Weyland, West, and other agents attended the Dedham trial in the expectation of finding sufficient evidence against Sacco and Vanzetti to deport them as anarchists in case they were acquitted of murder.
In the autumn of 1920, either West or Katzmann conceived the idea of planting an informer in the cell next to Sacco. West hoped to find out something about the Wall Street bomb explosion of September 16. Although all the clues in that bombing had come to nothing, the Justice Department held to its theory that the explosion was the work of anarchists. West and Katzmann talked the matter over with Feri Felix Weiss, formerly one of West’s agents. Weiss operated his own “Scientific-Secret-Service,” but still did occasional work for the Department’s Bureau of Investigation. He sent a letter to an informer, John Ruzzamenti, in Reddington, Pennsylvania, asking if he would be willing to help in getting evidence against two probable criminals. He might have to stay in jail for a few days, but success in this job might lead to bigger investigations, like the Wall Street explosion, with juicier expense accounts. The eager Ruzzamenti arrived on Weiss’s doorstep two days after Christmas.
Katzmann, on meeting Ruzzamenti in his courthouse office, appeared bluffly cordial, helping him off with his overcoat and calling him John. He then explained his plan. Ruzzamenti would be arrested with burglar tools in the act of breaking into a house. The sheriff would see that he was placed in the cell adjoining Sacco’s. Ruzzamenti would act depressed for the first few days and say nothing, then try to strike up a conversation.
Ruzzamenti objected to being tagged with a police record and when Katzmann could not change his mind, he suggested that Ruzzamenti go to Stoughton and see what he could ferret out there. They would arrange that he got some sort of job in the town, perhaps in a shoe factory. As an Italian he might even manage to rent a room from Rosina Sacco. Katzmann said he had reports that she was in an upset state. It should be easy to establish friendly relations with her.
To this proposal Ruzzamenti agreed. Whether or not Katzmann was serious about it or was just thinking aloud, he soon afterward dropped the idea as well as any connection with Ruzzamenti. He and West and Weiss managed to place a more amenable informer near Sacco. The man, Antony Carbone, spent several days in the jail and managed to talk with Sacco at intervals but could find out nothing.
The guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti in regard to the South Braintree murders was of no direct concern to the Department of Justice. Most of the Boston agents who knew anything about the case felt that Sacco and Vanzetti were not guilty. This was the opinion of Fred Weyand, who later deposed:
From my investigation, combined with the investigation made by the other agents of the Department in Boston, I am convinced not only that these men had violated the Selective Service rules and regulations and evaded the draft, but that they were anarchists, and that they ought to have been deported. By calling these men anarchists, I do not mean necessarily that they were inclined to violence, nor do I understand all the different meanings that different people would attach to the word “anarchist.” What I mean is that I think they did not believe in organized government or in private property. But I am also thoroughly convinced, and always have been, and I believe that it is and always has been the opinion of such Boston agents of the Department of Justice as had any knowledge on the subject, that these men had nothing whatever to do with the South Braintree murders, and that their conviction was the result of cooperation between the Boston agents of the Department of Justice and the District Attorney. It was the general opinion of the Boston agents of the Department of Justice having knowledge of the affair that the South Braintree crime was committed by a gang of professional highwaymen.
Six months before the trial Moore was reiterating the claim, sensationally and vociferously, that Sacco and Vanzetti would not and could not get a fair hearing in the biased atmosphere of Norfolk County. In his experience rigged trials were common enough, but beyond this it was part of his tactics to claim unfairness in advance.
Many earnest defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti have maintained, as did Moore, that in the postwar period of xenophobia no alien holding extreme political beliefs could possibly have found justice in conservative Dedham at the hands of a local jury. As early as January 1921, a Defense Committee pamphlet claimed that “a Northern jury does not examine the law and the evidence impartially when a murder accusation is leveled against a member of the Mediterranean race whose reputation is colored with the fanciful versions of the Mafia that furnished Sunday-Magazine readers mental diet for so many years.”
Yet, in contrast to these a priori beliefs, a case tried in Dedham in April 1920 demonstrated that the citizens of Norfolk had lost neither their sense of justice nor their common sense. The very week Attorney General Palmer was curling the hair of the credulous by announcing that on May Day the Reds planned to make the national capital “the scene of the slaughter of high officials” an alien anarchist with the outlandish name of Segris Zagroff was brought before Judge Thayer, charged with advocating the overthrow of the government by violence. Zagroff had been picked up in a foreign radical club in Norwood, the walls of which were hung with pictures of the new Bolshevik Russian leaders. He freely and volubly admitted to the police that he was an anarchist and that he did not approve of the American form of government. In spite of his statements the Dedham jury freed him.