Record
New-York Tribune (New York, N.Y.)
1903-04-16
Page Page 1
New-York Tribune, 16 April 1903, page 1: eight arrested in the barrel case
THINK THEY HAVE MURDERERS. Police and Secret Service Men Arrest Eight Italians. Thought To Be Counterfeiters and Mafia Members Who Killed Man Found in Barrel and Two Others.
- Paper
- New-York Tribune (New York, N.Y.)
- Date
- 1903-04-16
- Page
- Page 1
- Headline
- THINK THEY HAVE MURDERERS. Police and Secret Service Men Arrest Eight Italians. Thought To Be Counterfeiters and Mafia Members Who Killed Man Found in Barrel and Two Others.
- Rights
- A United States newspaper published in 1930 or earlier. Public domain in the United States. The Library of Congress serves the page from Chronicling America.
Front page of the New-York Tribune, Thursday, 16 April 1903. The story reports that eight men were arrested on the night of 15 April and locked up at Police Headquarters, and that, “if the theory of the police” was true, the still-unidentified man whose body was found in a barrel “early on Tuesday in Eleventh-st., near Avenue D” had been killed in the basement butcher shop at No. 16 Stanton Street. It lists the eight with their occupations, among them “Giuseppe Morello, agent” and “Tomas Pecco, clothes presser” (the OCR’s spelling), and says Morello was “the leader of the band, according to the police.” It reports that “Morello, Tomaso and Pecco were arrested at Delancey-st. and the Bowery about 8:30 o’clock.”
The paper credits Inspector McClusky, Detective Sergeant Petrosino and Secret Service agents who had kept the group under watch for months, and says McClusky asked Chief Flynn of the Secret Service Bureau to let his men work with the detectives. It also reports that one of Flynn’s men had followed “Ignazio Lube” (the OCR’s reading), “another of the band, not yet arrested.” The Secret Service’s own reports of these days are filed as NARA 151173326, pages 103-111.
The headline’s “Mafia” and the story’s description of the men as “desperate and blood thirsty criminals” are the police theory as the paper reported it, not findings. No one was convicted of the killing in any record filed here; the Second Circuit later wrote that Morello’s arrest for the murder “proved nothing” (189 F. 305). The page prints home addresses of the men named; this archive does not reproduce them. No scan of this page is stored: the Library of Congress image service was unavailable when the page was filed.