FOOTNOTES:
[15] Certain other leads, neglected at the time, are tantalizing in their possibilities. One such concerns a professional car thief, William Dodson, who worked in a Needham garage from 1917 to 1919 and who in February 1921 was arrested in Providence after stealing Judge Thayer’s car in Worcester. When, a year later, Dodson’s wife sued him for divorce, she testified that in the spring of 1920 he had given her eight hundred of the thousand dollars he had received for driving the bandit car in South Braintree. Another concerns the Randolph Savings Bank holdup of November 17, 1919. Although the bandits were never identified, the robbery was apparently planned by four men and a woman in a Brockton lodging house. Afterward a phial of cocaine was found in their empty room. The plates of the car they used had been stolen from Hassam’s Garage in Needham. According to the Brockton Enterprise of five days after the South Braintree holdup, “Thomas Finnegan of Braintree picked up a small bottle said to have been thrown from the murder car as it sped away. This leads police to believe that dope played a part in the crime?” Needham again crops up in the suspicion that the never-traced South Braintree payroll money may have been hidden there. Two days after the holdup, Fred Lyons passed a car that had stopped in the middle of an isolated road near the Working Boys’ Home. A short, slightly built man was walking up and down beside the car as Lyons drove by. Then, as Lyons continued, the other car started up and followed him a mile to his home. There it turned around and drove away. Next morning Lyons notified the police. They found a freshly dug hole about two feet deep in a clump of brush not far from where the strange car had stopped. After digging down three more feet they struck rock. Several weeks later it was discovered that someone had dug the hole several feet deeper, removing two boulders to uncover a shelf of rock with a pocket scooped out under it large enough to hold a suitcase.
[16] It may have been the mother rather than the son who saw the car go by, but Driver then had a good position with United Fruit Company and obviously did not want to become involved in a notorious case, especially after his family’s embarrassing experience with Weeks.
[17] In his book The Untried Case Ehrmann maintained that there was no link between Sacco and Vanzetti and the South Braintree holdup except for the negligible one that Sacco had worked a week at Rice & Hutchins in 1917. He was apparently not aware that their friend Coacci was working at Slater & Morrill until early in April 1920.
[18] Years later Ehrmann happened to meet his old classmate in the Pemberton Square Courthouse, and for some reason Ranney began to talk about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, speculating as to how he would have felt if he had been on the jury. “I think,” he told Ehrmann finally, “I should have considered the Commonwealth’s case not proven.”
[19] Kelley, in his affidavit, denied that any such conversation had taken place.
[20] Boda’s gun, examined by Chief Stewart at Coacci’s house, was a Spanish-type automatic. Stewart did not report the make.
[21] Joe had been moved from the Atlanta penitentiary after tipping off the Atlanta warden to an inmates’ drug-smuggling ring—for which he received a letter of commendation.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MORE HISTORY, WRITTEN
AND OTHERWISE
The sea-change decades of depression and war did little to alter the pattern of Joe Morelli’s life. On his return from Leavenworth he moved from Providence to the scarcely more scenic environment of adjacent Pawtucket. In that gray three-decker jungle city he was to spend the rest of his days—when not in prison—in a house at 70 Toledo Avenue, a convenient half-mile beyond the attentions of the Providence police.
In 1928 he was picked up by the Pawtucket police in connection with a clothing theft, the next year for smuggling liquor into the Providence county jail. In 1932 Secret Service agents arrested him for possessing counterfeit bills and engaging juveniles, including a thirteen-year-old female state ward, to pass them. He managed to get himself acquitted. Later that year the Secret Service raided his house and uncovered a cache of bogus five-dollar bills. The agents also found parts of a book he was writing about his gangland career.
At his trial Joe tried but failed to put the blame for the counterfeit money on his son, John. Sentenced to five years in the new federal prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, Joe had the distinction of being the first Rhode Islander to arrive there.
In 1941, he was arrested for keeping a house of prostitution in his home, setting up slot machines, and selling liquor without a license. A neighbor, James Prete, who had complained to the police about the goings-on at 70 Toledo Avenue had his house wrecked by dynamite.
While Joe was out on bail he was again arrested for counterfeiting. Not until March 1946 was he paroled. Nine months later he was picked up for running a house of prostitution. In March 1947, he was seized for violating his parole and sent to the Danbury Federal Penitentiary.
The following year he was released, only to be arrested on the old prostitution charge. In moments of self-pity Joe liked to predict that he would one day die in jail.
In 1931 Joe boasted to Morris Ernst, a New York lawyer connected with various civil liberties committees, that he and his gang had staged the South Braintree holdup and that he had ridden in the murder car. Ernst had taken no part in the Sacco-Vanzetti defense nor until the execution of the two men had he formed any fixed opinion as to their guilt or innocence, although he had concluded that there had been a lack of due process. Reading the six volumes of the case record as they were published in 1928 and 1929, he was struck by the amorphous Morelli hypothesis appearing in Volume V. “Being what I am,” he explained at the Massachusetts Judiciary Committee hearing in 1959, “and for no sensible reason probably, I went on the trail of Joe Morelli. I have had talks with Joe Morelli. I have had letters with him. I have seen him with his counsel. I am told that I am the only person who had examined the man who really did the job for which Sacco and Vanzetti went to the chair.”
Ernst started his private investigation by arranging a meeting in the Providence office of Joe Morelli’s lawyer, Louis Jackvony, a former Rhode Island attorney general whom Joe had known as a boy. After being introduced to Ernst Joe did not sit down, but stood for several minutes by the window while the latter talked. Finally he gave a signal to someone in the street, explaining then that he had decided Ernst was “jake.”
Ernst had prepared a list of detailed questions about the South Braintree holdup: Were there two cars or one? Were they open or closed, and where did they go? Where did the license plates come from? Who was in the car? Were the payroll boxes metal or wood? Who picked them up? How much money was in them and how many people divided it? Was there anyone leaning against the fence? Was there a team of horses? An excavation? A water tower? Why did they double back at the Matfield crossing? For two hours Joe answered all questions affably and correctly.
No person of this man’s make-up [Ernst wrote later] would have read the minutes of the trial with enough precision to fit all his answers into the known facts, down to the description of the flapping of the side curtains on the murder car. Nor could any human being have guessed the answers as to time and place of the many details of the shooting day about which I confronted him. I left completely satisfied that the gang chieftain was in the murder car and knew all the details of the planning of the robbery, the details of the shooting, and the technique of escape.
Joe was even willing to sign a statement—for a price—but he became angry when Ernst let slip that an underworld intermediary had been promised fifteen hundred dollars for his assistance in the case. Joe hinted that his price would be ten times that. Ernst finally offered him twenty-five hundred if he would produce the metal payroll boxes. “You couldn’t get them out of Canapa Pond,” Joe told him.
Later, while Morelli was doing his stretch at Lewisburg, Ernst said he learned that Canapa Pond was the local name for a body of water on the route of the escaping murder car, but he made no effort to recover the boxes.
During his three years at Lewisburg Joe continued writing his life history, accumulating almost six hundred pages by the time of his 1936 parole. Back at Toledo Avenue, he made various attempts to cash in on the manuscript. For some time he corresponded with Silas Bent, a friend of Jack Callahan, the journalist who had brought Frank Silva’s confession to the Outlook in 1928. Bent was impressed enough to get in touch with the Outlook and with Upton Sinclair, to whom he wrote:
Joe Morelli has asked me to write you about his autobiography, which he has completed. I have not seen it, and do not know whether he goes fully into the South Braintree holdup; but I have talked to him more than once about it, and if he is free to tell the whole story, the book should be a smash.
When Bent asked Joe’s price for a sworn confession that he had organized and committed the South Braintree holdup, Joe, apparently with an author’s vanity, insisted that his whole book appear, not just a chapter. After some further dickering, the deal fell through.
Meantime Joe had been angling Ernst, promising him “the real truth and not baloney” about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and when Ernst again met him in Jackvony’s office, Joe had the manuscript with him. His price was twenty-five thousand dollars, and he would not allow the pages to be inspected even briefly. All Ernst managed to see was the cover. Subsequently, with the help of Oswald Garrison Villard, Ernst raised an initial five thousand dollars. Joe still held out for his twenty-five thousand, which in Ernst’s court-hardened mind meant he would settle for ten thousand.
Some time in 1939 Ernst took Joe to lunch in Boston with Robert Lemond, an editor of Little, Brown & Co., to discuss publishing the confession-autobiography. Joe had his sealed manuscript with him, but he still refused to turn it over for less than his price. He and Ernst were not to meet again.
With the shadow of World War II moving across the landscape, interest in the Morellis faded. The only person still concerned with them was Ben Bagdikian, a reporter on the Providence Journal. In August 1950, he learned that Joe was dying of cancer. Hopeful of getting some last statement from him, Bagdikian went to Jackvony, one of the few men Joe trusted. Jackvony in turn went to Joe’s bedside and told him that a friend wanted to see him about the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
At first Joe refused to see anyone, but a few days later he whispered to the lawyer: “All right, tell him to come. I’ll tell him the whole story.” Jackvony reminded Joe that he did not have to say anything, but if he had something to get off his chest, this was the time. “Tell him to come,” Joe said again.
On August 25 Jackvony and Bagdikian drove to the house on Toledo Avenue. Jackvony went in alone, arranging to signal from the porch when Joe was ready. Bagdikian waited in the car for twenty-five minutes. A man in a large yellow convertible pulled up behind him, watched him suspiciously for fifteen minutes, then drove away. Bagdikian learned later that he was Joe’s brother Frank.
As soon as Jackvony entered Joe’s bedroom he was aware of the death smell. The white face on the pillow gave him one frightened appealing glance of recognition, the blue lips moved slightly, then Joe slipped into a coma. Jackvony stepped to the bed, tapped Joe’s knee, and called out his name, but there was no reply. He bent down, put his mouth to Joe’s ear, and shouted, “Sacco and Vanzetti!” There was no response. The secret still hovered inside Joe’s skull, but it was to remain there. Early next morning he died.
On a summer morning in South Braintree, just forty years after the holdup, I started off with Bob McLean of the Boston Globe to retrace the route of the 1920 getaway car. The day was heavy even at nine o’clock. Bob just managed to squeeze his amiable bulk into the driver’s seat of his ten-year-old Buick. I sat beside him as navigator, with map board, green and red pencils, and the topographic sheets of the U.S. Geological Survey—as I used to do with the survey maps in the Army in what we called tewts—tactical exercises without troops.
Suburban developments were sprouting up all round the Braintrees. The hard little core of industrial South Braintree had also seen changes. Opposite the station the mansarded Hampton House had been torn down and the space was now a parking lot. The Romanesque granite-and-sandstone station itself was boarded up and year-old signs in the windows of the empty waiting room announced the suspension of passenger service on the Old Colony Line. Rice & Hutchins’ brick building was still standing, as was the wooden Slater & Morrill factory, but both had been taken over by the Atlantic Abrasive Corporation, whatever that was. South Braintree’s shoe industry had long since disappeared. Where the Italians had been excavating on April 15, 1920, there stood a brick building, no longer a restaurant, occupied by a lamp firm and the Braintree Observer.
One afternoon in February I had dropped in at the Observer office to ask what Sacco-Vanzetti material they might have in their files. The woman at the desk did not know, but she went in back to the presses and returned with a man in his sixties wearing a printer’s apron. As soon as he heard the words Sacco and Vanzetti his face mottled. “Why do you people still come round writing sweet stuff about those two gangsters?” he shouted at me. “Why are you wasting your sympathy on them when you got none at all for that poor Mrs. Parmenter that lost her husband? They raised thousands of dollars for those two Eyetalians, and she got nothing. Afterward she had no money, she lost her house. No one ever gave her a thought. Why don’t you write about her? Why don’t you?” There was no arguing with him, but I was surprised, as I was to be on other visits, that the old emotions could still smolder beneath the small-town tranquillity and be brought suddenly to a flame by some casual word.
Almost every inhabitant of South Braintree over fifty seemed to have his own pet bit of gossip about the case. One story is that Mrs. Sacco was seen early on the morning of the murders at a South Braintree filling station. Another has it that Sacco and Vanzetti were observed wandering about town several days before April 15. The retired express agent tells of a local Italian who knew Sacco before the crime and saw him do the shooting, but was too scared to go to court to testify. Sacco is said to have confessed to one of his lawyers, and Jerry McAnamey is said just before his death, to have told a friend they were guilty. Amid the distortions of gossip there is the more coldly remembered fact that those who testified for the defense lost their jobs. Among others, Brenner and McCullum, who contradicted Pelser in court, were discharged soon afterward, as was Lewis Wade, who disappointed the prosecution by not identifying Sacco positively. All South Braintree still firmly believes that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty.
“Criminal exercise without criminals,” McLean announced as we pulled away from the curb where Berardelli’s body had lain. Pearl Street still kept its underlying pattern even though the spindle-legged water tower had gone, along with the gate-tender and his shack. Cain’s livery stable had been replaced by the Pearl Street Ramblertorium, and Schrout’s Bakery was now Adel’s Pizza Parlor. But the outline was the same, the wooden two- and three-decker workers’ houses still kept their old gray ranks, the barber shop was still there, and Torrey’s Drugstore—duly modernized—still hugged the corner.
“Here’s where they threw out the tacks,” McLean said as we turned left into Washington Street. At the Plain Street railroad crossing we made the sharp right turn and went up the hill past the white wooden grotesqueries of the South Congregational Church, then dipped down, skirting the edge of Sunset Lake.
Joe-pye weed spread in mauve masses along the roadside. There were smaller white patches of boneset, and the first spatterings of goldenrod. Most of the elms we passed were dying of the Dutch elm disease, and even the leaves of the other trees looked frayed and weary. I sensed the pause of the season, like the turn of the tide—that short breathing space between summer and autumn. Somehow it seemed more apparent in this flat browning landscape. Before World War II such sandy outlying acres had been scarcely more than squatters’ land. Now they had become dear to the heart of the developer, with his flat-topped regular rows of pastel ranch houses. The Randolph Woods were flat as a punctured tire.
We missed the right turn at Oak Street and drove almost to Randolph before we realized our mistake. One thing was already clear to us: The getaway driver and his crew must have been familiar with the back roads. I had a hard enough time keeping on course even with my map. And from the map it was plain how well they had known how to avoid every center of population. The reason they had gone astray on Orchard Street was apparent enough when we arrived there, for we made the same mistaken left turn ourselves.
Down Chestnut Street and along the old turnpike the way still runs straight and empty, the old pastoral landscape emerging as the ranch houses recede. We found the lane into the Manley Woods where the Buick had turned off, a scarcely visible dirt path branching to the right between an empty shingled cabin and a derelict cemetery. Two hundred yards from the highway we came to a field of stumps surrounded by speckled alders, the earth bulldozed away at one corner as if preparations were being made for another clutch of ranch houses, but still empty and deserted enough to hide a car there all day long without anyone being the wiser. It looked, in its accessible isolation, much the most logical place on the escape route to shift cars.
Ehrmann’s version seemed scarcely plausible—that Mike Morelli had driven back from New Bedford that same night in a car with the telltale missing rear window, a car for which by this time all the local police had been alerted, just to leave it in the Manley Woods when there were thirty-four miles of barren country lying between. As we looked at the opening of the lane, it seemed to us it would have been impossible to find it in the dark on the way north. McLean and I agreed that the car must have been abandoned in the Manley Woods on the way down and that the time lag had taken place there.
Why the escape car had returned after going over the Matfield crossing became clear to us only when we had gone over the route ourselves. Obviously the car had headed that way to avoid the five-cornered traffic center of West Bridgewater, half a mile to the south. But then, once beyond the railroad crossing, the driver had found himself on the road to thickly populated East Bridgewater, and had circled back.
Morris Ernst had said at the State House hearing in 1959 that Joe Morelli told him he had thrown the empty cashboxes into Canapa Pond and had even pointed out the spot. But when I had written to ask Ernst about the location, he replied that he had no idea where Canapa Pond was. As we traced our way from South Braintree I could find no appropriate body of water, large or small. Sunset Lake would have been too near, and anyhow I knew its original name had been Little Pond.
After the Matfield crossing, the last point where the getaway car was seen, we were on our own. We drove toward Providence, through Bridgewater and over Route 44 by way of Taunton. Just before Providence we stopped at Seekonk for whatever trace might remain of the bullet-scarred Bluebird Inn. We found that unappreciated landmark had long since been tom down. There were only the barest traces of its foundations in an empty corner lot overgrown with ragweed and tansy. Next to the corner was a white bungalow with children swarming on the front steps and a zinc mailbox lettered B. Monterios.
The air seemed to get heavier as we approached Providence, or perhaps it was just the sad wooden decay of those submerged streets below the anachronistic graciousness of Brown University’s island-hill.
I had pictured Ben Bagdikian as the dean of Providence reporters, a Rhode Island Frank Sibley, perhaps wearing old-fashioned spectacles on a ribbon, but when we met him in the city room of the Journal he turned out to be a small gray-haired man in his forties, with the long nose and dark animated eyes of his Armenian inheritance. He had come to the Journal from Stoneham, Massachusetts, after World War II. Before he began writing his pieces on them, he had never heard of the Morellis. I asked him if he knew anything about Canapa Pond and told him of the uncommunicative Morris Ernst.
“That sounds like Ernst,” Bagdikian said, at the same time making a note on a scratch pad. “I worked with him on the Morelli angle, and I never could get anything really definite out of him. As for Canapa, he mentioned it in a book and I asked him about it, too, and got about the same answer you did. There isn’t any Canapa Pond. What I think Joe said was Canada Pond—and Ernst may just have changed a letter to throw us off the track. Canada Pond’s only a couple of miles north of here, half in Providence, half in Pawtucket. You can see it from the new Woonsocket highway. It’s in an Italian district, not very far from Joe’s old house. As I remember there aren’t many houses right near it; lot of bushes and things, just the place to throw old boxes. As a matter of fact they tossed a couple of gangsters in there a few years back. But whether Joe threw any boxes in there or not, Canada would probably be the first name that would come into his mind.”
I asked Bagdikian if he had any idea what had become of Joe’s autobiography.
“I never followed it up,” he told us. “Perhaps I should have. But I have the feeling that if you should dig it up you wouldn’t find much in it. It’s like Joe and the Lindbergh baby. Joe made contacts with Jafsie Condon, and he was going to get to the bottom of the kidnapping, but first of all he needed five thousand dollars. That was Joe. Cash down!
“I’m not as sold on the Morelli theory as Ehrmann is” he went on, “but I always meant to look up Mancini when I was working on this. He was around here up till a few years ago. He was the toughest and brightest of the gang, and if he decided to talk why he’d talk. But I got off onto something else, and now he’s gone. Old Jackvony’s gone too. His son could probably tell you a lot, but he won’t. The old man was a criminal lawyer, and young Jackvony wants to get away from it all. Once I saw his garage with the back of it all piled up with his father’s papers. That autobiography might even be somewhere among them. It would be odd now if you found the key after all these years. Let me know if you get hold of it.”
McLean had copied down Frank Morelli’s address from the Journal’s files. It was on Mount Pleasant Avenue, a boulevard cutting through one of Providence’s many Italian districts. The house was easy enough to find: a garish cube of red-and-yellow mottled tapestry brick, the largest on the avenue. When we rang the bell a woman in her forties came to the door. Her expression turned sour when we mentioned the Morellis, and she announced with an equally sour voice that she knew nothing about them except that a year or so before her husband had bought the house from Frank. She did not know Frank’s address; she did not know who might know it.
Pawtucket is like Providence without the green university enclave, a brooding wooden decay of massed streets. It took us an hour to find Joe Morelli’s Toledo Avenue house. This was a different avenue, a still unpaved street on the outskirts, and Joe’s was the kind of shapeless wooden house perched on granite foundations common in the early 1900s. The layout would be routine—three rooms downstairs, four smallish bedrooms upstairs, and a room or two on the top floor. I walked up the steps to the long front porch. Everything looked neat, freshly painted. The aluminum combination screen door had a scrolled S on it.
No one answered when I rang, but as I looked over the porch rail I saw a woman by the garage emptying garbage into a can. I waited until she returned. When I mentioned the name Morelli, she winced. She said she knew nothing about the family except Joe’s reputation. Some years ago she and her husband had bought the house when it was in bad shape, and since then they had fixed it up. It looked too neat and too mild, really, for the place where Joe had kept his wenches and stored his counterfeit money and hidden his stolen goods and at last uncommunicatively died.
The chief of detectives at the Pawtucket police headquarters shook his head when McLean offered him a cigarette, and picked up a cigar with the end chewed so that it looked as if it were sprouting roots. He was a tanned heavy man in a sport shirt and summer trousers, his hair close-cropped almost to baldness, his only symbol of authority the automatic strapped to his belt. The walls of his office were bare of everything but the daily list of arrests and a safety calendar contributed by Pawtucket firms to warn motorists to look out for children at school crossings.
“Thank God I haven’t seen that crowd in a long time,” he said when McLean mentioned the Morellis. “That Joe was one of the most troublesome sons of bitches I ever had. I’d keep raiding his place and he’d keep coming back for more. Why, when he was dying he still had a couple of broads hustling upstairs.”
That might have ended our conversation if Bob had not somehow mentioned bass fishing. A night light seemed to glow behind the pupils of the chief’s smoky eyes. He picked up the cold cigar again and for ten minutes they talked about hula lures with double wiggles, ponds on Cape Cod that nobody knew about, and bluefish in the Canal at Bourne turning the water red when they attacked other fish. The chief had just come back from his vacation and the more he talked about it, the mellower he grew.
“Come to think of it,” he said finally, “Joe Morelli’s granddaughter was in here just a couple months ago. Her boy was up on some driving charge. She was married to some Italian, then to a fellow named Dunne. She’s married again. I don’t know his name, but here’s her address.” He flipped open a file. “On Douglas Avenue, Providence.”
Douglas Avenue, when we returned to Providence, proved to be a line of three-decker wooden tenements broken by an occasional barroom. The top floor of the three-decker we were looking for was empty, a FOR RENT sign in the blank center window. The second floor, too, looked empty, though it had Venetian blinds at the windows. We almost turned away, then decided to try the bells. A penciled card over the middle button read D’Agostino. I rang, but the rumble of trucks was so heavy anyone could have bawled down through the speaking tube without my hearing it. Finally, through the wavy glass of the door, I had a glimpse of a pair of legs that seemed to be walking by themselves in the shadow of a dim stairway. Then a woman with frizzed metallic hair opened the door. Long-chinned, with bright agate eyes, she seemed to be in her late thirties. When I mentioned Joe Morelli she relaxed and appeared almost amiable.
“Yes,” she replied, “I’m Helen Morelli. Joe Morelli was my grandfather.” Still expecting that the door might shut in my face, I said there were a few things about Joe I hoped I might talk over with her.
“I guess I got a little time,” she said. She turned and led us upstairs to an apartment that was being refinished: the paper off the walls, the floors scraped but not yet varnished. The room had a gypsy-like atmosphere, as if everything could and might be moved out in ten minutes flat. We sat on maple chairs with plastic chintz covers.
McLean said we were from the Boston Globe. At that she became animated, telling us she had once studied journalism in New York. “I used to know Walter Winchell there,” she went on. “My grandfather had a restaurant there for a while and sometimes Winchell would come in for a cup of coffee. My grandfather knew him, knew lots of people—James Michael Curley, the mayor of Boston. You knew him? I used to see him at Danbury. Remember how he got himself re-elected mayor when he was in jail there? I got letters from him.”
When I could slip in a word, I told her that what we were really interested in was the whereabouts of her grandfather’s autobiography.
She looked at me coldly. “You know, I had a feeling that’s what you might of come for. Yes,” she went on, her full lips twisting down, “I have it and it’s in a good safe place. As a matter of fact I’m rewriting it myself.”
“I don’t know whether you could let us see it or not”—I tried to make my voice sound matter-of-fact, watching her smile derisively and shake her head—“but could you let us know what’s in it in relation to Sacco and Vanzetti?”
I realized suddenly what the cliché about a veiled look coming over someone’s face really meant. The derision became vocal. “Do you think you’d get that out of me? A fat chance! But I can tell you this much, the whole secret’s there. Why, if it ever came out I guess millions of people would jump. Did you see that TV show? I had to laugh. Making those two ditch-diggers make speeches like that! Maybe people all over the country will fall for that stuff, but I had a good laugh because I know the truth. Silas Bent and Sinclair Lewis offered ten grand for that document. I could get big money for it. I know that, all right. Don’t think I’m green.
“Look.” Her voice sharpened. “How do you think it felt to be a Morelli when I was a child? When I was at school, any time I wanted to do anything, people would whisper behind my back I was one of them. Now I’m the last one. My Uncle Frank, he’s dying of cancer of the throat and he never had kids. My father’s in California. So I’m the last of the Morellis, the last legitimate one anyhow. Do you think I’m going to let that come out against my own kids, have all that stuff brought up again? No, sir!”
“Why bother to rewrite it then?” McLean asked her softly. “Why don’t you just burn the thing?”
Again her veiled look. “No, I’m going to keep it. Maybe when I’m gone. I don’t know. But I’m going to keep it.”
While we were talking her husband came into the room, naked to the waist, a dark hairy-chested man, still damp from the shower. He shook hands cordially enough, then turned to his wife.
“They want the document?”
She nodded. “I told them we’d never let it go.”
Her husband grinned knowingly.
“But did your grandfather know Sacco and Vanzetti?” I asked.
“Sure he knew them. I’ll tell you that much. You’d be surprised. They’ve made such a big mystery of the whole thing, and underneath it’s all very simple. They made them on TV like they had haloes. If I ever told what I know there’d be an explosion.”
Bob had his try. “Won’t you at least tell us whether your grandfather said they were guilty or not?”
She shook her head. “Sure they were guilty, but I’m not giving away the secret. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” she added enigmatically.
“Of course,” said Bob quietly, “there’s always a court order.”
She laughed. “What can they order me? It’s my property.”
I had a try at persuading her that the Sacco-Vanzetti case was part of the history of our times, that it had all happened too long ago for anyone to be hurt any more, and that if there really was anything in her grandfather’s autobiography that would settle the unsettled question, she had an obligation to reveal it. That was no good either.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “But I’m not changing my mind. There isn’t any money would make me, either. Nobody’s going to see it. Some things better stay a secret, I guess, and this is one of them.”
Not until a year after this interview did I finally manage to learn the contents of Joe Morelli’s document. When he wrote it, Joe was apparently still smarting from the remarks Ehrmann had made about him in The Untried Case. Joe’s opening pages are full of jeers about “smart Mr. Ehrmann,” “Ehrmann who thinks he knows so much.”
According to the manuscript the five men in the South Braintree murder car were Sacco, Vanzetti, Coacci, Boda, and Orciani. Coacci was the driver. Joe had known all five for several years, and in fact they had been with him in a Pawtucket holdup in 1918, one never solved by the police. He himself had planned to pull off the South Braintree job with them. Any number of times he had driven over the route to plan the getaway. He was familiar with South Braintree because, with the help of Coacci, who was working in one of the factories, he had occasionally stolen truckloads of shoes from there. Berardelli, the guard, was another of his confederates.
Joe’s explanation of the actual holdup was that the others had double-crossed him. He had set the job for April 22. They pulled it themselves a week earlier to cut him out, and they killed Berardelli because he recognized them. During the getaway Coacci had got lost because he did not know the roads as well as Joe did.
Throughout his manuscript Joe refers to Madeiros as the Blind Pig—no doubt a reference to his poor eyesight. Neither Madeiros nor Mancini, according to Joe, had anything to do with the South Braintree affair. Madeiros was just a small-time crook who made a fake confession about South Braintree to try to beat his murder rap. There was not even a house, just a vacant lot, at the place on North Main Street, Providence, where Madeiros said he had started out on the morning of April 15. As for the business of Canada Pond and the money-boxes, that was simply a hoax to take in Morris Ernst, for whom Joe seemed to have as much contempt as he did for Ehrmann.
Such, in its truth or untruth, was the confession of Joe Morelli.
On September 1, 1927, Alfred Foote, the Commissioner of Public Safety, wrote to District Attorney Wilbar:
As a finale to the Sacco-Vanzetti case, it appears to me that it would be well to gather and secure certain of the exhibits, particularly the firearms, bullets, cartridges and fired shells.
I trust you will agree that these important objects should be placed in our vaults for all time where they will be safe from opportunists as well as enemies.
The ample facilities of the State Police Laboratory will be utilized to obtain a photographic record in the most graphic form of each of the exhibits. The work contemplated will constitute an important addition to the record in this great case.
Yet when I asked to examine these “important objects” thirty-three years later, they were nowhere to be found. I tried first at the clerk of court’s office in Dedham. The clerk, Willis Neal, a nephew of the South Braintree express agent, said that from time to time someone would drop in to ask about the exhibits, but that he had never been able to locate them. He admitted he had never looked very hard. Together we went down to the storage files in the basement and spent several dusty hours going through the records. Finally he found a 1927 memorandum that the guns and bullets had been forwarded to the Lowell Committee.
I asked about them at the State Police ballistics laboratory on Commonwealth Avenue. Lieutenant John Collins, in charge there, was interested in the case, in fact had a private file on it that he had put together himself, but he had no idea what could have become of the exhibits.
I wrote to Governor Foster Furcolo about the missing exhibits, explaining my belief that they had never been tested properly and might still have much to reveal. After several weeks I received a reply routed from the governor’s office to some subordinate of the attorney general, who informed me that “we have no record in this office of ever having had the exhibits or as to any disposition of them after they were viewed by the Lowell Committee.” On reading this I again wrote to Governor Furcolo to say that I did not think this was good enough and that someone in the State House should look a little harder. I received no reply.
By chance I came on the trail of the missing exhibits when I happened to be in the Boston police headquarters talking to one of the men in the laboratory there.
“Why,” he said, “Van Amburgh’s son has those things. I thought everyone round knew. They were in the State Police lab for years, and then one of the Van Amburghs—I don’t know whether it was the old man or the son—took them away with him when he retired. That’s where they are. Young Van Amburgh has them down at Kingston.”
I wrote Van Amburgh twice, received no reply, and finally telephoned him to ask if he had possession of the exhibits in the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
“I have a lot of things around here,” he said.
“But do you or do you not have the pistols and the bullets that were examined by the Lowell Committee?”
His voice grew frostier. “I’d have to go through everything to know that.”
I did not have a very good hand but I dealt another card. “I have been told that you do have them.”
“I might,” was all he would answer.
I tried to explain why I wanted to see the bullets. The question had never been settled, I said, as to whether Bullet III might have been substituted for the one found in Berardelli’s body.
The voice cut me off. “You and I seem to be working along the same lines. I’m writing a book on the evidence in the case myself. I’m not going to let you see my private material. Why should I?” The telephone clicked at the other end.
Van Amburgh became singularly more communicative when Bob McLean drove down to see him. He told McLean that he regarded himself merely as a custodian of the exhibits “to be kept inviolate.” His custodianship lasted until the following week end when the Sunday Globe ran McLean’s front-page feature story of his discovery. The Commissioner of Public Safety, J. Henry Goguen, was one of the Globe’s early Sunday readers.
“He hit the roof,” McLean told me afterward. “They say he was shouting in his office, ‘How did they get out of here? Who let Van Amburgh take them? Send two men down to Kingston with a warrant and if he doesn’t give them up, arrest him!’ But Van Amburgh turned them over without a bleat. After all, if you’re getting a state pension you can’t fool around. The stuff was in a big package that looked as if it hadn’t been opened in years.”
I saw the exhibits on their return in the State Police ballistics laboratory, a room with a grille in the front like a cage and a metal door that opens by an electric button. It is a macabre room, the walls hung with the confiscated evidence of old crimes—a Heinz’ variety of pistols, rifles, submachine guns, even a grenade-thrower, dirks, switchblade knives, a Malayan kris, brass knuckles with inch-long prongs, blackjacks, homemade zip guns.
Sacco’s Colt, Vanzetti’s revolver, and the bullets were spread out on Lieutenant Collins’ desk next to a china ashtray in the shape of a revolver.
“The way they handled these exhibits from the beginning makes my hair stand on end,” Collins said. “The way I do is to impound any exhibits, then call in the defense, the prosecution, make whatever tests I have to make in front of them, and ask them if they’re satisfied. I’ve testified now in over sixty murder trials and nobody on either side has ever disputed my findings. But these things”—he swept his hand toward the display on the desk—“I don’t know whether you could prove anything with them now or not. I wouldn’t touch them myself. No matter what tests might show, somebody would be bound to accuse me of cooking the results. There ought to be some expert from outside Massachusetts to run the tests. That’s the way it should be handled.” He picked up one of the bullets. “You think that this Number III might have been switched from the one they cut out of Berardelli?”
“Some of the defense lawyers claimed it was,” I told him.
He cupped it in his hand. “The markings on the base do look somewhat different. Those scratches—it’s hard even to be sure if there are three of them. There’s so much muck on it you can’t really tell. They ought to clean them, but first of all they ought to make blood tests. Had you ever thought of that?”
I said I had not. He explained that it might still be possible to detect residual blood with proper tests and even to determine the blood type. Forty years were nothing. They could even blood-type mummies. If bullets I, II, and IV showed traces of blood when tested, while III showed none, it would be fairly conclusive that the mortal bullet was a substitute. If, on the other hand, all four showed blood, then it would be practically certain that all of them came from Berardelli’s body.
“Of course it’s possible that there won’t be any blood traces on any of the bullets,” said Collins.
I had thought that once the ballistics exhibits were back in the hands of the State Police, I should have no difficulty in having tests run on the bullets. When I went to see Commissioner Goguen, a gray, diminutive man, sharp-eyed as a chameleon, I soon learned otherwise. Instead of being grateful to me for recovering the material, he seemed aggrieved. “Why don’t you just forget the whole thing?” he asked me querulously. “I’m not going to allow any of your tests. No, sir, I don’t want any of that Sacco-Vanzetti business stirred up again.”
He wore a silver tie-pin engraved with the seal of Massachusetts, and in the buttonhole of his sharkskin suit I noticed the rosette of the Legion of Honor. Someone at the Globe told me he had been awarded it ex officio as president of L’Union St. Jean Baptiste d’Amérique, the largest French-Canadian fraternal-insurance association in the United States—from which he still received his salary while serving as Commissioner of Public Safety.
“No tests!” he announced, but a week after I had coaxed an editorial from the Herald, “Do Not Let Sleeping Bullets Lie,” he said I had quite misunderstood him. He would have no objection to tests made by properly qualified experts; he just did not want amateurs fooling with the exhibits. I thought my difficulties were over when I returned with the names of the honorary curator of the West Point Museum and of an internationally known hematologist. But I still could not get a straight answer from the commissioner. This time he said that before any tests could be made, he must first have permission from the attorney general’s office. Undoubtedly he thought this would not be forthcoming, but after a delay of several months I managed to turn up with it.
Goguen’s eyes darted at me as if I were a fly on the wall while he explained that he would have to consult with the members of his department. It was a consultation that took two more months. Then he told me that although he personally would be happy to allow such tests, his term of office was coming to a close and he did not want to commit his successor. The governor’s council, that archaic colonial survival, delayed month after month confirming the successor, and the gray little commissioner stayed on.
On my last visit to him, a year after the exhibits had been recovered, he had finally evolved what no doubt seemed to him the ideal politician’s formula—to say yes and to mean no. He now told me that if the American Academy of Forensic Sciences wanted to appoint a committee of experts to examine all the ballistics evidence, he would allow them to do so; but he could not allow any examination, even by experts, merely at the request of a private individual.
Not until Goguen was out of office did I finally get my permission. His successor, Frank Giles, raised no objections at all. A few weeks later Dr. William Boyd of the Boston University School of Medicine made the blood tests, although he said in advance he doubted whether after so many years and so much handling the bullets would still indicate anything. So it turned out. Dr. Boyd tested the four bullets taken from Berardelli’s body and the two taken from Parmenter. The result with all six was negative: no longer any trace of blood on any of them.
Frank Silva was dead, as was Guinea Oates. Of the other two mentioned in Silva’s confession of the Bridgewater attempt, Doggy Bruno had long since vanished, but in 1960 I was surprised to discover that Joe Sammarco was no farther away than Everett, where he was working as a janitor. He had been parolled in 1953 after thirty-three years in prison. At sixty-two, I thought, he should not have much to lose or be afraid of. If I could get him to admit that he had been one of the four in the Bridgewater holdup, that would corroborate Silva and go a long way to proving finally that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent.
“I don’t know about Joe,” the parole officer told me in the department offices on Tremont Street, appropriately opposite Brimstone Corner. “Sometimes he comes in here and acts as if I were his uncle. He’d tell me anything. Then the next time he’s as cold as a brick. I’ll ask him about this Bridgewater business, but I can’t promise he’ll give out anything.”
Two months later I got a call from a Somerville lawyer, Anthony DiCecca, who said Joe might talk to me but that he himself wanted to talk to me first. I drove over the following afternoon. The law office was on Broadway, a lower-middle-class neighborhood, in a remodeled three-story house that had been transformed by plate glass and concrete until it stood out against its drabber surroundings with the glitter of a funeral home.
DiCecca, a bustling, determined man, shook my hand in his paneled office, then sat down behind a vast desk on which a pastel-green telephone kept flashing a warning light. He stared at me for a moment, his eyes calculating in his grave Latin face.
“Now,” he said, as if he were satisfied. “I want you to understand I know nothing about the Sacco-Vanzetti case. I have no opinion and don’t want to have one. When I was watching that TV show in the spring I began to feel myself getting an opinion so I got up and shut it off. I understand you want to ask Joe about the Bridgewater holdup he was supposed to be in on that they later hung on Vanzetti. I want the details of that.”
I gave him a summary of Silva’s confession, while he took notes.
“Joe can either confirm this or not,” I told him finally, “but it will blow a big hole in the Sacco-Vanzetti conviction if he does confirm it.”
He sat there, indifferent to the flashing telephone light. “If it’s true, Joe could have spoken thirty-five years ago. It’s a terrible thing if he kept quiet and let an innocent man die. Maybe he won’t want to admit anything because of that, even though there’s nothing anyone could do to him now. Let me have a talk with him and then the three of us can get together here Sunday night. Just one thing, though,” he went on as I rose to go. “There’s no money going to enter into this. I need it like I need a hole in the head. If Joe has any idea that he’s going to make a little on a deal, then I want nothing to do with it or with him.”
The following Sunday I again drove to Somerville. I kept thinking of Joe Sammarco and his thirty-three years in state prison, all the years back to when I was a schoolboy in corduroy knickerbockers. I felt depressed, half wishing I were not going to see him.
As I walked upstairs and into DiCecca’s long anteroom I had my first glimpse of Joe. Squatting on a leather couch before a television set, he was watching the Ed Sullivan show. He was a slight, stooped man with an elongated, almost bald head, cheeks creased against high cheekbones, and eyes that seemed incongruously blue in his wasted face. When we shook hands I could feel his misshapen fingers. He told me DiCecca was out but would be right back. We sat there half an hour in silence. For once I was grateful for the sight of Ed Sullivan’s jacked-up shoulders and melon face.
Finally we heard drum-tap footsteps on the stairs. DiCecca brushed in, apologized, and we moved to the inner office, he to his desk, I to the seat I had taken before, and Joe to sit by the window, partly in the shadows.
“Now, Joe,” DiCecca began quietly, “I just want you to tell us what you told me here the other night—about Bridgewater, Silva, Jimmy Mede—just as it comes to you.”
“Mede is a rat,” Sammarco said without anger, his face set like a barrier between himself and the outside world.
“Wait,” DiCecca said. “We’ll get to that. Now as I read through that article of Silva’s—remember, I knew nothing about the case—it seemed pretty convincing. According to that, Silva and you and Doggy Bruno and Guinea Oates drove down to Bridgewater to try to steal the L. Q. White payroll. You’d cased the joint two years before with Jimmy Mede.”
Sammarco shook his head, laughed silently, and then spoke again. “It’s a pack of lies, every bit of it. Silva got some fellow to write that piece after he got out of jail, and he got paid plenty for it. I know, because he told me.” He looked at me quizzically, as if he were wondering whether I believed him. “Not a word of truth in it, not a word.”
“Wait a minute!” DiCecca interrupted him. “Let me just ask you these questions in order. Before you went to jail, did you know Jimmy Mede, Frank Silva, Guinea Oates, and Doggy Bruno?”
“Sure I knew them. I was just a kid then and we was all brought up in East Boston together. I knew them since I was that high. We used to hang around Nick’s Restaurant just across the street from Jimmy Mede’s shoeshine parlor. Frank Silva met this guy Luban in jail or somewheres and cooked up all this story. Why, Silva was too yellow to pull a real holdup. He’d roll some drunk sailor down on Atlantic Avenue, he’d steal when it was safe, but nothing dangerous, not him. Bruno wasn’t yellow. He was in dope, robberies, everything, and he got his own living. He never would of worked with Silva or anyone like that. And Guinea Oates, he was younger than the rest of us and never got in no kind of trouble.”
Again DiCecca interrupted him. “Did you ever ride in a car with Silva and Mede to plan a holdup?”
“Yes, I did. In 1917 Silva and Mede and me and a guy named Gargalino and someone else went to Braintree. We was going to get a payroll from the factory there when the paymaster come out with it.”
“You went down there several times to case it?”
“Yes. Then when we went to pull the job, Mede and Silva got cold feet, so we turned round and come back.”
“How do you know it was Braintree?”
“We called it Braintree, where two railroad lines crossed.”
“Couldn’t it have been Bridgewater?”
“No, it was nearer than that.”
I could see the shrug of DiCecca’s shoulders. “A matter of a few miles one way or the other. You didn’t know any of those places well. It could have been Bridgewater.”
“I don’t think so,” Sammarco said reflectively. “They kept saying it was Braintree. Anyhow, nothing happened. I went into the Navy after that. I was overseas. When I come out they said Jimmy was in jail for holding up a factory in Cambridge. After I took the rap for killing the cop I see Jimmy in Charlestown. He tells me that story about him and Silva. All Jimmy did was take the Braintree trip we made before the war and make it sound like it was Bridgewater afterward. He asked me to string along with his story, so I was dumb enough I says at first I’d go along for a gag. All the Big Chief wanted was to see what he could shake out of Moore. Moore said he’d help him get a pardon and gave him some money. Moore had a lot of money. After he got out Moore was paying him to investigate things in New York until they drove him out of there.
“Ferrari, the state detective, when he heard it, give it to me good. He’s still alive, down at the track now. Talk with him and he’ll tell you about me and Jimmy Mede. When that piece of Silva’s in the Outlook come out he come and hit me in the face with it. ‘What are you holding out on me for?’ he says. ‘I never had nothing to do with it,’ I told him. Afterward I wrote a letter to Commissioner of Correction Sanford Bates and told him so.”
“Now,” said DiCecca, steering him back, “were you offered any money by anyone to say you had taken part in the Bridgewater holdup?”
“Yes, Moore come to see me a couple times in Charlestown. He says if I’d confess to the Bridgewater job he’d give me ten thousand and he’d see I got a gun and a getaway car on the way to court.”
DiCecca’s voice crackled with annoyance. “Look, Joe, a story like this is too stupid for anyone to believe. A sharp lawyer like Moore offering you a gun and a getaway car. That’s plain silly. No one would swallow that. Moore wasn’t a fool.”
“That’s what he said,” Joe persisted. “I told him I wouldn’t. Even if he meant it, what the hell could I have done with a bunch of guards round me with shotguns!”
DiCecca turned to me. “It sounds crazy, all right. But Joe told me exactly the same story the other night when he was here. That’s why I say you need a lie detector on this thing.”
“All I can think,” I told him, “if it’s really true—and it certainly sounds fantastic—is that Moore would have said anything, promised anything to get Joe to talk. Moore was a brilliant man, but he thought this whole thing was a frame-up from beginning to end, and he was willing to do or say anything to get his clients off.” Then I asked Joe, “Did Thompson ever offer you money?”
“Him? No. He just talked legal. I guess in the end he knew I had nothing to do with it. He never bothered me none. Jimmy brought him in with some other lawyers one day and said in front of them, ‘Joe, I want you to give this man the real lowdown on Bridgewater—and then kind of under his breath he says quick, ‘No dice nienta questa no bon paga’—‘Don’t say nothing, they won’t pay.’ I never see Mede again in jail after that. The Big Chief looks tough but he’s yellow. After I got out in fifty-three I went to see him in his joint in Revere and I told him what he was to his face. Afterward I see Silva in a bar on Hanover Street and he says ‘You should of stuck with us, you could of made ten or fifteen grand!’ I told him what I thought of him right to his face. He’s dead now.”
“But why,” I asked him, “would Mede go to the governor afterward with his story and lose his boxing license?”
Joe’s voice was scornful. “Ah, that’s not why he lost it. He lost it for stealing a load of booze. He was never on the level in nothing he done.”
“Vanzetti,” I said. “You knew him in prison. If Mede and Silva were lying, do you think he was part of the Bridgewater gang?”
“No,” said Joe emphatically, “he wasn’t any stick-up guy. I was in the next cell to him awhile. I used to work in the number plate shop with him. People always coming to see him, old Boston ladies bringing him books and candy and things. He’d give me some. He used to read all the time. I always knew he wasn’t guilty.”
“The other prisoners, how did they feel about him?”
“They all felt the same way,” Joe said in his faded far-off voice. “Most of the guards thought he was innocent too. The night they was executed we made a hell of a row. It used to be the lights went dim at an execution for a couple seconds, but this time they wasn’t using Edison current and nothing happened, but we all knew when it was midnight just the same.”
His mind groped back to that August night thirty-three years before and he was silent for several seconds before he continued. “I remember Vanzetti come to me once, he was crying. He says, ‘You know I’m innocent. Tell them if you had anything to do with Bridgewater.’ I told him I would if I had—but I hadn’t nothing to do with it. Even my sisters and my cousins come in before the execution and asked me and I says ‘I wasn’t there, I didn’t do it.’ Sometimes I used to think, maybe that fellow Weeks had something to do with both the robberies. He was smart, he was. But Vanzetti never had nothing to do with them. He wasn’t that kind.”
DiCecca swung toward me in his swivel chair as if to call an end to the interview.
“Joe says he’s willing to take a lie-detector test along with Mede to see who’s telling the truth.”
“Or I’ll take it all by myself,” Joe broke in. “You’ll never get the Big Chief to take no test like that. He might try to con some money out of you, but he’d never take the test.”
“That’s the size of it,” said DiCecca. “Whether we believe Joe or not doesn’t matter until we give him a lie-detector test.”
“I’ll take it any time,” Joe said. We stood up. Joe and I left DiCecca there, walking out together through the echoing anteroom and down the stairs. The pinched and hostile face I had first encountered had now become relaxed, softened, the face of a human being.
“I was a dumb kid, no education,” said Joe reflectively. “I took that rap for thirty-three years because I didn’t know no better.” It was the second time he had used the word rap. I stopped on the stairs where the arc lamp shone through the doorway. “You’re telling me, then, that you didn’t kill that policeman?”
His voice was low, quite passionless. “Him or anyone else. I never did. Maybe you won’t believe that neither, but I never did. It was my gun all right, but if I’d of said at the trial who pulled the trigger I’d of got a bullet through my head. The one who done it got killed in a gunfight four years later. Back in thirty-one I come up before the parole board and his widow come and told them he done it, but they wouldn’t listen to her, just asked her why she didn’t tell it before. And she says, ‘I got to live too.’”
I remembered that Vanzetti in his speech to the court had said that no human tongue could say what he and Sacco had suffered in seven years’ imprisonment. Yet if what Joe had just told me was so, he had suffered over four times as long, unknown, inarticulate, without friends and partisans to speak for him, without the satisfaction of a well-advertised martyrdom, and yet no tongue could truly say—not even his own—what he had suffered.
“Would you be willing to trust that to a lie detector, too, whether or not you killed the policeman?”
“Yes,” he said simply. We continued to the bottom of the stairs. Then at the door he held out his maimed hand to me and smiled slightly.
On January 30, 1961, John Conrad, an expert with many years of experience in operating the polygraph lie detector, conducted an examination on Joe Sammarco to verify the truthfulness of the answers to the following questions:
Q. Were you ever in a holdup attempt in Bridgewater with Doggy Bruno, Guinea Oates, and Frank Silva?
A. No.
Q. Were you ever in a car with Bruno and Oates?
A. No.
Q. Did you ever tell Jimmy Mede at Charlestown that you had participated in the Bridgewater holdup?
A. No.
Q. Did Silva tell you that he and Mede received money from Moore to invent a story on the Bridgewater holdup?
A. Yes.
Q. Did Moore offer you ten thousand dollars if you would confess that you had participated in the Bridgewater holdup?
A. Yes.
Q. Have you any knowledge of who did take part in the Bridgewater holdup?
A. No.
Q. Did Frank Silva later admit to you that his confession was false?
A. Yes.
As a result of this examination Conrad certified that in his opinion Sammarco had told the truth.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
1926
After the flare-up in 1921, the Sacco-Vanzetti case smoldered obscurely for five years. Occasional sparks were thrown up, as when Ettor and Giovannitti returned to Boston in 1925 to speak for their imprisoned comrades and Eugene Debs visited Vanzetti in Charlestown, but for the most part the issues seemed lost in a lawyer’s maze. Across the Atlantic the case had become overlaid by other events and other conflicts. If the average demonstrator of 1921 had suddenly been asked in 1926 whether Sacco and Vanzetti were still alive, he would probably not have known.
In the United States, except in restricted circles of urban liberals and radicals, the names aroused no more response. The Defense Committee continued its Boston meetings. In December 1925 it published the first number of the Official Bulletin, a four-page booklet containing a message from Debs, a review of the ballistics evidence by Mrs. Evans, and an appeal to Governor Cox signed by George Lansbury, Ellen Wilkinson, James Maxton, and other members of the English Labor Party.
Sacco, in Dedham, resumed his English lessons with Mrs. Jack. In Charlestown, Vanzetti’s literary activities expanded. He contributed articles to the New Jersey anarchist journal, L’Adunata del Refratti, wrote his short autobiography as well as the booklet Background to the Plymouth Trial, began to translate Proudhon’s The War and the Peace into English, and completed a novelette, Events and Victims, about his experiences in a factory before the United States entered the war. Both men were much heartened by Thompson’s taking over as their counsel. Sacco, in spite of his class-conscious rigidity, trusted the Boston conservative lawyer as he had never trusted Moore, and wrote enthusiastically of the “splendour defense” that Thompson and Hill had made in their first appearance. Vanzetti was even more enthusiastic.
Permit me to express my gratitude and my appreciation to you [he wrote Thompson in February 1926]. I understand that your work in our behalfe is underpaid; the must difficult test of you; the noble sentiments and impulse by which you were decide to take the side of two underdogs; this I understand. And I also hope to understand a little the brave, learned, beautiful fight that you are fighting in our behalfe, paying of it in peace, rest, interest and other universally desired things.
Ha! to have known you 6 year ago! I would never have been a convict.
Thompson, in turn, as the months went on, found himself drawn closer to the two men he had reluctantly elected to defend. In May 1927 he could write:
I went into this case as a Harvard man, a man of old American tradition, to help two aliens who had, I thought, been unjustly treated. I have arrived at a humbler attitude. Not since the martyrdoms of the sixteenth century has such steadfastness to a faith, such self-abnegation as that of these two Italians been seen on this earth.
The Harvard graduate, the man of old American traditions, the established lawyer, is now quite ready to say that nowhere in his soul is there to be found the faith, the splendid gentility, which make the man, Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
Thompson later admitted that the case had been something of a catastrophe for his firm: that by taking it he had lost friends, clients, and a great deal of money. But it was a choice he never regretted. He told Felicani that if he had understood the situation better at the beginning, he would not have taken a fee.
While the jail years for Sacco and Vanzetti passed with unrelenting sameness, Rosina moved from the Stoughton bungalow to an old farmhouse near Milford. Here Mrs. Evans and Mrs. Jack aided her, and in addition she received a small monthly allowance from the Defense Committee. Ines was now almost old enough to go to school; Dante had reached the seventh grade. Even before Rosina left Stoughton she had living with her as a companion Susie Valdinoce, the grave, sad-faced sister of the man killed in the dynamiting of Attorney General Palmer’s house.
The rejection of Thompson’s appeal by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on May 12, 1926, marked the second stage of the case. With the court’s decision, affirming the convictions, came the realization that the affair was now moving toward a foreseeable climax. For the prisoners it was as if they had been walking down a long corridor of months and years, and now at last at the far end they could glimpse the door of the execution chamber.
To those familiar with the formalisms of Massachusetts legal procedure the court’s negative decision was expected. According to the statutes of the Commonwealth it was not the function of the higher court to review the facts of a case in an appeal but merely to consider questions of law. That in Madeiros’ first trial Judge Lummus had neglected to mention the presumption of innocence was an error sufficient to overthrow an obviously justified verdict. Judge Thayer had committed no such errors. Whatever his feelings, he had kept the written record straight just as Thompson, at the beginning of the trial, had predicted he would. In regard to the denied motions, the Supreme Court ruled that as long as Judge Thayer had given these consideration according to the prescribed legal forms, there would be no review of his decision. These were matters for his discretion, beyond the compass of any higher court.
The Supreme Court’s decision was like the tolling of a bell. In the next fifteen months the case would become a passionate issue, the linked Italian names a battle cry in all comers of the globe. Millions of men in dozens of countries, most of them with only a hazy and often erroneous notion of the facts, would identify themselves with the condemned Italians with such binding emotion that the fate of the two men would come to seem the very symbol of man’s injustice to man. For many European radicals the case loomed up as the most important occurrence since the Russian Revolution. Stalin, at the 1927 Party Congress, spoke of the recent Sacco-Vanzetti demonstration as evidence that “we are on the threshold of new revolutionary events.” The American Communist Max Shachtman asked rhetorically: “Since the Russian Bolshevik revolution, where has there yet been a cause that has drawn into its wake the people, not of this or that land, but of all countries, millions from every part and corner of the world; the workers in the metropolis, the peasant on the land, the people of the half-forgotten islands of the sea, men and women and children in all walks of life?”
That the renewed European agitation was conceived and directed by the Communist International is beyond dispute—a fact proclaimed with equal stridency by both Communists and their enemies. Moscow gave the signal and the International Red Aid set the well-oiled machinery in motion. But the Communists themselves must have been startled by their own quick success. Their calculated gesture loosed an avalanche, elemental and overwhelming, that spread beyond the bounds of any political party or dogma. Men of good will everywhere rose up to challenge the course of Massachusetts justice. There were protests from the Vatican; from ex-Premier Caillaux of France; from Paul Loebe, the president of the Reichstag; from Count Bernstorff, who had been ambassador to the United States in 1917; from John Galsworthy, Fritz Kreisler, Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, and scores of other international figures.
Why was it that in the fifteen months between the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s adverse decision and the executions the case of Sacco and Vanzetti became the most widely known and bitterly felt of its generation? They were not conscious martyrs. Nor, if it be assumed that they were innocent, were they uniquely so. It was already a cruel commonplace of the century for innocent men to die ignominiously and obscurely for their beliefs under red, black, white, or varicolored flags. In an era of bloodshed, violence, and injustice, why should the names of these two obscure Italians stand out, enduring over the years in literature, in art, in the theater, and even in that newest of media, television?[22]
Perhaps it is that when any celebrated or notorious trial becomes encrusted with doubts as to its justice, it becomes a focus for the raging social passions of the moment. Certainly, in the grim weeks before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the hundreds of thousands of militants demonstrating in the world’s cities found their own resentments and anger objectified in these two comrades whom they considered victims of class justice. Frustration and the envy of America’s callous wealth undoubtedly stirred them too, and the hope that through such potent symbols of martyrdom the hated system could be overthrown.
Among many Europeans unswayed by the more primitive emotions of hate and revenge, there was the feeling that, beyond any question of the fairness of the trial, the years under the shadow of death were themselves torture enough to demand the commuting of the death sentences. “We wish to see the lives of these men spared, whether they are innocent or guilty,” said Le Temps in Paris. The London Times felt that it was not the wrongs of the trial that had so stirred the public’s imagination but the fact that any man should be kept so long in suspense. The suspense was particularly aggravated by Massachusetts’ means of execution: Far more than the traditional noose, the electric chair was a horror symbol to the European.
If—regardless of the question of their guilt or innocence—Sacco and Vanzetti had been executed within a few months of their conviction (as would have happened had they been tried in most European countries), their names today would be almost unknown. To non-Americans the pettifogging byways of American justice, the complications and contradictions and the time entailed in appealing from state to federal courts, the to them astonishing fact that even if injustice is being done by the judicial system of an individual state, so long as it is being done within the limits of the Constitution the national government can do nothing—such things were outrageously incomprehensible. And the years of delay seemed to presume doubt. “It is impossible for us on this side to feel that execution would have been so long deferred,” George Bernard Shaw wrote, “if the case were clear enough to justify this infliction.”
Anticipating the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s adverse decision, the Red Aid’s Central European Headquarters in Berlin began in February 1926, to flood Europe with Sacco-Vanzetti propaganda and plans for a united front of artists, writers, actors, scholars, and teachers.
The anarchists had never ceased their sporadic and individualistic action, but international anarchy no longer rivaled Marxism as a world movement, as it had in Bakunin’s day, and it persisted mostly in the Latin countries. The Sacco-Vanzetti case contained, among many other things, the last gesture of international anarchism. Yet the anarchists by themselves could have accomplished little. It was the executive committee of the Communist International, with its tight organization and intricate networks, that was able to stir the streets. By the autumn of 1926 the groundwork had been laid for the world-wide agitation to come.
The year 1926 brought a belated stirring of interest in the case throughout the United States, partly as a reaction to the renewed agitation overseas as reported in such mass-circulation journals as the Literary Digest, partly because of the Supreme Court’s decision in May, and partly from the labors of the Defense Committee. In Massachusetts there was a quickening of emotions lying dormant since 1921, a xenophobic reaction by the community to criticism from outsiders that would rise to hysteria as world agitation rose.[23]
Robert Lincoln O’Brien, the half-Irish half-old-Yankee editor of the Boston Herald, whose reaction to the Sacco-Vanzetti case remained essentially neutral, observed that “a surprising number of groups and elements of the community came to regard leniency for Sacco and Vanzetti as an assault upon the honor of the Commonwealth.” That feeling, still amorphous in the spring of 1926, hardened under the impact of hostile gestures from overseas and was suddenly exacerbated in June when the house of Samuel Johnson in West Bridgewater was demolished by a bomb. Whoever planted the bomb apparently mistook Johnson’s house for that of his brother Simon, who with his wife had received a reward of several hundred dollars after their court testimony. No one was ever apprehended in this or any other bombings connected with the case, and the Defense Committee at once repudiated the act, but to the community it seemed a confirmation of its worst fears in regard to radicals. Guards were at once placed around the houses of Judge Thayer and of Chief Justice Arthur Rugg. District Attorney Wilbar announced that he would ask for the immediate imposition of the death penalty on Sacco and Vanzetti.
The Commonwealth was coming to feel that reviews enough had been made, the matter had been discussed long enough. Doubts expressed from outside, either in the United States or overseas, merely sharpened the edge of Massachusetts majority opinion. The Boston architect C. Howard Walker, on returning from Europe at the height of the agitation, declared himself “enough of a Machiavellian to rejoice in the electrocutions whether the accused are innocent or guilty.”
Stubbornly the Massachusetts community, the articulate, rooted middle-class community, closed ranks. Granville Hicks, teaching at Smith College, helped organize a clemency meeting in Northampton in the spring of 1927. So strong was the feeling of the townspeople against Sacco and Vanzetti that it broke up in bedlam. It was not, Hicks had to admit, just the rich and powerful who were against the two Italians: “It was also the doctors, the lawyers, the shopkeepers, the farmers, the workers. It was practically all my neighbors in Northampton except for the other members of the college faculty. The battle was between the intellectuals and everybody else.”
There was, however, a thoughtful minority made uneasy by the slow steamroller of Massachusetts justice. Liberals like Edward Filene, John Moors of the brokerage house of Moors & Cabot, and Professor Felix Frankfurter joined with conservatives like Joseph Walker, a former Republican speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and Richard Washburn Child, a former ambassador to Italy, in questioning the legal proceedings. Names old and distinguished were added to the list of protesters—the historian Samuel Eliot Morison, the philosopher William Hocking, William Allan Neilson, the president of Smith College, and the Harvard economist Frank Taussig.
In June 1925 the American branch of the International Red Aid was set up in Chicago as the International Labor Defense. For the Communists the Sacco-Vanzetti case was an issue ripe for manipulation. By exploiting it, the Party hoped to confirm its pose as the champion of the oppressed and for the first time develop into an American mass movement. After his expulsion from the Party, James Cannon, the International Labor Defense’s executive secretary, was to admit privately—much as Moore did—that he felt Sacco was guilty. But to the Communists guilt or innocence was immaterial. What mattered was the inflammability of the cause.
For Cannon and his lieutenant Max Shachtman, editor of the monthly Labor Defender, the efforts of the Boston Defense Committee were naïve, self-defeating, contaminated by “the slow poison of middle-class treachery.” Thompson, the aloof upper-class lawyer, had announced that he would not tolerate “pressure from the outside,” meaning in Shachtman’s view “the mass movement of labor that could surround Sacco and Vanzetti with a wall of iron against the attacks of their enemies.” That the Defense Committee could replace a class fighter like Moore with a reactionary like Thompson was merely another demonstration of the liberal fallacy—belief in the law, in justice above class, in all the paraphernalia that concealed the claws of capitalist society. Abstract justice could play no role, in Shachtman’s pronouncement as echoed by the Daily Worker, since “Sacco and Vanzetti were being legally assassinated because of their political and economic views and activities.”
Johnnies-come-lately though they might be, the Communists took the attitude that it was they who were the organizers of the protest movement. The Sacco-Vanzetti case was now theirs by right of Marxist eminent domain. And, here as abroad, they were able to bring about immediate sensational results. The International Labor Defense poured out posters and buttons and press releases, organized meetings all across the country, and collected large sums for what Cannon called “the protection” of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Of the millions collected by the Red Aid in various parts of the world for the defense of the convicted men, less than six thousand dollars ever found its way to the Defense Committee. There was no accounting for the balance. Felicani, who had so scrupulously recorded each dollar he received, was outraged. In July the Defense Committee warned in its Official Bulletin: “We are absolutely opposed to the collection of funds and the use of this cause to further special political or economic interests.” The Daily Worker and the International Labor Defense replied by calling the Defense Committee and its counsel ineffectual liberals who relied on bourgeois legal proceedings rather than the direct action of the workers.
Yet, whatever the Communists might claim, whatever self-advertising actions they might take, the shabby two-room headquarters at Hanover Street still remained the center of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense. The yeast of the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision worked as actively there as outside. Fabbri was succeeded as secretary by Joseph Moro, an Italian shoe-worker with a family, who gave up a job at forty dollars a week to work full time for the committee at ten dollars less. Eugene Lyons had left Boston at the end of 1922 to work for the New York branch of Tass, the Soviet news agency. Until 1926 no one took his place. As long as Moore remained in charge of the defense, Lyons continued to contribute articles and support, but Thompson’s advent was too much for him. Still wearing his Communist heart on his sleeve, still at the beginning of his long arc from left to right, he held to his opinion that the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti should be a class defense.
Through the quiescent years the members of the Defense Committee, working doggedly, had kept both the case and the defendants alive. As the tempo rose in 1926, so did the activity in Hanover Street. The headquarters developed into a small publishing house. Tables and typewriters and filing cabinets were wedged in by bales of pamphlets that served as seats for volunteer workers and visitors.
The moody, indefatigable Mary Donovan seemed always to be at her desk. Mrs. Evans appeared regularly, bringing with her such friends as Mrs. William James, the widow of the philosopher. Professor Frankfurter often trudged up the dark stairway accompanied by one or two of his sympathetic Harvard colleagues. In June a young Globe reporter, Gardner Jackson, gave up his newspaper job to take over where Lyons had left off. With the publicity under his enthusiastic control, the Official Bulletin—only one issue of which had appeared before this—now came out monthly.
Except for their energetic youth and their devotion to the same cause, the wealthy liberal “Pat” Jackson and the East Side Marxist Morris Gebelow, who wrote under the name of Eugene Lyons, had little in common. Jackson’s mother was the third wife of William Jackson, a Colorado banker and railroad owner whose second wife had been Helen Hunt Jackson, the author of Ramona. Starting at Amherst College, Pat joined the Army in 1917. After the war he studied at Columbia, took a turn at selling bonds, then worked in a Denver enterprise of his father’s before becoming cub reporter on the Globe, the paper that was reputed to print the name of every inhabitant of Greater Boston, and, if possible, his picture, at least twice a year.
Jackson had been gathering such neighborhood news for the Globe during the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. At the end of many an afternoon he would see Frank Sibley stalking into the city room on his return from Dedham. Sibley’s indignation expanded by the day, the more so since he was confined to factual reporting and unable to write his personal reaction to the Dedham goings-on. Sometimes he would stop by the tall, shock-haired young reporter to let off steam.
It was through Sibley that Jackson met Felicani. Never before had the tweedy, rather elegant young man met anyone like this philosophical anarchist. Evening after evening now found Jackson working in the upstairs rooms on Hanover Street. Then, in the summer of 1926, Felicani persuaded him to give his full time to directing the Sacco-Vanzetti publicity.
As it would for many others in the year to come, the cause brought Jackson’s being into focus. Independent financially, vaguely liberal, he had never really known what he wanted to do until he found his goal in the struggle for the two Italians’ lives. Though later he would become a minor New Deal administrator and a friend of Franklin Roosevelt’s, this was to be the high spot of his life. Journalistic talent, energy, honesty, and dedication—these he brought to the cause with the fervency of a convert.
By August 1926 it was clear to James Cannon that the Defense Committee could be neither dislodged nor superseded and that the only other possibility was infiltration. To mark this change in tack the International Labor Defense sent two thousand dollars to the Hanover Street headquarters while the Labor Defender announced in conciliatory tones that it was no longer making a general appeal for funds: All future donations for the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti should be sent direct to the Boston committee. In addition, Cannon sent Charles Cline to Boston to try to arrange an amalgamation of the committee with the International Labor Defense.
Cline, one of the Party’s so-called Texas martyrs, had just been released from prison after serving thirteen years of a life sentence for murder. In 1911 he had been the sole American among a band of Mexicans who had organized an expedition in Texas to join the Mexican revolutionaries in their fight against the government of Porfirio Díaz. When Texas Rangers found a dead Mexican spy tied to a tree, they pursued and captured Cline and a dozen of the expedition. Cline maintained that he was innocent of the spy’s death, and the American Federation of Labor had frequently demanded his liberation. He was finally freed by Governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson.
Cline’s long imprisonment for a revolutionary cause was expected to make him attractive to Sacco and Vanzetti. The real object of his visit was to persuade them to let the International Labor Defense take charge of their fight. Cline explained persuasively that the Boston Defense Committee was run by amateurs who were unable to grasp the class significance of the case. Even so, Cannon would be willing to form a united front organization with certain members of the Defense Committee on condition that the headquarters was moved to Chicago. There the Communist International would be able to bring an overwhelming force into operation that would compel the Massachusetts reactionaries to stay their hand. As a final glittering attraction Cline promised Sacco and Vanzetti that Clarence Darrow would take over from Thompson as their chief counsel.
Running through the letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, unaltered in the alterations of their moods, is their sense of outraged bewilderment at their predicament. What had brought them behind bars? What had taken Sacco from his neat Stoughton bungalow, his red-haired wife, the light-long summer evenings in his vegetable garden? What had taken Vanzetti from the Plymouth streets overlooking the harbor? What had ended the brightness of their years of freedom?
To each man the insistent answer was that they had been radicals, that however small they may have seemed to the men of state, the latter had nevertheless banded together to crush them. The owners of the Cordage works, of the Lawrence mills, those who lived in the big houses on the hill, who controlled the government and the police, who lived at the expense of the workers, this gross capitalistic world, this dying order would kill to preserve its insecure position. District Attorney Katzmann’s taunting phrases, the dry words that rustled from Judge Thayer’s set lips—these were the voices of executioners.
After the Supreme Court’s rejection of Thompson’s appeal on May 12, Vanzetti wrote to Alice Stone Blackwell:
Yesterday we got the last struck. It end all. We are doomed beyond any kind of doubts. I am sorry for myself. It is creuil to be insulted, umiliated, wronged, imprisoned, doomned, under infamous charges, for crimes of which I am utterly innocent in the whole sense of the word. But more for myself, I am sorry for my father, my sisters and my brothers, and for poor Rosi and her two children.
Both prisoners had been heartened by the renewed demonstrations in Europe and felt uncritically grateful to the International Labor Defense for its belligerent propaganda. Both felt at times that—as the Communists had said all along—only direct revolutionary action by the masses could save them. Both were divided between the class-struggle interpretation of their dilemma and their attachment to bourgeois partisans like Mrs. Evans. Both were inconsistent in their attitudes—as who might well not be after seven years in the shadow of the electric chair.
Sacco, in particular, with his more dogmatic mentality and limited outlook, tended to distort the possibilities of justice that could transcend class.
Let us tell you sincerely, dear comrade [he wrote a member of the International Labor Defense], that for hereafter I will never fall into another new delusion again, if I don’t see first the day of my freedom. Even when Mrs. Elizabeth G. Evans—that through all these struggle years she has been kind to me as kind as good mother can be, come to tell me “Nick! you again.” No! No! Six long torment years gives me enough experience because it is a great masterpiece for me and to anybody else not to be disappointed any more. Poor mother! She is so sincere and faithful to the law of the man that she has forgot very early that the history of all the government it were always and everytime the martyrdom of the proletariat. But, however, we will stick like a good Communard soldier to the end of the battle and looking into the eyes of our enemy, face to face, to tell them our last breath—which I had always faith—that you, the comrades and all the workers of the world solidarity, would free Sacco and Vanzetti tomorrow.
Yet in spite of such sentiments he would continue to prefer the conservative Thompson to the radicals.
Vanzetti, in his enthusiasm for the éclat of the International Labor Defense activities, could write to Cannon in an almost similar tone:
The echo of your campaign in our behalf has reached my heart. I repeat, I will repeat to the last, only the people, our comrades, our friends, the world revolutionary proletariat can save us from the powers of the capitalist reactionary hyenas, or vindicate our names and our blood before history.
Nevertheless, Vanzetti was as harsh in his judgments of the new Russia as he was of the old America. To his mind all governments were oppressive, whether they ruled in the name of proletariat, king, or constitution. His frequently expressed disbelief in the progress of the Russian Revolution, his contrary belief that “the Bolsheviki leaders’ dictatorship is an increased perfectioned exploitation of the proletariat,” constantly embarrassed the editors of the Daily Worker and the Labor Defender. The anti-revolutionary, anti-Marxist individualistic anarchist, Proudhon, remained his ideal, and the Frenchman’s ringing words: “Liberty of conscience, freedom of the press, freedom of labor, of commerce, and of teaching, the free disposal of the products of labor and industry—liberty, infinite, absolute, everywhere and forever,” are often echoed in Vanzetti’s letters.
The first reaction of Sacco and Vanzetti to Cline’s proposal was to accept it and let the International Labor Defense see what it could do. However they might differ theoretically from the Communists, such potent help was not to be spurned. And for all the Defense Committee’s efforts, they were still in jail after six years. Clarence Darrow—the untidy colossus who had slipped the noose from so many necks—appeared as a sudden new hope, a more certain guide than Thompson out of their legal labyrinth. Even though their trust and confidence in the Boston lawyer remained intact, they felt that they had nothing to lose by the change and much to gain.
Felicani, with whom they talked it over, felt otherwise. His distrust of the Communists was innate, and he, as the organizer of the Defense Committee, had a much clearer view of the Party’s reasons for taking up the case than did his two comrades. Darrow himself, in Felicani’s opinion, could do no more than Thompson had done and would do.[24]
Sacco and Vanzetti finally agreed to reject Cannon’s offer. When Cline reported this to Chicago, the Labor Defender struck back at the Defense Committee savagely, accusing it of “trying to represent the martyrdom of Sacco and Vanzetti as an ‘unfortunate’ error which can be rectified by the ‘right’ people proceeding in the ‘right’ way.” When Shachtman claimed that it was the Communists’ “campaign for international solidarity that has so far saved Sacco and Vanzetti from the death chair,” Jackson’s Bulletin announced angrily that “the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee has no official relationship with the International Labor Defense, the Communist Party, or the Sacco-Vanzetti Conferences, which we understand were organized through the ILD.”
During the summer and autumn of 1926 a whole new aspect of the case was opened up by the defense’s belated discovery that Pinkerton Detective Agency reports had been filed on both the South Braintree and the Bridgewater holdups. The existence of these primal documents became known largely through the efforts of Tom O’Connor, a State House News Service reporter who had first become interested in the case in 1920 after reading about it in the New Republic.
O’Connor kept in touch with developments after the trial, dropping in from time to time at Moore’s office and at the Hanover Street headquarters. Making his own investigations in Providence and elsewhere, he finally became so engrossed in the case that he gave up his State House job to work for Thompson without pay.
O’Connor was aware—it was common newspaper knowledge—that the Travelers Insurance Company had insured the South Braintree payroll. Searching the back numbers of Protection, the Travelers publication, he found what he had assumed—an account of the South Braintree crime and a statement that the company had hired the Pinkerton Agency to investigate it. O’Connor realized that the agents must have made day-by-day reports of what they found, but what interested him even more was the obvious fact that these reports, which would have been submitted long before Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, would be uncolored by preconceptions. If they could be located, O’Connor was certain they would prove to be the raw material of the case.
A week after the May Supreme Court decision O’Connor went to Thompson, then preoccupied with the Madeiros confession. Just what had occurred, he asked—well aware that Thompson did not have the answer—between the evening the Buick was stolen in Needham and the evening almost six months later when Sacco and Vanzetti were picked up on the streetcar? How did it happen they were arrested? All Thompson could do was to gesture helplessly and answer that he did not know. O’Connor then told him about the South Braintree Pinkerton report. Thompson, who had not heard of it before, banged his desk in his excitement.
Some days later, following Thompson’s request, a copy of the report arrived at the Travelers Boston office. Thompson was then away, but O’Connor managed to borrow the report and copy it. As he had hoped, it gave a picture of the case as it appeared before and just after Sacco and Vanzetti were picked up. O’Connor was particularly struck by Henry Hellyer’s notes on the fair brown-haired man Jenny Novelli had seen in the murder car who, by the time Hellyer testified at Dedham, had become black-haired with a dark complexion.
After this report came to light, O’Connor, while going through the files of the Bridgewater Independent, discovered references to a Pinkerton report on the Bridgewater holdup. But this second report, with its even more glaring discrepancies between the immediate impressions of witnesses and the evidence subsequently offered at the Plymouth trial, was not to come to light until 1927.
It had been common knowledge at the Dedham trial that the United States Department of Justice and District Attorney Katzmann’s office had cooperated in getting evidence for the prosecution. What was still not known was the degree of cooperation, for when Thompson raised the issue, the Bureau of Investigation followed its customary policy of refusing to open its files. Thompson increasingly came to feel that there might be evidence in the files indicating that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, and in any case he was outraged when he learned that the Bureau had placed spies in the Dedham jail and on the Defense Committee and had even planned to introduce one into Rosina Sacco’s house. He wrote to United States Attorney General John Sargent requesting that William West of the Boston office show him whatever documents and correspondence he had covering the investigations made before, during, and after the trial. In indirect answer to this, Thompson received a call from the Boston Bureau asking what information he was after. When he said that he wanted to go through whatever files the department had on Sacco and Vanzetti, West informed him that this would not be allowed.
If one can judge by a memorandum now in the National Archives and prepared by the Department of Justice at the request of the State Department on October 17, 1921, Sacco and Vanzetti, before their trial, were known merely as subscribers to Galleani’s Cronaca Sovversiva and a New Jersey anarchist paper, La Jacquerie. In the files Thompson particularly wanted to see there were of course the reports of the agents attending the trial, as well as the reports of Harold Zorian, who had infiltrated the committee, and Anthony Carbone, who had been planted in the Dedham jail.
Although he was unable to see the files, Thompson discovered that two former Bureau agents, Lawrence Letherman and Fred Weyand, were willing to sign affidavits as to what had taken place in the Boston office in regard to Sacco and Vanzetti during 1920 and 1921. Weyand explained quite frankly that the purpose of the Boston agents in going to the trial was to obtain enough evidence there to deport the accused as anarchists in case they were not convicted of murder.
Letherman, in his affidavit, corroborated Weyand:
The Department of Justice in Boston was anxious to get sufficient evidence against Sacco and Vanzetti to deport them, but never succeeded in getting the kind and amount of evidence required for that purpose. It was the opinion of Department agents here that a conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti for murder would be one way of disposing of these two men. It was also the opinion of such of the agents in Boston as had any actual knowledge of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, that Sacco and Vanzetti, although anarchists and agitators, were not highway robbers, and had nothing to do with the South Braintree crime. My opinion, and the opinion of most of the older men in the Government service, has always been that the South Braintree crime was the work of professionals.
The words are ambiguous. Thompson took them to mean that the Department of Justice, if it could not get Sacco and Vanzetti deported as radicals, would cooperate in getting them executed for a crime they had not committed. As a matter of fact, Sacco and Vanzetti, if they had been acquitted at Dedham, would through their own courtroom testimony have then been subject to deportation as anarchists. West’s attitude in cooperating with Katzmann, may have been a callous one, but it seems clear that there was nothing in the Bureau of Investigation files tending to prove either the guilt or the innocence of the two Italians.
On September 13 Thompson again appeared before Judge Thayer in the Dedham courthouse to argue that the verdict against Sacco and Vanzetti should be set aside because of the Madeiros confession and the Weyand and Letherman affidavits. Thayer denied Thompson’s request to have Madeiros examined and cross-examined in open court, but aside from this the judge’s manner was courteous if impassive. From time to time he would even unbend enough to come out with a small witticism. For five days affidavits were read and Thompson argued for, while Assistant District Attorney Ranney argued against, the motion. Sacco and Vanzetti were not in the courtroom. Rosina was there with Mrs. Evans as well as Mrs. Rantoul, Jerry McAnarney, and Professor Frankfurter.
Thompson maintained that if Sacco and Vanzetti had never come into the case, the evidence he had assembled in Providence would have been sufficient to indict the Morellis. Under these circumstances he felt that Judge Thayer should order a new trial. Thompson’s attack on the Department of Justice and his interpretation of its role caused much more of a sensation in Boston than did the twice-told tale of the Madeiros confession. One of his incidental revelations was that a Bureau agent named Shaughnessy who had investigated Sacco and Vanzetti had subsequently been sent to prison for highway robbery.
Assistant District Attorney Ranney admitted that if Madeiros had participated in the South Braintree holdup, Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, but he considered Madeiros’ confession worthless. The district attorney’s office would “answer, but not investigate, because we know or believe that the truth has been found.” As for Letherman and Weyand, Ranney took the position that the two ex-agents were traitors. “In all police departments, in all detective departments,” he told the court, “secrecy is a watchword, a byword—‘Do not betray the secrets of your departments.’ And if the secrets were broadcast, what would be the result? There would be no crime detected and punished. And yet Letherman and Weyand give their affidavits to these defendants and betray the secrecy of their department. We say on the face of it that there is a breach of loyalty, and we wonder if we cannot conscientiously and logically find that these men, not now in the department, did not leave there with honor but dishonor.”
Thompson flared up at Ranney’s mention of secrets: “I will say to your Honor that a government which has come to value its own secrets more than it does the lives of its citizens has become a tyranny, whether you call it a republic, a monarchy, or anything else. Secrets! Secrets! And he says you should abstain from touching this verdict of your jury because it is so sacred. Would they not have liked to know something about secrets? The case is admitted by that inadvertent concession. There are then secrets to be admitted!”
After studying the documents and affidavits for five weeks Judge Thayer, on October 23, rejected the motion. He could have done so without giving his reasons, but apparently feeling the need for self-justification, he issued a twenty-five-thousand-word opinion.
Being controlled only by judgment, reason and conscience [he wrote], and after giving as favorable consideration to these defendants as may be consistent with a due regard for the rights of the public and sound principles of law, I am forced to the conclusion that the affidavit of Madeiros is unreliable, untrustworthy and untrue. To set aside a verdict of a jury affirmed by the Supreme Judicial Court of this Commonwealth on such an affidavit would be a mockery upon truth and justice. Therefore, exercising every right vested in this Court in the granting of motions for new trials by the law of the Commonwealth, this motion for a new trial is hereby denied.
In his years on the bench Thayer must have told hundreds of juries that it was for them to determine the facts. Yet here, where his function was merely to determine whether the Madeiros evidence was weighty enough to warrant presentation to a jury, he had taken over the jury’s function of determining its truth. But beneath his formalism on the bench and his outward courtesy to Thompson, Judge Thayer was nettled. Why any respectable lawyer should attempt to stretch the law for two properly convicted anarchists was beyond him. He concluded:
Since the trial before the Jury of these cases, a new type of disease would seem to have developed. It might be called “legopsychic neurosis” or “hysteria” which means: “a belief in the existence of something which in fact and truth has no such existence.”
This disease would seem to have reached a very dangerous condition, from the argument of counsel, upon the present Motion, when he charges Mr. Sargent, Attorney-General of the United States and his subordinates, and subordinates of former Attorney-General of the United States Mr. Palmer and Mr. Katzmann and the District Attorney of Norfolk County, with being in a conspiracy to send these two defendants to the electric chair, not because they are murderers but because they are radicals.... In these cases, from all the developed symptoms, the Court is rather of the opinion that the disease is absolutely without cure.
Until Thayer’s decision was published, the only Massachusetts newspaper to take the side of Sacco and Vanzetti was the Springfield Republican, a paper that, though conservative in outlook, never altered its outraged opinion that “a dog ought not to be shot on the weight of the evidence brought out in the Dedham Trial.” As the waning months of 1926 whetted the issue, the Boston newspapers at first reacted predictably. The independent Globe kept to its traditional wary policy of not taking sides on divisive issues. Frank Sibley, in spite of his standing, was taken off the case, and on the day of the executions found himself covering a flower show. Federalist pre-immigrant Boston spoke with two voices: the McKinley-minded Herald, the breakfast voice of State Street; and the genealogical Transcript, the teacup voice of Beacon Hill. The Transcript held and would continue to hold that Sacco and Vanzetti had been given a fair trial, that the verdict was just, the defendants had been given every opportunity of appeal, and any further delay was an unworthy concession to foreign radicals, long-haired men, and short-haired women. But doubts had begun to creep into the editorial rooms of the Herald. They crystallized in the editorial “We Submit” that appeared three days after Judge Thayer denied the Madeiros motion. It was written by the chief editorial writer, F. Lauriston Bullard, with editor-publisher O’Brien neither suggesting nor objecting, and it is indicative of the national interest the case was now arousing that it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. The paragraphs that appeared on October 26 must have goggled eyes at many a Back Bay breakfast table:
In our opinion Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti ought not to be executed on the warrant of the verdict returned by a jury on July 14, 1921. We do not know whether these men are guilty or not. We have no sympathy with the half-baked views which they profess. But as months have merged into years and the great debate over this case has continued, our doubts have solidified slowly into convictions, and reluctantly we have found ourselves compelled to reverse our original judgment. We hope the supreme judicial court will grant a new trial on the basis of new evidence not yet examined in open court. We hope the Governor will grant another reprieve to Celestino Madeiros so that his confession may be canvassed in open court. We hope, in case our supreme bench finds itself unable legally to authorize a new trial, that our Governor will call to his aid a commission of disinterested men of the highest intelligence and character to make an independent investigation in his behalf, and that the Governor himself at first hand will participate in that examination, if, as a last resort, it shall be undertaken. We have read the full decision in which Judge Webster Thayer, who presided at the original trial, renders his decision against the application for a new trial, and we submit that it carries the tone of the advocate rather than the arbitrator. At the outset he refers to “the verdict of a jury approved by the supreme court of this commonwealth” and later he repeats that sentence. We respectfully submit that the supreme court never approved that verdict. What the court did is stated in its own words thus: “We have examined carefully all the exceptions in so far as argued, and finding no error the verdicts are to stand.” The court certified that, whether the verdict was right or wrong, the trial judge performed his duty under the law in a legal manner. The supreme court overruled a bill of exceptions but expressed no judgment whatever as to the validity of the verdict or the guilt of the defendants, Judge Thayer knows this.
Bullard went on to object to Thayer’s innuendoes, to say that the files of the Department of Justice should be opened, and to charge that Captain Proctor’s affidavit stood as a condemnation of the Dedham verdict. He concluded:
If on a new trial the defendants shall again be found guilty we shall be infinitely better off than if we proceed to execution on the basis of the trial already held; the shadow of doubt, which abides in the minds of large numbers of patient investigators of this whole case, will have been removed. And if on second trial Sacco and Vanzetti should be declared guiltless, everybody would rejoice that no monstrous injustice shall have been done. We submit these views with no reference whatever to the personality of the defendants, and without allusion now to that atmosphere of radicalism of which we heard so much in 1921.
Here was the first breach in the Commonwealth’s fortifications. The defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti now pressed forward in the paper war that thundered through the correspondence columns of the Herald and the Transcript.
Bullard’s attack received formidable support. Dr. Morton Prince, the internationally famous Harvard professor of psychiatry, wrote to the Herald that, after reading the evidence, he “had come to the conclusion that the trial was a miscarriage of justice, that the government had not proved its case and probably Sacco and Vanzetti had not committed the murder charged.” Dr. Prince particularly questioned a verdict to which Mary Splaine’s evidence had substantially contributed:
I do not hesitate to say that the star witness for the government testified, honestly enough, no doubt, to what was psychologically impossible. Miss Splaine testified, though she had only seen Sacco at the time of the shooting from a distance of about 60 feet for from 1½ to three seconds in a motor car going at an increasing rate of speed at about 15 to 18 miles an hour; that she saw and at the end of a year she remembered and described 16 different details of his person, even to the size of his hand, the length of his hair as being between two and 2½ inches long and the shade of his eyebrows! Such perception and memory under such conditions can easily be proved to be psychologically impossible. Every psychologist knows that—so does Houdini. And what shall we think of the animus and honesty of the state that introduces such testimony to convict, knowing that the jury is too ignorant to disbelieve?
How came Miss Splaine to become acquainted with these personal characteristics of Sacco?
The answer is simple. Sacco had been shown to her on several occasions. She had had an opportunity to study him carefully. More than this, he sat before her in court. At the preliminary hearing in the police court she was not asked to pick Sacco from among a group of other men. Sacco was shown to her alone. Everyone knows that under such circumstances the image of a person later develops, or may develop, in an observer’s mind and becomes a false memory. Such a memory is produced by suggestion. Every lawyer knows the unconscious falsification of memory due to later acquired knowledge, though ignorant of the psychology of the phenomenon. And yet Miss Splaine’s testimony was offered by the state to the Jury.
Why was not Miss Splaine asked to pick out Sacco from among a group of men? If this had been done, this unconscious falsification of memory would have been avoided.
In Morton Prince the genealogy of the Back Bay combined with the intellectualism of Cambridge across the river, and while the Herald editorial might jar Boston, his letter would cause the greater explosion. Even if the Supreme Judicial Court should rule against Thompson’s appeal from Thayer’s last decision, it was now clear to the more knowing Bostonians that the matter would not rest there. Many felt that Governor Fuller would commute the death sentence to life imprisonment.
When Judge Thayer brushed aside the Madeiros evidence, Sacco felt that nothing could now save him from his fate, neither lawyers nor appeals nor—hardest of all to face—the embattled proletariat. “I don’t care how it all ends, if it only ends,” he told one of his visitors.
At Christmas Mrs. Jack’s daughter Elizabeth brought Sacco apples and candy and—what moved him much—a present for his “dear darling Ines.” He wrote to Mrs. Jack in an afterglow of optimism that he hoped from the bottom of his heart “that the new year would bring us a freedom and in the embrace of mine and in the grant human family.” But it was something he had given up believing, and he had already requested Thompson to take no more legal steps on his behalf. The two prisoners’ joint Christmas message to their supporters sounded much more like Sacco than Vanzetti:
We are convinced that our murderors are determined to burn us within this, 1927, and that it is most probable that they will succeed. And our hearts move is that the new year may give us liberty or death—but menwhile we are ready to bear our cross to the last.
Vanzetti’s moods alternated. There was a black period in the autumn when he considered going on a hunger strike. Close to his cell he could hear workmen constructing a new prison electric plant, following the Boston Edison Company’s refusal to provide the Commonwealth with current for executions. But even in his darkest moods, when he thought of himself as a vanquished man, the shadow would in a few days be overcome by his basic optimism, just as he could forget the jangle of the electric-plant construction when he learned that Mrs. Corl, the wife of the Plymouth boatbuilder, had kept a vigil lamp lighted before the statue of the Virgin for the last six years for the grace of his liberation. Something in her naïve faith gave strength to his disbelieving heart. At times he would attend the prison’s Christian Science services, not out of any belief but merely to be able to sit in the spacious, almost empty chapel and glimpse the sky again through the barred windows and the sunshine reflecting on the gilt dome of the State House. To the chaplains he remained generally hostile. Unlike Sacco, he could still be hopeful of the higher court and of Governor Fuller as an independent-minded man. Even so, he refused to apply for a pardon. “Why should I,” he said, “when I am innocent?” Nevertheless he was still willing to cooperate with his lawyers and the Defense Committee. He began to translate Thompson’s brief into Italian for distribution in Europe.
In one and the same letter Vanzetti could announce that he was doomed, and then turn with lyric nostalgia to his father’s garden at Villafalletto:
It takes a poet of first magnitude to worthly speak of it, so beautiful, unspeakably beautiful it is ... the singing birds there; black merles of the golden bick, and ever more golden troath; the golden oriols, the gold-finches, the green finches, the chaf-finches, the neck-crooking, the green ficks; the unmachable nightingales, the nightingales over-all. Yet, I think that the wonder of my garden’s wonders is the banks of its path. Hundreds of grass, leaves of wild flowors witness there the almighty genios of the universal architecture—reflecting the sky, the Sun, the moon, the stars, all of its lights and colors. The forgetmenot are nations there, and nation are the wild daisies.
Christmas—his seventh behind bars—brought a cold snap, etching the jail windows with frost. Among Vanzetti’s letters and Christmas cards were a number of books—The Life of Debs, Jack London’s Essays on Revolt, and, accompanied by a necktie from Mrs. Evans, Emerson’s Essays. Emerson he found “so exquisitely anarchist,” delighting “at the lecture of Politics, Nature and New England Reformers.”
Just after Christmas he wrote to Alice Stone Blackwell:
I know perfectly well that within four month the Massachusetts will be ready to burn me....
So every hope to get reparation and freedom having been killed in me by each and all the words and deeds of Massachusettes black gowned, puritanic, cold-blood murderors, on the first day of the 1927, I formulated the wish, the wove, that I am get out within this year, no matter if alive or death. And I hope with all my force that this will come true. By it, I do not mean suicide.
As the short and frigid days moved toward the final year, the clamor from overseas echoed more loudly within the United States. The obscure foreigners who had stood up in court that sultry summer evening of 1921 to hear the foreman, Ripley, pronounce the verdict against them could at least console themselves that their names had been blazoned round the world. They who had traveled on the swaying Brockton trolley talking of a Sunday meeting of a few dozen immigrants, now could conjure up hundreds of meetings in dozens of countries. Proudly they accepted the fact that they had become symbols.