These met and planned the tricks that were to be turned, assigned each “picciotto” to his duty, received and apportioned the proceeds, giving a due share to the police, and perhaps betraying a comrade or two for good measure—a crowd of dirty rascals, at whose activities the authorities connived more or less openly until the dual murder that forced the Italian government to recognize the gravity of the conditions existing in the criminal world of Naples. Then, in the twilight of the early morning of June 6, 1906, two cartmen found the body of Cuocolo, the “_basista_,” covered with stab-wounds by a roadside on the slope of Vesuvius. At almost the same moment in the Via Nardones, in Naples, in a house directly opposite the Commissariat of Public Safety, the police discovered his wife, Maria Cutinelli Cuocolo, stabbed to death in her bed. Both were well known Camorrists, and the crime bore every indication of being a “vendetta.” The first inquiries and formalities were conducted quite correctly. The police arrived on the spot and reported. The magistrate came more deliberately, but in due course. The two places where the crimes had occurred were duly examined, the two autopsies made, and a few witnesses heard. So far, everything had gone on just as it might have in New York or Boston. But then the Camorra got busy and things began to go differently. Meantime, however, the police had received an anonymous letter, in which the writer alleged that upon the night of the murder (June 5) a certain dinner party had taken place at an inn known as “Mimi a Mare” at Cupra Calastro in the commune of Torre del Greco, within a hundred yards of the scene of the homicide, at which the guests present were Enrico Alfano, Ciro Alfano, his brother, Gennaro Ibello, Giovanni Rapi, and another. While they were drinking wine and singing, a man suddenly entered—Mariano de Gennaro—and made a sign to Alfano, who pledged the visitor in a glass of “Marsala” and cried, “All is well. We will meet to-morrow.” This the police easily verified, and the diners were thereupon all arrested and charged with being accomplices in the murder, simply because it appeared that they had been near by. There was no other evidence. Perhaps the wise police thought that if arrested these criminals would confess. At any rate, the merry-makers were all locked up and Magistrate Romano of Naples began an investigation. At this juncture of the drama entered Don Ciro Vittozzi, girded in his priestly robes, a “Holy Man,” in the odor of sanctity.