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From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 2, 9 January 1950, pp. 1 & 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
NEW YORK, DEC. 28 – Failure of District Attorney Frank S. Hogan’s office to solve the Carlo Tresca murder case was cited today by Norman Thomas as giving “clear and open encouragement” to the gangsters who have since murdered Joseph Scottoriggio, Republican political worker, and William Lurye, organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union.
Thomas, as head of the Tresca Memorial Committee, voiced this criticism in announcing plans to honor Tresca on Wednesday, January 11, seventh anniversary of his death.
The 1950 commemoration of this crime will be held at 8:15 o’clock at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 15th Street, where the editor of the anti-totalitarian Italian journal Il Martello (The Hammer) was shot down in the 1943 war dim-out. Short speeches in English and Italian will be climaxed by the dropping of red carnations where Tresca fell. If the weather should be unfavorable the speaking will take place in the Rand School auditorium, 7 East 15th Street.
“Seven years after Tresca’s murder,” Mr. Thomas said, “I do not believe that the district attorney's office exerted itself to the utmost in investigating it. I say this after scanning a current report of that office for 1946–1948. It gives four pages to the Scottoriggio killing, which it calls a political crime, and says ‘The investigation continues.’ But, as in several of Mr. Hogan’s previous reports, the Tresca case is not even mentioned.
“This is profoundly disturbing to me, and to many of Carlo’s friends, who feel that Mr. Hogan’s continuing official silence about that crime signifies that he and his staff would prefer not to be reminded of their failure to bring the Tresca killers to justice. That failure, to my mind, gave clear and open encouragement to the gangsters who afterward murdered Scottoriggio and Lurye.
“There is ample reason to believe that the Tresca slaying also was political, that he was ambushed because of his relentless opposition to one of the totalitarian movements, two of which were under suspicion from the start. So why does the prosecutor’s office say it will go on hunting for Scottoriggio’s slayers, and not even make the gesture of such a promise in the Tresca case?”
Thomas declared that Hogan, in assigning Assistant District Attorney Louis Pagnucco to question Benjamin Gitlow about the Tresca case before a grand jury last February, violated a 1944 pledge that Pagnucco would not be permitted to examine any new witnesses in this case. That pledge was made, Thomas averred, "after Attorney Morris L. Ernst and others presented documentary evidence showing that Pagnucco had been closely associated with Fascists in the past and had been honored by the Mussolini government.”
For nearly two years Pagnucco had handled the Italian part of the inquiry in the Tresca case, in which both Fascists and the Communist Party had been suspected. Gitlow, ex-general secretary of the American Communist Party, had alleged in a new book that Tresca was killed because he bucked the OGPU – the Russian secret service – in the Juliet Stuart Poyntz disappearance case, and because he tried to foil Stalin's plans in Italy by keeping the Communist Party out of the Italian-American Victory Council. Tresca had told a federal grand jury that Miss Poyntz, a disillusioned Soviet agent, had been slain by Communists.
“Why was Pagnucco assigned to question Mr. Gitlow?” Mr. Thomas demanded. "It is true that he had protested passionately to me his repudiation of Fascism and his desire to solve the Tresca case. Yet his being used to examine a new witness – any new witness in this case – was a glaring breach of Mr. Hogan’s 1944 pledge to the Ernst committee.
“Our committee remembers, too, that the district attorney’s office long-neglected to question four close friends of Tresca, who were familiar with his enmities, and that even after Mr. Hogan’s attention was called to this, we had to apply great pressure, and many months passed before all four intimates finally were examined.
“In view of these facts, we are doubtful about getting effective action from the Hogan office in the Tresca case. We think it much more likely that Carlo's murder eventually will be solved through the continuing quiet work of certain members of the Police Department who, for reasons of their own, would like to get to the bottom of that case.
“I do not accuse the District Attorney of deliberate intent to shield anyone, but of failure to act boldly, imaginatively, and persistently to clear up the mystery of the Tresca slaying."
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