The Sun (New York), 21 April 1903, page 1: man found in barrel known
MAN FOUND IN BARREL KNOWN. BENEDETTO MADONIA, WHO'D THREATENED COINERS' GANG. He Was Trying to Make Them Give Up the Property of His Brother-in-law, Convicted Member of Their Crew--They Feared He'd Tell of Their Crimes.
- Paper
- The Sun (New York, N.Y.)
- Date
- 1903-04-21
- Page
- Page 1
- Headline
- MAN FOUND IN BARREL KNOWN. BENEDETTO MADONIA, WHO'D THREATENED COINERS' GANG. He Was Trying to Make Them Give Up the Property of His Brother-in-law, Convicted Member of Their Crew--They Feared He'd Tell of Their Crimes.
- 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 Sun, Tuesday, 21 April 1903. The story runs in the right-hand column under the headline “Man Found in Barrel Known,” with the deck “Benedetto Madonia, Who’d Threatened Coiners’ Gang.” The headline and deck were read from the stored scan, which is legible at the top of the column although the Library’s OCR of them is garbled.
The story says Benedetto Madonia, an Italian stone mason of Buffalo and the father of five children, “suspected of being a professional passer of counterfeit money,” was the man whose body was found in an old sugar barrel “at Eleventh street and Avenue D, last Tuesday morning.” It credits Detective Sergeant Petrosino and Inspector McClusky’s staff: Petrosino obtained from Secret Service Chief Flynn the names of counterfeiters recently sent to prison and took photographs of the dead man to Sing Sing, where the dead man’s brother-in-law recognised him.
The account of the motive in the deck is the paper’s, drawn from what the police believed; no one was convicted of the killing in any record filed here. The story prints the dead man’s Buffalo street address, which is not reproduced in this text; it is legible in the stored scan, which shows the whole page.