I had heard a great deal about the Mafia in Italy, and about the criminal political organizations in other parts of Italy, before I came to Europe, and was anxious, if possible, to learn something that would give me an insight into the local causes and conditions which had produced them. One of the professional story-tellers whom I encountered while I was wandering about in the market in Catania recalled the subject to my mind. He was retailing to a crowd in the market square a story that was even more exciting and interesting to me, at least, than the one which I have already mentioned. It was, in fact, nothing less than an account of the murders and outrages of the Black Hand in New York City. At first it struck me as very curious that I should meet in Italy, the home of the Mafia and the Camorra, a crowd of people in the public square listening with apparent wonder and awe to an account of the fabulous crimes and misdeeds of their fellow countrymen in another part of the world. I had a sort of notion that the Black Hand operations would be so familiar to Sicilians that they would have no curiosity about them. It was not so, however, and after I learned that New York had an Italian population larger than Rome, larger, in fact, than any Italian city, with the exception of Naples, this did not seem so strange. There are, as a matter of fact, more than 500,000 Italians in New York City, and 85 per cent. of them are from southern Italy. Among this 85 per cent. are very many who belong to the criminal classes. The result is that the Mafia, under the name of the Black Hand, is probably as active and, perhaps, as powerful among the Italian population in New York to-day as it ever was in Italy. While I was in Palermo I had the place pointed out to me where Petrosino, the Italian detective from New York, who went to Sicily to secure the records of some of the noted Italian criminals then living in America, was shot and killed. Petrosino was killed March 12, 1909. The killing of this American officer in the streets of Palermo served to call attention to the number of Black Hand crimes committed by Italians in this country. During the next nine months after Petrosino's death it was reported that no less than fifty "Italian killings," as they were called, took place either in New York City itself or in the surrounding territory, and from 1906 to 1909, according to statistics prepared by the New York _World_, of the 112 unexplained murders committed in and around New York, 54 were those of Italians. This suggests, at least, the manner in which our own country is affected by the conditions of the masses in southern Italy and Sicily.