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Sitting stiffly in an arm-chair, his ugly moon-face expressionless save for an occasional flash from his black eyes, Petrosino recounted slowly and accurately how, by means of a single slip of paper bearing the penciled name "Sabbatto Gizzi, P.O. Box 239, Lambertville, N.J.," he had run down the unknown murderer of an unknown Italian stabbed to death in the park's shrubbery.
If the life of Petrosino were to be written, it would be a book unique in the history of criminology and crime, for this man was probably the only great detective of the world to find his career in a foreign country amid criminals of his own race.
Such an one was Guiseppe Petrosino, a great detective, and an honest, unselfish, and heroic man, who united indefatigable patience and industry with reasoning powers of a high order. The most thrilling evening of my life was when I listened before a crackling fire in my library to Joe's story of the Van Cortlandt Park murder, the night before I was going to prosecute the case.
Joseph Petrosino, the able and fearless officer of New York police who was murdered in Palermo while in the service of the country of his adoption, was, while he lived, our greatest guaranty of protection against the Italian criminal. But Petrosino is gone. The fear of him no longer will deter Italian ex-convicts from seeking asylum in the United States.
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.
I have instanced Petrosino as an example of a police detective of a very unusual type, but I have known several other men on the New York Police Force of real genius in their own particular lines of work.
But an ounce of prevention is worth several tons of cure. Petrosino claimed not boastfully that he could, with proper deportation laws behind him, exterminate the Black Hand throughout the United States in three months. But, as far as the future is concerned, a solution of the problem exists a solution so simple that only a statesman could explain why it has not been adopted long years ago.
*Petrosino is a national hero in Italy, where he was known as "Il Sherlock Holmes d'Italia" "the Italian Sherlock Holmes." Many novels in which he figures as the central character have a wide circulation there. By far the greater portion of these criminals, whether ex-convicts or novices, are the products or byproducts of the influence of the two great secret societies of southern Italy.
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