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From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 51, 20 December 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
NEW YORK CITY — Fresh hope of a solution of the 1943 murder of Carlo Tresca, Italian journal editor, was voiced today by Norman Thomas, chairman of the Tresca Memorial Committee, in view of new leads now being investigated by the office of District Attorney Frank S. Hogan and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“Recently,” Thomas said, “we wrote to Mr. Hogan concerning statements about the Tresca killing and the Juliet Stuart Poyntz disappearance, made in a new book by Benjamin Gitlow, former secretary-general of the Communist Party of America. We suggested that those statements would justify his [Gitlow] being asked to appear before the county Grand Jury, to discover what tangible evidence exists to support his story about both cases.
“Mr. Gitlow, in his book, The Whole of Their Lives, tells of a feud between Tresca and Enea Sormenti, now said to be head of the Cominform in Trieste, which ended with Tresca’s murder. He ascribes that slaying to two factors: that Tresca ‘dared to buck the IGPU [Stalinist secret police] on the Poyntz case’; and that Tresca ‘tried to foil Stalin’s plans in Italy by keeping the Communists out, of the Italian-American Victory Council.’
“Tresca testified before a federal Grand Jury here in 1938, accusing the Communists of kidnapping and murdering Miss Poyntz. At that time, Mr. Gitlow avers, ‘there was open talk in Communist circles that Tresca would pay with his life for his treachery.’
“The feud with Sormenti began, the Gitlow book says, after a close friend of Tresca was murdered in Spain. We know that Tresca devoted the whole front page of his journal Il Martello (The Hammer) in May 1942 to an attack on Sormenti, assailing him as a ‘commandant of spies, thieves, and assassins’ during the Spanish Civil War.
“Mr. Gitlow records that Tresca told him, shortly before he was killed, that he knew Sormenti was in New York. It was then that he also told several other friends about seeing Sormenti here, and remarked: ‘Where he is I smell murder. I wonder who will be the next victim?’
“In writing Mr. Hogan I pointed out that Mr. Gitlow’s statements about the two cases appeared Ito have much more solidity than those of Louis F. Budenz, ex-editor of the Communist Daily Worker, in his autobiography last year. From the manner of Mr. Gitlow’s writing (the manner of one with information from sources close to the facts) I felt that there was good reason to hope that he could be more helpful in solving both the Tresca and Poyntz cases than was Mr. Budenz.
“Our committee, however, has always kept an open mind about the guilty in the Tresca case. From the start fingers of suspicion have pointed toward both Fascists and Communists.”
Tresca was shot down in the dim-out at Fifth Avenue and 15th Street in 1943. Friends will honor him on the sixth anniversary of his death, Tuesday, Jan. 11, at 8 p.m., at a meeting sponsored by the Tresca Memorial Committee in the Labor Temple, 242 East 14th St.
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