“I saw Rizzi out in the hall,” she answered.  “It was funny-he put out the light!”

In a moment the milkman was out of bed and gazing, with his wife, into the street.  They saw Rizzi come down with his tray and pass out of sight.  So did a couple of Italian detectives from Headquarters who had been following him and now, at his very heels, watched him enter another tenement, take a bomb from his tray, and ignite a time fuse.  They caught him with the thing alight in his hand.  Meanwhile the other bomb had gone off and blown up the milkman’s tenement.

There is some ancient history in regard to these matters which ought to be retold in the light of modern knowledge; for example, the case of Patti, the Sicilian banker.  He had a prosperous institution in which were deposited the earnings of many Italians, poor and wealthy.  Lupo’s gang got after him and demanded a large sum for “protection.”  But Patti had a disinclination to give up, and refused.  At the time his refusal was attributed to high civic ideals, and he was lauded as a hero.  Anyhow, he defied the Mafia, laid in a stock of revolvers and rifles, and rallied his friends around him.  But the news got abroad that Lupo was after Patti, and there was a run on Patti’s bank.  It was a big run, and some of the depositors gesticulated and threatened—­for Patti couldn’t pay it all out in a minute.  Then there was some kind of a row, and Patti and his friends (claiming that the Mafia had arrived) opened fire, killing one man and wounding others.  The newspapers praised Patti for a brave and stalwart citizen.  Maybe he was.  After the smoke had cleared away, however, he disappeared with all his depositors’ money, and now it has been discovered that the man he killed was a depositor and not a Black Hander.  The police are still looking for him.

This case seems a fairly good illustration of the endless opportunity for wrong-doing possible in a state of society where extortion is permitted to exist—­where the laws are not enforced—­where there is a “higher” sanction than the code.  Whether Patti was a good or a bad man, he might easily have killed an enemy in revenge and got off scot-free on the mere claim that the other was blackmailing him; just as an American in some parts of our country can kill almost anybody and rely on being acquitted by a jury, provided he is willing to swear that the deceased had made improper advances to his wife.

The prevention of kidnapping, bomb-throwing, and the other allied manifestations of the Black Hand depends entirely upon the activity of the police—­particularly the Italian detectives, who should form an inevitable part of the force in every large city.  The fact of the matter is that we never dreamed of a real “Italian peril” (or, more accurately, a real “Sicilian peril”) until about the year 1900.  Then we woke up to what was going on—­it had already gone a good way—­and started in to put an end to it.  Petrosino did put an end to much of it, and at the present time it is largely sporadic.  Yet there will always be a halo about the heads of the real Camorrists and Mafiusi—­the Alfanos and the Rapis—­in the eyes of their simple-minded countrymen in the United States.