Bureau of Investigation report, November 18, 1930: Frank Ralph Nitto taken into custody at Berwyn on October 31, 1930 (Vault Nitti Part 01)

A report by Special Agent C. C. Dewey dated November 18, 1930, covering October 31 to November 8, 1930. Its synopsis says the subject was apprehended by federal and local officers in the early morning of October 31, 1930 at an apartment building in Berwyn, Illinois, was arraigned before Federal Judge Lindley and held on bond, that a writ of habeas corpus seeking a lower bond was denied by Judge Evan A. Evans of the Court of Appeals, and that he was later released on a bond furnished by the Grand Central Surety Co. The arresting party included an Internal Revenue special agent and a squad from the State’s Attorney’s office.

Questioned by the agent, the subject gave his name as Frank Ralph Nitto and said he was born in 1888 in the small town of Angri, Italy, and was brought to the United States as a child. He said he held first and second citizenship papers (p. 84); the agent checked the naturalization office in the Federal Building at Chicago and found no record of either. A Bureau letter of November 22 reports no earlier criminal record in the national identification files.

The birthplace and year are the subject’s own statement as the agent wrote it, not a birth record; the day and month, and the bond amount, are not legible in the OCR. The first page of the report (p. 83) prints the street address of the apartment, so the second page is the one shown and the address is not repeated. This archive read the page through the Vault viewer’s OCR text layer. The scans are poor; names, dates and figures can be garbled, and many names are redacted under FOIA exemptions (b6, b7C, b7D).