Early on the morning of 14 April 1903 a woman walking to work found a man's body stuffed into a sugar barrel among the lumber outside the New York Mallet and Handle Company at 743 East Eleventh Street, near Avenue D. His throat had been cut almost through. The victim was Benedetto Madonia of Buffalo, whose brother-in-law was in Sing Sing for passing counterfeit five-dollar notes. The case put into the newspapers the Morello family, the counterfeiting and extortion ring run by Giuseppe Morello and his partner Ignazio Lupo, called the Wolf. The Secret Service had already been watching the Morello gang over its counterfeit money, and agents under William Flynn had seen Madonia with Morello and his men the night before, at a butcher shop on Stanton Street.
Detective Joseph Petrosino of the city police identified the body by carrying its photograph to the brother-in-law in prison. About a dozen men were arrested, and Tommaso Petto, called the Ox, was found holding the pawn ticket for the dead man's watch. In May a coroner's jury found that Madonia had been murdered by some person unknown, and no one was ever convicted. Petto was himself shot dead in Pennsylvania in 1905. Flynn's work later sent Morello to prison for counterfeiting in 1910. That stretch of Eleventh Street is gone, closed for a school block where Public School 34 now stands.
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