The Mafia was thrown into panic. The bandits knew that Vella would win if Ortonello did not oppose him.
The very night following Ortonello's cancelling of his name for the office, Vella was murdered.
Previously on the evening that he was shot Vella had been making merry at the café "Stella d'Italia" with a number of public officials and was well "under the weather," as they say, when he started for home. He was seen to rest against a lamp-post. A neighbor offered him assistance to his door but Vella refused.
As soon as the shooting took place there was a commotion. Vella's wife, feeling that some such fate would befall her husband, rushed out terror-stricken and fell prostrate across the dying chief. The carabineers arrived and with them a crowd of people. Vella was taken in a dying condition to his house, which became jammed with excited neighbors. Among those present was Morello. He had hidden his gun in a pile of rubbish at the river's edge and hurried into Vella's house to look for developments. The hiding of the gun by Morello was testified to at the trial of Ortonello by a man named Antonio Caronia, who, by the way, was not murdered. He was a good shot himself, and had the reputation of being able to mix it up with any of the Morello crowd without much fear of the results.
The commander of the carabineers was a dear friend of Vella's and had been dining with the chief but a few minutes before the shooting. The commander asked Vella who shot him and the chief muttered:
"Cows, cows,—the Mafia." The chief also recited a long list of names of the men he had been camping after in his efforts to rid the community of the Mafia band. At this the commander of the carabineers interrupted the dying chief, and told him he was naming too many men, and that so many could not have done the shooting. The result, the commander told the chief, would be that no one would suffer for the offense. The commander then asked Vella whether he had any quarrels recently and the chief answered:
"Yes, I quarrelled with Ortonello yesterday. He wanted to take my job away—take the bread and butter from my wife and children—and he threatened me with a gun."
The commander of the carabineers immediately directed his men to go and get Ortonello and bring him to the house of the dying chief.
When Morello heard this order he smiled and departed for his home. It was upon returning there that the conversation took place which Zangara declared he had overheard between the "Black-Hander" and his mother.
When the carabineers arrived with Ortonello in their custody, Vella was in his last breaths. When asked by the commander of the carabineers if Ortonello was the man with whom he had quarrelled on the previous day, Vella nodded his head and fell back dead.