino and produce through his Appian Way banner. Paramount Pictures will release the film and is currently looking for a scribe to adapt the screenplay.

The Black Hand will published this April with the following official description:

Beginning in the summer of 1903, an insidious crime wave filled New York City, and then the entire country, with fear. The children of Italian immigrants were kidnapped, and dozens of innocent victims were gunned down. Bombs tore apart tenement buildings. Judges, senators, Rockefellers, and society matrons were threatened with gruesome deaths. The perpetrators seemed both omnipresent and invisible. Their only calling card: the symbol of a black hand. The crimes whipped up the slavering tabloid press and heated ethnic tensions to the boiling point. Standing between the American public and the Black Hand’s lawlessness was Joseph Petrosino. Dubbed the “Italian Sherlock Holmes,” he was a famously dogged and ingenious detective, and a master of disguise. As the crimes grew ever more bizarre and the Black Hand’s activities spread far beyond New York’s borders, Petrosino and the all-Italian police squad he assembled raced to capture members of the secret criminal society before the country’s anti-immigrant tremors exploded into catastrophe. Petrosino’s quest to root out the source of the Black Hand’s power would take him all the way to Sicily—but at a terrible cost.

The Gotham Group‘s Jeremy Bell and Ellen Goldsmith-Vein will also produce The Black Hand alongside Appian Way’s Nathaniel Posey. Ashley Brucks and Gabby Canton will oversee for Paramount.

Does The Black Hand sound like a film you’ll want to check out? Is there anyone that you’d like to see direct? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

(Photo Credit: WENN.com)

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