In Manhattan's Federal Detention Headquarters one day last week, top-ranking U.S. Communist Robert G. Thompson, 38, stood in the lunch line three days before he was due to go to trial for his two-year flight from a 1949 conspiracy conviction (TIME, Sept. 7). Suddenly a fellow-prisoner behind him raised a length of lead pipe and brought it down twice on Thompson's head. Thompson slumped to the floor, bloody and unconscious.
Guards who seized the man with the pipe discovered that he had Communist connections of another kind in his record. Alexander Pavlovich, 32, a Yugoslav seaman, had jumped ship in...
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