Barrel murder

The "Barrel Murders", as termed by the American press, was a method of execution used by early American mafiosi in the 1870s.

The victims, usually Italian immigrants, would be found stuffed inside a barrel after being shot, stabbed, or strangled to death, and left on a random street corner, back alley, or shipped to a nonexistent address in another city. First used by the Sicilian Morello crime family in New Orleans, the Barrel Murders eventually alerted authorities of the existence of the Mafia leading to the later investigation by New Orleans police chief David C. Hennessy whose eventual assassination by Sicilian mafiosi in 1890 would expose organized crime in the United States. The Morello's, suspected of over 100 murders, continued to use the barrel murder for over thirty years until eventually ceasing after the, now well publicized murders, created unwanted attention by local authorities as well as the practice of other non-Italian criminals drawing police suspicion away from themselves onto the Morello's and other Italian mafiosi.