there. Stewart told Simon Johnson ominously that there was some
pretty serious business afoot and that if Boda or anyone else should
come for the Overland, Johnson was to string him along until he could
call the police.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Several years later another investigator measured the shed and
said that it would have been impossible to maneuver a car from the
right-hand threshold to the area on the left.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE NIGHT OF MAY 5
A week after Stewart’s visit, Simon Johnson received a long-distance
telephone call at his garage from Boda asking if the Overland was
ready. Johnson told him it was. Boda said he would pick it up next
day. Next day he did not appear. Another week passed, and Johnson
began to worry about his bill. He asked Stewart if he could sell the
car for what was owing on it. Stewart told him to wait.
On the evening of May 5 Johnson had felt out of sorts and gone to bed
early. At a little after nine o’clock his wife, Ruth, was sitting
in the front bedroom of their one-story wooden house on North Elm
Street, a quarter of a mile from the garage, when she heard a knock
at the front door. Going to the vestibule, she asked who it was. A
voice replied that it was Mike Boda and that he had come for his car.
From the bedroom Johnson recognized the foreign voice. As his wife
came back, he whispered to her to go next door and telephone. She
nodded, then said loudly enough to be heard outside: “Mr. Boda is
here for his car. While you’re getting up I’ll go over for the milk.”
As she opened the front door and stepped outside she found herself
caught in a beam of light. At first she could make out nothing beyond
the whiteness, then she saw Boda vaguely outlined against a telephone
pole ten feet away. As her eyes grew more used to the glare, she
noticed two strangers walking toward her from across the railroad
bridge thirty feet south of the house. She could hear them talking—in
Italian, she thought. The glare caught them. They looked foreign. One
was wearing a derby and an overcoat. The other, who wore a felt hat,
Ruth Johnson remembered afterward because of his drooping mustache.
Boda called out something to them and then walked toward her.
“Mr. Johnson isn’t feeling good,” she told him, “but he’s getting out
of bed to get your car for you.”
Boda nodded as she walked past him toward the Bartlett house next
door. The light, she now saw, came from a motorcycle. A man in a
checked mackinaw with a hat pulled over his eyes was sitting in the
saddle with one hand resting on the empty sidecar. After she had
passed into the darkness she had the uneasy feeling that the men were
following her. But there were no steps behind her as she turned up
the Bartletts’ driveway. To her relief, the lights in the house were
still on downstairs.
One of the Bartlett children let her in. Over the hall telephone, in
a voice barely under control, she told the operator to get through
to the police. For the moment that was all she could think of to
say. West Bridgewater then had no police force, only two part-time
policemen. The operator connected her with the house of one of them,
Warren Laughton, who was also fire chief and water commissioner.
Laughton had just stepped out, his wife said, but she took the
message that the Johnsons had agreed on with Stewart: “Boda has come
for his car.”
Johnson dressed slowly. When he finally stepped out of his house the
first thing he noticed was Boda walking toward him from the bridge.
Farther off he saw the motorcycle with the indeterminate outlines of
the driver and the two other men. The usually dapper Boda was wearing
a crumpled brown suit and an old slouch hat. He said he wanted to
take the Overland away at once. Johnson asked him if he had brought
license plates. Boda said he had not. Johnson told him he could not
drive without plates. “I will take the chance,” Boda said. Johnson
said that when his wife got back, they would go down to the garage.
Boda, watching Mrs. Johnson return, said he guessed it was too late
for the car now, that he would send someone with plates for it next
day. He said good night and turned away. The man in the mackinaw
kicked the motorcycle’s starter pedal and the other two men stepped
back. Ruth Johnson, as she passed, sensed that they were watching
her and she thought she caught the word _telephone_ mixed in their
foreign speech.
Boda stepped into the sidecar, squatted down, and the motorcycle
spluttered off north toward Brockton. The taillight was out, but
Johnson had already noted the license plate: _871_. As the motor
echoed away, the two strangers, the man in the derby and the man with
the drooping mustache, started back over the railroad bridge. The
Johnsons watched them hesitate, turn, and disappear in the direction
the motorcycle had taken.
Along empty North Elm Street they trudged for a mile, following the
Bridgewater-Brockton trolley line. Meeting a solitary woman, they
asked her where the car stop was. She pointed just beyond them to a
white-striped pole on the corner of Sunset Avenue. They thanked her.
A few minutes later the electric car from Bridgewater hummed along
the track. It was 9:40 when the two men stepped aboard it.
Until he had a closer look at him, Austin Cole, the
twenty-three-year-old conductor, thought that the man in the derby
and the walrus mustache was a Portuguese named Tony. Cole asked if
they were going to Brockton and the other man, who was clean-shaven,
said yes. At that hour the car was almost empty. The newcomers walked
stiffly down the aisle and sat in the first cross-seat at the rear.
Somehow they reminded Cole of a pair who had got on at the same place
about the same time a few weeks back.
The car swayed and rattled through the darkness. Where North Elm
Street crossed the Brockton line it became Copeland Street, and the
houses—most of them with their lights out now—began to give way to
small shops and an occasional church. Cole, counting transfers, eyed
the strangers in the back seat. They were aliens. Anyone could see
that. The high-cheek boned man with the drooping mustache was easy
to spot, but beyond his obviousness there was a quality about them
both—a stiffness of feature, a fixed look to the eyes, just the
awkward way they wore their clothes—that set them apart. Americans
were put together more loosely.
When Warren Laughton arrived home and received Ruth Johnson’s
message, he had no idea what was back of it but called Chief Stewart
at once. However, by the time Stewart arrived at the Johnson house
the two strangers were already on the Brockton car.
How Stewart knew they were on that car is not wholly clear. One
account has it that Johnson followed them and saw the car stop
at Sunset Avenue. It may be that the unnamed woman at the corner
of Sunset Avenue reported them. In any case, Stewart went to the
Bartlett house and called the Brockton police headquarters.
A few minutes before 10 P.M. Michael Connolly, the officer on
duty at Station 2, Campello, received a call from the Brockton
central station telling him that two foreigners on the trolley from
Bridgewater had just tried to steal an auto. The trolley was due in
Brockton any minute. Connolly put down a sandwich, nodded to the
sergeant at the desk, and hurried off to Main Street with Officer
Earl Vaughn. Vaughn walked north, Connolly headed south. It was four
minutes past ten. Connolly saw the trolley’s headlight as it turned
into Main Street from Keith Avenue. A hulking, florid, pugnacious man
who liked a good pinch, he hoped that the suspects had not got off.
He signaled to the motorman and swung aboard while the trolley was
still moving.
As Connolly steadied himself and glanced down the aisle he saw the
foreigners in the rear seat. A year later at the Dedham trial he gave
his version of the arrest:
_I went down through the car and when I got opposite the seat
I stopped and I asked them where they came from. They said,
“Bridgewater.” I said, “What was you doing in Bridgewater?” They
said, “We went down to see a friend of mine.” I said, “Who is your
friend?” He said, “A man by the—they call him Poppy.” “Well,” I said,
“I want you, you are under arrest.” Vanzetti was sitting on the
inside of the seat ... and he went, put his hand on his hip pocket
and I says, “Keep your hands on your lap, or you will be sorry.”_
_They wanted to know what they were arrested for and I says,
“Suspicious characters.” We went on—oh, it was maybe about three
minutes’ ride where ... Officer Vaughn got on ... and I told Officer
Vaughn to fish Vanzetti, and I just gave Sacco a slight going over,
just felt him over, did not go into his pockets, and we led them out
the front way of the car._
Vaughn found a loaded revolver in the hip pocket of the man with the
mustache and gave it to Connolly, who kept it in his hand all the
way to the Brockton central station. Officers Spear and Snow of the
central station had driven down to meet the trolley.
_I put Sacco and Vanzetti in the back of our light machine [Connolly
continued], and Officer Snow got in the back seat with them. I took
the front seat with the driver, facing Sacco and Vanzetti.... I told
them when we started that the first false move I would put a bullet
in them. On the way to the station Sacco reached his hand to under
his overcoat and I told him to keep his hands outside of his clothes
and on his lap.... I says to him, “Have you got a gun there?” He
says, “No.” He says, “I ain’t got no gun.” “Well,” I says, “keep your
hands outside your clothes.” We went along a little further and he
done the same thing. I gets up on my knees on the front seat and I
reaches over and I puts my hand on his coat but I did not see any
gun. “Now,” I says, “Mister, if you put your hand in there again you
are going to get into trouble.” He says, “I don’t want no trouble.”
We reached the station, brought them up to the office and searched
them._
The revolver taken from the mustached man was a 38-caliber Harrington
& Richardson, its five chambers loaded with two Remington and three
U. S. cartridges. Taken from him at the Campello station were four
shotgun shells, a pocket knife, a handkerchief, twenty dollars, and
several pamphlets. The smooth-faced man was searched by Officer
Spear, who found a 32-caliber Colt automatic tucked in his waistband.
The Colt had eight cartridges in the clip and one in the chamber.
In the man’s pocket were twenty-three loose cartridges. Though all
32-caliber, the cartridges were of assorted makes—sixteen Peters,
seven U. S., six Winchesters, and three Remingtons. In addition the
man had in his pocket a penciled announcement in Italian that read:
_Proletarians, you have fought all the wars. You have worked
for all the owners. You have wandered over all the countries.
Have you harvested the fruits of your labors, the price of your
victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile
on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a
piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like
a human being? On these questions, on this argument, and on this
theme, the struggle for existence, Bartolomeo Vanzetti will speak.
Hour____Day____Hall____Admission free. Freedom of discussion to all.
Take the ladies with you._
Within a quarter of an hour Chief Stewart arrived at the station,
heady with excitement at the springing of his trap. With him were
his night patrolmen Frank LeBaron and Warren Laughton, and Simon
Johnson. Johnson at once identified the prisoners as the men he
had seen standing by the motorcycle. Stewart then questioned them
individually. He talked to the mustached man first, taking care to
repeat the cautionary formula that the latter did not have to answer
questions but that anything he said might be held against him. The
prisoner did not hesitate. He said his name was Bartolomeo Vanzetti,
that he was an Italian, thirty-two years old and a fish peddler,
and that he lived at 35 Cherry Street, Plymouth. For the last two
days, he said, he had been visiting his friend, Nick Sacco, in South
Stoughton. The two of them had gone to Bridgewater that evening to
see Vanzetti’s friend Poppy, but it was so late by the time they
arrived that they decided Poppy had probably gone to bed and they
might as well go home. They were on their way back to South Stoughton
when the police picked them up. As for Poppy, that was only the
man’s nickname. Vanzetti did not know his real name or even his
address in Bridgewater, but he was a big man who usually wore a blue
shirt. They had worked together in the Plymouth Cordage plant.
Vanzetti denied knowing anyone named Boda or Coacci. He said he had
never before been in West Bridgewater. He had walked some distance
before he had taken the trolley, but he had seen no motorcycle all
evening. Stewart suddenly asked Vanzetti if he was an anarchist, if
he approved of the government. All Vanzetti would admit was that he
was a little different and that he liked things different. As to
why he was carrying a revolver, he said that he was in business and
needed it for protection. He had no permit.
Stewart’s questioning of the second man followed the same line. The
suspect said his name was Nicola Sacco, that he was married, lived in
South Stoughton, and had been in America eleven years. For the last
two years he had worked at the Three-K factory in Stoughton. He had
once looked for a job in Bridgewater, but he had never been in West
Bridgewater until tonight. He did not know any Boda or Coacci. He had
not seen a motorcycle. He was not an anarchist or Communist. As for
the automatic in his waistband, he carried it because there were a
lot of bad men about. He had bought it a long time ago at some shop
near Hanover Street in Boston. The cartridges were from a box he had
bought and they just happened to be in his pocket. He had planned to
shoot them off in the woods with his friends.
Stewart’s questioning of both men lasted about ten minutes. They were
then locked up.
Neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had been behind bars before. Now, in
adjoining cells under the shadowless glare of the overhead light,
with a wooden shelf to sleep on and a seatless toilet in the corner,
they sensed the isolating fear of arbitrary impersonal force. To
the policemen going on and off duty they were curiosities and as
such subject to a certain amount of crude horseplay. When the two
men requested blankets the reply was that they would find it warm
enough when they were lined up in the hall for a little live target
practice, and one patrolman showed Vanzetti a cartridge which he then
slipped into the barrel of his revolver, cocking it and pointing
between the bars. When Vanzetti did not move, the other spat on the
floor contemptuously and turned away.
* * * * *
According to the Registry of Motor Vehicles records the motorcycle
in which Boda had ridden off belonged to Ricardo Orciani. A molder
in a Norwood foundry, Orciani boarded at 1532 Hyde Park Avenue with
Angelo Ventola, whose brother, Joseph Ventola, lived across the
street. Orciani was picked up in his room the night of May 6 and
taken to Brockton. Still wearing the checked mackinaw of the night
before, he was identified by Simon and Ruth Johnson as the driver of
the motorcycle. A short, cocky Italian with an assured round face
and clipped mustache, he was unperturbed by his arrest. He refused
to answer questions. Where he went, he told the police, was his own
business. The revolver found in his bureau was one he just happened
to have.
On Thursday, May 6, the district attorney for Norfolk and Plymouth
counties, Frederick Gunn Katzmann, appeared at the Brockton station
to take over the questioning, bringing with him a stenographer and an
interpreter.
Katzmann was then in his late forties, a plump, ambitious man
whose presence seemed underlined by the smartness of his dress,
his snap-brim hat, and his raglan Burberry coat. He had grown up
on one of the poorer streets of Hyde Park, a gray semi-industrial
adjunct of Boston, attending the Boston Latin School and then
crossing the Charles River to enter Harvard with the class of 1896.
As an unathletic poor boy from Hyde Park, his years at Harvard
were obscure. He belonged to no clubs, took part in no sports
or undergraduate activities. Nor, on the other hand, was he a
scholar. At the end of his senior year his one distinction was an
honorable mention in engineering. Returning to Hyde Park with his
diploma, he worked for several years as a meter-reader for the local
electric-light company. What he really wanted was to be a lawyer. If
he had had the money he would have gone on to the Harvard Law School.
Instead he attended night sessions at Boston University, receiving
his bachelor of laws degree in 1902.
For the next year he served as an apprentice with one of the
established firms of Boston’s Pemberton Square. But the staid legal
world of Beacon Hill and State Street was a fenced-off Brahmin
preserve. A Hyde Park boy with a B.U. law degree and a dubious name
would not penetrate that circle.
Katzmann was sensitive about his name. His mother’s maiden name—his
own middle one—was Gunn, and he tried to emphasize its Anglican
propriety in his signature. After his year at Pemberton Square he
returned to the familiar puddle of Hyde Park and set up his office
on the second floor of a wooden building on River Street. There,
in a small ocher room with a creaking floor smelling of oil, he
hung his two diplomas and filled several sectional bookcases with
secondhand volumes of _Corpus Juris_. He prospered. From 1907 to
1908 he represented Hyde Park in the Massachusetts legislature. The
following year he was appointed assistant district attorney. From
1909 until Hyde Park was absorbed by Boston in 1912 he served on the
school committee. In November, 1916, he ran for district attorney and
was elected to a three-year term. In 1919 he was re-elected.
Katzmann’s personality, like his figure, expanded with success.
He could plan to go back to his Harvard twenty-fifth reunion with
pride, the chill of his undergraduate years forgotten. As an active,
conforming Republican, the prospect of a judgeship in the superior
court or even, with luck, the state attorney-generalship lay ahead
of him. The drawback of his name scarcely bothered him now. He lived
with his wife and two young daughters in a Victorian frame house on
the Mattapan side of River Street, within walking distance of his
office. He was a member of the Hyde Park Lodge of Masons, the Cebra
Tennis Club, and the Wollaston Golf Club. He became Hyde Park counsel
for the Family Welfare Society of Boston. As district attorney he
was popular if undistinguished, a routine prosecutor addicted to the
McKinley-baroque style of oratory. The district had re-elected him
in spite of the war-fanned prejudice against German names. As with
many criminal lawyers, the law was for him, like politics, a game
where at times one might have to cut a few corners, but in the end
the best man usually won, and the loser congratulated the winner. It
was a game played with other men’s years and sometimes with their
lives—but still a game. Such was the man, soon to become a symbol
of chicanery and deceit for indifferently informed protestors all
over the world, as he arrived at the Brockton police station for the
routine questioning of two holdup suspects.
Especially in questioning foreigners the district attorney favored
the disarming approach, bluff, fatherly, confidential—you deal
straight with me and I’ll deal straight with you. It is particularly
effective after a suspect has spent a night in a cell. Katzmann first
questioned Sacco. For some time he put merely routine questions to
him about his acquaintances, about the gun and the cartridges. Sacco
said he had bought his gun two years before in the North End. He had
not given his right name then because he was afraid. As to Orciani,
yes, he knew him but Vanzetti did not. Boda he had never heard of.
Boda did not sound like an Italian name. Suddenly Katzmann asked
if he knew anyone named Berardelli. Sacco asked him who Berardelli
was. In the course of the interrogation Sacco said that his mother
had died recently and that he was planning to return to Italy. When
Katzmann asked if he had heard about the South Braintree murders, he
said he had read in the _Post_ “there was bandits robbing money.”
He had worked in various shoe factories, he admitted, but never in
Braintree. He had taken a day off early in April to go to Boston for
his passport, but thought he had been working in Stoughton on April
15, the day of the holdup. That was all—the opening gambit—but both
men were now aware of the South Braintree crime in relation to each
other.
When Vanzetti appeared, Katzmann asked him if he spoke English. He
said that he spoke a little. When reminded that he was free not to
answer questions, he said he was willing to answer any. He had known
Sacco for a year and a half. He told of taking the trolley from
Stoughton to Bridgewater with him to see a friend, and of changing
cars at Brockton. During the wait he had gone into a fruit store to
buy some cigars and to a lunchroom for a cup of coffee. At no time,
the evening of May 5, had he seen a man on a motorcycle. The name
Boda meant nothing to him. His revolver he had bought four or five
years before for eighteen or nineteen dollars at a shop on Hanover
Street. At the same time he had bought a box of cartridges. Some of
these he had fired off on the Plymouth beach. The remaining six were
in the revolver. Katzmann led him indirectly to the date of the South
Braintree crime. Vanzetti remembered Patriot’s Day, the nineteenth
of April, because it had fallen on a Monday. He had no particular
recollection of what he had done the preceding Thursday.
Katzmann had already discovered, before questioning the men, that
Sacco had been absent from his work on April 15. When he left the
police station he was convinced that Sacco had been involved in the
South Braintree murders. Of Vanzetti he was not so sure.
After their questioning, the two Italians, unshaven and bedraggled,
were photographed. They were then taken to the Brockton police court
and charged with carrying concealed weapons. A local lawyer, William
Callahan, was engaged for them. They pleaded guilty. The judge, after
consulting with the district attorney’s office, held them without
bail under an unrepealed wartime act that empowered him to hold men
suspected of major crimes.
Later in the day several dozen witnesses were brought from South
Braintree and Bridgewater to see if they could identify the prisoners
as participants in either of the holdups. In the small Brockton
police station there was no attempt to have the two Italians mixed
with other suspects in a lineup. They were merely led into the
emergency room by themselves where they stood docilely until ordered
to kneel, put on and take off their hats, raise their arms, and
assume the crouching position of a man firing a pistol. The various
witnesses walked around them slowly observing them from every angle.
Mary Splaine, Frances Devlin, Minnie Kennedy, Louise Hayes, Mark
Carrigan, Albert Frantello, Frank Burke, Hans Behrsin, Louis
DeBeradinis, Jimmy Bostock, Mike Levangie, and Lewis Wade were among
those who came from South Braintree. Minnie, Louise, Carrigan, Burke,
and Bostock could not identify either man. Frantello was certain that
they were not the ones he had seen on April 15. Wade thought Sacco
resembled the man he saw shooting Berardelli.
Frances Devlin and Mary Splaine studied the two men separately
several times. Sacco was again ordered to raise his arm as if holding
a pistol. The two women finally decided that he might possibly have
been the man they saw leaning out of the car and shooting, but they
were certain they had never seen Vanzetti before. Of all the South
Braintree witnesses only Levangie, the gate-tender, picked Vanzetti
as the driver of the getaway car. Jenny Novelli, coming to the
station with a later group of witnesses, said that Sacco resembled
the man she had seen in the bandit car, but she could not be positive
about him.