Bresci Circle

The Bresci Circle was a group of New York City anarchists who are remembered for a failed bombing attempt on St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1915, in which two of its members were arrested.

The meeting was called off as its heat threatened to attract police attention, but Bresci was incensed and it is implied that this affront precipitated into his plot to return to Italy and become a martyr.

[1] The anarchists carried the bomb back to a tenement in the Italian section of East Harlem (near the Bresci Circle headquarters).

[2] The New York City bomb squad, recently inaugurated under Thomas Tunney,[2] sent an undercover detective into the group, but his aggressive behavior and lack of Italian language led him to be twice suspected and unsuccessfully tried for spying.

[5] In time, the undercover detective purchased supplies and a room in which the three made two bombs of sulfur, black antimony, potassium chlorate, and brown sugar, which they packaged in soap tins and to which they attached iron rods with coat hanger wire as shrapnel.

[4] The day of the attack, Carbone said that he had stayed late at work and needed sleep, so Polignani and Abarno walked together to the church, where hundreds congregated.

Photographs of the undercover scrubwomen and the Fire Department Bureau of Combustibles' chief inspector, whose face showed burn marks from a prior bomb, enhanced the proof.

Labor activists and anarchists suspected Polignani as an agent provocateur since he featured prominently in the plot and had purchased the bomb components.

[4] Abarno and Carbone's legal defense revolved around La Salute è in voi and their right to read any books of any kind,[8] including bomb-making handbooks.

After Abarno credited the handbook with deranging him, in appeal for clemency during arraignment, the prosecution used seditious books to show the anarchists' intents.

Literature professor Ann Larabee concluded that the handbook's role was to sully Abarno and Carbone, having no proof of connection to the crime.