to the safety of a dentist’s office, she had been a San Francisco
prostitute with a long arrest record. In addition, she and James L.
Murphy, an uncle, had been indicted in 1913 for the murder of a boarder
at the rooming house in which they were then living. Estelle was never
tried but her uncle was convicted and sentenced to twelve years in
the penitentiary. Coincidentally, Uncle Jim was released on April 10,
1917, forty-five days after Mooney’s sentence. In 1929, Miss Smith gave
Fremont Older, then the editor of the _San Francisco Call_, a sworn
statement in which she admitted she and the Edeaus had been carefully
coached by Fickert’s men.
On February 7, 1921, John McDonald, the only key witness besides the
Edeaus to testify in all four trials, executed a startling affidavit in
New York City. In it, he stated that, while he had seen a man “lay down
a suitcase” on Steuart Street, he had never seen that man again. But
the District Attorney had wanted more out of him than this. “I think I
talked to Fickert every day for weeks about the case. He kept saying
to me every time I came, always using hard names against Mooney and
Billings, ‘Those are the men you saw there that day.’ Up to this time
I had never told Fickert that I could not have identified these men
if they had not been pointed out to me, and I could not do so.” Just
before the trial, Fickert told him that “there is a reward of $17,500
for the conviction of these people, and when I put them away, I will
see that you get the biggest slice of the reward.” For a man who hadn’t
worked in months, the temptation was just too much.
For some weeks prior to July 22nd, more than two hundred hand-printed
post cards had been mailed to various sponsors of the parade. These
cards warned their recipients that, because of their “extreme activity
in promoting and glorifying militarism ... the extermination of you
and your evil class, is going to be the sole and patriotic duty of
the Employees Liberty League.” Although many detectives thought that
there was a connection between the cards and the explosion, Fickert
had dropped any further investigation along this line when handwriting
experts advised him that neither Mooney nor Billings could have written
them. But in 1930, Alonzo A. Smith swore that his brother, Louis, had
told him before he died that he had been hired to throw a time bomb
from the top of Market Street building during the Preparedness Day
Parade. Dora E. Monroe said that Louis had once stated that “it was me
that threw the bomb ... which Tom Mooney was convicted for.” It was
to be dropped into a certain car in the parade and Smith had received
a two-thousand-dollar advance with eight thousand more promised for
results. But he had lost his nerve and thrown the bomb too early.
The rest of the story consisted of one application after another by
Mooney for a pardon. Although his petitions were supported, at one
time or another, by Captain Matheson, Detective Hand, Matthew Brady,
Fickert’s successor, Judge Griffin, and nine of the ten living Mooney
jurors, four California governors in a row--Richardson, Young, Merriam
and Rolph--refused to free him. Even a daring attempt by the defendant
in 1933 “to risk my neck” by insisting on being tried on one of the
other murder indictments, came a cropper when the district attorney
informed Judge Louis H. Ward that “the evidence in this case is
insufficient ... the State asks for an instructed verdict and rests.”
It was not until January of 1939 that Governor Culbert L. Olson ended
more than twenty-three years of imprisonment by granting Mooney an
unconditional pardon. But for San Quentin Convict Number 31921, it all
came much too late. The fifty-six-year-old man, who returned to San
Francisco to find his countrymen on the brink of another war, had only
three more years to live. The spirit that, as late as 1932, had been
“aflame with furious indignation,” had burned itself out in a dungeon.
4
_Anarchists With Bloody Hands_
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts
_versus_
Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco
Thursday, April 15, 1920, dawned bright and windy in South Braintree,
Massachusetts, a manufacturing town some twenty miles south of Boston.
Shortly after nine that morning, Shelley A. Neal, the local American
Express agent, waited at the New Haven railroad station for the
delivery of a $15,776.51 payroll. The money was consigned to Slater &
Morrill, Inc., one of South Braintree’s two shoe companies.
The cash arrived on the Boston train at about 9:10, and Neal took it
to his office on the first floor of Hampton House, a four-story frame
building on Railroad Avenue, a few feet from its intersection with
Pearl Street, South Braintree’s main thoroughfare. Slater & Morrill
occupied the top three floors of Hampton House, with its business
office on the second floor. After he had sorted and counted the money,
Neal left his office and walked down Railroad Avenue to the shoe
company’s main entrance in the center of the rectangular building. As
he locked his door, he saw that the hands on his office clock stood
at exactly 9:30. He was a rapid walker and had almost arrived at the
double-doored entrance before he noticed, with some apprehension, that
a large, newly varnished black automobile with its motor running was
parked alongside the curb.
When Neal passed the car, he saw that its driver, a light-haired man
with an emaciated, jaundiced face, was watching him intently. As he
entered Hampton House, he observed that the man got into the car and
drove slowly up Railroad Avenue. Neal followed the vehicle with his
eyes and thought that he could glimpse another man sitting in its rear
seat. Although he later admitted that he had considered the driver’s
conduct extremely suspicious, the agent did not report the incident to
anyone at Slater & Morrill.
The company’s paymistress receipted for the money and began at once
to fill the pay envelopes. When she had finished, the grey-colored
packets were stacked in two large tin flats. Thursday was payday at the
factory, and the boxes were scheduled to be picked up at three o’clock
that afternoon by Frederick A. Parmenter, Slater & Morrill’s acting
paymaster.
The car that had aroused Neal’s suspicions was apparently seen in other
parts of South Braintree that morning. At 10:30, Harry E. Dolbeare, a
piano repairman, was walking on Hancock Street when he noticed what he
later described as “a carload of foreigners” in a large black sedan
turning into Hancock Street from Holbrook Avenue. In the back of the
car, he saw a man with “a very heavy mustache ... leaning forward as
though he was talking to either the driver or the other person in front
of the car.” In all, there were four men in the car who appeared to him
to be “a tough looking bunch.”
A little after 11:30, Mrs. Lola R. Andrews, an unemployed practical
nurse, arrived in South Braintree with Mrs. Julia Campbell, an elderly
friend. Both women were seeking work and applied first at Slater &
Morrill’s Factory No. 2, a four-story frame building which was located
about an eighth of a mile east of Hampton House on Pearl Street. As
the women entered the factory, Mrs. Andrews noticed a large black car
parked in front of it. She saw a swarthy man, dressed in dark clothing,
bending over the hood. In the back seat, she observed a thin, emaciated
looking man with what she later depicted as “a light complexion.”
There were no jobs open at Slater & Morrill and, when Mrs. Andrews left
the building some fifteen minutes later, she saw that the swarthy man
was now lying on the ground with his head and shoulders under the front
part of the vehicle. The sickly looking man, who had been sitting in
the rear seat, was outside, leaning against the back of the car. Mrs.
Andrews asked the man under the car if he could direct her to the Rice
& Hutchins factory. At the sound of her voice, he got to his feet and
pointed to the five-story brick building which was some 120 feet west
of Factory No. 2.
Earlier that day, John M. Faulkner, a Cohasset pattern maker who was
bound for the post hospital at the Watertown Arsenal to be treated for
an infected hand, had boarded the 9:20 train to Boston. He was sitting
in the second seat on the left hand side of the smoker. As the train
came into East Weymouth, the passenger sitting on his right asked him
if the stop was East Braintree. As Faulkner remembered it, “he said,
‘the man behind me wants to know if it is East Braintree.’” The pattern
maker had then looked at the other man who was sitting in a single seat
near the lavatory. “He looked like a foreigner, with a black mustache,
and cheek bones.” The “foreigner” wore a felt hat and was dressed
in “kind of old clothes.” Faulkner had watched him leave the train,
carrying a leather bag, when the local pulled into East Braintree
shortly after ten o’clock.
At 11:30, William S. Tracy, a real estate broker, had driven by South
Braintree Square. He “saw two men standing with their back to the
window of that [drug]store, the window nearest the corner of Pearl
Street.” Some ten minutes later, he returned to the Square and noticed
that the two strangers were still there. “The man nearest the drugstore
was the shorter of the two and the other fellow ... the shorter man of
the two, he stood erect, and their general appearance was that they
were dressed respectably and looked as if they might have been waiting
for a car.” What had attracted his attention to the men, whom he
thought were Italians, was the fact that “no one was allowed to lean up
against that building.”
Just after noon, one William J. Heron, a railroad detective, saw two
strange men loitering near the station restroom. “One of them was
about 5 feet 6 inches, weighed about 145 pounds, Italian. The other
fellow was about 5 feet 11; I should say, weighed about 160. They were
smoking cigarettes, one of them.” He had observed them closely because
he considered it unusual for them to be there with no train due for
some time, and “they acted kind of funny to me, nervous....” Heron had
come to South Braintree to look for a lost boy whom he had found in
the station and taken into the ticket office. When he emerged, a few
minutes later, “the two men were gone.”
Shortly before three o’clock, Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli,
a guard, arrived at the paymistress’ office on the second floor of
Hampton House. They signed for the payroll and each man took one of the
tin boxes containing the pay envelopes. Mark Carrigan, a shoe cutter,
who worked on the third floor of Hampton House, watched the two men
leave the building. They crossed Railroad Avenue, passed to the right
of the New Haven station, talked briefly with James E. Bostock, a
Slater & Morrill millwright, and then started up Pearl Street toward
Factory No. 2.
A few minutes earlier, Bostock had noticed two foreign looking
strangers--he later said he thought they were Italian fruit
peddlers--leaning against a fence near a water tank on the north
side of Pearl Street, but he did not mention them to Parmenter or
Berardelli. His conversation with the paymaster and the guard was
brief--he remembered only that Parmenter had ordered him to “go into
the other factory and fix the pulley on the motor” and that he had
answered that he couldn’t do the job that afternoon because he was
“going to get this quarter past three car to Brockton.”
Albert Frantello, a former Slater & Morrill employee, also saw the two
strangers who had attracted Bostock’s attention, and remembered that
“the one that was nearest me had on a black cap, dark suit, dirty front
on him, looked like a jersey, dark complexion and needed a shave, and
he was a stocky build. The other fellow, he was light complexioned.
He had on a cap; dark suit. He was about as tall as the other fellow,
about the same height, only he was slimmer, kind of pale looking, and
his hair was light. It was not as dark as the other fellow’s. I would
say he was slimmer than the other fellow. He was not stocky build.” The
first man had been wearing “a dark cap ... pulled down just like any
ordinary fellow would have his cap on, just resting on his forehead.”
The two men had been having an argument and Frantello overheard the
stocky one berate his companion “in the American language.”
After his brief conversation with Parmenter and Berardelli, Bostock
hurried on toward Hampton House. He had only gone a few steps when he
was startled to hear a fusillade of shots behind him. He turned and
saw the guard lying on the ground and a man standing over him with a
smoking pistol in his hand. As he later testified, “... he stood over
him. He shot, I should say, he shot at Berardelli probably four or five
times. He stood guard over him.” Parmenter had dropped his box when he
was hit by the first bullet and managed to run across Pearl Street,
closely pursued by a second man who shot him in the back just as the
pair reached an excavation for a new restaurant on the north side of
the street.
According to Bostock, both bandits “was dressed in sort of dark
clothes, with ... dark caps ... they appeared to be foreigners.” As
for their physical appearance, “they was fellows of medium build ...
smooth face, dark complected.” When one of the gunmen fired two shots
at him, the millwright jumped behind the wooden fence where he had
first noticed them just before meeting Parmenter and Berardelli. He
had started to run back toward the railroad crossing when a black
seven-passenger Buick drove slowly down the street, picked up the two
gunmen and their loot, and then proceeded down Pearl Street toward the
railroad crossing. The millwright ducked behind the water tank as the
car shot by him. It was so close to him that “if I laid out at arm’s
length I could have touched the spokes of the car as it passed me.” He
saw four men inside, one of whom was firing at the excited crowd which
was rapidly collecting around the bodies of the paymaster and the guard.
When the shooting started, Lewis L. Wade, a sole leather cutter who
doubled in brass as an auto mechanic for Slater & Morrill, was filling
Mr. Slater’s car with gasoline from a pump located in a little concrete
shed in front of Factory No. 2. He saw Parmenter run across the street
and disappear from view behind “a dirt truck.” A short, bareheaded man
who “needed a shave” was standing over Berardelli, pumping bullets into
the fallen guard. “And the next thing that I saw was a car come up
Pearl Street, and stop--well, it didn’t exactly stop. I wouldn’t say
for sure whether it stopped or not. And there was a man at the wheel
... he was a pale-faced man, a man, I should judge ... about probably
30 or 35. He looked to me like a man that had sickness or he was sick.”
As soon as the car had passed him, Wade ran into the factory office and
called in the first alarm to the Braintree police. When he returned,
he “went to where Berardelli lay and he was not dead then. He was
breathing, and when he breathed the blood would come up and down on his
face.” Across the street, the mechanic noticed that James E. McGlone, a
teamster who was transporting stone from the restaurant excavation, was
struggling to keep his frightened team from stampeding. McGlone later
described the killers as “dark-skinned Italians” while Hans Behrsin,
Mr. Slater’s chauffeur, who had been crouched behind the gasoline shed
during the shooting, thought they had been “light complexioned boys.”
Mrs. Barbara Liscomb, who had been looking out on Pearl Street from
a third-floor window squarely in the middle of the Rice & Hutchins
building, said she saw “two men lying on the ground and one man, a
short dark man, standing on the ground facing me with his head up,
holding a revolver in his hands.” She was only at the window “about two
seconds,” having collapsed when the man waved the gun at her, and she
did not see the automobile traveling down Pearl Street. As she later
put it, “I sort of fainted away.”
Mary E. Splaine, a Slater & Morrill bookkeeper, was working in her
corner office on the second floor of Hampton House that afternoon. Just
after three o’clock, she had watched Parmenter and Berardelli walk
up Pearl Street toward Factory No. 2, and had returned to her desk
when they passed out of her line of vision. When she heard the shots,
which she first thought were automobile backfires, she returned to
the windows which opened on Pearl Street. She saw a black automobile
driving slowly in the direction of the railroad tracks. It crossed
the tracks and, as it passed under her window, she saw one of its
passengers leaning out of the car, a man she later described as “an
active looking man.”
Miss Splaine did not see the actual shooting but twenty-two-year-old
Lewis Pelser, a Rice & Hutchins employee, claimed that he did. He was
working on the main floor of the factory building when he heard the
first shots. He had rushed to the window, looked out and, as he put it,
“I seen this fellow shoot this fellow. It was the last shot. He put
four bullets into him.” The killer “had wavy hair pushed back, very
strong hair, wiry hair, very dark.” Pelser also jotted down the license
number of the car, noticing as he did so that the rear window of the
vehicle had been removed and that a rifle or shotgun barrel protruded
from this opening. Edgar C. Langlois, his foreman, had watched the
shooting from the floor above Pelser. According to him, the murderers
had been “stout ... thick-chested young men.”
Winifred H. Pierce, a Slater & Morrill shoemaker, had run to a window
on the Pearl Street side of Hampton House as soon as the gunplay
started. He saw two men in a black car, one of whom was climbing into
the front seat from the rear. Lawrence D. Ferguson, a co-worker who
was standing next to Pierce at the window, corroborated his story.
But Daniel J. O’Neil, a South Braintree school boy, had a different
version. According to him, the man in the car’s back seat had “walked
along [its] running board and before the car had got over the other
side of the crossing that man was sitting in the front seat.” The
man he had seen “was a man [with] dark hair, cleanly shaven, broad
shoulders light complexion.... He wore a blue suit and no hat ... of
and his hair was thick but light and combed back straight over his
head.”
As Parmenter and Berardelli walked up Pearl Street toward Factory
No. 2, they had been followed by Roy E. Gould, a razor sharpening
paste peddler, who hoped to sell his product to the Slater & Morrill
employees after they were paid. He was running in order to get to the
factory before the paymaster did, so that he could set up his display
stand. Before he could catch up with the two men, the hold-up occurred.
As the Buick passed within ten feet of him on its way toward the
railroad crossing, one of the gunmen fired at him, the bullet piercing
the pocket of his overcoat without injuring him. Gould gave his name
to a Braintree policeman and indicated that he would be available for
questioning if needed. His observations apparently failed to titillate
the police and he was never questioned by them.
Frank J. Burke, an itinerant glassblower who had arrived in South
Braintree at 2:30 that afternoon to give a demonstration of his art at
a local school, claimed that the hold-up car had passed within ten feet
of him after the shooting. When he first saw it, the sedan was moving
slowly down Pearl Street toward the railroad crossing. He watched two
men jump on the running board and climb into the back seat. As the car
approached the crossing, one of these men crawled into the front seat
next to the driver. Seconds later, Burke heard a gunshot in the car,
and the man who had climbed over into the front seat pointed a revolver
at him and shouted, “Get out of the way, you son of a bitch!” He saw “a
dark man with a short cropped mustache” in the rear of the car.
Mark Carrigan watched the car drive over the Pearl Street crossing but
it was going too fast for him to recognize anyone in it. One of its
occupants, “had black hair and looked, possibly, like an Italian.”
Louis De Beradinis, who owned a shoe repair shop at the corner of
Railroad Avenue and Pearl Street, noticed a man with a gun standing on
the vehicle’s running board. “This man pointed a revolver to my face”
and had “a long face, and awful white, and light hair combed in the
back. It was a thin fellow I saw.”
Carlos E. Goodridge, a Victrola salesman, who was whiling away a slow
day in Magazu’s poolroom which was a block west of Hampton House on the
north side of Pearl Street, rushed out when he heard the excitement. He
saw the black sedan cross the New Haven tracks and watched, with idle
curiosity, as it approached Magazu’s. Suddenly, he noticed that one of
its occupants--“a dark complexioned fellow, with dark hair, a peculiar
face that came down pointed”--was pointing a gun at him, and he jumped
back into the poolroom and hid under one of the tables.
Michael Levangie, the gate tender at the Pearl Street crossing, had
lowered his gates for an approaching train when the Buick came toward
him. He was startled to see that one of the passengers in the car was
pointing a revolver at his head. He was ordered by this man to raise
his gates. He remembered that the person who shouted at him spoke with
a decided foreign accent although it was Burke’s recollection that
the man who had ordered him out of the way had used good English. As
Levangie later testified, “I looked back at the train to see if I had a
chance to let them go. I saw that there was a chance to let them go and
I let them, and I put my gates back where they belonged.” He was able
to describe only one of the vehicle’s occupants, the driver, who, he
said, was “a dark complected man with cheek bones sticking out, black
hair, heavy brown mustache, slouch hat and army coat.”
The Buick continued down Pearl Street and turned left on Hancock
Street. As it crossed the New Haven tracks, it was seen by eight
railroad workers, most of whom described the driver as “kind of
light-complexioned” and the man sitting alongside of him on the front
seat as “big and dark.” Shelley Neal saw it make the turn when he
ran out of his office upon hearing the shots. As it passed the drug
store on the corner of Pearl and Hancock, its passengers scattered
rubber-headed tacks along the road. It took more than a week before
South Braintree could count a day without at least one blowout on
Hancock Street. Daniel Buckley, a railroad employee, was the last
person in South Braintree to see the car as it headed out of town on
South Street.
Several people remembered spotting it later that afternoon as it
headed south through Randolph, Canton, Stoughton, Brockton and West
Bridgewater. At four, sixteen-year-old Julie Kelliher, a student at
Brockton’s Hancock School, saw a black sedan hurtling through that town
at such a high rate of speed that she reported it to the police. It was
next seen by Austin Reed, the gate tender at the Matfield Crossing just
outside of West Bridgewater, at 4:15. Reed waved his warning sign at
the oncoming automobile because a train was expected momentarily. One
of the men in the car pointed his finger at the startled gate tender
and snarled, “What to hell you hold us up for?” The man he saw was “a
dark complected man, kind of hollow cheeks, with high cheek bones, had
a stubby mustache. His hair was black.”
Meanwhile, back in South Braintree, the horror-struck bystanders, who
had been scattered momentarily by some shots from the rear window
of the disappearing Buick, regathered around the two wounded men.
Berardelli was lying in the street with his head next to the curbing.
He was almost dead. According to Jim Bostock, the first man to reach
him, “he laid in a kind of crouched position and I helped lay him down
and every time he breathed, blood flowed and was coming out of his
mouth.” The two men were taken to the home of Horace A. Colbert, a
railroad tower man who lived just east of the restaurant excavation,
where Berardelli died. Parmenter lived until five o’clock the next
morning.