There was only one thing to do, you understand.

I resolved to slay her, just as you--giudici--would have done.

I bought a carving-knife and sharpened it, and asked her to walk with me to the park, and I would have killed her had not the police prevented me.
Wherefore, O giudici! I pray you to recall her and permit me to kill her or to decree that she be hung!" This case illustrates the depths of ignorance and superstition that are occasionally to be found among Italian peasant immigrants.

Another actual experience may demonstrate the mediaeval treachery of which the Sicilian Mafiuso is capable, and how little his manners or ideals have progressed in the last five hundred years or so.
A photographer and his wife, both from Palermo, came to New York and rented a comfortable home with which was connected a "studio." In the course of time a young man--a Mafiuso from Palermo--was engaged as an assistant, and promptly fell in love with the photographer's wife.

She was tired of her husband, and together they plotted the latter's murder.
After various plans had been considered and rejected, they determined on poison, and the assistant procured enough cyanide of mercury to kill a hundred photographers, and turned it over to his mistress to administer to the victim in his "Marsala." But at the last moment her hand lost its courage and she weakly sewed the poison up for future use inside the ticking of the feather bolster on the marital bed.
This was not at all to the liking of her lover, who thereupon took matters into his own hands, by hiring another Mafiuso to remove the photographer with a knife-thrust through the heart.