Presently he can restrain himself no longer, and both he and Rapi begin simultaneously to harangue the court, until the president orders Abbatemaggio to stop and the captain of carabinieri touches Rapi on the shoulder. The latter is now reduced to tears and wrings his hands as he calls his aged mother to witness that he is an innocent man! Soon order is restored, and the confronto concludes with a sort of summing up of his defence on the part of the “Professor.” It is a model of rhetoric, rather too carefully calculated to appear as sincere as his previous outbursts. He calls down the curses of God upon Abbatemaggio, who listens contemptuously; he protests the purity of his life and motives; he weeps at the irony of fate that keeps him—the merest object of suspicion—confined in a loathsome prison. Then he bows and resumes his seat by the side of Father Ciro Vitozzi, to whom, amid the laughter of the spectators, he has referred as “that holy man there.” And, apart from the argument between him and Abbatemaggio, there has really been no more denunciation, no more emotion, no more tears, than if an ordinary criminal attorney in a New York City court were summing up an important case.
Court adjourns. No sooner has the judge departed than an outcry is heard from the cage.
“I am tired—tired—tired!” exclaims an agonized voice. “I have been in prison for five years! Everybody else talks and I have to listen. I am not allowed to speak, and nothing ever happens! It is interminable! I cannot stand it!”
It is “Erricone” having one of his periodical moments of relief. After all, one is not inclined to blame him very much, for there is a good deal of truth in what he says—owing to the way the case was bungled in its earlier stages. The carabinieri rush up, “Erricone” is pacified by his fellow Camorrists, and quiet is restored. One inquires if there is generally any more excitement than has just occurred, and is told that it has been quite a sensational day, but then—that “Erricone” is always “yelling.” A good many defendants make a noise and carry on—and so do their relatives—after court has adjourned, in America.
One is in doubt whether to believe Abbatemaggio on the one hand or Rapi on the other, and ends by concluding that it would be utterly impossible to believe either. Both were acting, both playing to the gallery. You know Rapi is a crook, and—well you wouldn’t trust Abbatemaggio, either, around the corner. And, after all, it is the word of the one against that of the other so far as any particular defendant is concerned. But one fixed impression remains—that of the aplomb, intelligence, and cleverness of these men, and the danger to a society in which they and their associates follow crime as a profession. Once more you study the faces of the well-dressed prisoners in the cage, of the four alleged assassins of Cuocolo—Morra, Sortino, de Gennaro, and Cerrato; of Giuseppe Salvi, the murderer of Maria Cutinelli; of Luigi Fucci, the dummy head of the Camorra; of “Erricone” Alfano, the wolfish supreme chief and dictator of the society; of Luigi Arena, the captain of the Neapolitan burglars; of that mediæval rascal, “Father” Ciro Vitozzi, the most picturesque figure of the lot; of Desiderio, head of petty blackmailing and tribute-levying industry; of Maria Stendardo, whose house was a Camorrist hell; and of Rapi, the gambling “professor” and “Moriarty” of Naples—and you know instinctively that, whether as an abstract proposition Abbatemaggio conveys an impression of absolute honesty or not, what he has said is true and that this is the Camorra—the real Camorra, vile, heartless, treacherous!
Then, if you were asked to give your impressions of the way the trial was being carried on, you would probably say that, considering the magnitude of the task involved, the mass of evidence (there are forty volumes of the preliminary examinations), the great number of prisoners and the multitude of witnesses, and the latitude allowed under the Italian law in the matter of taking testimony, the trial was being conducted considerably faster than would be probable in America under like conditions; that the methods followed are admirably calculated to ascertain the truth or falsity of the charges; that the judge presides with extreme fairness, courtesy, and ability; that, all things considered, there is, as a rule, less confusion or disorder than would be naturally expected—that, in a word, the Italian government is making a good job of it, and deserves to be congratulated.
Indeed, so far as the procedure is concerned, it is not so very different from our own, and, were it not for the presence of the uniforms of the carabinieri and the officers of infantry in the court-room, and the huge cage in which the prisoners are confined, one could easily imagine one’s self in a court in America. The conduct of the trial is far more free, far less formal, than with us—a fact which, the writer believes, makes in the end for effectiveness, although the excitability of the Italian temperament occasionally creates something of an uproar, which calls for a suspension of proceedings. Doubtless the prisoners give vent to cries of rage and humiliation; perhaps one or two of them in the course of the trial may faint or have fits (such things happen with us); the judge and lawyers may squabble, and accuser and accused roundly curse each other. Such things could hardly help occurring in a trial lasting, perhaps, a year. In fact, deaths and births have occurred among them during this period, for Ciro Alfano has passed away and Maria Stendardo has given birth to a child; but, on the whole, there is probably no more excitement, no more confusion, no more bombast, and vastly less sensationalism than if thirty-six members of the Black Hand were being tried en masse in one of our own criminal courts for a double murder, involving the existence of a criminal society whose ramifications extended into the national legislature and whose affiliations embraced the leaders of a local political organization and many officials and members of the New York police.