According to the Registry of Motor Vehicles records the motorcycle in which Boda had ridden off belonged to Ricardo Orciani. A molder in a Norwood foundry, Orciani boarded at 1532 Hyde Park Avenue with Angelo Ventola, whose brother, Joseph Ventola, lived across the street. Orciani was picked up in his room the night of May 6 and taken to Brockton. Still wearing the checked mackinaw of the night before, he was identified by Simon and Ruth Johnson as the driver of the motorcycle. A short, cocky Italian with an assured round face and clipped mustache, he was unperturbed by his arrest. He refused to answer questions. Where he went, he told the police, was his own business. The revolver found in his bureau was one he just happened to have.
On Thursday, May 6, the district attorney for Norfolk and Plymouth counties, Frederick Gunn Katzmann, appeared at the Brockton station to take over the questioning, bringing with him a stenographer and an interpreter.
Katzmann was then in his late forties, a plump, ambitious man whose presence seemed underlined by the smartness of his dress, his snap-brim hat, and his raglan Burberry coat. He had grown up on one of the poorer streets of Hyde Park, a gray semi-industrial adjunct of Boston, attending the Boston Latin School and then crossing the Charles River to enter Harvard with the class of 1896. As an unathletic poor boy from Hyde Park, his years at Harvard were obscure. He belonged to no clubs, took part in no sports or undergraduate activities. Nor, on the other hand, was he a scholar. At the end of his senior year his one distinction was an honorable mention in engineering. Returning to Hyde Park with his diploma, he worked for several years as a meter-reader for the local electric-light company. What he really wanted was to be a lawyer. If he had had the money he would have gone on to the Harvard Law School. Instead he attended night sessions at Boston University, receiving his bachelor of laws degree in 1902.
For the next year he served as an apprentice with one of the established firms of Boston’s Pemberton Square. But the staid legal world of Beacon Hill and State Street was a fenced-off Brahmin preserve. A Hyde Park boy with a B.U. law degree and a dubious name would not penetrate that circle.
Katzmann was sensitive about his name. His mother’s maiden name—his own middle one—was Gunn, and he tried to emphasize its Anglican propriety in his signature. After his year at Pemberton Square he returned to the familiar puddle of Hyde Park and set up his office on the second floor of a wooden building on River Street. There, in a small ocher room with a creaking floor smelling of oil, he hung his two diplomas and filled several sectional bookcases with secondhand volumes of Corpus Juris. He prospered. From 1907 to 1908 he represented Hyde Park in the Massachusetts legislature. The following year he was appointed assistant district attorney. From 1909 until Hyde Park was absorbed by Boston in 1912 he served on the school committee. In November, 1916, he ran for district attorney and was elected to a three-year term. In 1919 he was re-elected.
Katzmann’s personality, like his figure, expanded with success. He could plan to go back to his Harvard twenty-fifth reunion with pride, the chill of his undergraduate years forgotten. As an active, conforming Republican, the prospect of a judgeship in the superior court or even, with luck, the state attorney-generalship lay ahead of him. The drawback of his name scarcely bothered him now. He lived with his wife and two young daughters in a Victorian frame house on the Mattapan side of River Street, within walking distance of his office. He was a member of the Hyde Park Lodge of Masons, the Cebra Tennis Club, and the Wollaston Golf Club. He became Hyde Park counsel for the Family Welfare Society of Boston. As district attorney he was popular if undistinguished, a routine prosecutor addicted to the McKinley-baroque style of oratory. The district had re-elected him in spite of the war-fanned prejudice against German names. As with many criminal lawyers, the law was for him, like politics, a game where at times one might have to cut a few corners, but in the end the best man usually won, and the loser congratulated the winner. It was a game played with other men’s years and sometimes with their lives—but still a game. Such was the man, soon to become a symbol of chicanery and deceit for indifferently informed protestors all over the world, as he arrived at the Brockton police station for the routine questioning of two holdup suspects.
Especially in questioning foreigners the district attorney favored the disarming approach, bluff, fatherly, confidential—you deal straight with me and I’ll deal straight with you. It is particularly effective after a suspect has spent a night in a cell. Katzmann first questioned Sacco. For some time he put merely routine questions to him about his acquaintances, about the gun and the cartridges. Sacco said he had bought his gun two years before in the North End. He had not given his right name then because he was afraid. As to Orciani, yes, he knew him but Vanzetti did not. Boda he had never heard of. Boda did not sound like an Italian name. Suddenly Katzmann asked if he knew anyone named Berardelli. Sacco asked him who Berardelli was. In the course of the interrogation Sacco said that his mother had died recently and that he was planning to return to Italy. When Katzmann asked if he had heard about the South Braintree murders, he said he had read in the Post “there was bandits robbing money.” He had worked in various shoe factories, he admitted, but never in Braintree. He had taken a day off early in April to go to Boston for his passport, but thought he had been working in Stoughton on April 15, the day of the holdup. That was all—the opening gambit—but both men were now aware of the South Braintree crime in relation to each other.
When Vanzetti appeared, Katzmann asked him if he spoke English. He said that he spoke a little. When reminded that he was free not to answer questions, he said he was willing to answer any. He had known Sacco for a year and a half. He told of taking the trolley from Stoughton to Bridgewater with him to see a friend, and of changing cars at Brockton. During the wait he had gone into a fruit store to buy some cigars and to a lunchroom for a cup of coffee. At no time, the evening of May 5, had he seen a man on a motorcycle. The name Boda meant nothing to him. His revolver he had bought four or five years before for eighteen or nineteen dollars at a shop on Hanover Street. At the same time he had bought a box of cartridges. Some of these he had fired off on the Plymouth beach. The remaining six were in the revolver. Katzmann led him indirectly to the date of the South Braintree crime. Vanzetti remembered Patriot’s Day, the nineteenth of April, because it had fallen on a Monday. He had no particular recollection of what he had done the preceding Thursday.
Katzmann had already discovered, before questioning the men, that Sacco had been absent from his work on April 15. When he left the police station he was convinced that Sacco had been involved in the South Braintree murders. Of Vanzetti he was not so sure.
After their questioning, the two Italians, unshaven and bedraggled, were photographed. They were then taken to the Brockton police court and charged with carrying concealed weapons. A local lawyer, William Callahan, was engaged for them. They pleaded guilty. The judge, after consulting with the district attorney’s office, held them without bail under an unrepealed wartime act that empowered him to hold men suspected of major crimes.