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Letter Sent to Bloomberg Is Said to Have Tested Positive for Ricin Letters Threatening Mayor Tested Positive for Ricin
(35 minutes later)
A letter addressed to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg that arrived late last week at a municipal building has tested positive for ricin, according to two people familiar with the matter. Two letters that contained threats to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg — one addressed to him, the other to a lobbyist who works on his gun control campaign — have tested positive for the deadly poison ricin, the authorities said on Wednesday.
A second letter containing the poison arrived at a building in Washington that houses Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group Mr. Bloomberg helps run and finances, a person familiar with the matter said. Investigators believe both letters were sent by the same person. The first letter was opened at a New York City mail center in Lower Manhattan on Friday, the police said. Although staff members at the mail center do not appear to have become ill, several police officers who came into contact with the letter’s contents “indicated some mild symptoms the next day, including diarrhea,” and they are being treated in hospitals, the New York Police Department’s spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said on Wednesday afternoon. “They’re being checked out as a precaution.”
“The writer, in letters, threatened Mayor Bloomberg, with references to the debate on gun laws,” said Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the New York Police Department. The second letter, which was opened on Sunday in Washington, was addressed to Mark Glaze, the director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group Mr. Bloomberg helps run and finances, officials said. No injuries were reported as a result of that letter, Mr. Browne said.
Mr. Bloomberg never received the letter addressed to him, those familiar with the matter said. A spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Peter Donald, confirmed that the bureau was investigating the letters, but declined to comment further. Both letters were identical in content, bore references to the debate over gun regulation and contained written threats to Mayor Bloomberg, Mr. Browne said.
The letter sent to Mr. Bloomberg arrived at 100 Gold Street in Manhattan, which houses the offices of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Both letters bore the same postmark, Mr. Browne said, indicating they had been sent from roughly the same time and place; he declined to say where they were mailed, but added that “something about the way it was addressed” raised suspicion about the letter sent to New York.
Members of the police department’s Emergency Service Unit who came in contact with the letter that was opened at the city’s mail facility on Gold Street on Friday are being examined for minor symptoms of ricin exposure that they experienced on Saturday, but which have since abated. Mr. Browne said that “civilian personnel in New York and Washington who came in contact with the opened letters remain asymptomatic.”
Ricin can be fatal if swallowed or inhaled. The letters contained a “pink, orange oily substance,” Mr. Browne said, which tested positive for ricin on Wednesday at the National Bioforensic Analysis Center in Maryland. Earlier tests, performed locally, also indicated ricin, Mr. Browne said.
The F.B.I.'s Joint Terrorism Task Force and the police department’s Intelligence Division, which is responsible for the Mayor’s protection, are investigating the threats. Mr. Browne said the Police Department, whose Intelligence Division is investigating the case along with the F.B.I., has handled “scores, if not hundreds” of emergency calls involving suspicious powders over the years. But since the anthrax attacks of 2001, Mr. Browne said, “each of those cases have been negative,” until this one.
Questioned about the letters on Wednesday night, Mayor Bloomberg said: “There’s  12,000 people that are going to get killed this year with guns and 19,000 that are going to commit suicide with guns, and we’re not going to walk away from those efforts. And I know I speak for all of the close to 1,000 mayors,” in Mayors Against Illegal Guns, he said. “This is a scourge on the country that we just have to make sure that we get under control and eliminate.”
In April, a former taekwondo instructor from Tupelo, Miss., was arrested on charges of sending ricin-laced letters to the president, a United States senator and a local judge, which were intercepted in mail sorting facilities serving the White House and the Capitol.

J. David Goodman contributed reporting.