the Italian law is willing enough, but its fleshly enforcement is curiously weak.  Those who have money enough manage to reach France or Holland and come over first or second-class.  The main fact is that they get here —­law or no law.  Once they arrive in America, they realize their opportunities and actually start in to turn over a new leaf.  They work hard; they become honest.  They may have been Camorrists or Mafiusi at home, but they are so no longer.  They are “on the level,” and stay so; only—­they are “men of honor.”  And what is the meaning of that?  Simply that they keep their mouths, eyes, and ears shut so far as the Mala Vita is concerned.  They are not against it.  They might even assist it passively.  Many of these erstwhile criminals pay through the nose for respectability—­the Camorrist after his kind, the Mafius’ after his kind.  Sometimes the banker who is paying to a Camorrist is blackmailed by a Mafius’.  He straightway complains to his own bad man, who goes to the “butter-in” and says in effect:  “Here!  What are you doing?  Don’t you know So-and-So is under my protection?”

“Oh!” answers the Mafius’.  “Is he?  Well, if that is so, I’ll leave him alone—­as long as he is paying for protection by somebody.”

The reader will observe how the silence of “the man of honor” is not remotely associated with the Omerta.  As a rule, however, the “men of honor” form a privileged and negatively righteous class, and are let strictly alone by virtue of their evil past.

The number of south Italians who now occupy positions of respectability in New York and who have criminal records on the other side would astound even their compatriots.  Even several well-known business men, bankers, journalists, and others have been convicted of something or other in Italy.  Occasionally they have been sent to jail; more often they have been convicted in their absence—­condannati in contumacia—­and dare not return to their native land.  Sometimes the offences have been serious, others have been merely technical.  At least one popular Italian banker in New York has been convicted of murder—­but the matter was arranged at home so that he treats it in a humourous vein.  Two other bankers are fugitives from justice, and at least one editor.

To-day most of these men are really respectable citizens.  Of course some of them are a bad lot, but they are known and avoided.  Yet the fact that even the better class of Italians in New York are thoroughly familiar with the phenomena surrounding the Mala Vita is favorable to the spread of a certain amount of Camorrist activity.  There are a number of influential bosses, or capi maestra, who are ready to undertake almost any kind of a job for from twenty dollars up, or on a percentage.  Here is an illustration.

A well-known Italian importer in New York City was owed the sum of three thousand dollars by an other Italian, to whom he had loaned the money without security and who had abused his confidence.  Finding that the debtor intended to cheat him out of the money, although he could easily have raised the amount of the debt had he so wished, the importer sent for a Camorrist and told him the story.