The Disappearance of Juliet Poyntz in 1937

 

Today we return to the streets of New York in search of answers to another long unsolved political assassination, that of Juliet Poyntz, a leading member of the US Communist Party who turned against Stalin after witnessing first hand the terror accompanying the Show Trials of 1936-37 in Russia. After her disappearance, it was Carlo Tresca more than any other radical who pointed directly to Stalin's killers as responsible for her death. 

Shortly before her disappearance on June 5, 1937, she met with Tresca and explained to him exactly why she could no longer associate herself with the Party. She had not yet gone public with what she had seen in Russia nor with what she knew of Soviet crimes in the US, but she may well have revealed far more to Tresca than the Party could tolerate. Or at least, Party leaders may have thought so. This possibly explains why he was assassinated  in January 1943, a time when Stalin was desperate for US aid to continue the war against Hitler. If members of the Soviet consulate in New York were complicit in Poyntz' abduction, that would have proven most embarrassing to the dictator.

Poyntz' New York story begins at Barnard College, where she was a leading student not only in academics but also in drama and debate. Following a brief early marriage, she took up a life of activism,  eventually becoming education director for the ILGWU. When the Socialist Party split after the Bolshevik Revolution, she sided with the newly formed Communist Party and became head of its Women's Department in 1928. Later, she dropped out of public view, traveled to Europe and Asia, and was widely assumed to have become an agent for the Comintern, Stalin's international intelligence/terrorism branch. In 1937 she was back in New York trying to raise money from her deceased ex-husband's estate, telling her attorney Elias Lieberman that she needed to "get away fast." Both Lieberman and Tresca later said that she seemed very frightened at this point in her life.

In the spring of 1938, Juliet Poyntz was staying at the American Women's Association at 353 West 57th Street in Manhattan, a low cost hotel for women. The building is still there, quite shabby and  undergoing renovations, but 84 years ago it was a very respectable place for single women. 

According to Denise Lynn (Where is Juliet Stuart Poyntz, UMass Press 2021) the only thing hotel employees saw  as unusual about Miss Poyntz was the frequency of phone calls she received from one unidentified man:

"Sometime in the spring of 1937, telephone operators at the American Woman’s Association Clubhouse at 353 West 57th Street in Manhattan began noticing that a man with a deep, German-sounding voice was calling daily for a resident named Juliet Stuart Poyntz. Poyntz was by all accounts a good resident. She was well educated, articulate, and had a background in teaching at Columbia University, where she was also working on a historical research project. She paid her rent on time and kept her room tidy. It was not particularly unusual for residents to get phone calls, but the man with the deep voice called so frequently that the clubhouse employees remembered him. Poyntz took the calls every time, so she must have known him. These daily calls did not raise any alarms, until Poyntz disappeared."

 She must have led a very isolated life by this point because no friend or acquaintance noticed that she had gone missing on June 5. According to the same source, it was the hotel manager Mr. Thackerberry who checked on her room when the rent went unpaid for several weeks:

Still, there was nothing to alert him to her unusual life—except for those daily phone calls. The telephone operators noticed that Poyntz took the calls throughout the spring and into the early summer. Then, on a hot June evening, after speaking briefly to the man, she left the clubhouse and reportedly walked in the direction of Central Park, three short blocks away. She did not return that day, or the next. After the rent went unpaid for several weeks, Thackerberry realized that something was wrong. He went to her deserted room and found an open jar of Jell-O on the desk, stale breadcrumbs on the table, and her belongings still in their places. The operators told him about the calls from the deep-voiced man and said that he had never called the clubhouse again after the June evening she had disappeared.

Thackerberry called Poyntz’s emergency contact, Marie B. MacDonald, a former co-worker and a long-time friend. MacDonald contacted Poyntz’s attorney, Elias Lieberman, also a former co-worker, and the two went to her room to look around. There was no indication that Poyntz had planned to be away from her room for long: she had left behind her passport and her citizenship papers and had not withdrawn any money from her skimpy bank account. The two contacted another friend of Poyntz’s, and together they packed up her belongings and put them into storage. They decided not to alert authorities because they knew that Poyntz was working for the underground and they did not want the police or FBI tracking her.

Seven months passed, and still no formal missing person’s report was made. MacDonald, concerned that Poyntz had failed to contact her, claimed that she had pressed Lieberman to contact the police, but he never did. Eventually, it was Thackerberry who unintentionally alerted them. After he mentioned to a police officer friend that one of his tenants had gone missing, that officer or another employee of the New York City police leaked the news to the press.

The mystery is why neither the friend whom she listed as her emergency contact nor her lawyer ever reported her missing. Were they active party members complicit in her disappearance or simply afraid for their own lives? Carlo Tresca, the longtime editor of the weekly il Martello, had no such hesitation once he learned of Poyntz' disappearance. Largely thanks to his unrelenting drumbeat of accusations, a grand jury investigated her disappearance and called the veteran anarchist as a witness. Tresca asserted, perhaps based on what she had told him, that Poyntz had been lured to Central Park by a former lover and current Comintern agent, Shachno Epstein, but no indictment was ever returned. A somewhat unreliable ex-communist named Paul Crouch accused the Stalinist executioner George Mink of being the one who lured her to her death, but there is no evidence she ever knew Mink. 

In the late 1940s many leading American communists became what could be called professional anti-communists, offering exposes of the Party's crimes to the Dies Committee (later HUAC) and to Joseph McCarthy. Among this group was Whittaker Chambers, Sidney Hook, Elizabeth Bentley and a long-ago founder of the Party, Benjamin Gitlow. He offered a very detailed take on Juliet Poyntz' disappearance. Whether it was based on insider knowledge or speculation is impossible to say. However, Peoples World, which bills itself as the successor to the Daily Worker, dismisses it as fiction:

 Poyntz was disillusioned by Stalin's purges and was unwilling to continue as an espionage agent for the USSR. Gitlow relates that the OGPU/NKVD used Poyntz's former lover, a man named Shakne Epshtein (Shachno Epstein (1881-1945)), the associate editor of the Communist Yiddish daily Morgen Freiheit (and an OGPU/NKVD agent himself), to lure Poyntz out for a walk in Central Park. "They met at Columbus Circle and proceeded to walk through Central Park...Shachno took her by the arm and led her up a side path, where a large black limousine hugged the edge of the walk ... Two men jumped out, grabbed Miss Poyntz, shoved her into the car and sped away." Gitlow relates that the assassins took Poyntz to the woods near the Roosevelt estate in Dutchess County, and killed and buried her there. "The body was covered with lime and dirt. On top were placed dead leaves and branches which the three killers trampled down with their feet."

Did the Comintern agent Epstein really meet Juliet Poyntz at this busy spot on the evening of June 5, 1937? 

Did Epstein really lead her to Central Park Drive, in 1937 a busy thoroughfare for automobiles, where she was seized and thrown into a waiting limousine?  

This scenario is certainly possible, maybe even likely, but if Gitlow had evidence of a brazen abduction and murder, why was he never called before a grand jury? In fact, why was he never indicted for concealing evidence of a crime? There are no answers at this late date, but it does seem likely that Poyntz was silenced so that she could not reveal what she had seen in Russia. And my own growing conviction is that Tresca's murder  five years later was linked to this never-solved disappearance.

"353 West 57,"  a short story based on the Juliet Poyntz mystery, was published in the journal, Drunk Monkeys, in May, 2023.

The still unsolved murder of Carlo Tresca

 

On January 11, 1943 the anarchist Carlo Tresca was shot to death on the northwest corner of 15th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City. There was no doubt that the shooter was 33 year old Carmine Galante, known associate of Mafia boss Frank Garofalo. He was held in prison for nearly a year but never charged by the Manhattan D.A. Frank Hogan, nor was the case pursued by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.

On July 12, 1979 Carmine Galante, who had risen over the next 36 years to head the Bonanno crime family, was shot to death by four masked gunmen in the garden of Joe & Mary's Restaurant in Brooklyn. His cigar was still in his mouth when this picture was taken.

You could say it was karma or quote Jesus, "Those who live by the sword die by the sword." Or you could point to the many killings Galante had himself ordered that same year in his takeover of the growing narcotics trade from the Gambino family. Or you could say it was the long delayed justice for his murder of one of the most courageous independent American radicals of the early 20th century. As Dorothy Gallagher titled her definitive 1983 biography of Tresca, he had "all the right enemies." In the pages of his Italian language weekly, il Martello, he had attacked Stalin, Mussolini, homegrown fascists and Kremlin stooges, the Mafia, the Catholic Church and an unending stream of capitalists and corrupt politicians. Although evidence and witnesses clearly pointed to Galante as the shooter, who had given the order to silence the 63 year old editor? And why now, when Tresca had been carrying on his unrelenting attacks for decades?

Years of controversy followed Tresca's death as one side and then another accused the communists or the fascists of ordering the murder. Both Ms. Gallagher and a second biographer, Nunzio Pernicone (Carlo Tresca; Portrait of a Rebel, 2010) agree that the most likely instigator of the murder was Frank Garofalo, a Mafia boss and frequent associate of Generoso Pope, publisher of the Italian language daily, il Progresso, whom Tresca had insulted a few months earlier. Pope's influence over the Italian vote had led FDR and Mayor LaGuardia to overlook his pro-fascist stance prior to Pearl Harbor, but that was not something Tresca would allow anyone to forget. However, the old radical had never attacked Garofalo in the pages of il Martello. 

Others pointed to the reported sighting in New York of the infamous Stalinist hit man Vittorio Vidali just before the murder. Tresca had reserved special scorn for Vidali, who was guilty of personally executing hundreds of anarchists and Trotskyists in Spain at the behest of Stalin. Tresca had an intense hatred for all Stalinists, especially since their abduction and murder of his friend Julia Poyntz in 1938. Her crime: after visiting the Soviet Union, she came away completely disillusioned. Could his continued focus on her disappearance have alarmed Stalin that winter of 1942-43 when continued US aid against the Nazis was so vital?

I returned to the neighborhood surrounding Union Square where Carlos Tresca spent most of his life, living in various apartments and moving the offices of his newspaper frequently, always low on funds, declaring the paper bankrupt more than once. I started where he was shot down, a few feet from the final location of il Martello. The building at 97 Fifth Ave has been renovated since his time and appears to be converted entirely to apartments. The 15th Street doorway through which he exited on January 11, 1943, according to Nunzio Perricone, has long since disappeared. and there is nothing to indicate the enormity of the crime once committed at this crosswalk.

Turning west, I looked down 15th Street where the getaway car carrying Carmine Galante and perhaps Frank Garofalo or the mysterious Vittorio Vidali sped away into the darkness of a city whose streetlights had been dimmed by wartime restrictions.

Retracing what I know of Carlo Tresca's life on these blocks, I came to 112 East 19th Street, an earlier home both to il Martello and to the Rand School, a longtime institution for workers run by American Socialists. No plaque identifies the history of the present building although it was here where a rightwing mob once stormed the school, only to be beaten back by workers and students.

il Martello, in the course of six moves from 1917 to 1943 occupied the same address as the Rand School once again at 7 East 15th Street. Today a Buddhist Center occupies the building, which might have pleased the old radical. Or might not, since he adhered to a very strict atheism.

Tresca moved his own quarters as frequently as he moved his office, but still never straying too far from Union Square, then and now a hub for demonstrations and activism. And a great place to meet the most interesting New Yorkers. Here is the square today:

The last stop of today's walking tour of Carlo Tresca's New York is at John's restaurant on 12th Street and Second Avenue, established in 1908. John's was a favorite gathering place for the radicals and writers of New York in the 1930s and it was here that Tresca enjoyed lunch with his old friend, the novelist John Dos Passos, only hours before he was killed. Perhaps they talked of Dos Passos' journey to Spain with Ernest Hemingway and his deep disillusion with the Stalinist destruction of the anarchist and socialist opposition to Franco's fascism. Dos Passos might perhaps have remembered how Carlo had warned him to beware the murderous NKVD agents sent by Stalin to wipe out any leftists who would not bow to Moscow. Or perhaps they discussed a rumor that one of those same homicidal agents, Vittorio Vidali, had left Mexico after arranging the murder of Leon Trotsky? And was possibly sighted in New York?

This coming January will mark the 80th anniversary of the still unsolved murder of Carlo Tresca. He has already appeared twice in my own works. He first appeared in The Red Nurse (2012, Amazon) as a brilliant organizer and onetime lover of Helen Schloss during the 1912 Little Falls Textile Strike. His second appearance was as mentor to the young radical Tom Ryan in The Witch Girl & The Wobbly, a novella published last year. ( Running Wild Novella Anthology, Volume 4 Book 1: Wright, Peter: 9781947041820: Amazon.com: Books) 

The next appearance of Carlo Tresca is a work in progress.

Poetry from Spring 2022 In Alba, Big Windows Review and Shot Glass Journal

Several poems which will be collected in the upcoming chapbook have been published in recent months. Last Week When It Rained appears in the Winter 2022 of Alba Journal of Poetry. This journal  also published  Sappho to Gongyla and The Confusion of Katya in issue 8 back in September 2003. 

Last Week When It Rained

Last week when it rained, we were together
in my small apartment, sharing the most intimate
confessions. Despite the late hour, we continued
to uncover answers to the questions that had troubled us
for many decades. This kind of work, you said to me,
is exceptionally satisfying, and I agreed.

The Confusion of Katya
(after Akhmatova)

A river flows past
a dome of many windows.
Monks are chanting.
My sister and I hear the mass, waiting for Catherine's barge
and the sweep of her golden wheat.

On the third day the aging Tsarina rides alone through ripening fields.
She takes my grandmother's ancient hand
and on the crooked staircase
kisses my lips.

 

Sappho to Gongyla
(inspired by several fragments from the Greek)

My face was hot. My need was strong.
I saw you lifting your arms at the edge of the sea.

Did you truly expect to touch the sky?

You did not glance in my direction.
You did not hear me breathing as I breathed your name.

When the moon sets, I will still be here counting the stars.

Big Windows Review published the poem Purple Sun and the flash fiction New Years Eve on the Q in their May 2022 edition. This journal also published What You Said in German was Not About Kissing in the May 2021 issue.

Purple Sun 

 

I am back where I started. You are walking 

toward me with a glass of water in your hand. 

I look downward at your bare feet in the grass.

I understand that there are shoes you have never worn.

 

I know that everything might have been different.

I might not have crossed the street. You might have told me 

to go away. There might be two moons in the sky 

or a purple sun. Nod your head if you agree.

What You Said in German was Not About Kissing

Sharing a ham & cheese hero with lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise and a bag of those cheese waffie things you liked on a hillside at the Bronx Botanical Garden was more fun than meeting you in that trattoria on the Piazza Navona with the waiter who spoke such good English because you were wearing the blue dress that buttoned down the front and we were caught in the rain but when we got back to the apartment on 189th street it was hotter than ever and we dragged the mattress up onto the roof and ate pepperoni pizza from downstairs where everybody spoke Italian to you but you didn’t know a word except maybe prego and scusi and although you took German at Hunter it wasn’t much help when we rode the D train to Central Park where the Met was performing something from Wagner, maybe Tannhauser which goes on forever but I loved you because you had read all of The Magic Mountain and called it Der Zauberberg and sometimes I look at you and want to tell you that Dominic’s has been closed for years and there’s probably no one else except maybe Barbara Kaufman who remembers the night when you said something in German and I thought you said “Kiss me.”

This poem was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Big Windows Review.

This month, Shot Glass Journal of Short Poetry published I Have No Memory, written in Austin last year.

I Have No Memory

 

 

I have no memory of getting on this bus.

I am sure I will recognize one of these streets eventually.

I will get off the bus and have something to eat.

Yesterday I drank coffee in the place that you loved on South Congress Street.

I ate the same kind of tacos with egg and chorizo that you always ordered.

Later, I will meet with old friends on zoom. 

They will tell me about people who are not dead.

I have no memory of getting on this bus.
I am sure I will recognize one of these streets eventually.
I will get off the bus and have something to eat.
Yesterday I drank coffee in the place that you loved on South Congress Street.
Later, I will meet with old friends on zoom. 
They will tell me about people who are still living.

A new view of the 1884 Roxy Druse murder case

 

Roxy in her cell at the Herkimer Jail

The Raven Review has been kind enough to publish my short fiction based on the notorious Roxy Druse murder case of 1884, entitled:

My Mother Killed My Father

An imagined witness at the Druse trial,  Jacob Timmerman gives his theory of the case. He is convinced that Roxy took responsibility for her husband's murder in order to save their daughter Mary from the consequences of her act. Although in that era, even the hint of incest or sexual abuse would never be mentioned in a courtroom, Timmerman is certain that was what drove the seventeen year old girl to take an axe to her father in their isolated farmhouse in Jordanville, NY.

As the trial unfolded in 1885, it drew wide attention in the newly sensation-seeking national press, notably The Saturday Globe, based in nearby Utica. On the one hand, Roxy was depicted as a monster for killing and butchering her husband Bill, and then feeding his remains to the family's pigs. On the other, she was defended by many early feminists and anti-capital punishment activists who petitioned the governor to commute her death sentence. Nonetheless, she was hung at Herkimer in 1887 and her daughter served ten years before being released.

In 2011, I published an historical novel inspired by the Druse murder, entitled:

Roxy Druse & The Murders of Herkimer County

In that much longer fiction, the narrator W.H. Tippetts visits Roxy and Mary in their cell act the Herkimer County Jail and eventually comes to a similar conclusion about Roxy's sacrifice of her own life in order to save that of her daughter. Tippetts, as I picture him, is not the most perceptive character and is involved in many mysteries and adventures before reaching a somewhat muddled understanding of what happened. He is based on an actual journalist who interviewed the Druse women and wrote the short history of the county's murders included in my volume.

Here is a link to my much more detailed article from 2011 on the Druse case:

Roxy Druse: Female Fiend or a Woman Wronged?

and here are some sources and suggestions for further research:

The Herkimer County Historical Society maintains extensive files on the Druse case, as well as on the even more notorious case of Chester Gillette, who was executed for the murder of Grace Brown in 1908. The Society also owns the old jail which is occasionally opened for public visits. It is a grim place and after Roxy’s death,  her spirit was said to haunt its dark corridors.

The Little Falls Historical Society holds a vast scrapbook collection compiled by my grandfather,  which includes numerous local articles on the Druse case.

The author of  The Forgotten Central New York Murder Case maintains  that the botched nature of Roxy's hanging led to the invention of the electric as a more "humane" method for taking a life. That instrument made its debut at the state prison in Auburn, NY in 1889, and Chester Gillette was one of its most famous occupants. Gillette was tried at Herkimer for the murder of Grace Brown  and held in the same jail occupied by Roxy a few years earlier.

A search of the New York Times archive under Roxalana Druse will yield several articles from the period of the trial.

The New York State Library has a comprehensive collection of local newspapers from the years of the trail and  appeals.The case attracted many opponents of capital punishment.