Maria Mercedes Féa was just 20 years old, her hair cut à la garçonne and traveling from Italy to Argentina, when she met Giuseppe Pistone, an Italian like her, on board the ship. Count Biancamano. Three years later, in October 1928, Maria Féa's body was shipped in a trunk, in the Port of Santos, to travel back on the steamer. massila.

Along with the body were the Italian girl's personal belongings, such as pillows, clothes and makeup. They were only discovered because the rope that was hoisting the luggage onto the ship broke. With the fall, the chest opened. the commander of massila he soon found that the luggage tag registered a name that was not on the passenger list – Ferrero, Francesco.

The crime left the country in an uproar. After all, 20 years earlier, another suitcase had terrified the passengers of a ship that had set sail for Europe, with a stopover in Rio. At the time, the Syrian Michel Trad had been caught dragging the suitcase to the rail, with the intention of throwing it overboard. In it was the body of the merchant Elias Farhat, for whom Trad worked.

In the case of the Italian girl, who would only be identified later, there was an aggravating factor: Maria Féa was pregnant. To get to her, the police put together a puzzle that began with the description of the man who had delivered the suitcase to the porters, passed through the first-class car of a train departing São Paulo and arrived at a square driver.

After seeing the photograph of the trunk printed in the newspapers, the driver Vicente Caruso went to the police. He said that he had taken the luggage from the third floor of a building in the center of the city, to take it, along with the passenger, to the train station. He had paid attention, as he found it too heavy to contain only clothes, as the passenger had emphasized.

By then, the passenger had moved out of the building. In São Paulo, filled with immigrants from war-torn Europe, the police called the Italian community. It didn't take him long to find the man who had clandestinely checked the suitcase: Giuseppe Pistone, the Italian Maria Féa had met on the return trip and had married.

The guy tried to get the version that he had suffocated his wife in a moment of madness, after surprising her with a lover. In fact, Pistone was a scammer, who after looting his mother's safe in Italy, prepared new boats in this part of the world. Maria Féa was about to denounce him. Even without pushing the suitcase himself, the scammer was unmasked.


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