The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (18 page)

At that time the police were on the lookout for men who had taken part in an unsuccessful payroll holdup in Bridgewater on the previous 24 December. Suspicion rested on Italians, as eyewitnesses told the police the holdup men seemed to be of that race. The Morelli gang of Providence was suspected.

On 5 May 1920, Nicola Sacco, steadily employed as an edge trimmer in a shoe factory, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler, self-employed, were arrested. They were not questioned concerning the two holdups for several days. The “Red raids” instigated by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had created a stir against radicals and the men were cross-examined as to their political beliefs. They were charged with carrying weapons unlawfully, pistols having been found on them, and they offered certain explanations for the weapons.

The arrest of the men, caught in a dragnet for radicals, placed their feet on the road which led to the electric chair seven years later. Vanzetti was a philosophical anarchist, dreamy and contemplative. He had assisted in some strikes. So had Sacco, whose radical beliefs were vague but socialistic.

Vanzetti was a friend of Salsedo, a follower of Galleani, well known among Massachusetts anarchists. Salsedo, under arrest by agents of the Department of Justice in the Red dragnet and held incommunicado on the fourteenth floor of the Park Row Building in New York was found dead on the pavement below, on 3 May, two days before the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti. Vanzetti had interested himself in the Salsedo case and had gone to New York late in April to consult Salsedo’s counsel. In New York Vanzetti was told that more government raids might be expected and to hide all radical literature possessed by him and his friends. It was while on that mission that he and Sacco were arrested.

Both the Bridgewater and South Braintree crimes were charged to the two men. Sacco proved a time-clock alibi for the first holdup. Vanzetti was indicted, tried for the Bridgewater holdup, and convicted on 22 June, before Superior Court Justice Webster Thayer who sentenced him to twelve to fifteen years in prison. It was later shown that defense counsel bungled the case miserably.

The trial on the lesser charge was in contrast to the usual legal procedure and was obviously part of a “build-up” against both men, for some of the stigma of the Vanzetti conviction spilled over against Sacco when the two were tried together.

On 11 September, 1920, the two were indicted for the South Braintree crime and tried before Judge Thayer the following May. They were convicted of murder in the first degree on 14 July. Eight appeals for a new trial followed, as new evidence was uncovered year after year, and the case became a
cause
célèbre
. Men of intellectual probity and all shades of political belief in many nations, convinced of the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti, enlisted in what became a great army, whose tramping feet were heard in all the capitals of the world. Sacco and Vanzetti became symbols, beliefs, almost a religion—and a crusade for their release swept the earth; a crusade which gained in intensity as the two men neared the shadow of the chair seven years after the shoemaker and the peddler were first arrested as dangerous “Reds”.

During my week’s investigation in 1922 of the background of the Sacco–Vanzetti trial, I saw the men of the defense committee who had already set the worldwide army on the march. Three men were the leaders in this vast movement. One was Aldino Felicani, Italian journalist and printer, who, almost single-handed, began the agitation. Felicani was a linotype operator at the time on
La
Notizia
, an Italian daily in Boston and he began the publicity by pouring forth dozens of letters to Boston newspapers. He had once been a close associate of Mussolini in the days when Il Duce was a Social Radical and had spent six months in the same Italian jail with him when both paid that penalty for their radical activities. A second chief figure was Frank Lopez, a jovial, thickset young man who became secretary of the Sacco–Vanzetti Defense Committee in Boston. It was from this bare Hanover Street office of the committee that the pamphlets and circulars and letters emanated that gained almost immediate worldwide repercussions, some not at all to the liking of members of the committee who believed that bomb explosions and riots would not help their cause.

The publicity was handled by Morris Gebelow, a slender, dark-haired student who wrote under the pen name of Eugene Lyons and who later went to Soviet Russia as correspondent for the United Press.

I also talked to newspapermen who had covered the case, impartial observers, state officials who had taken part in the trial, and Judge Thayer. It was my purpose to review the evidence on both sides.

The newspapermen, I found, with one exception, felt that the trial had been unfair because of the atmosphere surrounding the case. The men were tried in a steel cage, part of the equipment of Massachusetts courts. An unnecessary show of police force was exhibited when they were led to and from the courtroom. There were needless “searchings” of those entering the courtroom. Newspapermen were “patted” for weapons. The newspapers printed stories of threatening letters sent to the court and the jury. It had been difficult to get jurymen to serve because of the atmosphere of hysteria that preceded the trial. Frank P. Sibley, dean of Boston newspapermen who covered the trial, told me he had never seen anything like it. Four years later he put this in the form of an affidavit in which he told how Judge Thayer had solicited the attention of reporters during the trial, had discussed the case against Sacco and Vanzetti freely, and had even asked Sibley to print a story that he was conducting the trial fairly and impartially.

Sibley’s standing in the newspaper fraternity was so high that it was presumed that his affidavit would carry considerable weight. Well over six feet, Sibley, with his sombrero type hat and his flowing Windsor tie, was an outstanding figure wherever he went. As war correspondent with the Yankee Division in France he chronicled the deeds of the New Englanders and their commander in their history-making moments.

From the beginning of the Sacco–Vanzetti trial Sibley saw the gratuitous injection of “patriotism” in the case by the presiding judge and state attorneys. The
Globe
, for which he worked, was one of the most influential of New England’s dailies, and its management strongly opposed the idea that their star reporter make an affidavit as to his observations. Sibley, too, was reluctant to take himself out of the role of disinterested spectator and align himself on one side of the case. His perplexities on the ethics of such action tormented him for a long time but finally he felt that in signing the affidavit he was yielding to the highest sentiment of justice and fair play. Incidentally, this star reporter found himself covering trivial assignments such as flower shows for some time after he had made the affidavit.

“What impressed me more than anything else was his [Judge Thayer’s] manner,” said Sibley. “It is nothing you can read of in the record. In my thirty-five years I never saw anything like it . . . His whole manner, attitude, seemed to be that the jurors were there to convict the men.”

After I had had an opportunity to acquaint myself with the facts in the case and the testimony for and against the two Italians, I wired Judge Thayer for an appointment. He replied on 22 February, and a few days later I called on him at his home, 180 Institute Road, Worcester. After greeting me cordially the Judge said, “I hope the
New
York
Times
is not going to take the side of these anarchists.” He pronounced the first syllable of the word “anarchist” as if it were spelled “on”.

While I was rather taken aback that he should think the
Times
would be interested in “crusading” for two convicted radicals, I soon realized his remark was merely an introduction to a denunciation of all radicals. My reply to his question was that the
Times
was not concerned with taking either side of the case but that it was interested in having prepared a fair and impartial summary of the evidence on which the convictions were returned.

Judge Thayer then launched into a detailed discussion of the case, making no attempt to conceal his aversion for economic and political dissenters and particularly foreigners. His lips trembled with emotion and his yellow and deeply wrinkled face darkened as he spoke of the need for the defense of American institutions. It was obvious that to him a philosophical anarchist was the same as a murderer. He went on in this way for an hour, jumping from the trial testimony to criticism of aliens, anarchists, and radicals. They all seemed to be lumped together in his mind.

The Judge stipulated that I was not to quote him. But the measure of his extraordinary prejudice against Sacco and Vanzetti was obvious.

When I left Judge Thayer that night I was deeply discouraged. To witness at firsthand such expressions of antipathy for aliens and radicals as a group, from one who was called upon to judge his fellow man was disheartening. But Judge Thayer’s attitude was quite mild compared to that of citizens of Boston five years later when I covered the events of the three weeks leading up to the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.

The next five years were marked by a quickening of interest in the case due to the publicity that followed every attempt to obtain a new trial and to the propaganda of the little group of men and women who assisted the defense committee.

New evidence was uncovered year after year to prove that the two men were innocent, to prove that they had not had a fair trial, that Judge Thayer had denounced them as “bastards” and anarchists in conversation outside the courtroom. The Judge was begged to allow another member of the Supreme Court to pass on appeals since he was charged with prejudice. He ruled that he was not prejudiced. Affidavits to prove that important witnesses whose testimony helped convict the men had lied were submitted to Judge Thayer. He turned them down. The head of the State Police, who had told the jury that one of the fatal bullets was “consistent” with being fired from Sacco’s pistol, said that the question which elicited this answer had been framed by him and the prosecutor but that if he had been asked directly if the so-called mortal bullet had passed through Sacco’s pistol, “I should have answered then, as I do now without hesitation, in the negative.”

Celestino Madeiros, a young Portuguese, convicted of the murder of a Wrentham bank cashier and confined in the same jail as Sacco in 1925, signed a “confession” that he had taken part in the South Braintree killing and that Sacco was innocent. In further questioning by the defense he made some admissions that implicated the Morelli gang, well known for freight-car robberies and holdups, but Judge Thayer also rejected this “confession” as ground for a new trial.

To hear these various motions, sentence was postponed from time to time but finally, on 9 April 1927, Judge Thayer announced that the two men would “suffer the punishment of death by the passage of a current of electricity through” their bodies.

Asked by the court clerk whether they had “anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed,” the two men addressed the court, and protested their innocence. Sacco spoke briefly, preferring to have Vanzetti, whose English was better, speak for him. Vanzetti, a vibrant figure with drooping walrus mustaches, reviewed the case. His words stirred the courtroom—and the world.

“I am not only not guilty of these two crimes,” he said in conclusion, “but I never commit a crime in my life. I have never steal and I have never kill and I have never spilt blood and I have fought against the crime and I have fought and I have sacrificed myself even to eliminate the crimes that the law and the church legitimate and sanctify.

“This is what I say: I would not wish to a dog or to a snake, to the most low and misfortunate creature of the earth—I would not wish to any of them what I have had to suffer for things that I am not guilty of. But my conviction is that I have suffered for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian and indeed I am an Italian; I have suffered more for my family and for my beloved than for myself; but I am so convinced to be right that if you could execute me two times and if I could be reborn two other times I would live again to do what I have done already.”

Later he dictated this statement:

“If it had not been for these things, I might have live out my life talking at street corner to scorning men. I might have die unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of men as now we do by accident. Our words—our lives—our pains—nothing! The taking of our lives—lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler—all! That last moment belongs to us—that agony is our triumph.”

The sentencing of the men called for another review of the case, and I wrote a piece for the Sunday section bringing the facts up to date. It was published on 27 April 1927. Fabian Franklin, formerly an associate editor of
The
New
York
Evening
Post
and ex-contributing editor to
The
Independent
, a man of conservative views, read my article and wrote a letter to the
Times
commenting on it. He was “forced to the conclusion”, he wrote, that the men were convicted “upon utterly inadequate evidence, that this result was brought about in large part by deliberate exploitation of the anti-radical passions dominant at the time . . . That the conduct of the trial in many respects violated the first principles of justice and that in denying a new trial when new evidence of a most vital and substantial nature was offered, Judge Thayer failed to live up to the duty of a just and impartial judge.”