The Wall Street Bombing of 1920: America’s Unsolved Mystery in the Heart of Finance

Nov 11, 2024

9 min read

Updated: Sep 16

Historic Wall Street bombing scene with overturned cars and crowd, under headline The Wall Street Bombing of 1920.

Quick answers

Who was behind the Wall Street bombing of 1920?

No one was ever charged. The leading suspect is Mario Buda, an Italian anarchist linked to Sacco and Vanzetti, but the case was never proven and stayed open until at least 1944.

How many people died?

38 people died, 30 of them instantly and eight more later from their injuries. Over 400 people were hurt in total, with around 143 seriously injured.

Was J.P. Morgan hurt in the blast?

No. J.P. Morgan Jr, who ran the bank the bomb went off outside, was on holiday in Scotland. His son Junius was cut by flying glass, and the bank's chief clerk, Thomas Joyce, was killed at his desk.

Can you still see damage from the bombing today?

Yes. The pockmarks from the shrapnel are still visible on the marble facade of 23 Wall Street. The bank chose never to repair them.

It's been 106 years to the day since a horse and cart, parked outside the U.S. Assay Office on Wall Street, blew apart the middle of America's financial district. It happened at 12:01pm on 16 September 1920, right as the bells of Trinity Church were ringing in the lunch hour. Thirty people died where they stood. Eight more died later from their wounds. Hundreds were maimed by flying glass and the 500 pounds of cast-iron sash weights someone had packed around the dynamite specifically to turn it into a giant shotgun blast.

No one was ever charged. No one properly confessed. The case is technically still open, and the closest thing to physical evidence left is on the wall of the building the bomb was aimed at, where the pockmarks from the shrapnel are still sitting in the marble today, left there on purpose.

What actually happened at 12:01pm

The wagon had been sitting outside the Assay Office for a while before it went off. Witnesses gave wildly different accounts of how long, anywhere from a few minutes to over an hour, but they mostly agreed on what it looked like: an old, dilapidated cart with dark red wheels, pulled by a thin, ageing bay horse in poor shape. The driver had climbed down and vanished into the lunchtime crowd.

Then, right on the noon bell, the timer ran out. One survivor described it afterwards as "it was a crush out of a blue sky", and it's not hard to see why. Windows shattered for blocks. Trolley cars two streets over were knocked clean off their tracks. Some of the men who'd fought in the trenches a couple of years earlier assumed it was an aerial bomb, since nobody in New York had ever heard anything like it come from street level.

Wall Street picks itself up, and destroys its own evidence

A 17-year-old messenger called James Saul commandeered a parked car on the spot and started ferrying the wounded to hospital himself. Police officers did the same with any vehicle they could grab. NYSE president William H. Remick suspended trading straight away to stop a panic spreading through the market on top of everything else.

By the next morning, Wall Street was open for business again, which sounds like resilience and partly was, but it came at a real cost. Crews spent the night sweeping up glass and debris so the street could function, and in doing so they hauled away most of the physical evidence a modern investigator would have wanted, fragments, wiring, anything that might have pointed to how the bomb was actually built.

Who the bomb was really aimed at

Everyone assumed the target was J.P. Morgan & Co., whose headquarters at 23 Wall Street sat directly across from where the wagon stopped, and the timing backs that up: the bomb went off just as the lunchtime crowd of clerks, brokers and messengers was thickest outside it. J.P. Morgan Jr, who'd run the bank since his father's death in 1913, wasn't there. He was on holiday in Scotland. His son Junius, at his desk inside, was cut by flying glass. The bank's chief clerk, Thomas Joyce, was killed where he sat near the window.

It wasn't the first time an anarchist had gone after a Morgan. Five years earlier, a former German professor named Erich Muenter had talked his way into J.P. Morgan Sr's Long Island mansion and shot him twice, trying to force him to stop financing Allied weapons shipments during the First World War. Morgan survived. Muenter killed himself in his cell before he could be tried.

Other theories got floated at the time and mostly went nowhere. One held that the real target wasn't Morgan at all but the Sub-Treasury Building next door, where roughly $900 million in gold bars happened to be in transit that day, and that the bombing was cover for a robbery that never actually came off. Investigators also noted, almost as an aside, that a young stockbroker named Joseph P. Kennedy, father of a future US president, was thrown several feet by the blast.

Edwin Fisher

The flyers that turned an accident into a manhunt

A postal worker found the proof that this wasn't some industrial accident. Stuffed into a mailbox a few blocks from Wall Street, just minutes before the explosion, were flyers printed in red ink on white paper, warning "Free the political prisoners, or it will be sure death for all of you." They were signed American Anarchist Fighters.

The wording and printing style closely matched flyers left at a wave of anarchist bombings the previous year, in which mail bombs had been sent to dozens of American officials and businessmen, including J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. None of those bombs reached Morgan, but the attempt itself shows he was already a marked man in anarchist circles well before 1920.

The blacksmith, the sketch, and the men who weren't the driver

Investigators traced the horse's shoes to a Manhattan blacksmith named Gaetano DeGrazio, who remembered shoeing it the day before for a man he described as Sicilian. Working with a police artist, DeGrazio helped build a composite sketch by blending together photos of two different anarchist suspects, adjusting features as he went. It was, as historian Beverly Gage has put it, largely educated guesswork, and it never led anywhere solid.

Two separate men were dragged through the wringer as a result. An anarchist named Tito Ligi was arrested in Pennsylvania on an unrelated draft-evasion charge after police found what looked like matching sash weights near where he'd worked, and investigators briefly convinced themselves he was actually a wanted man named Vincenzo Leggio using an alias. The theory fell apart on closer inspection. Months later, a man named Giuseppe De Filippis was picked out of a lineup in New Jersey purely because he resembled the sketch. He had witnesses who placed him at a rail siding in Bayonne that day, and the case against him collapsed too.

At one point the Bureau of Investigation even sent an undercover operative to Italy, hoping he could track down Luigi Galleani, the anarchist theorist the whole Galleanist movement was named for. Galleani had already been deported the year before. The agent found his sister instead, who could only confirm he'd fled the country, and came home empty-handed.

Two men in suits and overcoats sit handcuffed together in a courtroom. The setting suggests a serious mood, with wood-paneled walls. — Anarchist trial defendants Bartolomeo Vanzetti (left) and Nicola Sacco (right)

The detective who lost his job over this case

The man under the most pressure to solve it was William J. Flynn, director of the Bureau of Investigation and known to the press as the Bulldog Detective. He told reporters at the time, "We'll get them," and for a while the papers ran with it as a certainty. It didn't happen. Every lead, the blacksmith, the sketch, Ligi, De Filippis, the undercover trip to Italy, ended in nothing.

Flynn had a rival waiting in the wings the whole time: William J. Burns, the detective who'd made his name a decade earlier by cracking the 1910 Los Angeles Times bombing, at that point the deadliest act of domestic terrorism the country had seen. When a new attorney general took office in 1921, an old friend of Burns's, he replaced Flynn with Burns outright. Burns didn't crack the Wall Street case either, and it would take a very different kind of investigation, decades later and a continent away, to show how a lone bomber with no accomplices could be run down through patient detective work rather than a lucky break.

Black and white portrait of a man with a neutral expression; wearing a suit and tie. Simple dark background, no text. — Mario Buda

Edwin Fischer's warnings 'through the air'

One of the odder subplots involved a tennis champion named Edwin Fischer, who'd mailed several friends postcards in the days before the bombing telling them to leave Wall Street before 16 September. When police caught up with him, he explained that he'd received the warning through the air. It turned out issuing this kind of tip was something of a habit for him. He was committed to Amityville Asylum and diagnosed as insane but harmless, and quietly dropped as a suspect.

Mario Buda: the suspect who was never even questioned

The name that has stuck to the case longer than any other is Mario Buda, an Italian anarchist and Galleanist who knew Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti personally, and whose car was what led police to arrest the pair for a separate robbery and murder just weeks before the Wall Street bombing. Historians including Paul Avrich have argued Buda planted the bomb as revenge for their arrest. He had direct experience with dynamite, was known to favour sash weights as shrapnel in earlier devices, and simply left the country for Italy that November, never to come back.

Buda was never arrested or even formally questioned. The case for his involvement rests largely on a 1955 interview his nephew Frank Maffi and a fellow anarchist, Charles Poggi, conducted with him in Italy decades later. Maffi separately recalled taking a drive down to Wall Street with Poggi years earlier and seeing the aftermath for himself. "You could still see the holes in the Morgan building across the street," he said. There's no confession on record, no trial and no conviction. Buda remains the prime suspect in a case that, on paper, was never actually solved.

The bombing that helped build the FBI

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, already the man behind the mass raids and deportations of suspected radicals carried out in his name the year before, reached the scene within hours and treated the wreckage as proof he'd been right all along. One newspaper at the time called it an act without precedent in the whole history of terrorism, and Palmer used almost exactly that language to argue for even tougher action against the political left.

Public fury over the unsolved attack fed directly into an expansion of federal surveillance powers. The Bureau's intelligence work grew under a young J. Edgar Hoover, whose own career would go on to define what the FBI became. New York's police department separately pushed to set up a dedicated unit to monitor what officials called radical elements in the city. The case never actually closed. The FBI dug it up again in 1944 and came away with nothing new, still leaning on the same theory investigators had settled on within weeks of the blast, that a small group of Italian anarchists was behind it.

The scars that are still there

Walk up to 23 Wall Street today and the pockmarks from the explosion are still cut into the Tennessee marble facade, right where the shrapnel hit. That's not neglect. J.P. Morgan Jr chose not to have them repaired, treating the scars as a statement that the bank hadn't been intimidated. A century later, they're one of the only physical traces left of an attack that, at the time, was the deadliest act of terrorism ever committed on American soil, a record it held until the Oklahoma City bombing on 19 April 1995.

It's a comparison worth sitting with. Timothy McVeigh's attack happened 75 years later, was solved within days and is remembered by name across the world. The Wall Street bombing killed almost as many people, was never solved at all, and most people walking past 23 Wall Street today have no idea what the marks in the wall actually are.

The blueprint for every car bomb since

Historians of terrorism now treat Buda's wagon as more than just an unsolved 1920s mystery. In his widely reviewed book Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, historian Mike Davis argues that Buda's device, crude as it was, is the first recognisable car bomb in the modern sense, an ordinary vehicle turned into a delivery system for mass violence and detonated once the driver has slipped away. Davis traces the tactic lying dormant for decades before militants in British Mandate Palestine picked it up again in the late 1940s, and from there it spread into a defining weapon of the second half of the twentieth century, used from Beirut to Belfast to Baghdad.

It's part of why so many financial and government districts around the world, Wall Street very much included, are now ringed with concrete bollards and vehicle barriers that have nothing to do with traffic control. They're there because of what one horse and cart proved was possible outside J.P. Morgan's front door in 1920.