Word: vidalis
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...Trieste the Cominform had publicly pointed a pistol at Tito, and cocked it with a click the world could hear. The man with the gun was thickset, rasp-voiced Vittorio Vidali, Cominform boss in Trieste. He had spent a quarter century in the Communist underground. Wherever he went, murder followed...
Many Names. Vidali was born near Trieste, about 50 years ago. After Mussolini marched on Rome in 1922 Vidali got away to Moscow, for three years of study. In 1926, as Emilio Sormenti, he turned up in the U.S. and in 1927 fled to avoid deportation. Ten years later, in the Spanish civil war, he was Carlos Contreras, commissar of the Fifth Loyalist Regiment. After Spain he was based in Mexico...
During his Mexican years, Vidali-Contreras had an outspoken enemy in the U.S., goateed Carlo Tresca, a fearless tyranny-hater and an exiled Italian anarcho-socialist. Tresca's Italian-language weekly, Il Martello (The Hammer), publicly accused Vidali-Contreras of many acts of terrorism, and the following specific crimes: 1) the assassination in Barcelona of Camillo Berneri, Italian anarchist, during the Spanish civil war; 2) the murder in Mexico of Tiña Modotti, Vidali's Communist mistress...