Courts, Criminals and the Camorra

by Arthur Cheney Train

“All right,” he replied crisply. “Send it up for January.” And he rang off.

I arose and walked over to the bookcase on which reposed several shelves of “minutes” of criminal trials. They were dusty and depressing. Practically every one of them was a memento of some poor devil gone to prison or to the chair. Where were they now—and why did they kill—yes, why did they?

I glanced along the red-labeled backs.

“People versus Candido.” Now why did he kill? I remembered the Italian perfectly. He killed his friend because the latter had been too attentive to his wife. “People versus Higgins.” Why did he? That was a drunken row on a New Year’s Eve within the sound of Trinity chimes. “People versus Sterling Greene.” Yes, he was a colored man—I recalled the evidence—drink and a “yellow gal.” “People versus Mock Duck”—a Chinese feud between the On Leong Tong and the Hip Sing Tong—a vendetta, first one Chink shot and then another, turn and turn about, running back through Mott Street, New York, Boston, San Francisco, until the origin of the quarrel was lost in the dim Celestial mists across the sea. Out of the first four cases the following motives: Jealousy—1. Drink—1. Drink and jealousy—1. Scattering (how can you term a “Tong” row?)—1.

I began to get interested. Supposing I dug out all the homicide cases I had ever tried, what would the result show as to motive for the killing? Would drink and women account for seventy-five per cent? Mentally I ran my eye back over nearly ten years. What other motives had the defendants at the bar had? There was Laudiero—an Italian “Camorrista”—he had killed simply for the distinction it gave him among his countrymen and the satisfaction he felt at being known as a “bad” man—a “capo maestra.” There was Joseph Ferrone—pure jealousy again. Hendry—animal hate intensified by drink. Yoscow—a deliberate murder, planned in advance by several of a gang, to get rid of a young bully who had made himself generally unpleasant. There was Childs, who had killed, as he claimed, in self-defence because he was set upon and assaulted by rival runners from another seaman’s boarding house. Really it began to look as if men killed for a lot of reasons. I wanted to call up my friend and ask what kind of killings counted. Did he simply want to know why men murdered one another? He couldn’t possibly mean that I was to attempt to explain why they saw fit to exterminate each other by means of capital punishment? Or ran over one another in trains and automobiles? Or allowed each other to die from unsanitary conditions? Or lynched one another?—there was only one reason for that I knew. Or killed themselves? Nor did he mean to have me go into the question of why they killed elsewhere—in Naples, Sicily, Constantinople, and so on. No; what he wanted to find out was why men in the United States of America killed other men of their own kind without malice aforethought—legal and quasi-legal killings excluded. Moreover, he wanted to know from the actual personal experience of those who had weighed the evidence as to their motives in a sufficiently large number of cases to be representative.

One consideration at once suggested itself. How about the killings where the murderer is never caught? The prisoners tried for murder are only a mere fraction of those who commit murder. True, and the more deliberate the murder, the greater, unfortunately, the chance of the villain getting away. Still, in cases merely of suspected murder, or in cases where no evidence is taken, it would be manifestly unfair arbitrarily to assign motives for the deed, if deed it was. No, one must start with the assumption, sufficiently accurate under all the circumstances, that the killings in which the killer is caught are fairly representative of killings as a whole.

All crimes naturally tend to divide themselves into two classes—crimes against property and crimes against the person, each class having an entirely different assortment of reasons for their commission.

There can be practically but one motive for theft, burglary, or robbery. It is, of course, conceivable that such crimes might be perpetrated for revenge—to deprive the victim of some highly prized possession. But in the main there is only one object—unlawful gain. So, too, blackmail, extortion, and kidnapping are all the products of the desire for “easy money.” But, unquestionably, this is the reason for murder in comparatively few cases.

The usual motive for crimes against the person—assault, manslaughter, mayhem, murder, etc.—is the desire to punish, or be avenged upon another by inflicting personal pain upon him or by depriving him of his most valuable asset—life. And this desire for retaliation or revenge generally grows out of a recent humiliation received at the hands of the other person, a real or fancied wrong to oneself, a member of one’s family, or one’s property. But this was too easy an answer to my friend’s question. He could have got that much out of any elementary text-book on penology. He wanted and deserved more than that, and I set out to give it to him.

My first inquiry was in the direction of original sources. I sought out the man in the district attorney’s office who had had the widest general experience and put the question to him. This was Mr. Charles C. Nott, Jr., who has been trying murder cases for nearly ten years. It so happened that he had kept a complete record of all of them and this he courteously placed at my disposal. The list contains sixty-two cases, and the defendants were of divers races. These homicides included seventeen committed in cold blood (about twenty-five per cent, an extraordinary percentage) from varying motives, as follows: One defendant (white) murdered his colored mistress simply to get rid of her; another killed out of revenge because the deceased had “licked” him several times before; another, having quarrelled with his friend over a glass of soda water, later on returned and precipitated a quarrel by striking him, in the course of which he killed him; another because the deceased had induced his wife to desert him; another lay in wait for his victim and killed him without the motive ever being ascertained; one man killed his brother to get a sum of money, and another because his brother would not give him money; another because he believed the deceased had betrayed the Armenian cause to the Turks; another because he wished to get the deceased out of the way in order to marry his wife; and another because deceased had knocked him down the day before. One man had killed a girl who had ridiculed him; and one a girl who had refused to marry him; another had killed his daughter because she could no longer live in the house with him; one, an informer, had been the victim of a Black Hand vendetta; and the last had poisoned his wife for the insurance money in order to go off with another woman. There were two cases of infanticide, one in which a woman threw her baby into the lake in Central Park, and another in which she gave her baby poison. Besides these murders, five homicides had been committed in the course of perpetrating other crimes, including burglary and robbery.