In the summer of 1885, Carmine Rotunno, an older Italian immigrant, was a familiar and hardworking presence in his Washington, D.C. neighborhood. A man who toiled honestly as both a laborer and a shoemaker, he had come to America seeking a better life and diligently saved the money he earned. His age is not recorded, but he was known as a man who kept to himself, focused on his work and the small savings he was accumulating, likely dreaming of a more secure future.
He lived a quiet life in a local boarding house, among other laborers trying to make their way in a new country.
His path tragically crossed with that of a fellow Italian immigrant, Antonio Nardello, a younger man who went by the aliases Frank Rosso and Michael Ross. Nardello, who had arrived in the United States in 1883, had a predatory eye for his fellow countrymen, viewing their hard-earned savings as his own. He learned that Rotunno, through his thrift, had managed to put aside a sum of money. In July 1885, under a pretense of trust or camaraderie, Nardello lured the older man to a secluded shack in the city. There, his brutal intentions were revealed.
The precise details of what happened in the shack remain grimly obscured by time, but the outcome was violent and final. Nardello, whose methods included shooting, throat cutting, and blunt force trauma, attacked Carmine Rotunno and killed him. The motive was simple and cruel: to steal the money that Rotunno had so painstakingly saved. His life was taken for the contents of his pockets, a devastating end for a man who had worked so hard for so little.
The investigation into Rotunno's murder led authorities to Nardello. On July 29, 1885, police tracked him to a house on Maryland Avenue where he was staying with a woman. They were arrested at the Baltimore and Potomac Depot as they prepared to board a train to Baltimore. A search of their room uncovered bloodied clothing belonging to Nardello, linking him to the violent crime. He resisted arrest, threatening suicide, and had to be shackled by the officers.
Antonio Nardello was part of a string of violent robberies and murders targeting laborers. In addition to killing Carmine Rotunno, he was responsible for the murder of Antonio de Balbo in Maryland in May 1885 and the 1884 killing of a laborer known as "The Blacksmith" in Gunpowder, Maryland, a crime for which another man had been wrongly convicted. Nardello would later confess to this earlier murder shortly before his own execution, exonerating the innocent man.
On October 10, 1885, Nardello was formally indicted for the murder of Carmine Rotunno. Because Nardello did not speak English well, an interpreter was appointed for his trial. Despite his attorneys' efforts, he was found guilty of first-degree murder on December 12, 1885, and sentenced to death. Antonio Nardello was executed by hanging at the D.C. Jail on May 28, 1886. While justice was served for his short but brutal crime spree, it could not return what he had taken. Carmine Rotunno, a quiet laborer with simple dreams, remains a poignant symbol of the vulnerability and peril that could befall immigrants who sought only to build a life through honest work.
