La Legge d'Onore

As usual in the Naples marketplace. the slight dark-haired man who stopped by the parked car talked tough. "I hear you've been looking for me," he said as he reached into the car's open window and tweaked the chin of the chubby-cheeked girl inside. "Here I am. Get out of the car."

As she swung open the door, the girl reached into her handbag and pulled out a Smith & Wesson .38. Holding it with both hands ("I was afraid I would miss," she explained later), she opened fire. Last week, on trial for murder in Naples, she defiantly declared: "I would do it again!" With that, the whole courtroom burst into cheers.

To millions of newspaper-reader Italians, black-eyed Assunta Maresca, 24, has become known affectionately as Pupetta ("Little Doll"). Though northern Italians often deplore the vendetta morality of the south, Neapolitans hailed Pupetta as a worthy descendant of the old Camorra--the "honor societies" hired by noblemen to settle their differences by duels and vendettas. The noblemen have disappeared; today's Camorra members grew up in the thriving black markets of World War II, and boast that they even disassembled and stole an entire U.S. ship piece by piece-from the Bay of Naples.* Among those who lived by the modern Camorra code was Big Pasquale Simonetti, who sold "protection" to the local growers and sellers of vegetables and fruit.

"Miss Rovegliano." Little Doll first met Big Pasquale when, as a buxom peasant girl of 19, she won a beauty contest and became "Miss Rovegliano." They got along fine together until Big Pasquale ran afoul of an old friend, tough-talking Tony Esposito. There had been bad blood between the two men ever since Big Pasquale did time for hitting a man with a monkey wrench. When he got out of jail, he found that Tony had taken over the business.

One day, while Big Pasquale was peeling his morning orange in the marketplace, he was accosted by a little man called "The Ship" because of his rolling gait. Within minutes, Big Pasquale was reaching for his pistol, but The Ship was too fast for him. True to the Camorra code. Big Pasquale told the police nothing, and everyone around--the shoeshine boy, the boy's customer, even the woman who sold the oranges--had sudden lapses of memory. But before he died in the hospital, Big Pasquale told Little Doll what had happened: Tony Esposito had sent The Ship around to kill him.

The College Education. Each day grief-stricken Little Doll placed fresh flowers on Big Pasquale's grave. But she had not come from a family called "Little Streaks of Lightning" (because they could fire a pistol so fast) for nothing. That day in the marketplace. Little Doll took her revenge on Tony Esposito with Big Pasquale's own big pistol. Awaiting trial in jail, she bore Big Pasquale's baby and cheerfully wrote her parents: "Think of me as a girl away at college. Sometimes I laugh and I sing."

Her trial last week made headlines all over Italy. Certain puzzling things about the case, e.g., the fact that 29 bullets were found in Tony Esposito's body and that Little Doll's brother who was with her at the time, had vanished, did nothing to impair the sympathy. "The Diva of Crime," one newspaper called her, and for the first time in history the Court of Assizes in Naples permitted microphones to be used so that the crowds could hear what was going on. Proposals of marriage flooded in and one musician was composing a song in Little Doll's honor called La Legge d'Onore. "She is a flower of a girl," sighed a Neapolitan last week, and he thought it inconceivable that any Neapolitan judge would give her more than a year in prison.

*An apocryphal exaggeration of their exploits. They also boast that during the Allied occupation they uncoupled the last car of every freight train leaving Naples and then sold it, sealed and contents unknown, to gamblers willing to take a chance on the cargo.

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