On this date in 1868, a trio of notorious Italian brigands went under the French guillotine in Marseilles.

Joseph Coda-Zabetta, the leader, had escaped a hard labor sentence in Italy and fled to France where he founded a large band of robbers who terrorized France’s Mediterranean countryside from Nice to Marseilles for some months in 1867.

From raiding unoccupied country homes the gang soon progressed to bold invasions of occupied houses and waylaying travelers. “In one instance,” a press report of their trial reported,* “six of the band attacked a convoy of carriers, one of whom received a pistol-shot in the breast and a stab with a knife, from which injuries he afterwards died.”

Twelve of the band faced trial, and four of their number received death sentences. (Seven others had long prison sentences; a man named Muletto was acquitted.)

Coda, Antoine Quaranta, and Felix Mardi (Italian pdf) were all guillotined on this date in 1868. (They died, it was said, repentant (French).) The fourth condemned prisoner, Jacques Mulatere, had his death sentenced commuted to life at hard labor.

* London Times, Dec. 20, 1867

On this day..

• 1872: George "Charcoal" Botts
• 1597: Jaakko Ilkka, Cudgel War victim
• 1725: James Casady, aged beggar
• 1697: George Seager, deserter and burglar
• 1591: Arnold Cosbie, writing his own elegy
• 1928: Edward Rowlands and Daniel Driscoll
• 1565: Benedetto Accolti, would-be papal assassin
• 1961: Wasyl Gnypiuk, sleep-killer
• 1550: The leaders of the Prayer Book Rebellion
• 1940: Isaak Babel
• 1781: Mutinous ringleaders of the New Jersey line
• 1142: Yue Fei, paragon of loyalty