Answer by Acid

Emerging from an after-midnight coffee session last week at Lindy's, his favorite spot, dapper little (5 ft. 4 in.) New York Labor Columnist Victor Riesel turned off Broadway and down silent 51st Street. By habit he had taken off his glasses. Half a block from Broadway, a young man stepped from the building shadows and threw a bottle of searing, concentrated sulphuric acid into Riesel's face. The columnist clutched at his burn ing eyes, gasping, "My gosh, my gosh!" The young man walked away and was swallowed up by the night and the city.

By the time Riesel had been taken to a hospital, county and city police, FBI agents and newspapermen were looking for the attacker and the answers to some obvious questions: Who had hired him? And why? The search was blocked not by a shortage of clues but by a plethora of them. Said one police inspector: "Riesel made a lot of enemies."

Born 41 years ago in New York City's Lower East Side slums, Victor Riesel grew up among militant unionists, remembers often seeing his father brought home bleeding from skirmishes with power-hungry elements in the garment trade. In his 14 years of turning out a labor column, now distributed by the Hall Syndicate to the New York Daily Mirror and 192 other newspapers, he has aimed the acid of his pen consistently at Communism, racketeering and racial bias in U.S. unions. His words have often been as hard as his father's fists. Typical opening jab: "For March, my private crook-of-the-month club award goes to Joe Fay [of the Operating Engineers Union], extortionist emeritus of the mobs."

Only two hours before he was attacked last week, Riesel gave an example of his blunt, sometimes overdramatic technique on a broadcast over radio station WMCA. He attacked William De Koning Jr., head of the Operating Engineers' Local 138 on Long Island, and De Koning's father, an ex-convict labor boss. Also on the program was Emanuel Muravchik, field director of the Jewish Labor Committee, who talked of discrimination against Negro labor in the South.

In their search for clues to the attack, police and newsmen recalled that Riesel, a hard-digging reporter, has been giving information to U.S. Attorney Paul Williams, who is probing industrial rackets in New York, and who considered Riesel a key witness. Said Williams of the attack: "A black effort to intimidate witnesses."

At week's end Riesel lay in St. Clare's Hospital, his eyes covered with bulky bandages. Doctors were not sure whether his sight could be saved; nor would the police admit to any leads on his attacker. But the price on the attacker's head was mounting fast. Rewards posted by the Hall Syndicate, the Mirror, station WMCA, labor unions (including De Koning's), and a crowd of press groups and newspapers totaled $41,000.

As the shock of his experience slowly wore off, Riesel began to sound like his old self again. Said he: "To the press, radio and TV: keep the heat on. To the decent men of labor: for God's sake stop looking the other way, stop apologizing and sidestepping. [Begin] an all-out war against the mob."

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