Corleone means Lion-Heart. _Korliun_ it was named by the Saracens, who founded it and made it a military stronghold in the picturesque thirteenth century. Something of the savage, marauding spirit of the Saracen, always a menace to civilization, hovers about the place--a savagery that has nursed into being a dangerous and powerful arm of the great Mafia or "Black-Hand" Society of Italy. The town holds only about twenty thousand inhabitants and there is no industry to speak of. Palermo is but twenty-one miles to the north of it. There is a splendid old church in Corleone reminiscent of the time when King Frederick II colonized these parts with Lombardian peasants as early as 1237. One night in the year 1889, while on his way home, Giovanni Vella, Chief of the Sylvan Guards, was murdered in a dark street but a short distance from his residence in Corleone. A bullet had torn its way through his back and into his lung. Vella lasted but a few minutes after the shooting, but long enough to cause a nasty tangle for the police in their effort to solve the murder. Vella lived just long enough to utter a few remarks that were misused by Mafia influences to send an innocent man to prison for twenty-two years. Anna Di Puma, a neighbor, returning to her house at that hour had just passed through a dark alley and noticed two men lurking in the shadow. She passed close and looked into their faces, recognizing one of the men as Giuseppe Morello, whom she knew very well. A couple of minutes later, even before she had reached her door, she heard a shot and ran back into the alley. There she found Vella lying in the exact spot where she had seen Morello and his companion apparently hiding but a few minutes previously. Anna Di Puma told the neighbors what she had seen. She was also incautious enough to say that she was going to court to tell on the witness stand just what she had observed. Anna Di Puma was shot in the back and killed two days later while she was sitting on the door-step of a neighbor's store. Morello was arrested and charged with the murder of the Di Puma woman. He was held in prison to await trial, but powerful influences of the Mafia were set to work and Morello was discharged for lack of evidence. The only witness to the murder of Vella was dead. Two lawyers of his band testified that Morello was in Palermo with them and not in Corleone on the night the Di Puma woman was murdered.