Courts, Criminals and the Camorra — Reading Notes

The Prosecutor’s Voice in the Courtroom

Train’s prose carries the cadence of a man who has cross-examined witnesses and argued before juries. He describes a judge complaining that the police violated the law, and the commissioner retorting, ‘I didn’t.’ That blunt exchange—‘You did,’ ‘I didn’t’—mirrors the adversarial style Train knows firsthand. He does not simply report legal principles; he stages them as miniature dramas. In the chapter on preparing a criminal case, he notes how a prosecutor must anticipate ‘the wildest sort of guesses’ from bank presidents who imagine master forgers with camel’s-hair brushes, only to find a rubber stamp blurred the certification. Train’s voice is wry, impatient with romanticism, and quick to puncture inflated theories with physical evidence.

Deduction vs. Legwork in Detective Work

Train contrasts two approaches to solving crime. One is the ‘deductive detective’ who, like a fictional sleuth, ponders whether the cook or the hired girl stole a necklace. The other is the practical agency boss who, by chance, hears of two known yeggs—‘Pittsburgh Ike and Denver Red’—boarding a train, and recovers the loot within hours. Train calls this ‘a coincidence that might not occur in a hundred years,’ but he clearly favors the legwork over armchair reasoning. His account of the rubber-stamp forger reinforces the point: the boss rubs his thumb over the blurred certification and declares, ‘He’s no painter! Why, that’s a rubber stamp!’ Then he gets busy with the rubber-stamp makers. The lesson, Train writes, is that ‘deduction was responsible for a mistake which would not have occurred had a little knowledge been acquired first.’

The Camorra: From Italian Origins to American Shores

The book’s third section shifts from American courtrooms to the Camorra, the Neapolitan criminal society. Train devotes a chapter to ‘The Camorra in Italy’ and another to ‘An American Lawyer at Viterbo,’ suggesting he observed a trial firsthand. He then traces ‘The Mala Vita in America,’ arguing that similar organized-crime structures have taken root in U.S. cities. The excerpts do not reveal his specific evidence for this connection, but the structure implies a comparative approach: he treats the Camorra not as a foreign curiosity but as a parallel to the American criminal networks he has described earlier. The shift in setting—from New York police stations to Italian courtrooms—broadens the book’s scope without abandoning its focus on procedure and testimony.

The Language of Evidence and Inference

Throughout the excerpts, Train pays close attention to how people talk about crime. Bank officers speak in superlatives—‘the most skilful forger in the world’—while the detective dismisses their rhetoric with a colloquial ‘Great artist—nothing!’ The dialogue is crisp and idiomatic: ‘Good-day, gents!’ says the boss, pocketing the check. Train also notes the physical details that undercut verbal claims: the torn creeper and white scratch on paint that point to an outside job, the blurred rubber stamp that reveals a forgery. His own language is precise and unadorned, favoring concrete nouns and active verbs. He writes of a thief who ‘secured three hundred and sixty thousand dollars worth of securities from a famous banking institution by means of a very simple device’—a sentence that builds suspense through understatement.

Readers should approach Courts, Criminals and the Camorra as a series of linked essays rather than a unified narrative. Train’s authority comes from his professional background, but he does not claim omniscience: he admits when he does not know whether the police were consulted in a case, and he presents the Camorra material as an outsider’s observation. The book rewards attention to its small details—the torn vine, the blurred stamp, the offhand mention of a friend who studies yeggmen. These are the clues to Train’s method: he builds his arguments from the ground up, letting anecdotes carry the weight of his conclusions.

Rain hammered the windows while I sat with Train’s old courtroom tales, his frustration with justice’s wobbling seams. That feeling—of systems built on paper promises—lingered. Later, almost idly, I pulled up Copyright Law of the United States of America and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code, Circular 92 — Story, Setting & Ideas, and saw the same strange gap: law as tidy text, living messily outside it.