middle of a city park or undeveloped property on the outskirts.  There the different members of the gang get their orders and stations, and perhaps a few dollars advance wages.  It is naturally quite impossible to guess the number of successful and unsuccessful attempts at blackmail among Italians, as the amount of undiscovered crime throughout the country at large is incomputable.  No word of it comes from the lips of the victims, who are in mortal terror of the vendetta—­of meeting some casual stranger on the street who will significantly draw the forefinger of his right hand across his throat.

There is rather more chance to find and convict a kidnapper than a bomb-thrower, so that, as a means of extortion, child-snatching is less popular than the mere demand for the victim’s money or his life.  On the other hand it is probably much more effective in accomplishing its result.  But America will not stand for kidnapping, and, although the latter occurs occasionally, the number of cases is insignificant compared with those in which dynamite is the chief factor.  In 1908, there were forty-four bomb outrages reported in New York City.  There were seventy arrests and nine convictions.  During the present year (1911) there have been about sixty bomb cases, but there have been none since September 8, since Detective Carrao captured Rizzi, a picciott’, in the act of lighting a bomb in the hallway of a tenement house.

This case of Rizzi is an enlightening one for the student of social conditions in New York, for Rizzi was no Orsini, not even a Guy Fawks, nor yet was he an outlaw in his own name.  He was simply a picciott’ (pronounced “pish-ot”) who did what he was told in order that some other man who did know why might carry out a threat to blow up somebody who had refused to be blackmailed.  It is practically impossible to get inside the complicated emotions and motives that lead a man to become an understudy in dynamiting.  Rizzi probably got well paid; at any rate, he was constantly demonstrating his fitness “to do big things in a big way,” and be received into the small company of the elect—­to go forth and blackmail on his own hook and hire some other picciott’ to set off the bombs.

Whoever the capo maestra that Rizzi worked for, he was not only a deep-dyed villain, but a brainy one.  The gang hired a store and pretended to be engaged in the milk business.  They carried the bombs in the steel trays holding the milk bottles and cans, and, in the costume of peaceful vendors of the lacteal fluid, they entered the tenements and did their damage to such as failed to pay them tribute.  The manner of his capture was dramatic.  A real milkman for whom Rizzi had worked in the past was marked out for slaughter.  He had been blown up twice already.  While he slept his wife heard some one moving in the hall.  Looking out through a small window, she saw the ex-employee fumble with something and then turn out the gas on the landing.  Her husband, awakened by her exit and return, asked sleepily what the matter was.