“Yes,” he said, offering me a chair, “but what were they, those papers? I have almost as many papers myself. If your lawyer’s wrong at the start, it doesn’t matter how many files he has. There are not many of us left from those days, the ones who really knew.”
I asked Felicani what he had done immediately after the two men’s arrest. He thought for a moment.
“It’s strange,” he said. “When you begin to think, then all the memories come back, just as clearly as if it all happened yesterday. I knew Vanzetti best. He was one of my closest friends. As soon as he was arrested he got word to me and I got the others together. We went to see them at the Brockton police station. We raised money—two or three dollars here, another dollar there. It’s all down in writing, every penny. Then, at the first trial for the Bridgewater holdup, Thayer gave Vanzetti twelve to fourteen years. When Tresca heard that he came on from New York. ‘What is going on here?’ he asked us. ‘Fourteen years? Is that what you do?’ So then he got Moore, the lawyer from the Lawrence strike, to come in and take charge of the case.”
“I know this may be painful to you,” I told him, “but I have a letter from Upton Sinclair, who talked with Moore after the executions. Moore told him then—his exact words were: ‘Sacco was probably, Vanzetti possibly guilty’.”
Felicani’s sport shirt rippled as he shrugged his vast shoulders. “I’ve heard things of that kind, so many rumors. You know, Sinclair wrote most of Boston right here in this office. I don’t see why he didn’t mention it to me. Moore was angry after he left the case. His anger just got too big.”
I knew that Sacco had come to distrust Moore, but I did not know the details of Moore’s leaving. Felicani was roundabout in answering me.
“I never say Moore kept money for himself. He was an honest man. But for all the money you gave him, he wanted more always—for witnesses, for travels, for new investigations. He had no idea of money. If you gave him a thousand dollars every other day Moore was all right, but we didn’t have that much, the committee. Finally I tightened the purse strings. Then Moore started his own committee to raise money. That was why he got into a fight with Sacco, how the bitterness started. That was why we let Moore go and got Thompson.”
His voice was heavy with regret. “Ah, if we had had Thompson from the beginning, then we would have got them off. When we first went to him he was cold. He listened to us and he said he’d take the case for twenty-five thousand dollars. When he started he didn’t know the difference between an anarchist and a Communist. You could tell that by an appeal he drew up that Vanzetti corrected. After he talked for some time with Vanzetti, he understood. It made all the difference. He took part then as if we were friends. A wonderful man, Thompson. An aristocrat, the way the word should mean. He would have made mincemeat of a man like Katzmann, if only we’d had him instead of Moore.”
One thing I had been wanting to ask was about the various bombings connected with the case. Would he agree that anarchists had been responsible for them? Sacco and Vanzetti themselves were said to have been philosophical anarchists, as opposed to violence as Tolstoy was. But where did the dividing line come?
Felicani stared at me with his guileless eyes. “You know,” he said, “there are times when a man is so desperate that he will do such a thing as set off a bomb. When that happens and to what man, I don’t know. Vanzetti never could have done anything like that—but, yes, in certain circumstances Sacco might have. That is the type of man he was. But a holdup murder, to kill innocent men like that? It was quite impossible.