New York Tribune, 17 August 1921, page 1: 8 Held in 51 Murders Charged to Camorra

Page 1 of the New York Tribune, Wednesday, August 17, 1921. The story in the second column is headed “8 Held in 51 Murders Charged to Camorra,” with the deck “Confessed Slayer, Marked for Death, Betrays Band He Says Has Used $500,000 Fund to Kill Feud Foes on Order of Council in Italy.” It carries no byline.

It reports that eight Sicilians, “arrested last night by Captain Fiaschetti and detectives of the Italian Squad on charges of homicide,” were “said by the arresting officers to be active members of the notorious Bonventre gang.” The arrests followed information from Bartolow Fontano, who, the paper says, confessed the murder on July 30 of Carmillio Caiozzo at Avon, N.J. Under “Men Under Arrest” the first name is “Stefano Magadinno, thirty years old,” of Brooklyn. The paper reports Fontano’s account that “Lombardi and Magaddino” instructed him to kill Caiozzo, and that the orders “came from Palermo.”

Everything here is the newspaper’s report of an informant’s confession and of police statements, made on the night of the arrests. Spellings vary within the story (Magadinno, Magaddino). The story prints home addresses for the men arrested, which this archive does not reproduce. No record opened for this archive gives the outcome of the charges. A Buffalo police lieutenant told a Senate subcommittee in 1963 that Stefano Magaddino “was arrested on August 16, 1921, as a fugitive from justice, relative to a homicide at Avon, N.J.” (see the Amico testimony). The Library of Congress also serves this page under the date August 18, 1921; its masthead reads August 17.