that he saved Kings County the expense and trouble of a trial by pleading guilty to "attempted robbery in the first degree, unarmed." This plea was accepted and Galante's lawyer thanked the judge and Assistant District Attorney Cohen for their "wonderful co-operation."

No one has suggested that Galante could have had any political differences with Tresca, or could have known or cared anything about the political issues with which Tresca was concerned. Around the prosecutor's and parole offices, and among the police who worked on the case in the early weeks, it was generally agreed that the man who did the actual shooting must have been hired.

At the time of the 1930 holdup Galante had been a helper in Fulton Fish Market. Now, in 1943, he identified himself to the police as an employee of the Knickerbocker Trucking Company, an incorporated concern with desk room at 520 Broadway, and only one truck. For three months this corporation had paid Galante $25 each week- but apparently he had done no work for it. When members of the Knickerbocker company were summoned to the District Attorney's office for questioning, according to Ezio Taddei, one of Carlo Tresca's close friends, who was there at the time, Samuel S. DiFalco came with them as their attorney.

From all accounts, the authorities were unable to get anything out of Galante, although they held him in the Tombs for eight months, and although he was linked by the parole officers to the murder car. District Attorney Hogan characterized him as "prison wise and a tough witness to crack"- yet such witnesses have been cracked in the past, and with fewer levers than would seem to have been available to the police in Galante's case. Galante was returned to Sing Sing as a parole violator to serve out his term, which was up in December, 1944. Despite the assertions of the two parole officers that they saw the prisoner enter the escape car on the night of the Tresca murder, Supreme Court Justice Andrew W. Ryan ruled that there was no ground on which the Parole Board could hold Galante any longer, and he was released. Neither Calabi, Tresca's companion at the time of the murder, nor the salesman who sold "Charles Pappas" the murder car, was able to identify Galante in a police line-up. Galante's handwriting, also, is quite unlike that of Charles Pappas as shown on the latter's application for an automobile license.

The Murder Car Has a Garage

On September 10, 1943, the police arrested Frank Nuccio, a small-time bootlegger who lives at 265 Elizabeth Street, less than a block from where Galante had been picked up. Nuccio was held, the authorities explained, because he was the lessee of a near-by eight-car garage in which the escape car was kept up to the night of the slaying. The garage had been located through the bunch of keys left hanging in the ignition lock of that car. From a locksmith who had made one of these keys the police had discovered also that the lock of Nuccio's garage had been changed a few hours before the Tresca killing-presumably to prevent the sedan being returned to the garage after the crime. For nearly two months Nuccio was