The Little River news., 1922-02-08
True Detective Stories THE DOUBLE CRIME


 that the New York police discovered
 the body of a man, evidently an Italian, concealed in a barrel on the East side. Every mark that could possibly supply clue to his identifi- cation had been removed--even the labels had been clipped from his clothes-and the manner in which his face had been mutilated rendered him totally unrecognizable.
 But, just as the case was about to be entered upon the book of New York's unsolved mysteries, it was cleared up through a coincidence so startling that no writer of detective fiction would have dared make use of it.
 On the night of the murder, William J. Flynn, then chief of the Eastern division of the United States secret service, with headquarters in New York, was working on one of the numerous cOunterfeiting cases which occur so frequently in the Italian sec tion of the metropolis.
 Flynn himself was elected to trail pair of Italians whom he had reason to believe were working for or with the cOunterfeiters. The trail led to an Italian grocery, where, from the shadow of doorway across the street, the government detective could see into lighted room in the suspect ed house. A few moments later covered wagon drew up in front of the house, man got out, entered the grocery, and made his way into the very room that Flynn was watching. The light from the lamp fell directly upon his face, and the secret service operative realized that this must be a new addition to the gang, for he was fore. Then the curtains to the win dow were drawn, and Flynn aban- doned his chase for the time being,
 The next morning the murdered man was discovered, nearly half a mile from the place where Flynn had hidden himself the night before. It was several days later that the opera tive read the official account of the crime and noted that the body had been found in a sugar barrel, partly filled with blood-stained sawdust. The date of the murder, coupled with the use of sugar. barrel, recalled to the operatives mind the fact that he had been watching an Italian grocery at or about the time that the foreigner had been killed. Merely to satisfy himself that there was no connection between the counterfeiters and the murdered man, Flynn went to the mOrgue and examined the body. The peculiar shape of the forehead, the manner in which the hair splayed out above the prominent ears and the blood-stained green hat which had been found in the barrel, told the story beyond the shadow of doubt. It was the stranger whom Flynn had seen entering the store which he had been watching!
 Feeling certain that here was a sign which pointed toward the operations of the gang which he was after, Flynn had the body photographed from number of angles, while experts in physiognOmy reconstructed the fea- lures to something approaching life like appearance. Then, armed with these post-mortem pictures, Flynn took trip to Ossining to see if any of the members of the Italian colony in Sing Sing could identify the dead man.
 The idea proved to be a good one, for convict whom Flynn knew-an Italian serving time for another cOun- terfeiting case-identified the photo graphs as being those of his brother in-law, Maruena Benedetto, whom he described as being a peaceful hard working citizen who had never been implicated In any of the crimes of the Italian settlement.
 Working backward from this clue, Flynn and the other secret service operatives trailed the Italians whom the chief had seen in the grocery store on the night of the murder, and it was not long before they had made a complete roundup of the gang. AS was to be expected in a crime of this nature, alibis were plentiful, but, as was usual, these were none too well supported by fact, and it was a con- paratively simple matter for the pO- lice to get at the bottom of the case, once the identity of the victim had been established.
 A judicious application of the third degree" brought to light the fact that BenedettO had been killed because he had gotten wind of the counterfeiting plot, and because he was the brother in-law of the man who later identified the bOdy-a man who had incurred the undying enmity of his cOmpa- triots by turning states evidence. The inflexible laws of the society to which they both belonged-One of the sO- cieties which rules Little Italy with a rule of iron and hand of blood-de-