The bombings were broken by an FBI informant who infiltrated the radical cell

Evidence

Melville enlists Demmerle to work on his next caper, and Demmerle sets him up. The two men are arrested November 11 pre-planting a bomb at the 69th Regiment Armory at Twenty-Sixth Street and Lexington Avenue. A few hours later, cops pick up Alpert and Hughey at her place, 235 East Fourth Street. “Trouble in New York is when a lovely young thing sitting under a dryer at Kenneth’s thinks only thus: ‘What if a bomb should explode and me sitting here in curlers,’” Sidney Zion will write in the New York Times. “Last week in what was rapidly becoming Scare City, no reasonable person would put the child [sic] down as paranoid.” Nor would Jeff Spero. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1490

Categorization

• SEED: The Demmerle informant story is a ready-made true-crime essay: an FBI informant turned in the very comrades he helped build bombs with, ending the Scare City spree.