Secret Service daily reports, New York District, 14-17 April 1903: the body identified, the arrests, and a telegram about a letter to New Orleans (T915 roll 109, pages 103-111)

These pages, stamped 103 and 106 to 111, are in the same Secret Service volume (T915, roll 109). A stamp on page 99 shows the report was received in the chief’s office on 17 April 1903. The film images are blurred; the readings below were made from zoomed crops and uncertain readings are marked.

The identification. Page 111, shown here, is the report of Assistant Operative Burns for 14 April 1903. After a day’s watch near the butcher shop at #16 Stanton Street, he was sent with Agent Henry to the Union Market police station to view “the body of a man who was murdered on the East Side,” was told it was at the Morgue, and there saw the body and “positively identify the same as that of a man I had seen the day previous, with Morrello et al.” Later that evening, at the Morgue with Inspector Schmittberger, another assistant “identified the body as that of the stranger we had seen with Morrello et al, the previous day.” Burns describes the stranger’s clothing: a black derby hat, a dark suit, a white shirt with a standing collar and a dark four-in-hand tie. Page 108 records body measurements taken on 16 April.

The arrests and the searches. The reports for 15 April record agents following “Morrello” and a second man until headquarters detectives arrested them at “Delancey and Forsyth Sts.,” and a search that night of Lupo’s residence on West 40th Street. One operative reports that in a cellar on Prince Street occupied by Lupo he “found Two white butcher Aprons, with large blotches of blood on them,” which were turned over to the police. The pages do not say what the stains were or whether they were tested.

The telegram. Page 106 copies a telegram from Flynn to “John E. Wilkie, Washington D.C.,” typed with the date “March Seventeenth” although the report covers 16 and 17 April. As read from the blurred film, it says that Morrello had mailed a letter to a man in New Orleans, “you have copy,” and that the “Letter indicated that murder was to be done, this letter, if could be had, would greatly aid the Police.” The recipient’s name, read as “Impostato,” and street are uncertain and are not reproduced. No record filed here shows the letter itself or what became of it; the telegram is the agency’s belief.

The suspects. Page 107 lists the suspects then under arrest, among them Giuseppe Morrello, Ignazio Lupo and “Tomasso Petto,” and notes that “Cascioferro has not been arrested,” because he was not at home. The same page says correspondence found in Lupo’s house showed that a brother was arriving on the S.S. Palatia under a surname that is blurred on the film; this archive does not read it as an alias.

These are internal reports of an agency: they show what its operatives did and believed, not the cause of death or who was responsible. Street numbers of homes are legible in the film image; this archive does not reproduce them in the text.