On September 16, 1920, a horse-drawn wagon detonated in front of the J. P. Morgan headquarters in New York City, killing 38 people and injuring hundreds in what was then the deadliest terrorist attack on U.
S. soil. As the smoke cleared, NYPD detectives and federal agents realized their primary piece of physical evidence was scattered across Manhattan: the mangled remnants of the wagon, its cast-iron sash weight shrapnel, and the tragic remains of the horse.
Bureau of Investigation agents immediately attempted to track down the perpetrators by tracing the ownership of the equine transport. In the 1920s, motor vehicles were rapidly gaining registration systems, but horse-drawn wagons remained part of an entirely unregulated, informal economy. Detectives visited thousands of stables, blacksmiths, wagon manufacturers, and horseshoe makers throughout the Tri-State area and beyond.
They analyzed the unique shoes on the horse's hooves, leading them to a Manhattan blacksmith named Dominick DeGrazia, who recognized his own recent custom ironwork. DeGrazia recalled shoeing the horse just hours before the blast for a nervous man with a heavy accent, but he had no name, receipt, or address to provide. Agents canvassed over 5,000 stables across the East Coast, yet every lead evaporated into a cloud of cash-only transactions and unrecorded handshakes.
Because horse sales required no titles, registration numbers, or paper trails, the vehicle was effectively an anonymous ghost. This fundamental limitation of turn-of-the-century law enforcement allowed the bomber—widely suspected to be an Italian anarchist named Mario Buda—to escape to Italy untouched, leaving the Wall Street bombing permanently unsolved.