When Guadagni objected that fifteen thousand was still too much, Mrs. DeFalco telephoned the Dedham courthouse and after talking briefly with someone not identified, told them that five thousand would be enough for a start; they would also reduce the remainder to thirty-five thousand, which had to be paid as soon as the trial was postponed. She said she had arranged to have the lawyers meet the committee members at her house that evening. Felicani and Guadagni agreed to drive out.
They left Boston about eight o’clock. When they reached the back street in East Dedham where the DeFalcos lived, they hesitated. The small square house was brightly lit and two cars were parked in front of it. Felicani and Guadagni decided not to go in. Before leaving, they copied down the license numbers of the cars. One turned out to be Squires’, the other Fred Katzmann’s.
The members of the committee were inclined to pay the money. Not so Moore. Suspecting that the defense might be charged with trying to bribe public officials, he—over Felicani’s protest—had Cicchetti and Mrs. DeFalco arrested. Cicchetti was released but Mrs. DeFalco was held on the technical charge of attempting to solicit law business, not being an attorney. As no money had changed hands this was all she could be charged with.
On the stand in the Boston municipal court she gave a rambling account of how Cicchetti, a brother-in-law of her brother, had asked her if she could help him see his friend Sacco. He had also asked if she and her brother would go to Boston with him to see Felicani about getting a Norfolk County lawyer to defend Sacco and Vanzetti. She admitted that she had had talks with members of the Defense Committee. One morning she had met Guadagni, who introduced himself as Mr. Giovannitti of New York. He had told her the committee had a lawyer, Moore, whom they were paying three hundred dollars a week although he was not doing much. When Felicani had asked her what lawyer she would recommend she had named Squires, whom she knew because her husband was his gardener. She had arranged a meeting for them with Squires at her home, but Felicani and Guadagni had never showed up.
District Attorney Katzmann then took the stand to deny that he knew Mrs. DeFalco. He had never even heard of her until her arrest. Percy Katzmann said he had known her for about seven years and had employed her as an interpreter in his Italian cases. Mrs. DeFalco had asked him several times if he would take on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and though he first told her he would not, out of friendship for her he had agreed to meet Felicani and Guadagni at her house.
Inspector Flaherty, who had arrested Mrs. DeFalco, testified she had said then she would “fix those anarchists.” She was found not guilty. Judge Murray called her conduct “imprudent, unwise, but not criminal.”[8]
Whatever Mrs. DeFalco had been up to, the episode and the standing of the men involved gave the Greater Boston community its first inkling of the enlarged dimensions of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Moore’s propaganda efforts were getting not only action but reaction.
Even before Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, their names were in the files of the Department of Justice. After the Plymouth trial the Boston office began to take a more active interest in them. Agents were assigned to attend the various Sacco-Vanzetti defense meetings. One of them, Harold Zorian, even managed to become a collector for the Defense Committee, although, as he admitted afterward, he kept most of the money for himself.
William J. West, the agent in charge of the Boston office’s Radical Division, furnished memoranda regularly to District Attorney Katzmann about Sacco and Vanzetti’s anarchist activities. As Fred Weyand, one of the Department’s Boston agents explained it:
The understanding in this case between the agents of the Department of Justice in Boston and the District Attorney followed the usual custom, that the Department of Justice would help the District Attorney to secure a conviction, and that he in turn would help the agents of the Department of Justice to secure information that they might desire.