Crime occupied an uneasy place in Alabama’s Italian press and the Italian language press did more than report arrests. They argued over protection, public authority and the damage that one criminal accusation could do to an entire group. Il Gladiatore, for instance, turned Corrado Rosana’s death in a Birmingham hotel (1925) into a front-page indictment of the police. In two 1926 briefs, it marked suspects by race and ethnicity, first setting an Italian shopkeeper against Black assailants, then placing an Italian suspect beside two Black men. These notices show the paper demanding fair treatment for Italians while also writing within the racial grammar of Jim Crow.
The question extended beyond the courtroom as the projected deportation of Charles Ponzi in 1934 showed how punishment could continue after prison for an immigrant subject to removal. The Columbus–Balbo Review later answered journalist Westbrook Pegler’s attack on Italian criminality by presenting Italian Americans as law-abiding workers, citizens and professionals. Crime therefore became a test of belonging at several levels: safety from police violence, position within the South’s racial order, the right to remain in the country and the collective reputation of Italians in American public life.
Arturo D’Albergo devoted two columns of Il Gladiatore to the violent death of Corrado Rosana, a twenty-seven-year-old worker from Noto, denouncing the killing as an assassination and questioning the conduct of the police to whom Rosana had turned for protection. According to his account, Rosana felt persecuted by a protective society and had barricaded himself in his hotel room, where hotel employees and officers attempted to force their way inside. D’Albergo described more than twenty-five policemen firing revolvers and rifles and using bombs against the young man, a response whose violence prompted him to lodge a protest with the city coroner, although he lacked the official standing to initiate an inquiry. His objection concerned both the force used against Rosana and the violation of a room in which he had sought safety. The newspaper’s accompanying editorial note brought the tragedy closer to its Alabama readers by identifying Rosana as a member of the Pratt City society, expressing sympathy and offering to help pay for his funeral. Through the protest and this practical offer of support, Il Gladiatore treated his death as a loss for the community and a matter that required public scrutiny of police conduct.
The two notices show how ethnic and racial labels shaped accounts of everyday crime, whether an Italian appeared as the victim or among the accused. In May, Il Gladiatore identified grocer Tony Ludi as “an Italian” confronted by Black men who attempted to rob him. One ordered him to raise his hands, but when Ludi reached for his revolver the men fled and a shot wounded him in the foot. The September notice placed an Italian in different company under the headline Two Black Men and an Italian Arrested for a Series of Thefts. Charles Giovino, James McGrew and John Lewis were accused of leading a group linked to nearly two hundred thefts involving about $10,000 in stolen property. While the first report distinguished the Italian shopkeeper from his Black assailants, the second described an alleged criminal enterprise in which Italian and Black men worked together. The newspaper continued to identify them separately even as it reported their association, showing that the distinction between Italians and African Americans could remain explicit without placing them on opposite sides of every crime story.
Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant in Boston, had become notorious in 1920 for an investment scheme that promised large profits from trading international reply coupons while using new investors’ money to pay earlier subscribers. Its collapse cost investors millions and led to a federal conviction for mail fraud in 1920, followed by a Massachusetts conviction for larceny in 1925. Il Gladiatore expected immigration officials to take him directly from Charlestown State Prison and hold him in East Boston for the first ship to Italy. The article recalled the losses his financial “genius” had inflicted on New England residents, then shifted to the deportation order he was fighting through his lawyers. Ponzi hoped to remain with a wife born and raised in Boston, who had supported him throughout his imprisonment. Here the prison sentence did not end punishment. Deportation instead carried the judgment into the immigrant’s family life and made the right to remain in the United States depend on immigration status as well as residence, marriage or attachment. The case unfolded in Massachusetts, but its place on Il Gladiatore’s front page put this specifically immigrant form of punishment before Alabama readers.
E. W. Castaldi, a contributor to the Columbus–Balbo Review, challenged Westbrook Pegler, a nationally syndicated American newspaper columnist whose articles appeared in the Pittsburgh Press, by questioning both his account of Italian criminality and his motives for attacking Italians. He claimed that Pegler’s hostility began after a visit to Italy to study Fascism, when the journalist resented being denied an interview with Mussolini. To answer Pegler’s assertion that America’s worst criminals came from Italy, Castaldi drew on Persons in Hiding by John Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He listed notorious offenders with non-Italian names and argued that kidnapping for ransom, blackmail, bank robbery and machine-gun hold-ups were products of American society. Even an Italian who committed such crimes, he insisted, was “Italian in name only,” having learned these practices through Americanization.
Castaldi thus defended Italians against an accusation of collective criminality while attributing the criminal behavior of some Italian Americans to their adopted country. He contrasted Pegler’s portrayal with the lives of industrious, law-abiding citizens, American-born or naturalized, whose contributions extended from manual labor to the professions, politics, industry and culture. His appeal also addressed the editors who published Pegler’s columns, asking why newspapers supported by Italian readers should circulate insults against them. At stake was the community’s ability to defend its reputation in the American press and to claim that loyalty to the United States could coexist with affection for Italy.
