killed in Piazza Marina in Palermo; two men were seen running from the crime scene. Petrosino had gone to Sicily to gather information from local police files to help deport Italian gangsters from New York as illegal immigrants. The two men were very much aware of the danger to each other's survival; Petrosino carried a note describing Cascio Ferro as “a terrible criminal”, while Cascio Ferro had a photograph of the police officer. Many accounts claim that Cascio Ferro personally killed Petrosino. Legend has it that Cascio Ferro excused himself from a dinner party among the high society at the home of his political patron De Michele Ferrantelli, took a carriage (that of his host according to some), and drove to Piazza Marina in Palermo's city centre. He and Petrosino engaged in a brief conversation, then Cascio Ferro killed Petrosino and returned to join the dinner again. Historical reconstructions have dismissed this version and cannot locate Cascio Ferro at the scene of the crime. News of the murder spread fast in U.S. newspapers and a swell of anti-Italian sentiment spread across New York. Cascio Ferro pleaded his innocence and provided an alibi for the entire period when Petrosino was assassinated. He stayed in the house of De Michele Ferrantelli in Burgio. However, the alibi provided by De Michele Ferrantelli was suspicious, taking into account the relation between the two. Moreover, while in jail after his arrest and life sentence in 1930, Cascio Ferro apparently claimed that he had killed Petrosino. According to writer Arrigo Petacco in his 1972 book on Joe Petrosino, Cascio Ferro said: "In my whole life I have killed only one person, and I did that disinterestedly … Petrosino was a brave adversary, and deserved better than a shameful death at the hands of some hired cut-throat." A report by Baldassare Ceola, the police commissioner of Palermo, concluded that the crime had probably been carried out by Mafiosi Carlo Costantino and Antonino Passananti under Cascio Ferro's direction. Evidence was thin, however, and the case was effectively closed when in July 1911 the Palermo Court of Appeals discharged Cascio Ferro, as well as Costantino and Passananti, due to insufficient evidence to send them to trial. Petrosino's murder was never solved. Nevertheless, Costantino and Passananti were identified as the most likely assassins. Costantino died in the late 1930s and Passananti, in March 1969. In 2014, more than a century