The Barrel MysteryFlynn, William J. (William James)
General
The Barrel Mystery
Flynn, William J. (William James)
Detective and mystery stories; Fiction
You are now familiar with the kind of punishment meted out to one whom
the gang suspects of having betrayed a member. You have also been
acquainted with the Sicilian custom of revenge by way of an actual
example showing how the slayer of the man in the barrel came to his
end in a manner that is as certain as daylight follows darkness. It is
the racial idea of the antique Hebrew law, "An eye for an eye and a
tooth for a tooth." The Sicilian "vendetta" demands a life for a life.
You may have noted further that the police of New York and the
machinery of the law failed to track down the slayer of the man in the
barrel. A circumstance that makes it singularly difficult for the
authorities to cope with this type of criminals is that the Sicilian
does not ask the police for help when a member of his family is
murdered. He keeps it quiet. And as quietly a blood relative of the
slain person assumes the responsibility which we Americans place on
the police and the courts. The end of Petto, the Ox, shows exactly
what happens when individual vengeance succeeds in place of justice
meted out by a court of law.
The reader will remember that when the criminal band, which the police
rounded up in connection with the barrel murder, were turned out by
the police magistrate, because there was insufficient evidence to hold
them for the murder of Benedetto, the suspects dropped out of sight as
far as the police of New York were concerned.
The Secret Service kept its eagle eye on them, however. Every suspect
was carefully "shadowed" by a special operative. We expected that they
would gravitate back to their haunts, and they did. We spotted them in
such places as the café of Pietro Inzarillo, at No. 226 Elizabeth
Street, and in the dark, little Italian grocery shop of Ignazio Lupo,
at No. 8 Prince Street, which is just around the corner from
Inzarillo's place. We also located suspects loafing around the dingy,
garlic-smelling restaurant of Giuseppe Morello, tucked away in the
rear of Lupo's grocery shop, like an evil thing afraid of the light of
day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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