dates back more than a century, to when cameras' shutter speed became fast enough to allow photography of a small group of individuals walking. It is believed to have been done even prior to Theodore Roosevelt's tenure as New York City police commissioner in the 1890s. The city's newspaper photographers soon ritualized it. J. Edgar Hoover, the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), made sure the press could witness his agents bringing accused gangsters Alvin Karpis and Harry Campbell to justice. One of the earliest precursors of the perp walk, before the term came into use, occurred in 1903. NYPD inspector George W. McClusky had arrested the principal members of the Morello crime family, one of the earliest dominant Mafia groups in the city, following the discovery of a mutilated, dismembered corpse later identified as a Morello associate from Buffalo in a barrel outside a Little Italy apartment house, the most notorious of the city's organized crime-related Barrel Murders around the turn of the 20th century. After they had been in lockup for a night, McClusky had the cuffed suspects marched through the streets of Little Italy, in full view of their fellow Italian immigrants, from police headquarters to the nearby Third Judicial District Courthouse for arraignment, claiming that the paddy wagons in which this would normally be done had not arrived as scheduled. American Mafia historian Thomas Reppetto not only likens this to present-day perp walks but sees further historical precedents. Italian police of the era sometimes paraded arrested mafiosi before their communities as well, "dramatizing their powerlessness." Before them, the ancient Romans had done the same with prisoners of war. Many of the immigrants watching the chained Morellos being walked past them were, The New York Times reported, believed to be supporting them. The police eventually had to disperse them when they feared an attempt was underway to free them from custody. "The papers liked such stories," Repetto wrote, "and so did the police. Portraying the Mafia as an all-powerful organization made their occasional victories seem all the more impressive." ABC News reporter John Miller, who has also worked as a press secretary for law enforcement agencies, has identified three distinct stages in the evolution of the perp walk. Until the 1940s, suspects were paraded before reporters across a stage in the basement of police headquarters. The reporters decided if any would make a good