For all the great majority of the Italian immigrants are peaceable and industrious, no other element matches them in propensity for personal violence. In homicide, rape, blackmail, and kidnapping they lead the foreign-born. Says the Immigration Commission: "The Italian criminals are largest in numbers and create most alarm by the violent character of their offenses in this country." Among moderns, gainful offenses occur from three to seven times as frequently as crimes of violence. The medievalism of the South Italians appears from the fact that they commit more deeds of personal violence than gainful offenses.
Browning, who knew the Italians, expresses this cheerful alacrity in murder when, in "The Ring and the Book," the Pope tells of the four "bright-eyed, black-haired boys" Count Guido hired for his bloody work:
Murder me some three people, old and young,
Ye never heard the names of—and be paid
So much. And the whole four accede at once.
Demur? Do cattle bidden march or halt?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
All is done purely for the pay—which earned,
And not forthcoming at the instant, makes
Religion heresy, and the lord o' the land
Fit subject for a murder in his turn.
The patron with cut throat and rifled purse,
Deposited i' the roadside ditch, his due,
Naught hinders each good fellow trudging home
The heavier by a piece or two in poke,
And so with new zest to the common life,
Mattock and spade, plow-tail and wagon-shaft
Till some such other piece of luck betide.
It was frequently stated to the members of the Immigration Commission in southern Italy that crime had greatly diminished in many communities because most of the criminals had gone to America. One Italian official at Messina stated that several years ago southern Italy was a hot-bed of crime, but that now very few criminals were left. When asked as to their whereabouts, he replied, "Why, they are all in the United States." From the Camorra, that vast spider-web of thieves and prostitutes by whom life and politics in Naples are controlled, have come thousands who find the hard-working Italian immigrants a richer field of exploitation than any field open at home. Still more harassing is the Mafia, by means of which Sicilians contrive to ignore police and courts and to secure justice in their own way. A legacy of Spanish domination and Spanish arrogance is the sense of omertà, or manliness, which holds it dastardly to betray to justice even one's deadliest foe. To avenge one's wrongs oneself, and never to appeal to law, is a part of Sicilian honor.
In an Italian quarter are men who never work, yet who have plenty of money. "No," they say, "we do not work. Work does not agree with us. We have friends who work and give us money. Why not?" It is these parasites who commit most of the crime. Their honest fellow-countrymen shrink from them, yet, if one of them is arrested, some make it a point of honor to swear him off, while all scrupulously forget anything against him. Thanks to this perverse idea of "honor," an Italian murder may be committed in the street in broad daylight, with dozens looking on, yet a few minutes later every spectator will deny to the police that he has seen anything. This highbinder contempt for law is reinforced by sheer terrorism. It is said that often in our courts the sudden wilting of a promising Italian witness has been brought about by the secret giving of the "death-sign," a quick passing of the hand across the throat as if cutting.
The American, with his ready resort to the vigilance committee, is amazed that a whole community should let itself thus be bullied by a few miscreants known to all. Nothing of the sort has ever been tolerated by North European immigrants. The secret lies in the inaptness of the South Italians for good team work. Individualistic to the marrow, they lack the gift of pulling together, and have never achieved an efficient cooperating unit larger than the family.
General Theodore E. Bingham, former Police Commissioner of New York, estimated that there are in that city not less than 3000 desperadoes from southern Italy, "among them as many ferocious and desperate men as ever gathered in a modern city in time of peace—medieval criminals who must be dealt with under modern law." In 1908 he stated: "Crimes of blackmailing, blowing up of shops and houses, and kidnapping of their countrymen have become prevalent among Italian residents of the city to an extent that cannot be much longer tolerated." It is obvious that if our legal system is called upon to cope with a great volume of such crime for a long time, it will slough off certain Anglo-Saxon features and adopt the methods which alone avail in Italy, namely, state police, registry system, "special surveillance" and "admonition."