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!