sap, but Vanzetti was a real interesting man. I used to drive him
to the Plymouth trial from the jail, and each morning I saw him I’d
say ‘Hello, Bertie,’ and he’d say ‘Hello, Mike.’ Sometimes he used
to sing songs for us in Italian on the way over, and he had quite a
voice. After he heard me testify in court though, the next time he
saw me he raised his hands—he was handcuffed—and shook them at me.
And he never spoke to me again. The thing I remember most about him
is his eyes. He had terrible eyes, like fire when he looked at you.”
Though Orciani, who was with Sacco and Vanzetti just before their
arrest, had produced a watertight alibi after he was picked up,
Stewart was nevertheless convinced of his guilt. “For my money
Orciani was the cleverest of the lot,” he told me. “That’s how he
managed to rig himself up such a good alibi. He was one of those
wise guys. During the trial he used to go to court every day. There
was a little room in back the defense had for exhibits and things
like that, and he had charge of it. Most of the time he’d stand in
the doorway watching what went on in court. Well, Katzmann spotted
him there and the day they were cross-examining Vanzetti and asking
him about where he got his gun, Katzmann looked straight at Orciani
and said, ‘I’ll tell you, Mr. Vanzetti, where you got that gun.’
You could hear his voice right down the corridor. ‘You got it from
your friend Orciani after he took it off of Berardelli’s dead body.’
Katzmann pointed his finger right at him and Orciani ducked. That was
the last time he ever showed up.”
* * * * *
One late-summer afternoon I drove to Billerica to meet Dr. Warren
Steams, dean emeritus of Tufts Medical School, who as state
prison psychiatrist had seen Sacco and Vanzetti regularly in the
years following their conviction. I found him in the study of his
classically square colonial mansion facing the common. He was
listening to a middle-aged man in heavy tortoise-shell spectacles who
held an open book in his left hand and pointed to a passage with his
right.
“It says here,” the man explained, “ten thousand people were there
to see him hanged. That was 1820. I wonder what would draw all those
people to an execution?”
Steams, with his wreath of kinky white hair surrounding a bald
dome, looked amiable, but his voice was tart. “Cruelty. If it were
announced that I was going to be publicly tortured and hanged next
Monday morning on Boston Common there’d be at least a hundred and
fifty thousand people there to see it.”
He beckoned to me apologetically and then, when the other had left,
pointed to a chair. “I’m the Billerica antiquary,” he said. “The
local historians all call on me with their problems. Seventy-five
years old I am. That gives me a life expectancy of five years—and it
would take fifty for me to do all the things I have to do. You came
here to ask me about Sacco and Vanzetti. What do you want to know?”
Without waiting for my answer he went on. “I don’t think the truth
will ever be known. As to whether they did it or not, I don’t know
and I’ve made a point of not trying to know. I tell you this, though.
They weren’t criminal types. For a while I think I saw them as much
as anyone. Sacco had a very winning way about him. Of course he was
a more settled type, with a wife and family. Vanzetti reminded me
of a trade-union leader. That rigid mentality. He once said to me
that where he came from in Italy there was a castle above the town
and one family living in it had been oppressing the ordinary people
in the valley for eight hundred years. I told him that it wasn’t so
in America, that a family scarcely lasted three generations here.
He’d read a little, but he’d not digested it too well—an unstable,
wandering type, paranoid at times. When I saw him once over in the
Charlestown Prison he said to me, ‘I don’t deny the right of the
state to execute a man, but they have no right to castrate me and
make me a laughingstock.’”
The doctor had known personally almost everyone connected with the
case on both sides. Katzmann was to him lazy and incompetent, though
he thought better of his assistant, Harold Williams. Judge Thayer he
gave credit for honest intentions, but found him irascible, a snob,
and obsessed with the idea that the Communists were just about to
take over the United States. Governor Fuller was merely a successful
automobile salesman. Thompson he respected, but felt that he had gone
into the case merely for the fee.
“I thought,” I said, making another stab at it, “that seeing Sacco
and Vanzetti so closely, you might have formed some opinion as to
their guilt or innocence.”
“I feel,” he said, “as William James did about psychic phenomena. I
just do not know.”
When I left, he walked out with me through his back garden blooming
with zinnias. “If you are interested,” he said finally, “I’ll try to
find my files on Sacco and Vanzetti for you. There may be something
there. I’ve had so many cases since that I can’t remember the
details. But drop in when you’re by this way again.”
Three weeks later he was dead.
* * * * *
By chance I discovered that Beltrando Brini was living in Wollaston,
a twenty-minute drive from my home in Wellesley. When a boy of
thirteen, Brini had testified at Vanzetti’s first trial that the
two of them had been delivering eels in Plymouth the day before
Christmas, 1919—the day Vanzetti was to be found guilty of attempting
a holdup in Bridgewater. As he grew up, Brini had broken away from
the Italian community. He had graduated from Boston University and
was now an elementary school principal. Community affairs seemed to
take up most of his spare time. Two weeks passed before he could
find a free evening to see me. I found his house easily enough, a
decent inconspicuous house in a decent inconspicuous street. He was
a small man in his fifties. Like many of the second generation he
still looked Italian, but to a diminished degree. He showed me into
his living room. His wife was standing near the fireplace, a thin
fair-haired woman, not Latin at all. After he had introduced me to
her we sat down, taking each other’s measure while she went into the
kitchen to make coffee.
“You know,” he said finally, “I could have been a musician. I really
could at one time have gotten into the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
But I thought it was safer to be a teacher. That’s why I never seem
to be home nights—always something they want a school principal to
be doing, somewhere they want him to be.” He looked at me sharply.
“You want to know about Vanzetti. He lived with us a long time. He
paid more attention to me than my parents did. He was kind to all
children. I remember one Halloween we all had jack-o’-lanterns.
The others had theirs lighted but mine didn’t have a candle in it.
Vanzetti came along and asked me why I didn’t get a candle. I said I
hadn’t any money. He asked me how much candles cost and I said two
cents, so he fished in his pocket and gave them to me. When I got to
the hardware store I found he’d given me a cent and a dime. So I got
my candle and I brought him back the nine cents. I’d never had that
much money in my pocket before, but I remember how proud of myself I
was that I brought that nine cents back to him.
“I remember the last time I saw him before his arrest. It’s a thing
I somehow still feel ashamed about. A bunch of us were playing ball
in Suosso’s Lane and somebody hit one over the fence into a garden.
While I was climbing over to get it I trampled on some vegetables and
the man who owned the garden came out and started to bawl me out. I
answered him back, like any fresh kid. Then Vanzetti came along, took
me over by the fence, and talked to me. He wasn’t angry, he didn’t
raise his voice, but what he said made me feel ashamed. I didn’t feel
like playing ball any more. I’ve often wished it hadn’t been that
way, the last time I saw him free.
“You know, of course,” he went on, “that I testified I was delivering
eels with him the morning he was supposed to have been holding up the
pay truck in Bridgewater. That’s been the terrible thing for me. I
_was_ there with him all that morning long, and I couldn’t make them
believe me. Sometimes I’ve asked myself, Could I have been wrong,
could I have dreamed it all? Was Vanzetti really at Bridgewater?
But then I know, I _know_ that I was delivering eels with him that
morning. It couldn’t have been any other day, because that’s the
one day Italians always eat eels, no matter what they cost. And I
remember how I started out that morning to go to Vanzetti’s house. It
was muddy and I forgot my rubbers. At the corner I met my father and
he sent me back for them, so I was late. Vanzetti was waiting for me
with the pushcart. We delivered eels until, it must have been, two
o’clock. It’s funny the things you remember. I remember a two-family
house where I made a mistake and went to the wrong door. When we got
all through Vanzetti paid me off at the corner of Cherry Lane and
Court Street. And I know that it happened that way, that it was the
day before Christmas, the same day and the same time they said he was
holding up the truck in Bridgewater. When I told my story in court
Katzmann complimented me on learning my part so well.
“I was only thirteen then and I was scared. I’d never been in a court
before. Katzmann would go at me like a tiger, fire three questions at
me at once. Thayer would never help me out. His face was so stern. He
never said anything, but you could feel his hostility.”
Brini’s wife came in with a tray, and Brini took a pile of magazines
from the coffee table to make room.
“Tell me,” I said, as she joined us. “If you had a friend in trouble
you knew was innocent, could you lie to establish an alibi for him?”
He leaned back in his chair for some seconds, frowning slightly,
while his wife poured the coffee. “I thought you might ask me
something like that,” he said finally. “No, I couldn’t. I suppose you
wanted me to say yes, but I couldn’t. I don’t know why I couldn’t,
either.”
“Could you?” his wife asked me.
“Yes,” I said truthfully, “I could quite easily. Under oath too.”
“So could I,” she said, looking at her husband as if she thought he
was being foolish.
“Well,” he said, “I know this, that I didn’t want to go to court.
Young as I was, I knew what a disadvantage it would be for me to get
mixed up in it. I wanted to be a musician, and whatever I might want,
once I testified, I knew I’d find the way blocked. And it’s shadowed
me ever since. They’ve pointed me out—Brini, the boy who testified
for a murderer. In 1927 I told my story to Governor Fuller, and he
said he believed me, but he never did anything about it. The day
before they were executed I tried to see the governor again, but I
couldn’t get past his secretary. I shouted at him, ‘If I lied, why
don’t you arrest me for perjury?’ All he said was, if I was so brave
why wasn’t I out picketing on the Common. I told him I’d been there
the day before, and I asked to be locked up, but he just turned his
back.”
He set down his coffee cup. “I don’t suppose what I’ve been telling
you helps you much. These are just my feelings. Those others, where
we delivered the eels that morning, they didn’t want to testify
either. They were all good Catholics and Vanzetti was an anarchist.
But they’d bought the eels, they’d seen Vanzetti, and my father
talked to them. They had respect for him, not fear but respect, so
they went.”
As we talked the lights of the suburban street began to wink out,
and I could see it was time for me to go. “You’ll probably think of
things you forgot to ask me,” he said at the door. “Just telephone me
or come down, if there’s anything more you want to know. Any time.”
Driving home, I thought over what Brini had told me. What had a
respectable school principal to gain by lying? If he had had anything
to hide, forty years after the event, he could simply have refused to
see me. Yet if Brini was telling the truth, Vanzetti was innocent of
the Bridgewater holdup. And if he was innocent of the first crime, it
seemed to me he was most probably innocent of the second. But Brini
knew. If he had told me the truth, Vanzetti was an innocent man.
“I think you can sense whether a person is telling the truth or not,”
I told a sergeant at the State Police headquarters a few days later.
“You can judge a man by the sort of person he is, by the general
impression he gives as much as by what he says. You can size him up,
don’t you think?” The sergeant did not reply directly, but his laugh
had a jeering ring.
* * * * *
For weeks I had been trying to get an interview with Michael Dray,
Katzmann’s old law partner, but always, without quite turning me
down, he had eluded me. Katzmann had been dead six years, but Dray
still kept the firm’s name. After the trial Katzmann had never made
any public comment on his great case. Nor since his death had his
partner been less reticent.
Finally, unexpectedly, Dray offered to see me. I drove through Dedham
again, past the rain-wet courthouse with its glistening columns, down
the empty High Street and across the empty square, and then through
the mean industrial section of East Dedham, following the loops of
the Neponset River to Hyde Park. It was a strange feeling to be on
that journey, as if I might at last be heading toward the center of
the maze.
_Katzmann & Dray_—there was the name on the downstairs directory
of the modernized office building on River Street. Upstairs it was
not quite so modern. I followed the dark, creaking corridor until I
faced the name painted on an open door, then walked into a narrow
brown room with nothing in it but a table, a lamp, and a gilt-framed
photograph of Katzmann. I recognized him at once from the afternoon
at Dedham: the square domineering head with the close-cropped hair.
Dray came suddenly out of a back room, a short, pudgy man in his
sixties, with thin mouse-gray hair and blue eyes. “Just go in there,”
he said pointing to another room, “and I’ll be right with you.”
On the oak door were the faded letters F. G. KATZMANN, Room 12.
Stepping inside, I found myself alone. An oak desk faced me. On its
plate-glass top I noticed the issue of _American Heritage_ containing
my Sacco-Vanzetti article with the Ben Shahn illustrations—to
my embarrassment, for my description of Katzmann in it was not
flattering.
Dray strode in briskly, sat down at the desk, and stared at me
several seconds before speaking. “I could have seen you at any time
within the last two months,” he said finally, “but I couldn’t make up
my mind whether to or not. This is what decided me.” He tapped the
magazine. “You write here that though you thought they were innocent,
just by reading the evidence alone you’d have found them guilty. When
I read that I decided you at least were honest. But for that I’d not
have seen you.
“You know that Fred, as long as he lived, refused to discuss this
case publicly with anyone. Of course he mentioned it to me. I don’t
suppose a day went by that he didn’t think of it in one way or
another. I saw him come in sometimes with tears in his eyes and say,
Why do they say these things about me? Why do they keep on attacking
me?’ Don’t think he wasn’t hurt.
“Now he’s gone, thinking it over, I’m willing to tell you a few
things I know to set the record straight, because so much has
been said against him. Fred was almost like a father to me. I was
twenty-four when I came here just after the trial, and I studied what
law I know right here in this office. Fred never had a son of his
own, just his two daughters, and I think he came to look on me sort
of as a son. All I know is this: My son’s at law school now, and if
I can teach him as much decency and as much law as Fred Katzmann did
me, I’ll think I’m a lucky man. You think I admire Fred. I do.”
He opened the _American Heritage_. “Here you speak of Katzmann as
being, in spite of his name, a Mayflower descendant. He wasn’t. His
father was a German, his mother Scotch and came from Roxbury. They
were poor. His mother used to work. Fred had nothing. I think when he
went to Harvard an aunt helped him out a little, but he used to tend
furnaces to work his way through. Sometimes he earned a bit singing.
He had a fine voice. Even when he was starting up his practice he
still used to sing sometimes at churches and funerals.
“We got pretty close over the years. I don’t think in the end
there was anything he kept back from me. I knew about his family,
his social life, his practice. I knew how he felt about the
Sacco-Vanzetti case. In that he never changed. He didn’t just think
they were guilty, he _knew_ they were guilty. He wouldn’t have
avoided the case, for he never did put off dirty jobs onto other
people, but sometimes he’d say to me, ‘Mike, if I had my life to live
over, I’d never want to go through that again.’ He always felt it
shortened his wife’s life, the whole business. For years they had to
have guards round his house. He said whenever he woke up nights he’d
hear them tramping round.
“A lot of things I set myself out to tell you,” Dray went on, “but
they slip through my mind right now. Just this, though. I’ve built up
a good practice in Hyde Park. I’ve done all right here. But I always
have the feeling somehow that it was Fred’s practice, that anything
I’ve amounted to has been through him. I want to defend his memory,
and that’s why I’m talking to you.
“I’ll tell you another thing. When Jerry McAnarney was on the
Sacco-Vanzetti defense, he thought his clients were innocent. I never
heard any of the Defense Committee boys criticize Jerry. He went to
the governor’s committee afterward and he still thought they were
innocent. But he and Fred stayed the same good friends all through
the years. They were partners together on that Willett-Sears case.
Maybe you remember, that case lasted fourteen months—the longest jury
case in the history of Massachusetts. I suppose if anyone asked Fred
to name his ten best friends, Jerry McAnarney would have been among
them. And if Jerry named his best five, Fred would have been on the
list. I remember, too, just a short while before Jerry died he said
one day right in this office: ‘No matter what they said about you,
Fred, you were all right.’”
So we talked—or rather, I listened—as the lawyer talked through the
afternoon. Katzmann had avoided the Dedham courtroom the day Thayer
passed sentence, but Dray had gone there deliberately, and had heard
Vanzetti’s speech to the court and watched him point his finger at
the judge. For Dray, Vanzetti had seemed a sinister figure at that
moment with his glaring eyes, his heavy bobbing mustache, and his
passionate foreign voice.
Inevitably, we got to the subject of the guns.
“There’s a church just across the street,” Dray said. “The priest,
Father Fraher, had a brother who was in here after the trial. He told
Fred, ‘You want to know where Berardelli got his gun? He got it from
me, that’s where he got it.’ There was a crack or nick or some sort
of mark on the handle, and this Fraher said, ‘If the one you found on
Vanzetti has that mark on it, it’s the same gun.’ He hadn’t even seen
the gun then, mind you, but when we showed it to him, there was the
mark, just like he said.
“Ah,” he said at last, sadness in his voice, “I wish I could explain
to you in words what Fred really was. You couldn’t really understand
him, seeing him just that once. Perhaps you were fed up with being
on a jury. Fred wasn’t tricky. He was honest all the way through. I
remember some man came in here once and wanted Fred to defend him
in a robbery case, offered him five thousand dollars. That was a
lot more money then than it is today. When he came to pay Fred, he
brought the money in a box, all in bills, done up in little piles. As
soon as Fred saw it, he wouldn’t touch the case. That money looked
too much like payroll money. But an assistant district attorney over
in Suffolk County didn’t mind taking it. No, you couldn’t get Fred
to do anything that had even a suspicion of being wrong. He was that
kind of man.”
I left Dray in the anteroom. We shook hands beside Katzmann’s
picture. “I’m glad you came,” he said finally.
Out I went into the slashing rain, to my car parked by the dark bulk
of the Catholic church where Father Fraher or his successor was
probably still hearing confessions. If only Dray could have whipped
open one of his filing cabinets and taken out the ultimate document
that would have satisfied everyone from Aldino Felicani in his
sheet-metal office to the corporation lawyer on Federal Street. I
would have settled for a villain, but I had found only decent-enough
people in irreconcilable positions, and still at the core of the
labyrinth two men who had died a third of a century earlier in the
electric chair.
CHAPTER THREE
APRIL 15, 1920
Thursday mornings Shelley Neal, the South Braintree agent for the
American Express Company, met the 9:18 local from Boston to pick
up the payrolls of the Slater & Morrill and Walker & Kneeland shoe
factories. Until January 1920, the payrolls had been sent down on
Wednesdays, but recently there had been so many holdups around Boston
that the head office had altered its delivery schedules.
It was an uneasy time, that year after the soldiers returned. In
November the savings bank in the neighboring town of Randolph, a few
miles west of Braintree, had been held up and robbed. A month later,
on the day before Christmas, four men in a touring car had tried to
rob the paymaster of the L. Q. White shoe factory in Bridgewater,
sixteen miles to the south. An unknown gang had recently stolen
several freight-car loads of shoes belonging to Slater & Morrill.
Almost every week Neal received a notice from the Boston office
warning him to take every precaution, particularly to watch out for
suspicious strangers. He now carried his 38-caliber Colt in his
pocket with the pocket flap tucked inside so that he could reach for
it quickly.
South Braintree was the other side of the New York, New Haven
& Hartford tracks, at the wrong end of town. Had there been a
national-bank branch there, the payroll money would not have
had to be sent down by train, but the triangle of factories and
narrow streets and workers’ houses was not commercially important
enough. Braintree itself, lying ten miles south of Boston, was an
undistinguished community of about fifteen thousand inhabitants that
one passed through almost absent-mindedly on the old turnpike road to
Cape Cod.
On Thursday morning, April 15, Neal, in his customary dark suit,
derby, and overcoat, waited on the station platform with Art Stevens,
one of his expressmen. The 9:18 was late. Neal drew out his gold
Waltham on its heavy chain with the Masonic seal. Nine twenty-one. He
could hear the wail of the steam-whistle—two long notes, a short, and
a long—as the train approached the Braintree crossing. It would take
another five minutes to reach South Braintree.
His express wagon was backed up to the curb, the driver hunched
forward on the seat, his coat collar over his ears. Between the
shafts the horse jingled his brasses, stamped, steamed, and tossed
his head. Although the sun was four hours up, the air still held an
aftermath of winter. Neal’s blunt hands with their hairy knuckles
showed red, the diamond set in the thick gold band on his left ring
finger reflected the light coldly.
A cumulus puff from the invisible train billowed up, blurring the
horizon outline of the water towers on Penns Hill, Quincy. Within
a minute the engine rounded the curve, growing larger as it moved
soundlessly against the wind. Then the whistle echoed again and
suddenly the train loomed up on the Union Street crossing by the
Victorian brick aggregate of Thayer Academy. The station windows
began to vibrate with the sound.
Almost before Neal was aware of it the train had slipped into the
station, the brass bell on the boiler clanging, the driving wheels
slurring to a halt. He waved to the engineer as the cab passed.
Below the station at the Pearl Street crossing Mike Levangie, the
lank-mustached, one-legged gate-tender, hobbled out of his shack
and cranked down the double gate, then clumped over the tracks and
lowered the single one.
Several passengers got off, a man and a woman got on, the
stationmaster came out to check a bundle of Boston newspapers. Neal
and Stevens walked to the baggage car where the freight clerk was
waiting for them. Neal did not know his name—he was a new fellow—but
he was a Mason. “Cold morning,” he remarked as he shoved an iron box
across the floor. It contained some thirty thousand dollars in bills
and coin. After Neal had signed the receipt book the clerk handed him
the box’s key in a sealed envelope.