[5] Like Sacco a native of Torremaggiore, Mucci had spent some time in America and had been one of the defending counsel in the Ettor-Giovannitti trial at Lawrence.
[6] Shields would end up a Communist. Minor, already one, visualized even that early the propaganda possibilities in Sacco and Vanzetti. He became a cartoonist for the Daily Worker and later its editor. By the time of the Bridgewater crime he had written a savage attack on anarchism in which he defended the recent suppression of the Russian anarchists by the Bolsheviks.
[7] Francis J. Squires was clerk of the district court in Dedham; Percy, a lawyer, was Fred Katzmann’s brother.
[8] Four years after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, Angelina DeFalco appeared in the Suffolk Superior Court in Boston, accused of the theft of fifteen hundred fifty dollars from Mrs. Giovanino Voce on the promise of bringing about the release of the latter’s brother, then serving a ten-year sentence in state prison. Found guilty of grand larceny, Mrs. DeFalco received a six-month jail sentence. She was still living in Dedham in 1961. When I telephoned her and mentioned the Sacco-Vanzetti case, she hung up. A few weeks before Francis Squires died in 1960, I found him unwilling to discuss the DeFalco incident.
CHAPTER NINE
THE TRIAL: I
Judge Thayer’s voice rasped as he looked down from the bench at the plump venireman from Brookline, the fourth in succession who had asked to be excused because he did not believe in capital punishment. “Do you set your opinion above the law?” the judge asked caustically. “Have you done anything to get the law changed? Have you seen your local representative about it?” The man did not know who his representative was.
From the look of the odd-lot prospective jurors who were passing through the courtroom on this first morning of the trial it seemed as if most of the able men of Norfolk County had managed to sneak their names off the jury list. The apologetic line filed by the bench—fogies long past the statutory age, invalids, men who had been deaf for years, whose wives were dying and who had certificates to prove it, who were just about to sail for Europe, and finally the objectionable objectors.
Of course there were the occasional better prospects, but every time a man came along who looked educated or respectable, as if he might be somebody, Moore seemed bound to challenge him. That was the way it struck Jerry McAnarney. If Jerry had been going on trial for murder he knew he would rather take his chances with a businessman than with some fellow who dug sewers. But not Fred Moore; he wanted the sewer-digger every time. There was a young fellow Jerry had spotted in the line, a good clean-cut college type; as soon as Moore found out he worked for Page & Company, that finished him. Then there was someone McAnarney recognized from the New England Trust Company, the sort of man any defense lawyer ought to get down on his knees to have on a jury. He told Moore so, but Moore would not have him.
For thirty years Jerry McAnarney had been going in and out of the Dedham courthouse, but he had never seen anything like this morning. State troopers in khaki, some mounted, were deployed all around the courthouse. Other troopers with motorcycles and sidecars swept up and down the High Street, the pop of their exhausts sounding like machine-gun fire. And inside there were police and deputies at the doors, parading up and down the corridors, on the stairs.
When Jerry and Tom arrived at the courthouse just before ten they found the front door locked. The side door was also locked. When they knocked, a guard looked through the glass and waved them off. Finally a court officer recognized them and let them in. Inside, a trooper patted them over for weapons. Then a flashy policeman stopped them at the foot of the stairs, and on the landing they were stopped again. The way the place was guarded, Jerry told his brother, it looked as if Sheriff Capen was getting ready to try the Kaiser.