The story really starts about twenty years ago. In the spring of 1900, an Italian from Paterson, N. J., Brescia by name, attended a meeting of anarchists in a house in Elizabeth Street, New York. The group was composed of two parties, one which we may call the progressives, and one the inactives. Brescia assailed the inactives, denounced them as cowards, and stirred up so much dissension that the meeting broke up for fear of a police raid, and several of the members retaliated at Brescia by accusing him of being a police spy. He sailed for Italy, and on July 29, in the little Lombardi town of Monza, murdered King Humbert the Good. When the news was cabled to America it was hailed with proper grief by the public and with great joy by the anarchists who had called Brescia a traitor. His execution, which followed swiftly, made him a martyr. So to do him honor, the group was named the Brescia Circle.
By 1914 the membership of the circle was nearly 600. A cosmopolitan lot: Italians, Russians, Russian Jews, Germans, Austrians, Spaniards and Americans, of both sexes. The leaders were agitators whose speaking ability had lifted them out of the ranks and who found an easier living by their wits than by their hands. The Bomb Squad knew something of their activities and habits, for the past history of anarchist cases linked up certain names in a pointed way. We knew their fondness for bombs, and the records of the police department contain many instances of anarchists inspired to violence by the inflammatory speeches of such agitators, as their idol, Francisco Ferrer, had preached violence in Spain. The outbreak of war in Europe, from which so many of the group had migrated to America, and the promise of social confusion which it held for them had stirred the Brescia Circle more than a little. The active members met regularly in the basement of a building at 301 East 106th Street, a shabby house in a shabby district east of the New York Central tracks. These meetings, which occurred usually on a Sunday, as many of the members were working during the week, were addressed by such notorious anarchists as Emma Goldman, Becky Edelson, Frank Mandese, Carlo Tresca and Pietro Allegra—names probably unfamiliar to the general public, but names with which the Police Department had “auld acquaintance.” Occasionally an editor of an anarchist newspaper in Lynn, Massachusetts, Gagliani by name, came to speak in the cellar, and Plunkett, Harry Kelly, and Alexander Berkman were usually to be found in the group.
The winter of 1913–1914 was one of industrial depression. Many of the radical labor element rallied to the I. W. W. and the unemployed readily joined them. The methods of the anarchists and I. W. W.’s were similar, and the advocates of unrest were enlisted under both standards. In the late winter demonstrations began and multiplied until in March a youth named Frank Tannenbaum, to whom Emma Goldman later took a fancy, led a mob of I. W. W.’s into St. Alphonsus’ Church demanding food. The police waited until they had passed inside, then locked the doors, and arrested the whole lot. This was but one instance of a number which promised more trouble. Whatever nice distinctions of creed separated the Industrial Workers from the anarchists were paper distinctions; the performances of both bodies made it fairly plain that if you scratched an anarchist you found an I. W. W. underneath.
There may have been some intimation from abroad of the impending war, among the anarchists, for in July certain of them began to grow demonstrative. On Independence Day Mandese was arrested in Tarrytown, in uncomfortable proximity to the estate and person of John D. Rockefeller. Carron, Berg and Hansen, three members of the Brescia Circle, were engaged on that same day in perfecting a bomb in their rooms at Lexington Avenue and 104th Street, when the machine exploded prematurely and killed them. That bomb had been intended for the Rockefeller family. Naturally everyone with a shred of respect for order who read of these episodes recoiled from them, but it was necessary to judge them from the anarchist’s own standpoint to see that while one of the cases had resulted in death, and the Mandese incident in arrest, both had been successful in creating a disturbance. The anarchist likes disturbance as well as he dislikes order, for unrest is contagious, and means new recruits to the cause. It became our duty, therefore, to make a careful investigation of these disturbances at their source, and we insinuated a detective into the Brescia Circle itself.
He spoke only English—a good language for social intercourse, but not the key to the affairs of the group in the 106th Street basement. Whenever the more prominent agitators had a really important matter to discuss they used the Italian tongue, and it was impossible for our man to eavesdrop. Perhaps he was over-eager, for twice he was brought to trial by the Circle charged with spying. Twice he was acquitted. But when his enemies had him formally charged a third time with treachery, the anarchists decided that although they had no evidence against him beyond a powerful suspicion, he would be better outside. Outside he went.
On October 3, the anarchists gave a grand ball at the Harlem Casino in honor of Emma Goldman, and at that affair announcement was made that October 13 would be observed by those of the cause with a celebration at Forward Hall, in East Broadway, fitting to the anniversary of the “assassination” of Francisco Ferrer. The orator, Leonard Abbott, also reminded the gathering that “the Catholic Church had been responsible for Ferrer’s death.” At five o’clock in the afternoon of October 12 a vicious explosion occurred in the north aisle of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It was an anarchist’s bomb. The nave of the church held numerous worshippers, who were panic-stricken, but who fortunately escaped injury with the exception of a young man struck in the face by a flying splinter from one of the altars. Shortly after midnight of the next day a bomb placed in the front area of the priests’ house of St. Alphonsus’ exploded with violence enough to break every window in the house and every window in the house across the street. Ferrer’s “assassination” had evidently been appropriately observed.
The situation was disturbing. We had to put a stop to bombing before the anarchists grew bolder and began to kill someone beside themselves. Of course we wanted all the evidence we could lay hands on, and yet the evidence we had been able to obtain had not prevented two outrages. We felt that undoubtedly the best place to look for it was still the Brescia Circle, as it constituted the chief organization and headquarters for the element which we believed guilty. And we now return to the question of the stool-pigeon.
It would have been possible to employ one of the Circle, perhaps. It is certain that I should have been uneasy with only his evidence to depend upon, for a bomb does not wait to be investigated. Planting a man in the Brescia Circle had not been successful, but I felt that it could be made successful. So out of five or six candidates from the department I chose Amedeo Polignani for the work.
He was a young Italian detective who kept his own counsel, short, strong, mild-mannered and unobtrusive. And he knew Italian. “Your name from now on is Frank Baldo,” I said. “Forget you’re a detective. You can get a job over in Long Island City, so as to carry out the bluff. You are an anarchist. Join the Brescia Circle and any other affiliated group, and report to me every day. The older members may be suspicious of you, and they’ll probably follow you, so we had better arrange when you are to telephone and I’ll let you know whenever and wherever I want to see you.” We discussed every possible angle of the work in order to anticipate and forestall whatever accident either of omission or commission might occur to make Polignani’s position suspicious. He was instructed to call me by telephone at certain hours, using a private number, telephoning from a public pay-station in a store in which there was not more than one booth, so that no one might follow him and hear his conversation through the flimsy walls of a booth adjoining. He was to deport himself in a retiring manner, and to throw himself earnestly into the part he was to act. I felt sure that his quiet, agreeable nature would disarm any suspicion of him as a newcomer, and that complete concentration upon the spirit of the masquerade would gradually draw out important information. First and foremost, he was to be on the watch for evidence of the man who had committed the two bomb outrages in October; secondly, he was to cover the activities and intentions of the anarchists in general; thirdly, he was to keep his eyes and ears open and his mouth shut, and to deal with any emergency which might arise.
