trees with a sense of sympathy for them, and almost a sort of
remorse; while now thinking of my axe, a lust seizes me to get a
mad delight and exaltation by using them on the necks of the men’s
eaters; on the necks of those who seem to have the evil in their head
and on the trunks of those who seem to have the evil in their breast._
In the weeks before Christmas his mental balance began to waver. He
told the guards of having feelings in his head and chest that meant
earthquakes were coming. He noticed a sensation of electricity in
the air. Each night he barricaded the door of his cell with a table
for fear that his enemies might overpower the guards and kill him.
The day before Christmas he threatened another prisoner who, he
said, was laughing at him. Six days later he smashed a chair. Joseph
McLaughlin, the prison physician, and Charles Sullivan, the state
expert for insane criminals, spent some time questioning him. He told
them that everyone had forsaken him; that at his trial “perjurers,
fascists and others” had been “out to get him,” and that he needed
to carry a gun for protection. The doctors diagnosed him as in a
dangerous hallucinatory and delusional state of mind, and recommended
his committal to the Bridgewater Hospital, where Sacco had been sent
twenty-one months before.
Vanzetti arrived manacled the day after New Year’s. When the
admitting doctor asked him routinely why he was there, he replied,
“I don’t know, I am not crazy. Perhaps they think I need a rest.”
Although for the next two months he seemed a model prisoner, quiet
and controlled, his inner turbulence persisted. He told the doctors
of a fascist plot against him being prepared through certain Italian
prisoners in Charlestown who could kill him “any time any day they
want to.” Even in Bridgewater there were such fascists. “I more than
feel it,” he told the doctor.
The records of Vanzetti in Bridgewater are scanter than those of
Sacco. On February 23 the attendant noted that he spent the day
sitting in a chair pretending to have his eyes closed, but watching
the other prisoners. At the evening meal he looked at his food
suspiciously, then took potatoes from another prisoner’s plate and
ate them, saying nothing. He was kept in his room except for two
periods a day that he could play ball in the yard. When Thompson
spoke to the doctors about this, they told him they could not give
Vanzetti more freedom because he was dangerous. On the arrival of a
new Italian prisoner Vanzetti was removed to a more secluded wing
of the hospital, a change he resented deeply. Like most patients in
mental institutions, he had the feeling that the doctors were working
against him. In April his physical symptoms had begun to abate, and
by May he could write, “Yes, my heartburn is gone, and I am quite
well—so well that I feel to write a treaty on sociology—wich I have
not yet begun, because I wish to hear some friends in its regards.”
On May 28, 1925, he was certified as not insane and returned to
Charlestown.
* * * * *
The disorganization of the Defense Committee that Moore had watched
was followed about the time of his departure by a reorganization
and an opening up of the membership to non-Italians. Lopez had been
inflexible in excluding outsiders, but Amleto Fabbri, the gentle,
softspoken shoe-worker who had replaced him as secretary, welcomed
them. Many of the new members came over from the dissolved New
Trial League, but the influx that really broke through the Latin
limitations of the old committee came from the James Connolly
Literary Society.
That society was made up of a group of forty or fifty dissidents
from the local branch of the Gaelic League. They called themselves
a literary society because in Boston they could not say what
they really were—Irishmen of the indeterminate left, socialists,
associates of the Socialist Labor Party, some of them even Wobblies.
Most of them had turned against the church and were anathema to their
pious majority compatriots. More concerned with day-to-day problems
of economics than with theoretical Marxism, their only literary
activity was the distribution of pamphlets. The name Connolly was
really a cover—who in such an Irish city could say a word against the
martyr of 1916?
The James Connolly Literary Society had become interested in the
Sacco-Vanzetti case during the Dedham trial. As it now drew closer to
the Italian nucleus of the Defense Committee, three of its members
became officers, with John Barry, a quiet, conciliatory Irishman
taking over as chairman. Barry, a steelworker, would never play
a conspicuous role. His retiring nature made him acceptable to
everyone, and in fact he was so accepted as a symbol of intergroup
unity.
Michael Flaherty, a painter and member of the Boston Labor Union
named vice-chairman, took a much more active part. Flaherty and his
associates brought a lighter spirit to the ordained seriousness of
the anarchists. An Aran Islander, Flaherty possessed an underlying
humor that the darkest situation could never quite down. If he
had stayed in Ireland he would undoubtedly have played his part
in the Easter Uprising. In America he gravitated naturally to the
Sacco-Vanzetti case.
Mary Donovan, who came with him from the Society, was both a
more practical and a more pugnacious type, a lank, raw-boned,
sharp-featured woman in her thirties. Emotional, opinionated,
suspicious, generous, and devoted, she was not an easy person to
get along with, but she made the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti so
much her own that she became possessed by it. So much of her time
did she spend at the Hanover Street headquarters, where she took
charge of correspondence and communications, that she soon became
the committee’s recording secretary and lost her State House job as
industrial inspector for the Department of Labor.
With Moore gone, the McAnarneys in turn resigned, leaving the defense
temporarily without counsel. Most of the committee by now felt that
Moore had been an unfortunate choice, that what was needed was an
outstanding local lawyer, someone with authority and position.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, after consulting with the American Civil
Liberties Union and the Workers’ Defense Union, came on from New
York to talk the matter over with the committee. “I then had long
conferences,” she wrote with the customary exaggeration of her own
role, “in which I interviewed every element—from conservative trade
unionists, Socialists, Anarchist, Communists, and Liberals including
Professor Frankfurter at Harvard University. The universal opinion
was that a new, distinguished local counsel was imperative.”
Frankfurter recommended that the committee try to get William
Thompson. That had been John McAnarney’s idea from the beginning, and
many of the committee had come to feel the same way after listening
to Thompson’s arguments on the supplementary motions. The question
was whether he would be willing to take on such an unpopular case.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Mary Donovan, Barry, Felicani, and Mike
Flaherty called at the Matthews, Thompson & Spring offices in the
Tremont Building to see what they could do. Thompson received them
in his austere office, looked at them through his rimless glasses,
and listened noncommittally. Finally he told them, in a tone that
suggested he expected to hear no more of the matter, that he would
take the case for a fee of twenty-five thousand dollars, paid in
advance.
In two days they were back with the money. “I thought sure you
couldn’t raise it,” Thompson told Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. “I
can’t say that I’m glad.” In a quick trip to New York, she had
borrowed twenty thousand dollars from the American Fund for Public
Service—popularly known as the Garland Fund—on the security of the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the International Ladies Garment
Workers’ Union. Felicani, in a stupendous burst of energy, had
managed to raise the additional five thousand dollars locally through
the harder way of individual contributions.
The moment Thompson received the certified check was, although he did
not then know it, the turning point in his life. After that the world
of Boston, his incorporated world, would never be the same for him
again.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] Katzmann’s successor. Katzmann was retained as special assistant
in the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE CONFESSIONS
It is not unusual for a notable murder case to have several
confessions as a by-product. Where these are false, they are either
the notoriety-seeking of a psychopathic misfit or the effort of some
criminal to obtain a pardon for a crime he has committed in order to
stand trial for one he has not. In the latter case he can plan, once
safely pardoned, to repudiate his confession.
Such was, no doubt, the motive of Augusto Pasquale, under life
imprisonment in New York for kidnaping, when in May 1922 he confessed
to being one of the South Braintree gunmen. According to his story
he had met two strangers in a Bowery saloon who asked him if he
wanted to pull a job with them in a factory in South Braintree. He
agreed, and they went from New York to Boston by train to pick up
a car. Pasquale did not know the make of car nor did he seem to be
familiar with the geography of South Braintree. He said that he and
the others held up an auto with the payroll in it. When the paymaster
and guard drew their guns, they shot them, took over the auto, drove
a quarter of a mile, then hopped a train to New York. His story was
so obviously concocted that the police did not even pretend to take
it seriously.[15]
The confession of Frank “the Winker” Silva to being a member of
the gang that staged the Bridgewater holdup was a matter of more
substance. Silva did not make his confession until Sacco and Vanzetti
were dead—and then only after he was paid for it—but Moore had been
aware of some of its details as early as 1922.
Jack Callahan, an ex-bank burglar turned journalist, who still kept
his underworld contacts, was the go-between who persuaded Silva to
sell his story to the _Outlook and Independent_, where it appeared in
1928.
Silva, at the time of the Bridgewater holdup, was thirty-five years
old. He had come to Boston from Italy at the age of ten, and still
spoke English with an accent, although his close-set face with
its clipped mustache looked more American than Italian. Sensual,
indolent, usually down on his luck, as readily a pimp as a mugger,
Silva was the petty-criminal type not uncommon in the North End,
where the brown, wrinkled-faced old women would draw their shawls
tighter in contempt as he passed.
When the police seemed too active Silva would take a job, but never
for long. In 1916, he told Callahan, he had worked briefly in the
L. Q. White factory in Bridgewater, but soon returned to Hanover
Street. His favorite hangout there was Jimmy “Big Chief” Mede’s
shoeshine parlor and cigar stand, where a few of the boys were always
talking about easy money, figuring things out. Jimmy was a dark-eyed,
heavy-browed Sicilian who asked questions and let others do the
answering.
According to Silva, he had told Jimmy it would be easy enough to go
down to Bridgewater the day before Christmas and snatch the payroll.
He figured it would amount to twenty or thirty thousand dollars.
Several times in the autumn of 1917, Silva said, he and Mede and Joe
Sammarco, a nineteen-year-old Italian corner boy known as Joe Nap
because he had come from Naples, went to Bridgewater to look over
the factory, the bank, and the connecting streets. Then on November
14, 1917, Mede and some of his boys were caught after robbing the
paymaster of the American Net & Twine Company in Cambridge, and the
Big Chief found himself doing a seven-to-ten-year rap in Charlestown.
Silva, left to himself, joined the Army. After his discharge in 1919
he returned to the North End and ran into Joe Sammarco. They were
both broke. Silva remembered the L. Q. White payroll, waiting there
in Bridgewater like a Christmas turkey. The job would need two more
to pull it off. Sammarco said he knew just the two. Next day he
appeared with “Doggy” Bruno, a chunky fellow with a short mustache
like Silva’s, and “Guinea” Oates, who owned a touring car.
Silva told Callahan that the four of them had driven to Bridgewater
several times to check the roads. They had walked around the town,
shot a little pool in the parlor under the post office, and taken a
long look at the Bridgewater Trust Company, where the White truck
picked up the payroll. Because Christmas would fall on Thursday, they
knew the delivery would be made on Wednesday.
Monday of Christmas week, Silva told Callahan, Guinea had driven them
to Needham and at a garage near the police station Silva asked a
man about license plates. When the man walked away for a moment, he
spotted an old car that had dealer’s plates tied on with string. He
untied them, tucked them under his coat, and cleared out to meet the
others. From Needham they drove to Bridgewater for another rehearsal.
On Tuesday they made their final dry run. Wednesday morning they
arrived in Bridgewater at about half past six and parked on Hale
Street, not far from a lunch stand. Silva said, “Boys, let’s go down
and have something to eat because this is liable to be our last meal.”
He and Doggy finished eating ahead of the others and walked up to
the square opposite the bank to watch for the truck. Suddenly Silva
noticed that it had slipped in from the side street and was parked in
front of the bank.
They returned to the car and Doggy got in, leaving Silva outside as
look-out man. Guinea Oates was at the wheel. At Silva’s signal, he
was to back the car into the street and block the truck.
Silva called out “Let’s go” and Guinea shoved the car into Broad
Street while the other two piled out. What they had not counted on
was a trolley car coming down the street right behind the truck. They
shouted at the men in the truck, now almost on top of them, and Doggy
leveled his shotgun, but, as Silva told it:
_When we said, “stick ’em up,” instead of the driver sticking up his
hands, and the rest of them they kept on going, and all of a sudden
shots were fired from both sides. Most of us were behind some trees
or posts, a few feet from Hale Street. I seen this man that was
sitting on the side seat, I don’t know who it was, but it was a big
man. He got up from his seat and grabbed the driver’s wheel and while
he was grabbing the driver’s wheel, the street car comes down and
cuts us off from seeing the truck. All of a sudden I heard a noise.
We heard some glass breaking. We couldn’t see the payroll car any
more. We all got on our car and we shot straight through Hale Street
into Plymouth Street.... No cars followed us._
They stopped near a cemetery to change license plates, and Doggy
threw the stolen ones into a pond. Back in the North End Silva and
Bruno shaved off their mustaches. “I was broke and desperate,” Silva
told Callahan. “There was some Jew from New York that was hanging
around Boston and I got acquainted with him. He was way worst off
than I was.” The man, a down-and-outer named Jacob Luban, was full
of plausible talk about easy money in New York. Calling himself Paul
Martini, Silva set out with him. His easy money turned out to be
nothing more than working the combinations of post-office boxes and
stealing letters that might contain money. In this paltry venture
Silva and Luban were joined by another floater, Adolph Witner.
Hanging around New York post-office lobbies, they were soon noticed
and arrested. Witner turned state’s evidence. Luban and Silva
received terms in the United States penitentiary in Atlanta.
Doggy Bruno and Guinea Oates vanished. Only Joe Sammarco stayed on
in Boston. Three weeks after the Bridgewater failure a policeman
was killed during a dance-hall brawl in City Square, Charlestown.
Sammarco was convicted for this crime in 1920 and sent to Charlestown
State Prison for life. There he found himself with Big Chief Mede.
In August, 1920, Vanzetti was taken to Charlestown. Mede, with an
eye to parole, was conducting a weekly English class for those who
did not know the language, and Vanzetti became one of his students.
Mede never forgot him. Forty years later he was still scornful of
the idea that anyone could ever have considered the bookish Vanzetti
capable of committing a holdup.
By the end of 1921 Moore’s investigators had picked up rumors
connecting Mede and Silva with the Bridgewater affair, and
in January, February, and March, 1922, Moore visited Mede in
Charlestown. The Big Chief would neither deny nor affirm anything,
but intimated that if he was given help in getting a parole, plus
certain other favors, he would disclose a lot. Moore wrote to
Governor Channing Cox, explaining Mede’s situation and asking for
assurance that no statement Mede made would hurt his chances for
parole. Cox replied that inasmuch as Mede was not going to be paroled
anyhow, he should feel perfectly free to tell what he knew. The Big
Chief did not think much of the governor’s answer and refused to talk.
Mede’s counsel was James Vahey, the brother of Vanzetti’s Plymouth
lawyer. As soon as Vahey heard that Moore had been seeing his
client, he paid a visit to the Charlestown prison and asked Mede
point-blank just what he had said to Moore. When Mede denied that he
had told Moore anything, Vahey—according to Mede’s sworn statement
in 1928—warned him: “Don’t you dare say anything in regard to the
Sacco-Vanzetti case. You know, my brother defended Vanzetti, and you
will only be putting my brother in Dutch.”
Mede agreed to say nothing, but shortly afterward he broke with Vahey
and on receiving the guarantee of an unrevealed sum of money from
Moore told a story of the Bridgewater holdup similar to that later
told by Silva. Mede had got together with Sammarco and said the
latter would corroborate him, but although Moore talked with Sammarco
several times, he could get no admissions out of him.
Meanwhile, Adolph Witner, who had been let off with a token sentence
for helping to convict Silva and Luban, found himself extradited to
Boston on charges of forgery and mail robbery. Moore ran into him at
police headquarters, overwhelmed by his new troubles. He told Moore
that he could open up the Sacco-Vanzetti case if Moore, in turn,
would help him. Somehow the adroit Moore arranged to get the charges
against Witner dropped, and late in April the two men, accompanied
by an ex-convict named John Jocomo, then working as an investigator
for the Defense Committee, headed for Atlanta to interview Luban and
Silva.
Luban, envious of Witner’s freedom, decided to turn a little state’s
evidence on his own and proceeded to write a long, garbled account
of these interviews to William J. Burns, the Director of the Bureau
of Investigation of the Department of Justice. Burns sent an agent
to Atlanta to interview Luban and Silva. Receiving a report of the
interview, Lawrence Letherman of the Boston Bureau sent a copy to
the attorney general of Massachusetts. A few days later one of the
attorney general’s assistants, Albert Hurwitz, arrived in Atlanta to
take affidavits from the two men.
Luban told Hurwitz that on April 18 he had been called to the
warden’s office to find Silva and an outsider whom Silva introduced
as John Jocomo already there. Jocomo said he had come down from
Boston to investigate the Bridgewater holdup “committed by Sacco and
Vanzetti.” Although he knew that Silva really had had nothing to do
with it, Jocomo said he was in Atlanta for two reasons—first because
he was being paid; second, to cover himself and his brother, who had
deposited some of the money taken in the South Braintree holdup.
The next day Luban and Silva were brought to the office again; this
time Moore was there with Jocomo, who asked if they would like to
talk to Witner. Moore had Witner brought in. Witner confronted his
two former pals as if he were doing them a favor.
_During my conversation [Luban explained to Hurwitz] I was
interrupted by Moore who said to me, “There is no use talking,
Martini [Silva] don’t know the first thing about Bridgewater or
about Braintree, but is willing to help along and take the blame
providing Mr. Moore will keep the promise that he made him.” I forgot
to state that when Mr. Moore came to Atlanta he told me he was in
Washington, that he seen William J. Burns and Attorney General
Dougherty, and that they told him they would be glad if this case
would be disposed of in any way at all, as long as Sacco and Vanzetti
go free. He also told me he had a conversation with Attorney General
Allen of Massachusetts, a man I never heard of or never seen in my
life before and that Mr. Allen told him that if he can find a way
how to free Sacco and Vanzetti, “we don’t care whether legitimate
or unlegitimate” that he, Mr. Allen, would help him in any shape or
form.... He says ... Mr. Allen wants to dispose of this case in the
worst way, and he don’t care how it is disposed of as long as these
two men are free, because the Governor and everybody else is sick and
tired of it._
_The promises made to me were these, first that Mr. Moore will use
his influence to get Martini and myself out of prison, and second
that Witner would go to New York and confess to his part of the
perjury which would show my innocence automatically. Third, that we
would receive $5,000 apiece before Martini takes the stand, $5,000
apiece after he goes off the stand; fourth, that Martini will get
a good lawyer who will instruct him while Martini is on the stand
testifying, this lawyer will instruct him to refuse to answer
questions on the grounds of incriminating and degrading himself, that
will create an impression with the judge that he did not want to
commit himself, but it is true that he is the one and not Sacco who
committed the holdup in Bridgewater, and he believes on these grounds
Sacco and Vanzetti will get a new trial. Later on Martini will be
able to defend himself by telling the truth and showing that really
while this murder and attempted murder was committed Martini was in
New York._
When Hurwitz asked Luban what Moore wanted Martini-Silva to do, Luban
replied: “He wanted Martini to confess that he together with another
man named Joe Napp and Jas Meade committed the attempted robbery at
Bridgewater. He said these two men were willing to take the blame for
it, and was also willing to testify that Martini was along with them,
providing Martini will consent to it, not otherwise.”
Witner, according to Luban, said that he was working as an
investigator for Moore and being paid fifty dollars a week and
expenses by the Amalgamated Garment Workers’ Union. He suggested
that Silva also should admit that he and two other convicts now dead
committed the Braintree murders. Later it would be easy to prove that
he was in New York on both days.
_He also stated they had two witnesses [Luban continued], one by
the name of Louis Pelser has already been fixed up to change his
testimony so it will be in favor of the defendants._
_He said they had another witness by the name of Roy Gould who
previously did not testify, but will testify now and will identify
Martini, but should they want to prosecute Martini for murder Gould
will retract his original testimony against Martini._
_One of the man’s witnesses, a certain woman whose name I don’t
remember, has already changed her testimony. From Mr. Moore’s
statement to me I first understood she first testified in favor of
the prosecution, and now she is ready to testify for the defense,
that the prosecuting attorney had coached her and induced her
when she identified Sacco, but she will switch over to Martini if
necessary, because they look so much alike, and Witner told me in
Jewish that it cost a good many thousand dollars to get the woman
to change her testimony, and they are ready to spend a good many
thousand more._
Luban gave a complicated account of Witner’s going to Moore’s office
and seeing a picture he recognized as Silva’s only to have Moore tell
him it was Sacco’s.