After a time it became just a matter of course for the more established southern Italian hoodlums to walk their newly arrived countrymen to a point near Police Headquarters and point out to them the short, squat, derby-hatted detective, so that in the future they might recognize him on sight and accord him wide berth. Petrosino was his name, Joseph Petrosino, and he was out to get every one of them. He was fearless, Petrosino was; he would stomp into a basement and collar two desperate killers at a time and march both of them off to the electric chair by the scruffs of their necks, and the room could be full of armed men and nobody would dream of drawing on him. Of Joseph Petrosino it was most wise to beware.

It wasn't merely that he was a cop. With Petrosino, the sworn duty was a matter of private honor. Giuseppe Petrosino had been born in Salerno, and he had come to the New World as a youth, and he had shined shoes and he had sold newspapers and he had gone to school and bettered himself, and then he had become New York's first Italian policeman, a man deeply trusted by the city's immigrant families, a man looked up to by children in the street.