The thing about Carlo Tresca was that he looked exactly like what a crazy bomb-throwing radical foreigner was supposed to look like: wild-bearded, wild-eyed, always passionately shaking his fist and thundering away about the oppressed workers.

Actually, he was quite a genial fellow, unfailingly polite to the cops who started visiting him regularly in the wake of the 1920 Wall St. explosion. "They are nice boys," he told reporters. "Whenever there is a bomb, they come to me. They ask me what I know, but I never know anything. So we have wine."