Carlo Tresca

Carlo Tresca (1879 - January 11, 1943, New York City) was an Italian-born American anarchist, newspaper editor, and labor agitator. Tresca was famous for the fight and the opposition to the fascism, stalinism, and the mafia. Tresca was part of the defense committee for accused murderers Sacco and Vanzetti, and frequently spoke in their defense at rallies and in articles. During the 1930s, Tresca became an outspoken opponent of Soviet Communists and Stalinism, particularly after the Soviet Union had engineered the destruction of the anarchist movement in Catalonia and Aragon during the Spanish Revolution. Before this, Tresca had supported the Bolsheviks, with the excuse of that a Communist state was preferable to a capitalist state. In early 1938 Tresca publicly accused the Soviets of kidnapping Juliet Poyntz to prevent her defection from the Communist Party USA. Tresca said that, before she had disappeared, Poyntz had talked to him about her disgust over Joseph Stalin's Great Terror. In 1941 Tresca, in a revealing moment, admitted to Max Eastman that Nicola Sacco was guilty of the crime with which he was charged, though Vanzetti was innocent. In New York, Tresca also began a public campaign of criticism of the Mafia in his weekly newspaper, "Il Martello". Tresca was killed probably by the mafia, with a gun shot. Others have thought that Tresca was eliminated by the NKVD because of the criticism of the Stalin regime of the Soviet Union.