1. 1. At his death, the New York Times wrote that he “was a man of uncommon courage and determination” (“The Murder of Petrosino” 1909, 10), and President Theodore Roosevelt stated that the lieutenant “did not know the name of fear” (quoted in Nicaso 2018, 482). The New York Times’ front-page headline noted “200,000 Citizens Line Streets” to pay their respects at his funeral (“Petrosino Buried” 1909, 1).
2. 2. Petrosino intervened in an extortion plot against the famous tenor Enrico Caruso. He convinced Caruso “that he would open himself to more and larger extortion” if he paid the $5,000, and instead Petrosino set up a sting operation and captured the extortionists (Raab 2006, 19-20). Petrosino also had warned of an assassination plot against President McKinley in Buffalo, New York, but it went unheeded; and on September 6, 1901, anarchist Leon Czolgosz murdered McKinley.
3. 3. The 1906 silent film The Black Hand is based on a case that Petrosino solved, but it is touted as the first gangster film with no mention of Petrosino in the credits. Since Petrosino’s death, there have been a number of movies made about his life, including the now-lost 1912 full-length silent film The Adventures of Lieutenant Petrosino as well as Pay or Die! (1960), which starred Ernest Borgnine as Petrosino, and Black Hand (1950), based on Petrosino’s life. Leonardo DiCaprio is currently slated to star as Petrosino in an adaptation of Stephan Talty’s The Black Hand: The Epic War Between a Brilliant Detective and the Deadliest Secret Society in American History (2017).
4. 4. It is not clear if dime novels by authors like Bernardino Ciambelli are included in the above number, but Italian-language American dime serials focused most often on Italian immigrants’ domestic concerns (Deschamps 2012, 148-150). Robert Viscusi notes that even when Ciambelli’s characters find themselves in the middle of “a narrative of sexual abuse and immigrant helplessness,” they are not one-dimensional criminals or victims but given dignity to decide “their destinies” (2014, xxi). An excerpt of Ciambelli’s Il martire del dovere ovvero Giuseppe Petrosino (The Martyr of Duty; or Giuseppe Petrosino) appears in Francesco Durante’s edited volume Italoamericana: The Literature of the Great Migration, 1880-1943 (2014, 205-209).
5. 5. Of the 115 issues, “65 [are] from 1883 and 50 from 1888” (Bedore 2013, 184 FN2).