New-York Tribune, 15 April 1903, page 1: Man's body in a barrel

Front page of the New-York Tribune, Wednesday, 15 April 1903. The page is led by a postal-inquiry story; the barrel story is a short item headed “Mafia Murder Victim. Man’s Body in a Barrel,” with the deck “Dead Italian Unidentified, and No Clew to Slayers.”

The report says a man’s body packed in a barrel on East Eleventh Street, near the East River, was found early the previous morning, that his throat had been cut, and that by the end of the day he had not been identified and detectives had made no real progress in finding the killers. It says assistants of the district attorney and the coroners worked with the police.

The headline’s “Mafia” label comes from the police theory the story reports, that the dead man was a victim of a secret Italian society, which is the paper’s inference and is not adopted here. Hostile language about Italians in the paper is not quoted. This archive files the page only as a record of how the discovery was reported. The Butte Inter Mountain page of the day before is filed separately.