29 Facts About Carlo Tresca

Carlo Tresca was an Italian-American dissident, newspaper editor, orator, and labor organizer and activist who was a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World during the 1910s.

Carlo Tresca is remembered as a leading public opponent of fascism, Stalinism, and Mafia infiltration of the trade unions for the purposes of labor racketeering and corruption.

Born, raised, and educated in Italy, Tresca was editor of an Italian socialist newspaper and secretary of the Italian Federation of Railroad Workers before he emigrated to the United States in 1904.

Carlo Tresca was jailed in 1925 after printing a paid advertisement for a birth control pamphlet in one of his newspapers.

Carlo Tresca used his newspapers to mount a public campaign criticising the Mafia.

Carlo Tresca was assassinated in New York in January 1943, allegedly by Carmine Galante.

Carlo Tresca was born March 9,1879, in Sulmona, Abruzzo, Italy, the son of a landowner.

Carlo Tresca had no hope of attending university as his family's finances were poor during the economic slump of the 1880s.

Carlo Tresca enrolled at a seminary instead but left soon afterward and emerged as an anticlerical and an atheist.

From 1898 to 1902, Carlo Tresca was secretary of the Italian Federation of Railroad Workers.

Carlo Tresca was the editor of Il Germe, a socialist weekly based in Abruzzo.

Carlo Tresca had a relationship with sculptor Minna Harkavy, whose bust of him was erected in his birth town of Sulmona.

Carlo Tresca remained in that position for the next three years.

In 1907 Carlo Tresca resigned as editor of Il Proletario and began publishing his own newspaper, La Plebe.

In 1909, Carlo Tresca became editor of L'Avvenire, remaining in that capacity until the coming of World War I, when the publication was suppressed under the Espionage Act.

Carlo Tresca joined the revolutionary syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World in 1912, when he was invited by the union to Lawrence, Massachusetts, to help mobilize the Italian workers during a campaign to free strike leaders Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti, jailed on false murder charges.

Carlo Tresca was arrested several times and jailed for nine months awaiting trial for murder in conjunction with the Minnesota action, ultimately being released without going to trial.

Carlo Tresca had great influence among the sea-faring fraternity and suggested that we should call out the seamen from the British ships as a protest against the arrest of Dr Mannix.

Carlo Tresca was found guilty in an October 1923 trial and was sentenced to a year and a day in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.

Carlo Tresca became a prominent figure among Italian-Americans for his opposition to fascism and was reported to Benito Mussolini as a leading enemy of the fascist movement.

Carlo Tresca edited an anti-fascist newspaper named Il Martello, where he attacked the myths that undergirded Mussolini's power.

Carlo Tresca was monitored by the United States Department of Justice, who sought to deport him, and by Rome, where Mussolini feared that Italian-Americans would hurt his reputation with the United States and its banks.

Carlo Tresca was sentenced and subject to deportation, but public dissent led the United States President Calvin Coolidge to commute Carlo Tresca's sentence.

Carlo Tresca contributed towards stopping Mussolini's ideological spread among Italian-Americans, despite Carlo Tresca's lack of reach into Italian-American media and business influence.

In 1937, Carlo Tresca was a member of the Dewey Commission, which cleared Leon Trotsky of all charges made during the Moscow Trials.

In early 1938, Carlo Tresca publicly accused the Soviets of kidnapping Juliet Stuart Poyntz to prevent her defection from the Communist Party USA underground apparatus.

Carlo Tresca alleged that before she had disappeared, Poyntz had talked to him about "exposing the communist movement".

On January 11,1943, in New York City, Carlo Tresca was leaving his parole officer's offices when he dodged surveilling officers by jumping into a car that was waiting for him.

Two hours later, Carlo Tresca was crossing Fifth Avenue at 15th Street on foot when a black Ford pulled up beside him.