published in the Countercurrent of Bostin in 1944 an open letter to Mayor LaGuardia, asking him: "Is there some political reason why the Tresca mystery has not been solved?... Would it complicate our international relations... if the forces which inspired that murder were revealed at this time?"

Mayor LaGuardia has never publicly voiced any regret over the Tresca killing, nor has he, so far as is known, put any pressure on the District Attorney's office in this case. When Margaret De Silver Tresca, widow of the slain editor, tried to get an interview with him to ask his active help, she was told on three different occasions that he was too busy to see her. Yet the Mayor had long been known as Carlo's friend. And neither Prosecutor Hogan nor U.S. Attorney General Biddle could find more than a few minutes for Mrs. Tresca. Mr. Biddle declared that the Department of Justice had no jurisdiction in the case, and Mr. Hogan was called to the telephone in another room soon after Mrs. Tresca was ushered into his presence, and did not return.

What Became of the Promised New Inquiry?

On January 12, 1945, Mr. Hogan told the press that Mr. Lipsky was devoting full time to the Tresca case. But on March 6 he was working on another mystery- the killing of Salvatore Bianco, coat manufacturer, in an East 16th Street apartment building elevator... We wonder why... Since then a deep fog of official silence has settled over the Tresca slaying.

Despite the probability that international forces were behind the slaying, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has never entered the case, holding aloof on the ground that it lacked jurisdiction. Representative Will Rogers Jr. tried to remedy this in March, 1944, by introducing a resolution in the House of Representatives to authorize the FBI to step into any case in which some one, because of his political belief, has suffered violence presumably instigated by persons outside the State, and in which the local authorities, after a reasonable length of time, have been unable to apprehend the guilty. But the Rogers resolution died in committee.

The solving of the murder of Carlo Tresca is of vital importance to all groups in this nation, just as the life of Carlo Tresca was of importance to every group in the nation. Political criminals are just as dangerous as war criminals. They have no right to immunity. Political assassination is in fact the worst fomr of murder, because it is the very negation by violence of democracy, and one of the weapons of totalitarianism from which the modern world has suffered so terribly. Whoever killed Carlo Tresca must be found, if any one of whatever political belief is to remain safe while exercising the privilege of expressing that belief.

Those labor unions particularly for which Tresca did so much and so freely during his lifetime, have a moral obligation never to rest until his murderer and the employer of that murderer have been punished. Progressive citizens in every economic and political group have a moral obligation to insist that every means of investigation be used to apprehend the killer's boss.