number of cases is insignificant
compared with those in which dynamite is the chief factor. In 1908,
there were forty-four bomb outrages reported in New York City. There
were seventy arrests and nine convictions. During the present year
(1911) there have been about sixty bomb cases, but there have been none
since September 8, since Detective Carrao captured Rizzi, a picciott',
in the act of lighting a bomb in the hallway of a tenement house.

This case of Rizzi is an enlightening one for the student of social
conditions in New York, for Rizzi was no Orsini, not even a Guy Fawks,
nor yet was he an outlaw in his own name. He was simply a picciott'
(pronounced "pish-ot") who did what he was told in order that some other
man who did know why might carry out a threat to blow up somebody who
had refused to be blackmailed. It is practically impossible to get
inside the complicated emotions and motives that lead a man to become an
understudy in dynamiting. Rizzi probably got well paid; at any rate,
he was constantly demonstrating his fitness "to do big things in a big
way," and be received into the small company of the elect--to go forth
and blackmail on his own hook and hire some other picciott' to set off
the bombs.

Whoever the capo maestra that Rizzi worked for, he was not only
a deep-dyed villain, but a brainy one. The gang hired a store and
pretended to be engaged in the milk business. They carried the bombs in
the steel trays holding the milk bottles and cans, and, in the costume
of peaceful vendors of the lacteal fluid, they entered the tenements and
did their damage to such as failed to pay them tribute. The manner of
his capture was dramatic. A real milkman for whom Rizzi had worked
in the past was marked out for slaughter. He had been blown up twice
already. While he slept his wife heard some one moving in the hall.
Looking out through a small window, she saw the ex-employee fumble
with something and then turn out the gas on the landing. Her husband,
awakened by her exit and return, asked sleepily what the matter was.

"I saw Rizzi out in the hall," she answered. "It was funny-he put out
the light!"

In a moment the milkman was out of bed and gazing, with his wife, into
the street. They saw Rizzi come down with his tray and pass out of
sight. So did a couple of Italian detectives from Headquarters who had
been following him and now, at his very heels, watched him enter another
tenement, take a bomb from his tray