house in North Square. Mrs. DeFalco told them that fifty thousand
dollars would be needed to take care of everything. First of all, she
said, the committee must appoint Squires and Percy Katzmann counsel
for Sacco and Vanzetti. Money spent on other lawyers would be wasted.
When they had paid the fifty thousand dollars, Percy would take
charge of the defense. Fred would not prosecute, but the case would
be given to Harold Williams or one of the other assistant district
attorneys. Guadagni said the committee could not collect so much
money quickly, and suggested that Mrs. DeFalco take ten thousand
dollars and get the case postponed until September. She said she
would see what she could do, and Felicani and Guadagni agreed to meet
with her again.
During the week various members of the committee met almost daily
with Mrs. DeFalco, though as yet she was paid no money. She made an
appointment with Felicani and Guadagni for Friday at the defense
headquarters. Following Moore’s advice, Felicani concealed a
microphone in the room so that a public stenographer in the basement
could take down the conversation in shorthand.
Mrs. DeFalco said she had come to complete arrangements with them,
that Fred Katzmann and Squires had assured her of the freedom of the
two men, but that by Monday the committee must pay fifteen thousand
dollars. The money was to be paid to Squires or Percy Katzmann and
all the committee’s evidence was to be turned over to the latter.
After the payment there would be a mock trial with the jury made up
so that the foreman would be a member of the county ring. She told
them it was a simple matter to fix a jury.
When Guadagni objected that fifteen thousand was still too much,
Mrs. DeFalco telephoned the Dedham courthouse and after talking
briefly with someone not identified, told them that five thousand
would be enough for a start; they would also reduce the remainder to
thirty-five thousand, which had to be paid as soon as the trial was
postponed. She said she had arranged to have the lawyers meet the
committee members at her house that evening. Felicani and Guadagni
agreed to drive out.
They left Boston about eight o’clock. When they reached the back
street in East Dedham where the DeFalcos lived, they hesitated. The
small square house was brightly lit and two cars were parked in front
of it. Felicani and Guadagni decided not to go in. Before leaving,
they copied down the license numbers of the cars. One turned out to
be Squires’, the other Fred Katzmann’s.
The members of the committee were inclined to pay the money. Not so
Moore. Suspecting that the defense might be charged with trying to
bribe public officials, he—over Felicani’s protest—had Cicchetti and
Mrs. DeFalco arrested. Cicchetti was released but Mrs. DeFalco was
held on the technical charge of attempting to solicit law business,
not being an attorney. As no money had changed hands this was all she
could be charged with.
On the stand in the Boston municipal court she gave a rambling
account of how Cicchetti, a brother-in-law of her brother, had asked
her if she could help him see his friend Sacco. He had also asked
if she and her brother would go to Boston with him to see Felicani
about getting a Norfolk County lawyer to defend Sacco and Vanzetti.
She admitted that she had had talks with members of the Defense
Committee. One morning she had met Guadagni, who introduced himself
as Mr. Giovannitti of New York. He had told her the committee had a
lawyer, Moore, whom they were paying three hundred dollars a week
although he was not doing much. When Felicani had asked her what
lawyer she would recommend she had named Squires, whom she knew
because her husband was his gardener. She had arranged a meeting for
them with Squires at her home, but Felicani and Guadagni had never
showed up.
District Attorney Katzmann then took the stand to deny that he knew
Mrs. DeFalco. He had never even heard of her until her arrest. Percy
Katzmann said he had known her for about seven years and had employed
her as an interpreter in his Italian cases. Mrs. DeFalco had asked
him several times if he would take on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and
though he first told her he would not, out of friendship for her he
had agreed to meet Felicani and Guadagni at her house.
Inspector Flaherty, who had arrested Mrs. DeFalco, testified she
had said then she would “fix those anarchists.” She was found not
guilty. Judge Murray called her conduct “imprudent, unwise, but not
criminal.”[8]
Whatever Mrs. DeFalco had been up to, the episode and the standing of
the men involved gave the Greater Boston community its first inkling
of the enlarged dimensions of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Moore’s
propaganda efforts were getting not only action but reaction.
Even before Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, their names were in
the files of the Department of Justice. After the Plymouth trial the
Boston office began to take a more active interest in them. Agents
were assigned to attend the various Sacco-Vanzetti defense meetings.
One of them, Harold Zorian, even managed to become a collector for
the Defense Committee, although, as he admitted afterward, he kept
most of the money for himself.
William J. West, the agent in charge of the Boston office’s Radical
Division, furnished memoranda regularly to District Attorney Katzmann
about Sacco and Vanzetti’s anarchist activities. As Fred Weyand, one
of the Department’s Boston agents explained it:
_The understanding in this case between the agents of the Department
of Justice in Boston and the District Attorney followed the usual
custom, that the Department of Justice would help the District
Attorney to secure a conviction, and that he in turn would help the
agents of the Department of Justice to secure information that they
might desire._
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.
Judge Thayer was vibrant with anger at the verdict. “Mr. Foreman,” he
asked testily, “did you take into consideration the testimony that
was given us here by the police officers that the defendant told them
he believed in the overthrow of the government? Didn’t you hear the
testimony to the effect that the defendant said in the presence of
witnesses and in the conversations he had with officers that he did
not like this form of government and that the only true government
was the kind run by workingmen? How did you arrive at the verdict
that you announce?”
Unintimidated, and with equal testiness, the foreman replied that
“the jurors disregarded the testimony of the officers after they
understood the definition of ‘advocating anarchy,’ as given by the
court, to be the act of a person who actually used violence in
bringing about his aims and not the advocacy of those aims when he
talked on the subject.”
Although this verdict showed that in Norfolk County ordinary men
could still think clearly and act justly, it also showed the bias
of Judge Thayer. Curiously enough, the prosecution of Zagroff was
conducted by Assistant District Attorney Kane, who would shortly
assist Katzmann in the prosecution of Vanzetti at Plymouth. Zagroff
was defended by Katzmann’s brother Percy.
In February, at Moore’s request, the trial was postponed from March
until May 31 so that he could secure an affidavit in Italy from
Giuseppe Adrower, a former consulate clerk who claimed to have
seen Sacco in Boston on the day of the crime. The ninety days that
followed were a period of rapid polarization. Moore, the artist, had
taken two aliens, neither of whom sympathized or cooperated with the
organized labor movement, and fashioned them into generic figures of
the workingman. He had made ringingly spectacular claims about the
fate of accused anarchists in Norfolk County, and now the community
responded by accepting his challenge. During Vanzetti’s first trial
there had been almost no mention of his social and political beliefs,
but long before anarchism became an issue in the Dedham court
everyone on the jury, in the courthouse, in the town was aware of
it. Moore’s class-angling in troubled waters had stirred the depths.
While no one can now say for certain that, solely in the light of
the evidence presented, Sacco and Vanzetti would have been acquitted
if they had been Elks or members of the American Legion, they would
certainly have had a much better chance.
It was Moore the artist who painted the affair in broad
expressionistic strokes, embellished it and retouched it, spread the
panoramic design on a world canvas. But for Moore there would have
been no case as it is today remembered, and the Dedham trial—whatever
its outcome—would have been as forgotten now as the then-sensational
Zimmerman trial.
By the time the formal preparations for the trial were being made,
Moore had created the situation he wanted. Nick and Bart, the two
Italians at first mentioned so casually, had become symbols of
man’s injustice to man. No one, whatever his views, could now take
the trial casually. If the Defense Committee members already saw
the shadow of injustice lying across the path of their imprisoned
comrades, the citizens of Dedham had a feeling of sinister forces
in the offing. Any morning the mannered inhabitants of the High
Street half expected to see the columns of the courthouse collapse
under a dynamite charge. Sedate Dedham beside its winding river
began to take on the aspect of a besieged town with the courthouse
a forward bastion. The blue-coated local police, out in force, were
augmented by a detachment of the recently formed paramilitary State
Constabulary. The tension was sharp as an east wind.
A week before the trial, Stewart interviewed George Kelley. Kelley
still considered himself a friend of Sacco’s and said so. The arrest
made no difference. He had visited Sacco in jail, and his wife had
stayed with Rosina during her confinement. Many a time before this
trouble the two men, next-door neighbors, had chatted together at the
end of a long summer evening as Sacco was coming in from his garden.
Kelley did not think much of Sacco’s socialist ideas and had warned
him about airing them too freely. But Sacco had just laughed, saying
that what was in the heart had to come out of the mouth.
Stewart asked Kelley if he could describe Sacco’s cap. Kelley said
all he could remember about it was that it was dark. Then Stewart
showed him a cap and asked if it was Sacco’s. It was the cap found
near Berardelli’s body. Kelley did not want to say. When Stewart
pressed him for a definite opinion, he still declined. “I have an
opinion about the cap,” he said finally, expressing the prevailing
Dedham atmosphere, “but I don’t want to get a bomb up my ass.”
* * * * *
Moore and the Defense Committee had had differing ideas about how
the defense should be managed. Local lawyers might be useful,
indeed necessary, but Moore wanted them subordinate, subject to his
direction. He was in no hurry. This was, after all, his case. Not
until May did he start looking for any legal assistance. On the
nineteenth he wrote to a friend:
_The defense committee has agreed to pay the McAnarney brothers who
are supposed to be the highest grade porch climbers in the business,
$10,000 for their professional ability. They don’t care how we get
the money. We don’t particularly care how they get results._
The McAnarneys, John, Thomas, and Jeremiah, had been practicing law
together thirty years in the tide-edged granite city of Quincy,
five miles south of Boston. John had been for thirteen years city
solicitor as well as president of the county bar association. Thomas
was associate justice of the district court. Jeremiah, the youngest,
was in general practice, and counsel for the Eastern Massachusetts
Street Railway. Second-generation Irish-Americans, piously Catholic,
conservative in attitudes and beliefs, they represented the middle
class that had moved away from the proletarian South Boston matrix
that had first sheltered the beaten immigrant survivors of the Famine
years. So far had the McAnarneys evolved in the more open environment
of Quincy that they had even become Republican—still an act of
apostasy in South Boston, if rewarding elsewhere. Thomas had been
appointed to the bench by Governor Calvin Coolidge.
John McAnarney was the head of the family, partly from being the
eldest but mostly because of his assimilated dignity. White-haired,
formal in speech and sedate in manner, he had in his late middle age
come to resemble the Yankee prototypes that the Irish were replacing.
He kept a second office in Boston where, as the years passed, he
spent the greater part of his time, concerning himself more with
banks and investments than actions and torts. He moved familiarly in
the Boston legal world that was so much a postgraduate extension of
the Harvard Law School; he numbered his acquaintances from the law
firms with the triple-barreled names; he became a recognized figure
on the well-beaten path from State Street through Pemberton Square to
the State House.
Thomas, the judge, was the family wit. Frail and in failing health,
his legal work off the bench had become nominal. Jerry was the trial
lawyer of the family. He was Jerry to everybody. The priest who
baptized him had been the last to call him Jeremiah. Unlike John, he
had not conformed to State Street, and his speech still bore traces
of the South Boston flats. Short, short-mustached, ruddy-faced, he
had a tendency to trip over his grammar if he became excited. When he
hurried down the street, as he always did, he seemed to do a little
clog dance. He had a habit of buttonholing people, in the literal
sense, emphasizing the point he was making with a jab of an index
finger toward his auditor’s chest. He also had the reputation of
winning his cases.
When Moore, prodded by the committee, finally decided to use local
reinforcement, he consulted James Sisk, with whom he had worked
on the Ettor-Giovannitti case in Lawrence. Sisk, who had since
been appointed to the superior court, recommended the McAnarney
combination. Moore went to John in his Boston office. McAnarney said
he no longer took court cases. His brother Jerry, he felt, would be
the one to deal with a case like this, with Tom perhaps helping out.
He would talk it over with them, but before doing so he wanted to
know more about the two Italians. Like everyone else, he had been
shocked by the South Braintree murders. Any man, it was true, was
entitled to a defense, but if Sacco and Vanzetti had been in any
way concerned with this crime his office wanted nothing to do with
keeping them from getting the punishment they deserved. Only if the
men were innocent would the McAnarneys consider taking part. Moore
was convincing.
The three McAnarneys drove over to Dedham and spent the better part
of an afternoon in the jail’s reception room talking with Sacco
and with his wife, who happened to be there on a visit. Sacco was
forthright. The McAnarneys felt satisfied with the answers they
received. After leaving the jail John McAnarney met Moore and the two
of them walked the back streets of Dedham for an hour, discussing
the matter. McAnarney said he had put Sacco through every test he
could think of and his answers—in fact everything about him—convinced
him that the man was innocent. His brothers felt the same way. His
office could work for Sacco’s acquittal with a clear conscience. The
McAnarneys would accept the brief.
* * * * *
The measure of Moore’s success in building up the Sacco-Vanzetti
case was sensed by the legal profession some time before the rest
of Massachusetts became aware of it. Judge Thayer, stimulated by
the prospect (and with a blindness to proprieties that would later
become increasingly apparent), wrote to his fellow Dartmouth alumnus,
Chief Justice John Aiken, requesting that he be appointed presiding
judge at the Dedham trial. Thayer apparently saw nothing improper
in the request. In fact he may well have visioned himself as a
judicial Peter plugging the American dike against the flooding seas
of radicalism. Years later at a Dartmouth reunion, he told a friend
that if he knew the Reds were outside the door and he could save his
country by walking through it to be shot down by them he would be
glad to sacrifice his life.
Apparently the impropriety of Thayer’s approach to the chief justice
was offset by their Dartmouth kinship. Aiken, too, must have been
sniffing the wind when he wrote in reply: “I am assigning you to hear
the most important murder case tried in Massachusetts since the last
century, if not in all time.”
FOOTNOTES:
[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.