TRAGEDY IN DEDHAM

In his Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard,

Lowes Dickinson inquired,

“Is immortality desirable?”

I almost think it is,

if only to get at the truth

of the Sacco-Vanzetti case.

—FERRIS GREENSLET

NEW YORK / TORONTO / LONDON

TRAGEDY
IN DEDHAM

THE STORY OF THE
SACCO-VANZETTI CASE

Francis Russell

McGRAW-HILL BOOK COMPANY, INC.

TRAGEDY IN DEDHAM
COPYRIGHT © 1962 BY FRANCIS RUSSELL.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF
MAY NOT BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT
WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-13822
54340

CONTENTS

CHRONOLOGY

CHAPTER ONE
THE TRAGEDY IN DEDHAM

The case of Sacco and Vanzetti, which began as the prosecution for a commonplace if brutal murder, developed gradually into one of the world’s great trials. In the end it was much more than a trial. It became one of those events that divide a society. Although the issues that it raised have been overlaid by war and political events, they never wholly die. Even today middle-aged men and women, hearing by some chance the names Sacco and Vanzetti, still find themselves stirred by the passion and violence of their younger days. Sacco and Vanzetti have become a symbol, and, like all symbols, the meaning varies with those who adopt it.

I myself do not have any memory of the trial, being then in the sixth grade of the Boston public schools, but I do remember from my eighteenth year the agitation and excitement of those summer weeks in 1927 preceding the two men’s execution. The day they were to die I spent the better part of the afternoon walking over Beacon Hill and across the Common in the muted August sunshine. Police were everywhere, hard-faced and angry, some of them carrying rifles—a thing I had never seen before. Pickets with placards marched up and down before the Bulfinch façade of the State House. Periodically the police carted groups of them away in a patrol wagon to the Joy Street Station. Almost at once their places were filled by others. Buses kept arriving from New York hung with signs proclaiming SACCO AND VANZETTI MUST NOT DIE! and trailing red paper streamers. As the buses pulled into Park Square those inside began to sing “The Red Flag.” They looked like foreigners, most of them. I did not like their looks. I sensed in myself the hostility of the bourgeois world toward those two men. In spite of any pickets and red-streamered buses from New York, I knew that they were going to die that night. As I walked under the lindens on the Tremont Street side of the Frog Pond I felt a sense of oneness with the community that was asserting itself. I was glad Sacco and Vanzetti were going to die.

It never occurred to me that they might be innocent. In the shabby-genteel private school I went to in Roxbury none of the masters would have dreamt of such a thing. We took our opinions from them and from our parents. The father of one of my classmates was Reporter of Decisions of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. He published in 1927 a much-approved pamphlet on the trial in which he demonstrated the quasi-divine status of Massachusetts justice, a status that made even the appointment of the Lowell Committee to investigate the case a reflection on the Commonwealth’s judicial system. According to the reporter, that system, sanctified by the past, could not err. Such a conservative position was common enough in Massachusetts then. Nor did it change. Thirty years later the reporter still listed his pamphlet in Who’s Who as his single literary accomplishment.

By and large one’s view of the case depended on one’s status in the community. If one was middle-class and Republican and read the Herald mornings and the Transcript nights, one thought Sacco and Vanzetti guilty. Any latent doubts subsided after President Lowell of Harvard issued his report. But if one was a university liberal, one tended to think the trial unfair, and if one read the Nation or New Republic one was sure they were innocent.

My father was a lawyer and a Republican. He believed the two men guilty not from any particular study of the trial itself but because of his acquaintance with Captain Van Amburgh, a ballistics expert who testified at the trial. Van Amburgh, through laboratory examinations, was certain that one of the recovered murder bullets had been fired from Sacco’s gun. This convinced my father, although—as it came out later—it never convinced Captain Proctor of the State Police.

My Aunt Amy, who was a social worker and lived in the Elizabeth Peabody House, was equally convinced of the two men’s innocence. This again was not from studying the evidence—it was simply the way one had to feel if one was a social worker. Nobody could have continued to stay at the Elizabeth Peabody House who felt otherwise—not that such a person would ever have been there in the first place. One of the proud moments of Aunt Amy’s life was when she was arrested for picketing the State House and taken away in a patrol wagon. I think she was almost disappointed that the policeman who arrested her was so courteous about it.

I do not know when my views about Sacco and Vanzetti changed. It must have been sometime in the thirties, when I happened to read a book of their letters. Those letters were just not congruous with the sordid and mercenary Braintree murders. As to the question, Who were the murderers if Sacco and Vanzetti were not? I thought I found that answered later by one of their counsel, Herbert Ehrmann, whose book The Untried Case seemed to prove that the men who did the killing were from the Morelli Gang of Providence. If one accepted that explanation, reinforced by other evidence as time went on, everything apparently fitted together. One of the Morellis looked enough like Sacco to have been his brother.

Dedham, where the trial took place, is a colonial backwater. For the most part it is a mill town stretched along the loops of the Charles River, but the older section near the High—not Main—Street is a well-preserved relic, with spacious frame houses of the mid-eighteenth century and later and more grandiloquent mansions of the century’s end. The courthouse, built in 1827, is a stone building with massive Greek-revival columns. Its Roman dome, soberly proportioned to the columns, is the most conspicuous object in Dedham. From the flat country beyond the river it looms above the elms, flanked by white meeting-house spires, a symbol of authority. Almost always when I see the great dome so secure above the peaceful community I find myself thinking back to the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. Whatever one’s feelings about the trial, its presence still seems tangible in the courthouse and the High Street.

I felt the presence in 1953, thirty-two years after the trial, when I was called on to serve for a month as a juror in the same paneled room where Sacco and Vanzetti were tried and found guilty and, after all the exceptions and delays, were sentenced to death six years later. Scarcely a day of that month passed but there was some reference to the case.

Sometimes during the lunch hour one of us would ask the old sheriff about the trial. In his blue serge cutaway he had served the Dedham court for forty years. For him the law revealed there was majestically certain. I do not think he ever entertained the idea that it might err or that the Sacco-Vanzetti decision might have been unjust. To think this would have been to challenge the things that had become part of him—his engraved brass buttons, his white mace with the blue state seal on it. His office did not, however, keep him from having his personal feelings. He had come to like Sacco and Vanzetti. “They were good boys,” he told us. “I knew Nick best, but they were both good boys. Never any trouble.”

At the end of the afternoon session he occasionally took a few of us through the jail, two streets away, and—after showing us the reception hall and the dining room and the laundry—he would point out the cells Sacco and Vanzetti had occupied. “I was in the court,” he told us one afternoon, “that day when Judge Thayer sentenced them. Vanzetti made his speech first, that long speech—maybe you heard about it. And all the time he was talking Judge Thayer just sat there with his chin in his hand looking down at his desk. Never moved. But when Vanzetti finished, then he let him have it.”

On our way into the courtroom we would pass the prisoners’ cage, used in all Dedham murder trials. In this cage Sacco and Vanzetti had sat. The cage is often mentioned in the literature of the case, as if the men had been exhibited in court like monkeys in a zoo. But in spite of its name the cage is no cage at all. It is a topless enclosure of metal lattice about three feet high in front, rising to five feet in the back. Except for its symbolism there is nothing very formidable about it.

I was on a civil jury. Most of our cases concerned personal injuries. One of our last, involving a woman who had cut her leg in the door of a car, made the courtroom buzz as the lawyer for the plaintiff appeared. The clerk came over to the rail and muttered something to our foreman.

The lawyer was a portly man in his seventies, with a manner so assured that it was almost contemptuous. He was nearly bald, his face florid, with the flesh sagging under the cheeks. Behind his rimless spectacles his pale blue eyes watered. He was dressed with the conservatism of a Boston banker, wearing a hard-woven worsted suit cut in characteristic pear-shaped style. Two points of a linen handkerchief projected sharply from his breast pocket. His shoes were of Scotch grain. His voice was upper-class Bostonian—with that elastic prolongation of the vowel sounds that has come to be known as the Harvard accent. As soon as he opened his argument he lapsed into Victorian rhetoric.

The clerk’s remark was passed along the jury box. The man next to me nudged my elbow. “That’s Katzmann,” he said, “the fellow that got Sacco and Vanzetti.”

He seemed a culmination of the ghosts of the month. There he was again, in Judge Webster Thayer’s old courtroom, at the scene of his triumph of a generation before. As he faced us, spinning polysyllabic phrases out of nothing, I tried to form an impression of him divorced altogether from the Sacco-Vanzetti case. If I had seen him only at that moment, I should have thought him empty and pompous, but I should also have admitted his basic honesty.

He died the following autumn. Some months later I talked with a judge who had known Katzmann. When I told about seeing him at Dedham he asked me my opinion of the man. I said he was verbose, third-rate, not wholly grammatical. He laughed. “That describes most of us lawyers,” he said. “As for Katzmann, he was average—an average district attorney, a little tricky like most of them, but no worse than most out to get a conviction. He thought Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. I’m sure he never changed his mind.”

Four decades have passed since the trial. Judge Thayer, Katzmann, President Lowell, Governor Fuller, and most of the jurors and witnesses are dead. What remains out of this shadowed past? Beyond all else, doubt. Refusing to face this doubt, the two sides became irreconcilable. One side felt, as did the court reporter in his pamphlet, that anything less than the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti would undermine the Massachusetts judiciary. The other side demanded that the whole proceedings of Judge Thayer’s court be repudiated. There should have been some middle way out, some face-saving formula that would at least have pacified if not contented the reporter and his kind and yet given the men their lives. Whatever the defense’s private opinion of Judge Thayer, it would have been better to have said less about him and to have concentrated on the evidence discovered after the trial. That this evidence changed nothing was preeminently the responsibility of President Lowell. Working as he did in private with his committee, unhampered by the strict rules of legal evidence, he had the opportunity to examine all the facts. A word from him, an indirect indication, and Governor Fuller would have stayed the death sentences and ordered a new trial.

Governor Fuller, of course, took his cue from the Lowell Report. If he, the parvenu, had not been so in awe of Lowell and the Back Bay ascendancy he represented, perhaps he would have acted otherwise. His jail meetings with Sacco and Vanzetti are said to have been friendly.

Once or twice a year in the decade after World War II, going into the State Street Trust Building, I used to see Fuller. The doorman would see him first and swing the door open with a ringing “Good morning, Governor.” I could slip through in the eddy. The old financial clipper would billow ahead of me under full sail. Self-esteem carried him along like a favoring wind. His was the pride of manner that had reached its goal. An Alger story of the new century. From a Malden bicycle shop to the head of the Packard agency for New England when Packard was the Rolls-Royce of America. A mansion on the water side of Beacon Street hung with Gainsboroughs and Romneys and Raeburns. That was the first stage. Then the governorship. And when Packard slipped in the Depression, the ex-governor sensed the moment of ebb and shifted to Cadillac.

There was a cragginess to his features in age. More and more he came to resemble the Back Bay Brahmins he so much admired. I suppose Sacco and Vanzetti, those men whose hands he had shaken so long ago in the death cells, had become blurred impressions, overlaid by eighteenth-century paintings and the tailfins of Cadillacs. “Our reputation is your protection,” said the governor’s used-car ads. Yet I never saw him sweeping into the State Street Trust but I thought of his role in the case.

Public opinion in Massachusetts was against Sacco and Vanzetti. To the community they were two murderers who had been given a fair trial and every opportunity for appeal afterward. The whole thing had gone on for much too long. Radicals and anarchists and Communists were trying to use the case as a lever to pry apart the foundations of law and order. But Massachusetts was not going to be dictated to by such people. There might be demonstrations in front of American embassies throughout the world, there might be more bombs planted in the houses of those concerned—as had already happened to a witness and one of the jurors. Nothing like that was going to change the course of justice! Conservative opinion more and more adopted the point of view that Sacco and Vanzetti had become a challenge to society that could be answered only by their deaths.

Literary talent was the forte of the other side. That side consisted of the literary left, radicals, liberals, Communists, woolly well-meaning progressives like my Aunt Amy, plus a large scattering of people who could not be labeled politically but whose sense of justice had been outraged. Some of these latter were starched conservatives. The crystallized view of the opposition was that Sacco and Vanzetti were the victims of a malignant conspiracy. Neither judge nor district attorney had really believed them guilty of murder. The trial was a put-up job to get rid of two troublesome agitators.

For the Communists—to whom this case in its later stages gave their first opportunity for an international mass appeal—Sacco and Vanzetti were martyrs of the proletariat, murdered by reactionaries trying to preserve an unjust social order. Seen from this point of view, two alien Reds could expect no justice from a Massachusetts court or a Dedham jury.

During my month in Dedham I used to wonder about that earlier jury. Drawn in much the same way that we were, the jurors could not have been so very different from ourselves. And what were we? Some middle class, some working class, a few of us stupid, a few opinionated, but most of us reasonable enough to weigh an issue. At least we tried to overcome our prejudices. The jury I sat on would have been prejudiced against Reds, but it would not have convicted a Communist on a capital charge because of his political beliefs. It did not seem to me the Sacco-Vanzetti jury could have been otherwise. Granted even that the foreman was prejudiced, some of the others would have stood out against injustice. I felt sure that when the jurors decided that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty, it was because they were convinced that they were guilty of murder.

Thinking of the great trial, I found myself wondering how I should have voted, had I been on that jury. As soon as I had the time I read the transcript of the record. Much it could not offer—the atmosphere of the court, with its tensions, the appearance of the witnesses and the defendants, the subtleties that could be gathered from a tone of voice but could not be preserved in black and white. Yet the substance, the prime matter of the trial, endured, each word spoken during that six weeks pressed and dried between the now-yellowing pages. As the inchoate mass gradually took shape for me, I tried to disavow any preconceptions, to imagine myself in the jury box at Dedham occupied solely with the question of whether two men murdered two other men, and knowing no more about it in advance than the evidence offered. How should I have judged?

I knew one thing—that I should have disregarded the testimony of the experts. My month had taught me that. Experts canceled each other out as the paid bias of either side, and a jury then decided on other grounds. The real grounds in this case were the half-dozen or so witnesses who identified Sacco—and to a lesser extent Vanzetti—as being at or near the scene of the murder on that April day. In opposition to them were an equal number of witnesses who testified that these two were not the men. It was a question finally of which group to believe. The weakest part of the Commonwealth’s case was that it never established an adequate motive for the crime.

On the other hand Sacco and Vanzetti were armed the night the police picked them up, Sacco with an automatic of the type that fired the murder bullet, Vanzetti with a revolver that might have been taken from the murdered guard. This was the most damaging evidence against them. Sacco maintained that he had tucked his gun inside his belt that afternoon and forgotten about it. Vanzetti said that he carried his for protection. Both statements may have been true. Often the lame excuse is the truthful one. Yet here were two philosophical anarchists who maintained that the use of force was never justified, not even for the advancement of their beliefs, who boasted that they had never shed blood, but when they were picked up, they had on them weapons of force. If they had not been armed the chances are they would never have been tried.

The trial may well have been more unfair than seems apparent in the record. There the most glaring fault is the district attorney’s harrying interrogation of the two men as to their beliefs, their lack of patriotism, and their reasons for running away to avoid the draft. The impropriety stares out of the printed page. Here certainly was error, yet I cannot believe that this was primary in the jury’s verdict. On the other hand, the judge’s charge, which Felix Frankfurter so condemned, seems reasonable enough in cold print. I was finally left with the feeling that if I had been on the original jury, I should have voted with the others. Yet I was not really certain.

Looked back at over the lapse of years, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti becomes a tragedy in the classical sense. It was no melodrama, as many have seen it, with good neatly divided from evil. Katzmann was as sharp as most district attorneys out for a conviction, a limited man but not a bad one. Judge Thayer could not hide the bias of his obsessions. He was indiscreet and he was weak, but he made an effort to conduct the trial fairly. Both he and Katzmann believed to their dying day that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty.

It was not a conspiracy of evil men against noble men, as Maxwell Anderson saw it in his play Gods of the Lightning. There was something more, something deeper and more embracing in the case. It was in fact fate that was the mover behind the events at the Dedham courthouse in the spring of 1921. And it was fate in the ironic Greek sense, dwarfing all the participants, ending in inexorable disaster.

Sacco and Vanzetti were figures of Greek tragedy: the doomed king’s son becomes in modern dress two Italian workmen. Fate lurks behind them at each step. Sacco scarcely misses a day at his factory except the day of the murders. If he had missed any other day, the factory records would have been his alibi. Without him it is agreed that Vanzetti could not have been convicted. Fate engineered the almost accidental arrest of the two men as they were riding on the Brockton streetcar. But for fate, Sacco would have been off to his native country in three days.

And as in Greek tragedy the hero condemns himself unknowingly in his own words, is doomed by his own inner weakness, so in the end are Sacco and Vanzetti doomed by theirs. The men of peace go armed. Fate plus human weakness—that is the basis of high tragedy, a tragedy such as theirs that they played out to the end with bravery and dignity. It was a tragedy for everyone concerned with the case, and in the end it is best accepted so, as it was by the Greeks.

CHAPTER TWO
HISTORY, WRITTEN AND
OTHERWISE

Walking up State Street a third of a century after the executions, on another August afternoon, I wondered again about the enigma of the case. The whole drama had been played out within twenty miles of here: in South Braintree, in Bridgewater, in sedate Dedham, in the gilt-domed State House beyond the Common, and finally just across Prison Point Bridge in the granite fortress of the now-demolished state prison. Would it ever become as clear-cut as the Dreyfus affair, where everyone was at last satisfied of the grossness of the injustice done? That still seemed unlikely. In 1950 the seven surviving jury members were interviewed as to their later opinions. The decades had only confirmed their belief in the rightness of their verdict. In 1959 a judiciary committee of the Massachusetts legislature had refused to consider granting Sacco and Vanzetti a posthumous pardon.

Where the past is reduced to shelves of documents in a library it becomes manageable enough for the scholar or historian to make his evaluation. But where it is still an actual present in the contradictory minds of living men, what yardstick can one use except that of preconceptions? Was the chief of police who arrested Sacco and Vanzetti a forger of evidence? Did their first lawyers betray them? Was the district attorney a barrator with his hand out under the table? Was the judge mad? Was President Lowell of Harvard a Yankee bigot? Many upright men had maintained these things. Were Sacco and Vanzetti quietistic anarchists, or did they believe in the politics of the deed?

Boston seemed downcast, heatstruck. The Old State House at the head of State Street had, I noticed, been steam-cleaned, and the clock over the balcony had been replaced by a more authentic sundial. As I reached the subway entrance under the ancient foundations, an eddy of heat snapped in my face like a dirty towel. At that moment a herd of tourists following the Freedom Trail had paused at Point 9 to get Freedom Stamps from the slot machine for their souvenir albums. A shiny-faced man in a Hawaiian sport shirt was maneuvering against the sun to get a photograph of the lion-and-unicorn supports on the Old State House facade, no doubt thinking they went back to 1776 instead of merely to a twentieth-century Armenian tinsmith’s shop. Watching the tourists, I felt I ought to have some sort of souvenir book myself to paste with self-congratulatory stamps for interviewing people on an afternoon like this.

My first call was on a corporation lawyer who had spent years writing a book to prove that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. His firm, occupying the sixth floor of a large old-fashioned building on Federal Street, was ostentatiously shabby with a well-preserved Edwardian décor. A horseshoe-shaped receptionist’s desk dominated an outer office.

The man in his seventies who showed me into his private office without shaking hands was less the calcined Boston type than I had expected. There was a metallic quality about his eroding features. His wiry gray hair fluffed over the collar of a rumpled white shirt. He had taken off his coat, exposing waist-high trousers held up by police galluses. His eyebrows were tufted and he wore round gold-rimmed spectacles.

“I did not,” he announced, “like the tone of your Sacco-Vanzetti article in American Heritage at all. Nevertheless I am willing to see you. What is it you want to know?”

I told him I was trying to write an impartial study of all the events in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, that I knew he thought they were guilty, and that I wanted to include his point of view.

His knees creaked a little as he sat down opposite me. A smile broke through his clouded face. “If you want to write a book like your article you could probably finish it in four or five months; but if you really want to be honest, it will take you two years just to do the preliminary reading. The fundamental thing is to make the proper comparisons between the trial record and that of the governor’s committee. Of course if you tell the truth you’ll never find a publisher. Because if you really go into the case you can only conclude that those two Italians were guilty. And you’ll never get a hearing on that. Why? Because their innocence has become a liberal trademark. There has never been any real doubt about this case among those who know about it. It was just used by people—by the anarchists and that radical lawyer of theirs and then the Communists.

“The case was open and shut. Everyone at the Dedham trial was convinced they were guilty, except a few old women social workers and Frank Sibley of the Globe. Sacco and Vanzetti said the night they were arrested they were out to pick up anarchist literature from their friends because they were afraid of the Department of Justice raids. That was May fifth, though. All those anarchists knew beforehand that the raids were going to take place on May first. No, they weren’t out to pick up their anarchist papers that night. They were going to Bridgewater with guns on them to get a car because they knew that next day was payday at the factories. They needed money for the defense of their comrade Elia in New York, and they were going to get it in the only way they knew.”

I said that I could not imagine why, if a man had shot someone, he would be foolish enough to have the murder weapon in his belt three weeks later. Any sensible murderer would have thrown the gun away.

“Ordinarily, yes,” he went on, “but they had those guns on them very simply because they needed them, because they were planning a robbery next day. That radical business was an excuse they concocted afterward—and don’t forget it was the defense that introduced anarchism into the case. During the trial they had some Italian professor from the North End testify that he had seen Sacco in town the day of the South Braintree murders and that Sacco had left him to go to the Italian Consulate. But it took him over a year to tell that tale. If, as soon as he’d heard Sacco was arrested, this man had gone to Katzmann and told him he’d been with Sacco that day, then they could have gone directly to the Italian consul. And if the consul had confirmed the story, that would have been the end of the case. But they didn’t because they couldn’t fake that fast, because the whole alibi was something they concocted months afterward.”

“Moore, their counsel, knew they were guilty. He was just in it for the money. Why, all in all they collected a third of a million dollars for their defense fund. They say that Italian anarchist printer fellow who organized it made himself a small fortune. Moore finally had to quit the case or they’d have arrested him for perjury. He chased one witness, that poor fellow Goodridge, to Maine after the trial and pretended he was going to have him arrested if he didn’t change his testimony. The Andrews woman from Quincy who identified Sacco—he had her beaten up. Orciani—the third one they arrested—he probably was the one who did it. Orciani had a time-clock alibi for the day of the robbery so they couldn’t touch him, but you know it’s easy enough to get some other man to punch your time card. He was in the court for the early part of the trial. He was the one the defense said sold the gun to Vanzetti, but Moore could never get him to testify. That was the way it was all through with the defense—lies, cheating, evasion.”

I mentioned that some of the prosecution witnesses had changed their stories several times between the preliminary hearing and the Dedham trial.

“Sacco and Vanzetti weren’t convicted on the testimony of the witnesses,” he said. “It was the evidence of the bullets that convicted them. Some of the bullets they found on Sacco were so obsolete that the State Police experts couldn’t find any duplicates when they wanted to make firing tests. Yet the same kind of obsolete bullet was found in the guard’s body. As far as witnesses go, you may not be able to describe a man properly but if you see him again you’ll recognize him. Could you describe our receptionist now?”

I had to admit that I could not.

“Yet you just talked with her. But if you went out there you would know if another girl had taken her place. You see!”

He paused and I could hear the squeak of his swivel chair. “Maxwell Anderson wrote a play about the case just after the executions. He had dinner with me afterward and I told him he was barking up the wrong tree. I explained why, and I think I convinced him. Then he wrote Winterset, and in that he saw the case quite differently. To my mind the greatest wrong, the greatest injustice in the whole trial, was done to Webster Thayer. He was an upstanding man, and they took years off his life. The trial grew to be an obsession with him later, but it’s small wonder the way he was threatened. He once told me that every day at noon he telephoned home to see if his house was all right, and every day he felt sick inside thinking it might be blown up. You remember they finally did dynamite it.

“One of the jurors, Dever, became a lawyer afterward and he wrote an account of his experiences during the trial. Simon and Schuster would have published it. They found it all very interesting, if he’d only put in a happy ending: tell how he changed his original opinion and decided they were innocent. But Dever wouldn’t do it, so he never did find a publisher. That’s the situation I’ve been up against. That’s what you’ll face if you’re honest. It’ll take you five years, and you’ll come up against a stone wall.”

He stood up abruptly and stalked to a table on which were two piles of manuscript, each over a foot high. “Here’s my answer,” he said, patting them. “This is my book on the case, the definitive answer. But do you think any publisher will touch it? Of course not. Can’t you imagine what the Times and the Herald Trib and the Saturday Review would say to anything like this?”

The chapters of the book were bound separately. He let me leaf through the one on the ballistics testimony while he moved over to a row of filing cabinets labeled S-V. “Look,” he said, rolling open the drawers one after another. “That’s the raw material. It would take you years to get all that together, years. Much of it’s not even in the record. There’s the report from the Attorney General’s office, for example—never been released. I can’t even tell you how I got it.

“You aren’t a lawyer, your mind isn’t trained to evaluate,” he said, leading me out to the elevator. “If you’ll take my advice, kindly meant, just give up the whole business.”

When I stepped from the air-conditioned building onto sun-baked Federal Street the city growled. The sky beyond Post Office Square looked rancid. I remembered the World War II British Army expression for accumulated paperwork: bumf. Those tight-packed filing cabinets with their formidable accumulation of details were bumf. The transcript of the record itself ran to over six thousand pages, and on top of this was enough additional bumf to bury me.

My next call was to be on Aldino Felicani, the man the lawyer had dismissed as “that Italian anarchist printer fellow.” An extraordinary old man, Felicani. The organizer of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, he seemed so much a part of the past that I could never quite get used to the idea of his still being around. He was an anachronism. Whenever I saw him in public he wore the red shirt, the black Latin Quarter tie, and the wide-brimmed hat that had been the anarchist uniform in Bakunin’s time. So I had seen him last at the legislature’s Judiciary Committee hearing for a posthumous pardon for Sacco and Vanzetti. As I watched him listening to the proceedings I thought of the charge Vanzetti had given him: “Avenge our blood! Clear our names!” I had heard Felicani repeat it many times in his heavy accent.

Sacco and Vanzetti had about as much chance of getting a pardon from that legislative committee as Benedict Arnold. The gum-chewing faces behind the oak desks in the State House’s Gardner Auditorium were implacable. When my father had been in the legislature during World War I, the characteristic member had been a lawyer, Republican, middle- to upper-class, interested more in maintaining the status quo than in himself. In 1959 the social revolution of forty years was apparent enough in these lower-middle-class legislators whose interest was mainly in keeping their feet in the trough.

Yet from these men representing a new emergent class I should somehow have expected more charity for the two dead Italians. Instead there was entrenched hatred, concentrating in the chairman as he interrogated Judge Musmanno.

Justice Michael Musmanno of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, one of Sacco and Vanzetti’s final counsel, was the main speaker in favor of the committee’s bill. Silver-maned and silver-tongued, he unwound reels of words until he was stopped by the chairman’s hard voice. The latter had the features of the ur-Celt: savage blue eyes, gray shaggy hair looped over the back of his collar like an old-time United States senator.

“Look, Judge, why did Vanzetti have the loaded revolver on him, and a pocketful of slugs that fit it and why did he go for it when the police grabbed him?”

Musmanno tried to explain that carrying revolvers was then a common custom in America, especially among Italians, and that it was a right guaranteed by the Constitution. The chairman’s voice, burred as a cat’s tongue, broke in.

“You mean to tell me that the district attorney, the judge, the jury, the governor, the president of Harvard, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, the Supreme Court of the United States—they’re all wrong and you’re right?”

Musmanno maintained that this was just what he was trying to tell him. Applause from the audience, in which I saw old Felicani join, brought the familiar threat to have the hall cleared. That audience was a curious conglomeration of the elderly, a scattering of students, and a cluster of beatniks at the side in beards and blue denims tied up with rope.

The elderly were survivors of an old storm, their eccentricities accentuated by age, the crackpot label attached to their clothes, their hats, their gestures. Emotionally they were drawn to lost causes, and here they gathered again like old soldiers at a reunion. The Sacco-Vanzetti case with its drawn-out tragic climax had been for them a generation ago a self-fulfillment in indignation that they were now reliving. At one point a woman near the exit caused a stir, almost a suspension of the hearing, by holding up Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s death masks.

Felicani’s Excelsior Press was on the ground floor of a decrepit building near the foot of Milk Street under the shadow of the new John F. “Honey” Fitzgerald Expressway where the business district fringes into the Italian North End. Every time I saw the large red and green linoleum squares on the floor of that familiar little office I thought back to the hopscotch games of my childhood. The walls were of pebbled tin sheeting painted with mauve Chemtone. Next to Felicani’s desk was a pay telephone and just above it an oak-framed clock, invariably six minutes fast. On top of a filing cabinet next to a spindly philodendron plant was a plaster bust of the dead anarchist leader, Carlo Tresca.

I was glad to find the old man there on this hot August afternoon. A man who towered in any crowd and looked more like a viking than a Latin, he was wearing a brightly patterned sport shirt. His gray eyes peered with astigmatic blankness until he recognized me and smiled. I told him of the mass of bumf I had just encountered.

“Yes,” he said, offering me a chair, “but what were they, those papers? I have almost as many papers myself. If your lawyer’s wrong at the start, it doesn’t matter how many files he has. There are not many of us left from those days, the ones who really knew.”

I asked Felicani what he had done immediately after the two men’s arrest. He thought for a moment.

“It’s strange,” he said. “When you begin to think, then all the memories come back, just as clearly as if it all happened yesterday. I knew Vanzetti best. He was one of my closest friends. As soon as he was arrested he got word to me and I got the others together. We went to see them at the Brockton police station. We raised money—two or three dollars here, another dollar there. It’s all down in writing, every penny. Then, at the first trial for the Bridgewater holdup, Thayer gave Vanzetti twelve to fourteen years. When Tresca heard that he came on from New York. ‘What is going on here?’ he asked us. ‘Fourteen years? Is that what you do?’ So then he got Moore, the lawyer from the Lawrence strike, to come in and take charge of the case.”

“I know this may be painful to you,” I told him, “but I have a letter from Upton Sinclair, who talked with Moore after the executions. Moore told him then—his exact words were: ‘Sacco was probably, Vanzetti possibly guilty’.”

Felicani’s sport shirt rippled as he shrugged his vast shoulders. “I’ve heard things of that kind, so many rumors. You know, Sinclair wrote most of Boston right here in this office. I don’t see why he didn’t mention it to me. Moore was angry after he left the case. His anger just got too big.”

I knew that Sacco had come to distrust Moore, but I did not know the details of Moore’s leaving. Felicani was roundabout in answering me.

“I never say Moore kept money for himself. He was an honest man. But for all the money you gave him, he wanted more always—for witnesses, for travels, for new investigations. He had no idea of money. If you gave him a thousand dollars every other day Moore was all right, but we didn’t have that much, the committee. Finally I tightened the purse strings. Then Moore started his own committee to raise money. That was why he got into a fight with Sacco, how the bitterness started. That was why we let Moore go and got Thompson.”

His voice was heavy with regret. “Ah, if we had had Thompson from the beginning, then we would have got them off. When we first went to him he was cold. He listened to us and he said he’d take the case for twenty-five thousand dollars. When he started he didn’t know the difference between an anarchist and a Communist. You could tell that by an appeal he drew up that Vanzetti corrected. After he talked for some time with Vanzetti, he understood. It made all the difference. He took part then as if we were friends. A wonderful man, Thompson. An aristocrat, the way the word should mean. He would have made mincemeat of a man like Katzmann, if only we’d had him instead of Moore.”

One thing I had been wanting to ask was about the various bombings connected with the case. Would he agree that anarchists had been responsible for them? Sacco and Vanzetti themselves were said to have been philosophical anarchists, as opposed to violence as Tolstoy was. But where did the dividing line come?

Felicani stared at me with his guileless eyes. “You know,” he said, “there are times when a man is so desperate that he will do such a thing as set off a bomb. When that happens and to what man, I don’t know. Vanzetti never could have done anything like that—but, yes, in certain circumstances Sacco might have. That is the type of man he was. But a holdup murder, to kill innocent men like that? It was quite impossible.

“Think of the times,” he said, lifting his hands palms upward. “I carried a pistol in my pocket then. I never fired it, I didn’t even know how to load it, but it gave me strength to feel it in my pocket.” He stopped as if he were thinking again of those far-off days. I watched him, the peaceable elderly printer who had outlived his party and his time. Where the word anarchism had once aroused fear, it now brought a kind of nostalgia. Violent some of the anarchists may have been, but there had been an integrity about them, a trust in human nature that I could never have. Now here he was, gnarled and sturdy as an old oak, speaking to me of the lost comrades of his young manhood.

Afterward, as I walked out into the reverberant street, I felt I had put the bumf into perspective. I knew it was intuition rather than reason, that the historical method had fallen by the wayside, yet I did not see how anyone could spend an afternoon talking with Aldino Felicani and still feel that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. But that was the difficulty in trying to form any picture of an event by talking with the survivors. The three principals in the case whom I had seen in the flesh and who were now dead—District Attorney Katzmann, Governor Fuller, President Lowell of Harvard—I had judged harshly. But others I met, whom I had expected to find fools or knaves, I had found neither.

Among these was Michael Stewart, the Bridgewater police chief whose suspicions started the events that led to the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti. Some time after the trial Stewart had left Bridgewater to become police chief of Scituate, a seaside town southeast of Braintree. He had a speech about the case that he liked to deliver at men’s-club meetings. Now retired, he lived with his son in a white bungalow near Scituate Harbor. I knew the inside of it well: the gumwood trim, the nicknacks on the tapestry-brick mantel, the Child Jesus of Prague under cellophane, the sofa and the overstuffed chairs. Whenever I rang the bell I could see Stewart through the glass as he came limping to the door, lame from some old police injury. There was an unmistakable Celtic look about him from the cut of his mouth to the blueness of his eyes and the wave to his white hair.

Never since the night in 1920 that he had driven down to the Brockton police station to interview Sacco and Vanzetti had he ever had any doubt about their guilt. To him, it was all very simple. Godless men, atheists like Sacco and Vanzetti, were capable of any crime. Yet his relations with them after their arrest were for a period amiable, and he had liked Vanzetti.

“Sacco I never paid much attention to,” he told me. “He was just a sap, but Vanzetti was a real interesting man. I used to drive him to the Plymouth trial from the jail, and each morning I saw him I’d say ‘Hello, Bertie,’ and he’d say ‘Hello, Mike.’ Sometimes he used to sing songs for us in Italian on the way over, and he had quite a voice. After he heard me testify in court though, the next time he saw me he raised his hands—he was handcuffed—and shook them at me. And he never spoke to me again. The thing I remember most about him is his eyes. He had terrible eyes, like fire when he looked at you.”

Though Orciani, who was with Sacco and Vanzetti just before their arrest, had produced a watertight alibi after he was picked up, Stewart was nevertheless convinced of his guilt. “For my money Orciani was the cleverest of the lot,” he told me. “That’s how he managed to rig himself up such a good alibi. He was one of those wise guys. During the trial he used to go to court every day. There was a little room in back the defense had for exhibits and things like that, and he had charge of it. Most of the time he’d stand in the doorway watching what went on in court. Well, Katzmann spotted him there and the day they were cross-examining Vanzetti and asking him about where he got his gun, Katzmann looked straight at Orciani and said, ‘I’ll tell you, Mr. Vanzetti, where you got that gun.’ You could hear his voice right down the corridor. ‘You got it from your friend Orciani after he took it off of Berardelli’s dead body.’ Katzmann pointed his finger right at him and Orciani ducked. That was the last time he ever showed up.”

One late-summer afternoon I drove to Billerica to meet Dr. Warren Steams, dean emeritus of Tufts Medical School, who as state prison psychiatrist had seen Sacco and Vanzetti regularly in the years following their conviction. I found him in the study of his classically square colonial mansion facing the common. He was listening to a middle-aged man in heavy tortoise-shell spectacles who held an open book in his left hand and pointed to a passage with his right.

“It says here,” the man explained, “ten thousand people were there to see him hanged. That was 1820. I wonder what would draw all those people to an execution?”

Steams, with his wreath of kinky white hair surrounding a bald dome, looked amiable, but his voice was tart. “Cruelty. If it were announced that I was going to be publicly tortured and hanged next Monday morning on Boston Common there’d be at least a hundred and fifty thousand people there to see it.”

He beckoned to me apologetically and then, when the other had left, pointed to a chair. “I’m the Billerica antiquary,” he said. “The local historians all call on me with their problems. Seventy-five years old I am. That gives me a life expectancy of five years—and it would take fifty for me to do all the things I have to do. You came here to ask me about Sacco and Vanzetti. What do you want to know?”

Without waiting for my answer he went on. “I don’t think the truth will ever be known. As to whether they did it or not, I don’t know and I’ve made a point of not trying to know. I tell you this, though. They weren’t criminal types. For a while I think I saw them as much as anyone. Sacco had a very winning way about him. Of course he was a more settled type, with a wife and family. Vanzetti reminded me of a trade-union leader. That rigid mentality. He once said to me that where he came from in Italy there was a castle above the town and one family living in it had been oppressing the ordinary people in the valley for eight hundred years. I told him that it wasn’t so in America, that a family scarcely lasted three generations here. He’d read a little, but he’d not digested it too well—an unstable, wandering type, paranoid at times. When I saw him once over in the Charlestown Prison he said to me, ‘I don’t deny the right of the state to execute a man, but they have no right to castrate me and make me a laughingstock.’”

The doctor had known personally almost everyone connected with the case on both sides. Katzmann was to him lazy and incompetent, though he thought better of his assistant, Harold Williams. Judge Thayer he gave credit for honest intentions, but found him irascible, a snob, and obsessed with the idea that the Communists were just about to take over the United States. Governor Fuller was merely a successful automobile salesman. Thompson he respected, but felt that he had gone into the case merely for the fee.

“I thought,” I said, making another stab at it, “that seeing Sacco and Vanzetti so closely, you might have formed some opinion as to their guilt or innocence.”

“I feel,” he said, “as William James did about psychic phenomena. I just do not know.”

When I left, he walked out with me through his back garden blooming with zinnias. “If you are interested,” he said finally, “I’ll try to find my files on Sacco and Vanzetti for you. There may be something there. I’ve had so many cases since that I can’t remember the details. But drop in when you’re by this way again.”

Three weeks later he was dead.

By chance I discovered that Beltrando Brini was living in Wollaston, a twenty-minute drive from my home in Wellesley. When a boy of thirteen, Brini had testified at Vanzetti’s first trial that the two of them had been delivering eels in Plymouth the day before Christmas, 1919—the day Vanzetti was to be found guilty of attempting a holdup in Bridgewater. As he grew up, Brini had broken away from the Italian community. He had graduated from Boston University and was now an elementary school principal. Community affairs seemed to take up most of his spare time. Two weeks passed before he could find a free evening to see me. I found his house easily enough, a decent inconspicuous house in a decent inconspicuous street. He was a small man in his fifties. Like many of the second generation he still looked Italian, but to a diminished degree. He showed me into his living room. His wife was standing near the fireplace, a thin fair-haired woman, not Latin at all. After he had introduced me to her we sat down, taking each other’s measure while she went into the kitchen to make coffee.

“You know,” he said finally, “I could have been a musician. I really could at one time have gotten into the Boston Symphony Orchestra. But I thought it was safer to be a teacher. That’s why I never seem to be home nights—always something they want a school principal to be doing, somewhere they want him to be.” He looked at me sharply. “You want to know about Vanzetti. He lived with us a long time. He paid more attention to me than my parents did. He was kind to all children. I remember one Halloween we all had jack-o’-lanterns. The others had theirs lighted but mine didn’t have a candle in it. Vanzetti came along and asked me why I didn’t get a candle. I said I hadn’t any money. He asked me how much candles cost and I said two cents, so he fished in his pocket and gave them to me. When I got to the hardware store I found he’d given me a cent and a dime. So I got my candle and I brought him back the nine cents. I’d never had that much money in my pocket before, but I remember how proud of myself I was that I brought that nine cents back to him.

“I remember the last time I saw him before his arrest. It’s a thing I somehow still feel ashamed about. A bunch of us were playing ball in Suosso’s Lane and somebody hit one over the fence into a garden. While I was climbing over to get it I trampled on some vegetables and the man who owned the garden came out and started to bawl me out. I answered him back, like any fresh kid. Then Vanzetti came along, took me over by the fence, and talked to me. He wasn’t angry, he didn’t raise his voice, but what he said made me feel ashamed. I didn’t feel like playing ball any more. I’ve often wished it hadn’t been that way, the last time I saw him free.

“You know, of course,” he went on, “that I testified I was delivering eels with him the morning he was supposed to have been holding up the pay truck in Bridgewater. That’s been the terrible thing for me. I was there with him all that morning long, and I couldn’t make them believe me. Sometimes I’ve asked myself, Could I have been wrong, could I have dreamed it all? Was Vanzetti really at Bridgewater? But then I know, I know that I was delivering eels with him that morning. It couldn’t have been any other day, because that’s the one day Italians always eat eels, no matter what they cost. And I remember how I started out that morning to go to Vanzetti’s house. It was muddy and I forgot my rubbers. At the corner I met my father and he sent me back for them, so I was late. Vanzetti was waiting for me with the pushcart. We delivered eels until, it must have been, two o’clock. It’s funny the things you remember. I remember a two-family house where I made a mistake and went to the wrong door. When we got all through Vanzetti paid me off at the corner of Cherry Lane and Court Street. And I know that it happened that way, that it was the day before Christmas, the same day and the same time they said he was holding up the truck in Bridgewater. When I told my story in court Katzmann complimented me on learning my part so well.

“I was only thirteen then and I was scared. I’d never been in a court before. Katzmann would go at me like a tiger, fire three questions at me at once. Thayer would never help me out. His face was so stern. He never said anything, but you could feel his hostility.”

Brini’s wife came in with a tray, and Brini took a pile of magazines from the coffee table to make room.

“Tell me,” I said, as she joined us. “If you had a friend in trouble you knew was innocent, could you lie to establish an alibi for him?”

He leaned back in his chair for some seconds, frowning slightly, while his wife poured the coffee. “I thought you might ask me something like that,” he said finally. “No, I couldn’t. I suppose you wanted me to say yes, but I couldn’t. I don’t know why I couldn’t, either.”

“Could you?” his wife asked me.

“Yes,” I said truthfully, “I could quite easily. Under oath too.”

“So could I,” she said, looking at her husband as if she thought he was being foolish.

“Well,” he said, “I know this, that I didn’t want to go to court. Young as I was, I knew what a disadvantage it would be for me to get mixed up in it. I wanted to be a musician, and whatever I might want, once I testified, I knew I’d find the way blocked. And it’s shadowed me ever since. They’ve pointed me out—Brini, the boy who testified for a murderer. In 1927 I told my story to Governor Fuller, and he said he believed me, but he never did anything about it. The day before they were executed I tried to see the governor again, but I couldn’t get past his secretary. I shouted at him, ‘If I lied, why don’t you arrest me for perjury?’ All he said was, if I was so brave why wasn’t I out picketing on the Common. I told him I’d been there the day before, and I asked to be locked up, but he just turned his back.”

He set down his coffee cup. “I don’t suppose what I’ve been telling you helps you much. These are just my feelings. Those others, where we delivered the eels that morning, they didn’t want to testify either. They were all good Catholics and Vanzetti was an anarchist. But they’d bought the eels, they’d seen Vanzetti, and my father talked to them. They had respect for him, not fear but respect, so they went.”

As we talked the lights of the suburban street began to wink out, and I could see it was time for me to go. “You’ll probably think of things you forgot to ask me,” he said at the door. “Just telephone me or come down, if there’s anything more you want to know. Any time.”

Driving home, I thought over what Brini had told me. What had a respectable school principal to gain by lying? If he had had anything to hide, forty years after the event, he could simply have refused to see me. Yet if Brini was telling the truth, Vanzetti was innocent of the Bridgewater holdup. And if he was innocent of the first crime, it seemed to me he was most probably innocent of the second. But Brini knew. If he had told me the truth, Vanzetti was an innocent man.

“I think you can sense whether a person is telling the truth or not,” I told a sergeant at the State Police headquarters a few days later. “You can judge a man by the sort of person he is, by the general impression he gives as much as by what he says. You can size him up, don’t you think?” The sergeant did not reply directly, but his laugh had a jeering ring.

For weeks I had been trying to get an interview with Michael Dray, Katzmann’s old law partner, but always, without quite turning me down, he had eluded me. Katzmann had been dead six years, but Dray still kept the firm’s name. After the trial Katzmann had never made any public comment on his great case. Nor since his death had his partner been less reticent.

Finally, unexpectedly, Dray offered to see me. I drove through Dedham again, past the rain-wet courthouse with its glistening columns, down the empty High Street and across the empty square, and then through the mean industrial section of East Dedham, following the loops of the Neponset River to Hyde Park. It was a strange feeling to be on that journey, as if I might at last be heading toward the center of the maze.

Katzmann & Dray—there was the name on the downstairs directory of the modernized office building on River Street. Upstairs it was not quite so modern. I followed the dark, creaking corridor until I faced the name painted on an open door, then walked into a narrow brown room with nothing in it but a table, a lamp, and a gilt-framed photograph of Katzmann. I recognized him at once from the afternoon at Dedham: the square domineering head with the close-cropped hair.

Dray came suddenly out of a back room, a short, pudgy man in his sixties, with thin mouse-gray hair and blue eyes. “Just go in there,” he said pointing to another room, “and I’ll be right with you.”

On the oak door were the faded letters F. G. KATZMANN, Room 12. Stepping inside, I found myself alone. An oak desk faced me. On its plate-glass top I noticed the issue of American Heritage containing my Sacco-Vanzetti article with the Ben Shahn illustrations—to my embarrassment, for my description of Katzmann in it was not flattering.

Dray strode in briskly, sat down at the desk, and stared at me several seconds before speaking. “I could have seen you at any time within the last two months,” he said finally, “but I couldn’t make up my mind whether to or not. This is what decided me.” He tapped the magazine. “You write here that though you thought they were innocent, just by reading the evidence alone you’d have found them guilty. When I read that I decided you at least were honest. But for that I’d not have seen you.

“You know that Fred, as long as he lived, refused to discuss this case publicly with anyone. Of course he mentioned it to me. I don’t suppose a day went by that he didn’t think of it in one way or another. I saw him come in sometimes with tears in his eyes and say, Why do they say these things about me? Why do they keep on attacking me?’ Don’t think he wasn’t hurt.

“Now he’s gone, thinking it over, I’m willing to tell you a few things I know to set the record straight, because so much has been said against him. Fred was almost like a father to me. I was twenty-four when I came here just after the trial, and I studied what law I know right here in this office. Fred never had a son of his own, just his two daughters, and I think he came to look on me sort of as a son. All I know is this: My son’s at law school now, and if I can teach him as much decency and as much law as Fred Katzmann did me, I’ll think I’m a lucky man. You think I admire Fred. I do.”

He opened the American Heritage. “Here you speak of Katzmann as being, in spite of his name, a Mayflower descendant. He wasn’t. His father was a German, his mother Scotch and came from Roxbury. They were poor. His mother used to work. Fred had nothing. I think when he went to Harvard an aunt helped him out a little, but he used to tend furnaces to work his way through. Sometimes he earned a bit singing. He had a fine voice. Even when he was starting up his practice he still used to sing sometimes at churches and funerals.

“We got pretty close over the years. I don’t think in the end there was anything he kept back from me. I knew about his family, his social life, his practice. I knew how he felt about the Sacco-Vanzetti case. In that he never changed. He didn’t just think they were guilty, he knew they were guilty. He wouldn’t have avoided the case, for he never did put off dirty jobs onto other people, but sometimes he’d say to me, ‘Mike, if I had my life to live over, I’d never want to go through that again.’ He always felt it shortened his wife’s life, the whole business. For years they had to have guards round his house. He said whenever he woke up nights he’d hear them tramping round.

“A lot of things I set myself out to tell you,” Dray went on, “but they slip through my mind right now. Just this, though. I’ve built up a good practice in Hyde Park. I’ve done all right here. But I always have the feeling somehow that it was Fred’s practice, that anything I’ve amounted to has been through him. I want to defend his memory, and that’s why I’m talking to you.

“I’ll tell you another thing. When Jerry McAnarney was on the Sacco-Vanzetti defense, he thought his clients were innocent. I never heard any of the Defense Committee boys criticize Jerry. He went to the governor’s committee afterward and he still thought they were innocent. But he and Fred stayed the same good friends all through the years. They were partners together on that Willett-Sears case. Maybe you remember, that case lasted fourteen months—the longest jury case in the history of Massachusetts. I suppose if anyone asked Fred to name his ten best friends, Jerry McAnarney would have been among them. And if Jerry named his best five, Fred would have been on the list. I remember, too, just a short while before Jerry died he said one day right in this office: ‘No matter what they said about you, Fred, you were all right.’”

So we talked—or rather, I listened—as the lawyer talked through the afternoon. Katzmann had avoided the Dedham courtroom the day Thayer passed sentence, but Dray had gone there deliberately, and had heard Vanzetti’s speech to the court and watched him point his finger at the judge. For Dray, Vanzetti had seemed a sinister figure at that moment with his glaring eyes, his heavy bobbing mustache, and his passionate foreign voice.

Inevitably, we got to the subject of the guns.

“There’s a church just across the street,” Dray said. “The priest, Father Fraher, had a brother who was in here after the trial. He told Fred, ‘You want to know where Berardelli got his gun? He got it from me, that’s where he got it.’ There was a crack or nick or some sort of mark on the handle, and this Fraher said, ‘If the one you found on Vanzetti has that mark on it, it’s the same gun.’ He hadn’t even seen the gun then, mind you, but when we showed it to him, there was the mark, just like he said.

“Ah,” he said at last, sadness in his voice, “I wish I could explain to you in words what Fred really was. You couldn’t really understand him, seeing him just that once. Perhaps you were fed up with being on a jury. Fred wasn’t tricky. He was honest all the way through. I remember some man came in here once and wanted Fred to defend him in a robbery case, offered him five thousand dollars. That was a lot more money then than it is today. When he came to pay Fred, he brought the money in a box, all in bills, done up in little piles. As soon as Fred saw it, he wouldn’t touch the case. That money looked too much like payroll money. But an assistant district attorney over in Suffolk County didn’t mind taking it. No, you couldn’t get Fred to do anything that had even a suspicion of being wrong. He was that kind of man.”

I left Dray in the anteroom. We shook hands beside Katzmann’s picture. “I’m glad you came,” he said finally.

Out I went into the slashing rain, to my car parked by the dark bulk of the Catholic church where Father Fraher or his successor was probably still hearing confessions. If only Dray could have whipped open one of his filing cabinets and taken out the ultimate document that would have satisfied everyone from Aldino Felicani in his sheet-metal office to the corporation lawyer on Federal Street. I would have settled for a villain, but I had found only decent-enough people in irreconcilable positions, and still at the core of the labyrinth two men who had died a third of a century earlier in the electric chair.

CHAPTER THREE
APRIL 15, 1920

Thursday mornings Shelley Neal, the South Braintree agent for the American Express Company, met the 9:18 local from Boston to pick up the payrolls of the Slater & Morrill and Walker & Kneeland shoe factories. Until January 1920, the payrolls had been sent down on Wednesdays, but recently there had been so many holdups around Boston that the head office had altered its delivery schedules.

It was an uneasy time, that year after the soldiers returned. In November the savings bank in the neighboring town of Randolph, a few miles west of Braintree, had been held up and robbed. A month later, on the day before Christmas, four men in a touring car had tried to rob the paymaster of the L. Q. White shoe factory in Bridgewater, sixteen miles to the south. An unknown gang had recently stolen several freight-car loads of shoes belonging to Slater & Morrill. Almost every week Neal received a notice from the Boston office warning him to take every precaution, particularly to watch out for suspicious strangers. He now carried his 38-caliber Colt in his pocket with the pocket flap tucked inside so that he could reach for it quickly.

South Braintree was the other side of the New York, New Haven & Hartford tracks, at the wrong end of town. Had there been a national-bank branch there, the payroll money would not have had to be sent down by train, but the triangle of factories and narrow streets and workers’ houses was not commercially important enough. Braintree itself, lying ten miles south of Boston, was an undistinguished community of about fifteen thousand inhabitants that one passed through almost absent-mindedly on the old turnpike road to Cape Cod.

On Thursday morning, April 15, Neal, in his customary dark suit, derby, and overcoat, waited on the station platform with Art Stevens, one of his expressmen. The 9:18 was late. Neal drew out his gold Waltham on its heavy chain with the Masonic seal. Nine twenty-one. He could hear the wail of the steam-whistle—two long notes, a short, and a long—as the train approached the Braintree crossing. It would take another five minutes to reach South Braintree.

His express wagon was backed up to the curb, the driver hunched forward on the seat, his coat collar over his ears. Between the shafts the horse jingled his brasses, stamped, steamed, and tossed his head. Although the sun was four hours up, the air still held an aftermath of winter. Neal’s blunt hands with their hairy knuckles showed red, the diamond set in the thick gold band on his left ring finger reflected the light coldly.

A cumulus puff from the invisible train billowed up, blurring the horizon outline of the water towers on Penns Hill, Quincy. Within a minute the engine rounded the curve, growing larger as it moved soundlessly against the wind. Then the whistle echoed again and suddenly the train loomed up on the Union Street crossing by the Victorian brick aggregate of Thayer Academy. The station windows began to vibrate with the sound.

Almost before Neal was aware of it the train had slipped into the station, the brass bell on the boiler clanging, the driving wheels slurring to a halt. He waved to the engineer as the cab passed. Below the station at the Pearl Street crossing Mike Levangie, the lank-mustached, one-legged gate-tender, hobbled out of his shack and cranked down the double gate, then clumped over the tracks and lowered the single one.

Several passengers got off, a man and a woman got on, the stationmaster came out to check a bundle of Boston newspapers. Neal and Stevens walked to the baggage car where the freight clerk was waiting for them. Neal did not know his name—he was a new fellow—but he was a Mason. “Cold morning,” he remarked as he shoved an iron box across the floor. It contained some thirty thousand dollars in bills and coin. After Neal had signed the receipt book the clerk handed him the box’s key in a sealed envelope.

Neal and Stevens carried the box across the platform to the wagon and pushed it under the seat. Then Neal climbed up beside the driver. The driver flicked the reins and the horse started forward. Stevens, who had climbed over the tailboard, remained standing. Just as the wagon began to move, the locomotive backed up suddenly with a clank of couplings. Its piston rods reversed, a jet of steam shot from the cylinders, and the train started off in the direction of Weymouth, Hingham, and the South Shore.

The shadow of the wagon moved diagonally across Railroad Avenue toward the Hampton House, a mansard-roofed structure, four stories high, that had been built in the seventies for a trunk factory. It now housed the Slater & Morrill offices as well as the cutting rooms of the upper factory—Slater & Morrill’s lower factory was some distance away on Pearl Street. On the ground floor of the Hampton House, to the left of the center entrance, was the express company’s office. The gilt sign over its door, unchanged from an earlier day, read New York & Boston Despatch Express Co.

Its clapboarding flaked and blistered, the gray building lay full in the slanting sunlight that burnished its windows. A narrow grass border divided the avenue from an indented strip of pavement in front of the porticoed Slater & Morrill entrance. Six or seven cars were parked along the outside of the border. Neal recognized them. It was still possible to know all the cars in town at sight. “A lot of autos here this morning,” he remarked to the driver. There was one auto parked by the granite curb near the central entrance that Neal had never seen before: a touring car, dark and shiny as if it had just been polished. The top was up, the rear side curtains were fastened in place, and the motor was running. Neal’s driver had to turn out sharply to avoid scraping its fender. A man slumped down in the driver’s seat did not turn or look at them. He wore a felt hat, and his shoulders were hunched so that all Neal could see was the back of his neck, and his right hand on the steering wheel. Then, standing in the doorway under the portico, Neal noticed a second man, thin and fair-haired, with a pale sunken face. He had on a brown coat like an old army overcoat and he wore a gray hat pulled over his forehead. Neal did not like his looks.

The driver backed the wagon into the space in front of the express office, and Neal and Stevens carried the box inside. After the outside chill the office was warmly pleasant, smelling of floor oil and cigars. Neal took the key from the envelope and opened the box. Inside were the payrolls for the two companies, each in a brown canvas bag stamped National Shawmut Bank. He took out the Slater & Morrill bag and put the box containing the Walker and Kneeland money in the safe. Then he closed the safe door, pressed down the nickel-plated handle, and spun the dial.

With the bag tucked under his arm Neal motioned to Stevens and they started out the door toward the building’s center entrance. Neal now noticed another strange car. This one was parked across the avenue, facing south. He could not tell what kind it was. It was streaked with mud. He heard its driver call out “All right!” to the man in the first car. The pale man was still standing under the portico leaning against the door post. His hands were thrust into his overcoat pockets, and he held his head low, but as Neal and Stevens passed he stared up at them, moving his eyes without lifting his head. Neal felt for the reassurance of the Colt in his pocket. The man did not move. He had blue bulging eyes, the whites muddied, and his skin was yellowish, sickly, as if he were tubercular.

There was something queer about him, about his being there, Neal felt as he trudged up to the second floor. “Some funny-looking people round here today,” he told the girl at the desk. Margaret Mahoney, the paymistress, was at her desk by the water cooler. Neal had known Margaret Mahoney for years. The payroll bag was heavy for her so he walked across the office and put it in the safe himself. She gave him the receipt for it, and he and Stevens started downstairs.

From the top of the landing Neal could see the pale man still standing in the doorway but when he was about halfway down the man took his hands out of his pockets, walked over to the touring car, opened the rear door, and got in. Neal kept his hand on his Colt. By the time he reached the doorway the car had started up and swung round the corner of Holbrook Avenue. The mud-streaked car had already disappeared.

South Braintree Square was empty at half-past ten when Harry Dolbeare, a piano tuner, finished a cup of coffee at Torrey’s Drugstore on the corner and started up Washington Street to Cuff’s Music Store. Cuff had called him the day before to see about the felts on a secondhand upright, and Dolbeare told him he would have a look at it. As he reached Gregor’s Restaurant he noticed a black touring car turning left from Holbrook Avenue to Washington Street. He could see two men in front and, although the rear side curtains were up, three more men in the back seat. One of the men in back was leaning forward talking to the driver. Dolbeare had never seen any of them before, or the car either. They looked to him like foreigners, maybe some of that Dago bunch from the Fore River shipyards. Tough tickets, the lot of them, he thought to himself after the car had passed him.

At 11:15 Lola Hassam, a hard-faced woman in her forties, got off the train from Quincy with Julia Campbell, the old woman who rented one of her two rooms in the Alhambra Block there. Lola now called herself Lola Andrews, her name before her divorce, although some people said she had never been married. At various times she had been a waitress, a cleaning woman, and a practical nurse. Men often used to come to her room in the Alhambra. Since things were slack in Quincy, she and Julia had decided to come to South Braintree and look for work in one of the shoe factories.

They crossed the tracks by the gate-tender’s shack at the end of Railroad Avenue, walked down Pearl Street past the double pipe fence in front of Rice & Hutchins, and continued another twenty-five yards to the lower Slater & Morrill factory. Julia Campbell was developing cataracts, and she took the younger woman’s arm going downhill.

About thirty feet from the factory they passed a black touring car parked at the side of the road. A dark stocky man with high cheekbones was bending over the raised hood adjusting the motor. Lola Andrews saw another man sitting in the back of the car, a pale, sick-looking sort of fellow in a khaki overcoat.

The men paid no attention to them and the women walked up the steps of Slater & Morrill. Once inside they could not locate the employment office. As they stood there undecided, a middle-aged man in a business suit came down the corridor and asked them what they wanted.

“We want work, mister,” Lola Andrews said. The man said that three months ago he could have given them both jobs. Now they were not taking on any new help. She was not to be put off so easily, insisting she had heard in Quincy that the factory needed people. He told her she had heard wrong. “Isn’t this Rice and Hutchins?” she asked him finally.

No, he told her, Rice & Hutchins was up the road.

When the women again passed the touring car, the pale man in the overcoat was standing behind it and the dark man had crawled underneath and was working on the motor from below, his head and shoulders just visible through the spokes of the front wheel. Lola had almost to step over his feet to get by. He had a screwdriver in his hand, and just as she was opposite him he glanced up at her.

“Pardon me,” she said, “could you tell me how to get to the factory office?”

He crawled out from under the car, stood up, and asked her what factory she wanted. When she told him Rice & Hutchins, he pointed out the brick building and told her to take the driveway to the left; that was the office up there.

Lola and old Julia went down the gravel walk along the side of the brick building, up the stairs, and through the double folding doors. They could see the Employment Office sign there plainly enough.

Whenever William Tracey drove to the square on an errand, as he did two or three times a day, he liked to drive by his building, the wooden three-decker he had built in 1907 at the corner of Hancock and Pearl. Torrey’s Drugstore occupied the ground floor. That Thursday morning as he parked on Pearl to pick up his wife’s groceries at Dyer & Sullivan’s, just across from the drugstore, he noticed two strangers standing with their backs to Torrey’s window where the big glass vase of red water hung from its chains. The men were swarthy, about medium height, one just a little taller than the other. If it had been twelve o’clock the streets would have been full of factory hands and he probably would not have noticed them, but it was still half an hour before the noon whistle and the square was empty. He could not help but notice them.

After Tracey reached home with the groceries he found he had forgotten bread, so he drove back again, past his building and left to Schrout’s Bakery on Pearl Street. The strange men were still leaning against the window as he went in. When he came out they were gone.

Not quite an hour later William Heron, a railroad detective, noticed the same two men in the station. They were sitting on a bench by the gents’ toilet smoking cigarettes and talking in some foreign language. Dagos, he thought they were. He had come down on the 12:27 from Boston, and he was scarcely off the train before he spotted a fresh kid who had climbed on top of the Union News stand and was trying to tip it over. Eleven or twelve years old he was, one of that gang that hung around the station afternoons. Heron grabbed him by the collar and ran him into the operator’s room. The Dagos didn’t even look up as he went by.

McNamara was the kid’s name. The operator said his old man was all right, worked for the railroad, so Heron told the kid what he’d do to him if he ever caught him hanging round the station again, and let him go. He was not in the operator’s room more than five minutes, but when he stepped out again the Dagos had left. Somehow they stuck in his mind, and he wondered where they had gone to.

By trade Ralph DeForest was a shoemaker, though he had been unemployed for two months now. When he had nothing else to do, and that was most of the time, he wandered around South Braintree Square or sometimes dropped in at Magazu’s poolroom on Pearl Street. At 2:20 he was talking with Officer Shea on the corner next to Torrey’s when he spotted two men in front of the jewelry store. In the last two months he had seen everyone in town, but he had never seen those two before. Shea left to go up to the town hall and DeForest walked down by the fruit store past the jeweler’s. The two men looked him over as if they wanted to make something of it. Dark men they were, tough babies. He wasn’t going to let them think he was scared of them, though. Deliberately he turned round and walked past them again. They stared at him, and he stared at them, and finally he said: “I don’t think I owe you fellows anything.”

Without answering him they started off down Pearl Street, one about five feet ahead of the other. DeForest decided he would follow them. At the crossing they turned left toward the station. Just in front of the station a pinch-faced man in a brown coat was tinkering with the engine of a black touring car. The other two paused on the platform and DeForest brushed right by them and through the station into the toilet. When he came out the car and men had disappeared.

At ten minutes to three Jenny Novelli, a nurse, was on her way down Pearl Street to call on her friend Mrs. Knipps, who lived on Colbert Avenue, a dead-end dirt road just beyond Rice & Hutchins on the left. As she passed Schrout’s Bakery she noticed a large curtained touring car abreast of her and going in the same direction scarcely faster than she was walking. The car kept level with her until she reached the cobbler’s shop on the corner. At first she thought the man next to the driver was a friend of hers, William Mooney, but at second glance she realized she was mistaken. The pale driver she scarcely noticed.

For sixteen years Lewis Wade had been working in the sole-leather room at Slater & Morrill. Then, late in 1919, the boss had put him in charge of the shed and gasoline pump in front of the lower factory. Any time the company cars needed gas he went out to take care of them. Every afternoon at the same time Hans Behrsin, Mr. Slater’s chauffeur, would come round to fill up Slater’s Marmon sedan, and Wade was always ready for him with the shed door open and the pump unlocked.

On this April 15 just before three o’clock, Behrsin dropped by as usual and said he was on his way to the garage and that he would be back in ten minutes. A couple of minutes after three, as Wade was hitching the hose onto the pump, he happened to see a touring car below the factory in front of the little wooden house that belonged to the carpenter at Rice & Hutchins. A man was bending over the hood of the car fixing something.

Behrsin pulled up alongside the shed with the gray Marmon and Wade put in about eight gallons of gas. While he was cranking he kept watching the black car until before he knew it the tank had overflowed. Behrsin and he wiped up the overflow, then Behrsin drove off up Pearl Street toward the station.

As he passed Rice & Hutchins he saw two men sitting on the pipe fence near the end of the building, their feet on the lower bar. He knew they were strangers, but that was all he noticed about them.

From the time Shelley Neal brought in the payroll money, Margaret Mahoney had been dividing it to make up the envelopes for the lower factory. There were almost five hundred separate envelopes to be filled, and dividing the $15,776.51 took her right up to three o’clock, with only about ten minutes off for lunch. After she had sealed the envelopes she packed them in two wooden cases that went inside steel cashboxes with Yale locks. Hardly had she got the locks fastened before Mr. Parmenter and his guard Berardelli, the one everyone called the detective, stood there waiting for them.

Frederick Parmenter was in his middle forties, a full-faced man with a short mustache. The solidness of his body, his slightly sagging features and thinning brown hair made him seem older. Margaret Mahoney and the other girls in the office looked forward to his weekly visits. He liked to joke and pretend to make dates with them, though it was only in fun, for he had been married for years and did not play around. He was always very careful of his dress. That day he wore a white shirt with black and pink stripes and a new brown felt hat. Before he left he kidded a bit with the bookkeepers, Frances Devlin and Mary Splaine. He said he would take his pay now while there was still some money, and Margaret Gabney, the assistant bookkeeper, told him he had better, for there might not be any tomorrow. Then he took one of the cashboxes by the handle, and the detective took the other. The detective was just another Italian who never said anything.

Margaret Mahoney remembered afterward how Parmenter stood for a moment in the doorway and then how the stairs creaked as he and the detective walked down. It was a few minutes past three.

Outside the main entrance of the Hampton House, Parmenter, with Berardelli behind him, met Albert Frantello from the lower factory. Frantello said he was on his way to the office to get some cardboard tags. The paymaster and his guard walked on out of the shadow of the Hampton House.

Frances Devlin and Mary Splaine watched them for some minutes from their window on the second floor. Parmenter, without an overcoat, kept to the outside of the gravel walk and the detective, his overcoat buttoned up, walked a little way behind him. Just before they reached the crossing Parmenter shifted the cashbox from his left to his right hand. Fifteen feet beyond him the gate-tender was out washing a window of his shack.

From the cutting room on the third floor, Mark Carrigan, also looking out a window, kept his eye on the paymaster and the detective with their boxes as they passed the cobbler’s shop on the corner and went on toward the railroad-crossing sign. Just beyond the crossing, they stopped to talk with a man coming uphill from the other direction. Then they went on down, behind the high board fence by the water tower.

The first-floor windows of the lower Slater & Morrill factory were open, and Minnie Kennedy and Louise Hayes at their workbench noticed a touring car parked by the side of the street only about ten feet from them. A slight fair-haired man in a blue suit was fussing with the motor, lifting one side of the hood and then the other. Finally he stood by the front mudguard and lit a cigarette. A sickly young man he seemed, but not bad-looking. While he was standing there with a screwdriver in his hand, Thomas Treacy drove up with a wagonload of coal for Slater & Morrill, noticed the man’s light hair, and remembered that he had seen the same car with another man in front of the railroad station early that morning.

After a while the two girls watched the fair-haired man get into the car, drive down Pearl Street toward the swamp, turn round, and start back again.

Roy Gould had invented an oil-and-pumice paste for sharpening safety razor blades. All you needed to do was smear a little on the edge of a blade, run the blade a couple of times around the inside rim of a glass tumbler, and it was as good as new. He used to go to the different South Shore factories on paydays and sell his paste at the gates as the men came out. On April 15 he arrived at South Braintree on the 2:59 train. There was a young fellow standing on the platform and Gould asked him if he knew where and how they paid off at the shoe factories. The other pointed to two men walking down the street to the railroad crossing. “There goes the paymaster now,” he told him. “Just follow him.”

Gould started off toward the gateman’s shack. He could see the paymaster stop briefly at the crossing to talk with someone, then disappear behind the board fence the other side of the tracks.

Jimmy Bostock, the bandy-legged machine repairman, hurrying up Pearl Street from the lower factory to get the 3:15 trolley to Brockton, was near the water tower when he saw Parmenter and Berardelli coming down the street. He crossed over to meet them.

“Bostock,” Parmenter said as he came up, “there’s a pulley off one of the motors up at Number One.”

“I can’t look at it, not today,” Bostock told him. “I got to get this quarter-past-three trolley to Brockton to do a job there.”

“Well,” said Parmenter amiably, “they just told me to tell you if I saw you. That’s all.” While they were talking, Behrsin drove by in the Marmon sedan, honking and waving as he passed. Bostock said he would have to leg it to catch his trolley. “Don’t let me keep you,” Parmenter told him. He and his guard continued down the gravel walk.

Parmenter shifted the cashbox from his right to his left hand. The afternoon sun was warm on his back. To his right was the garage with the tin roof, and beyond it the tower of Rice & Hutchins. The lilac bush on the little dirt triangle in front of the factory was just coming into bud. A flock of pigeons circled over the tower, then headed back to their loft in Cain’s livery stable. Across the street, beyond a pile of bricks, some Italians were digging the cellar for a new restaurant. A loaded truck had just started up out of the excavation. Jim McGlone’s dump cart was pulled up to the curb beside a couple of little carts into which the Italians were shoveling dirt.

Parmenter passed the telephone pole with the red fire-alarm box on it. Two strangers were standing by the fence in front of Rice & Hutchins, dark squat men, their hands in their pockets. One wore a cap, the other a felt hat. He kept on past them, one step, two steps, three....

As his guard, still following, reached the telephone pole, the strangers whipped their hands from their pockets, and the man in the cap lunged forward, pinning Berardelli by the shoulder with his left hand while his right brought up a pistol. Berardelli tried to grapple with him, but before he could get a grip the man fired into him three times. Parmenter turned like a cat to find the same man now facing him, pistol in hand, and Berardelli just behind, his knees buckling. Then the gun muzzle flashed and a bullet struck him in the chest. He flinched, took a few steps sideways, and the man fired again. This time the bullet struck him in the back, and as he staggered across the street his legs began to go limp. Berardelli lay in the gutter, his arms twitching, the second cashbox just beyond the reach of his right hand. The man in the felt hat snatched up the box, then darted out toward the box Parmenter had dropped.

The man in the cap, who had followed Parmenter halfway across the street, now signaled with his pistol and fired again. As he did so the dark touring car that had been parked below Slater & Morrill seventy-five yards away started jerkily uphill with a grinding of gears.

The staccato sound of the shots echoed from the factory walls. From the loft of the livery stable the pigeons swirled up into the sunshine, then wheeled over the Hampton House. At the end of the wooden fence, almost at the crossing, Jimmy Bostock turned to see Berardelli doubling up and the gunman firing. Parmenter was walking jerkily across the street, and Bostock did not realize the paymaster had been hit until he began to sag. Seeing him fall, Bostock took a few steps toward him, but as he did so the man in the cap froze him by the fence with two shots.

The touring car churned along the street, sputtering and skipping, the driver furiously working the spark lever on the steering wheel. Berardelli had managed to get to his hands and knees. Before the car stopped a man, crouched on the running board, sprang off near the brick pile. He had an automatic in his hand. Stepping to the swaying Berardelli, he fired point-blank. Berardelli collapsed in the gravel. The first two bandits had piled into the back seat with the cashboxes. After firing several shots at the upper factory windows, the third bandit climbed in the back seat after them. As the car whined toward the crossing he crawled over into the front seat, leaning out, pistol in hand.

Wade was just snapping the lock on the gas pump when he heard the noise and looked up the street, thinking the Italians had started a fight. He saw Parmenter drop behind the cart and then watched a wavy-haired man shoot at Berardelli.

Along the front of each floor of Rice & Hutchins were nine rows of frosted-glass windows. Even if the sash of the middle cutting-room window on the first floor had not been jammed several inches above the sill, the cutters at their benches might still have heard the shots above the noise of the machinery. The jammed window made this certain. At the sound William Brenner leaned forward from his cutting board to peer through the slit, as did Louis Pelser on his right. As they looked down they saw Berardelli writhing in the gutter almost directly below them and a man with a pistol standing over him. Afterward they found it difficult to remember just what or how much they had seen in that one glimpse. As Pelser later testified, “We seen a glance of the whole thing.” From behind them Peter McCullum sprang on top of the bench, kicking the cutting boards aside and throwing the window up to the sash. What he saw was a dark man pushing a box in a car with his right hand. The sunshine was flickering on a whitish pistol in his left hand.

“Duck!” McCullum yelled, “There’s shooting going on!” Another shot echoed, and there was a tinkle of broken glass. McCullum, Brenner, Pelser, and the rest of the cutters threw themselves on the floor under the benches. A few seconds later a cutter at the other end of the room shouted that the automobile was crossing the tracks. They crawled out from under the benches, and Pelser pushed down to the end of the room where someone had opened the last window. He managed to see only the rear of the car jolting over the tracks but he could still make out the license plate. Going back to his cutting board he wrote down the number: 49783.

From the treeing room on the floor above, the foreman, Edgar Langlois, glanced incredulously down at the slumped Berardelli and the two strangers. “Someone’s been shot!” he shouted and ran for the wall telephone in the corridor. Barbara Liscomb peered from the window to see the paymaster and his guard on the ground, and just below her a dark, short, hatless man with a pistol in his hand. As she looked, he lifted his head and stared directly at her, a face that she could never afterward get out of her mind. He pointed his pistol, but before the bullet crashed through the pane over her head she had fainted. Langlois, dashing back, looked out again to see the dark car rolling toward the crossing. The glass had been removed from the back window and a rifle or shotgun barrel was sticking through the opening.

In the Slater & Morrill lower factory Minnie Kennedy and Louise Hayes had gone upstairs to the ladies’ room. When they heard the shots they dashed to the window just in time to catch a glimpse of the vanishing car.

From the kitchen of the frame house in back of the excavation Annie Nichols, so startled that she could hardly breathe, had watched the shooting, seen Berardelli and Parmenter fall, and the laborers scatter and dodge toward her fence. Then the touring car appeared and a man tossed the cashboxes into it. In his house next door Maurice Colbert, a carman for the railroad, had just gone into the kitchen to take off his coat when he heard the shots and saw the Italians running. He started for the front door only to find that his wife, sensing trouble, had locked it and removed the key. All he could see from the window was the auto and the two men with boxes running toward it.

As the car approached the railroad crossing, it came so close to Bostock that he could have reached out and touched it. Levangie, washing the windows of his shack, had heard the shots without heeding them until he saw a man come out from behind the brick pile and commence shooting. At that very moment the warning bell began to ring for the Brockton train, and he left his cloth and bucket to crank down the gates. Just as he brought the bars horizontal the touring car came to a halt in front of him, a man leaning out with a pistol that he jerked up sharply, shouting “Up! Up!” The train was still beyond the Hood Rubber Works, the engine just rounding the bend. Again the man jerked the pistol, then pointed it. Levangie raised the barrier. The touring car jolted across the ties, passing within a few feet of Roy Gould on his way to the factories with his razor-blade paste. A bareheaded gunman fired at Gould almost point-blank, the bullet piercing a lapel of his overcoat. Gould fixed the man’s look in his mind: the blown wavy hair, the blue suit, and oddly enough the watchchain that he was wearing across his waistcoat.

Mary Splaine and Frances Devlin from their Hampton House office, Mark Carrigan from the cutting room above, watched the topheavy car with its flapping curtains as it crossed from the tracks to the cobbler’s shop on the corner. The gunman in the front seat was firing at random. Workers scurried out the side entrance of Rice & Hutchins. Someone was chasing up the street from the factory calling “Stop them! Stop them!” A railroad gang working beside a sandpile stood gaping, their shovels still in their hands, Angelo Ricci, the foreman, trying to keep them back.

On the corner of Railroad Avenue in front of the cobbler’s shop the car almost brushed Frank Burke, an itinerant glassblower down for the day from Brockton. The gunman in the front seat aimed directly at him and pulled the trigger, but the hammer merely clicked. “Get out of the way, you son of a bitch!” he bellowed at Burke, the curtains blurring his face.

Louis DeBeradinis in his cobbler’s shop was giving an order to a salesman, Merle Averill, when he heard the tattoo of shots. “What the hell’s that?” Averill asked him, dropping his order book and running to the door. DeBeradinis followed. Together they saw the touring car sputter past the shop. The gunman leaned out and fired almost in DeBeradinis’ face. Again the weapon misfired.

At the poolroom at 66 Pearl Street, beyond the stable, Carlos Goodridge, a Victrola salesman, had been having a quick game with Peter Magazu, the proprietor, who also owned the shoe store next door, when he heard the first shots. He walked to the window, saw nothing, came back, and was chalking his cue when he heard more shots and people shouting. This time, stepping out to the edge of the sidewalk, he saw the dark touring car only twenty feet away and a swarthy man leaning out of it pointing a revolver at him. He ducked back inside and slammed the poolroom door, then peered out through the glass as the car spun by. The gunman had lowered his hand now, but he still held the revolver. Goodridge, his stomach tightened in a knot, watched the car swerve past the bakery, a gun barrel protruding from the gap of the rear window.

It gathered speed, running more smoothly, rolling past the stores and the frame two- and three-family houses and the barber shop with its spiraling striped pole. At 54 Pearl Street Nicola Damato, the barber, watched it pass, as did a shoe worker, Olaf Olsen, who had just come out of Torrey’s Drugstore. Both of them saw the gunman leaning out. Olsen noticed how he kept his left hand over his mouth as he held the pistol in his right. As the car swung left onto Washington at the top of Pearl Street, the tires spewing up the gravel, one of the men in the rear seat threw out several handfuls of tacks.

Elmer Chase, loading a truck in front of the Co-operative Society a hundred yards down Washington Street, heard the squeal of brakes and the grinding of gears. He looked up at the oncoming car, expecting a smashup. It slowed slightly as it passed him, and he had a glimpse of a sickly-looking driver and a stocky dark man with blowing hair bent over next to him.

Scarcely a minute had elapsed from the first shot until the getaway car vanished, but with its disappearance the actuality faded and the myth took over. All in all there were more than fifty witnesses of the holdup in its various stages, yet each impression now began to work in the yeast of individual preconceptions. The car was black, it was green, it was shiny, it was mud-streaked. There were two cars. The men who did the shooting were dark, were pale, had blue suits, had brown suits, had gray suits, wore felt hats, wore caps, were bareheaded. Only one had a gun, both had guns. The third man had been behind the brick pile with a shotgun all the time. Anywhere between eight and thirty shots had been fired. On some points there was a rough agreement: The car was a touring car, there were five men in it, the driver was a fair, sallow man, and the two men who had begun the shooting were short and clean-shaven.

The three gunmen had scarcely climbed into their car before Jim McGlone crawled from the excavation to where Parmenter lay sprawled on a stone. “I got him by the shoulder,” McGlone related two days later at the inquest, “and asked him where he was hurt and he didn’t answer, and I lowered his head to the ground. I went to the double team and got a horse blanket to put under Parmenter’s head and my brother came along and we lifted Parmenter up and they spread the horse blanket out and we put Parmenter in, and my brother and two other fellows took hold of a corner of the blanket and we carried him into the house.”

As soon as the car had passed the water tower Jimmy Bostock ran back to Berardelli. The detective lay on his side, his lips open, and with every breath blood foamed from his mouth. Bostock propped the guard’s head up slightly and wiped his face with a handkerchief.

Berardelli gave a shudder, the bright bubbling at his mouth stopped, and Bostock knew that the man was dead. In the gravel Bostock noted four spent shell cases. He picked them up and put them in his pocket.

All the factory entrances were now clogged with gesticulating figures. Those who remained inside lined the open windows. From the shops and tenements and the Hampton House beyond, people were streaming across the tracks to where the two men were lying. Around Berardelli they gathered ten deep. Fred Loring, who had run out with the others from the lower factory, saw a dark cloth cap lying a foot or so from the guard’s body. He picked it up and tucked it into his pocket. McGlone kept pushing the crowd back from the groaning Parmenter. Then he and his brother and Bostock carried the paymaster into the Colbert house, just behind the excavation. Crowds swarmed into Pearl Street: men in shirtsleeves, women in work aprons, small boys underfoot pushing their way through the others. The roadway was soon blocked from the factories to the railroad crossing. The voices of the men and women mingled, a collective murmur of incredulity that a thing such as they might have read about in newspaper headlines could actually have happened in South Braintree.

Shelley Neal arrived with his special police badge pinned on his coat and his Colt in his pocket just as they were carrying Parmenter into the Colbert house. The paymaster looked almost gone. As soon as Neal saw him in the blanket his one thought was to get back to the office and call the man’s wife. It took him five minutes, bucking the crowd, to reach the Hampton House and once there he found all the telephone lines busy. After trying several times to get central, he hurried down the steps to his harnessed wagon and headed for the telephone exchange.

Police Chief Jeremiah Gallivan, driving up in his Ford, passed the careening wagon, Neal with his feet braced against the dashboard and slashing at his galloping horse. By the time Gallivan covered the mile and a half from his home to Rice & Hutchins, Parmenter had been taken inside and Berardelli was dead. The chief shouldered his way through the crowd until he stood looking down at the familiar body with the unfamiliar glazed eyes. The mill workers pressed about him, their voices clamorous as they pointed out where the shots had been fired and the route of the car. Fire Chief Fred Tenney, already on the spot, told him it was a touring car with a green body. Its motor was acting up, Tenney said. He thought there might still be a chance to catch the gunman. Gallivan was willing to try. Together they started off in the red department runabout, forcing their way up Pearl Street, Tenney sounding the brass bell mounted on the radiator. After a left turn onto Washington Street they had to stop to brush away the scattered tacks, but after that they were in the clear. At the Plain Street railroad crossing Gallivan shouted at Joe Buckley, the gate-tender, that there had been a killing. Had he seen a car pass? Buckley had not. Gallivan and Tenney continued straight south toward Holbrook, two miles away.

At Holbrook Square they found a soldier who had seen just such a green touring car ten minutes before on the way to Abington. They swung east on the Abington road, Gallivan gun in hand, Tenney clanging his bell as he held the accelerator to the floor. The flat wooden town came on them with a rush, but beyond, in the network of roads between Whitman and Cox’s Corner, they lost the trail. Back and forth through the barren landscape they circled, along dirt ways that looped back on themselves or ended in the litter of some squatter’s chicken yard. The dust rose behind them and the afternoon shadows lengthened as the red runabout pushed on—until after almost two hours of driving they gave up.

Gallivan’s revolver was back in its holster and the fire chief’s bell silent when they again reached the Plain Street crossing. Buckley waved for them to stop. “I forgot to tell you about a car that came down here and went up that way,” he told them, pointing north. “It went out of my mind. The brakes screeched so much I thought it was going into the river.”

“Well,” said Gallivan, “it’s too late now.”

Instead of continuing over the tracks at Plain Street the car—with the screech that Buckley noted—had made a hairpin turn and headed back toward South Braintree on the almost parallel Franklin Street. But at the hill corner by the white-spired South Congregational Church it had swung west on Pond Street, following the curve of Sunset Lake on the right, and past the cemetery and the Torrey Elementary School on the left. After following Pond Street west for a mile, slapping and jolting, side curtains billowing and the motor roaring, the car turned south on Granite Street toward Randolph.

Mrs. Alta Baker saw it near the Randolph line, moving at fifty miles an hour. At twelve minutes after three it passed Walter Desmond, a tobacco salesman, on his way from Randolph to South Braintree. Then at the junction with the Randolph highway it swung right along the broken surface of Oak Street, cut through the scrubby outskirts of the Randolph Woods for a mile and a half, and took the left fork near an old cemetery into Orchard Street. On this obscure lane it passed Albert Farmer and his wife Adeline with their horse and wagon that they had just taken from the barn where the two roads joined. The Farmers noticed the swirl of dust as the car moved toward them and they watched it make the abrupt turn south into Orchard Street.

The driver must have soon realized he was off course, for ten minutes later George Chisholm, a road laborer working on Main Street, a stone’s throw from Oak, saw the car beating up north with flaring curtains, hurtling by him so fast he thought the tires were coming off. It turned right into Oak Street and continued a quarter of a mile east, bearing down Orchard until it again arrived at the junction. The driver stopped, hesitated, then swung the car into the yard of the Hewins house on the corner just across from the Farmers. Mabel Hewins was standing on her porch when the swarthy man in the front seat leaned out and asked her the way to Providence. She told him to follow Oak Street to Chestnut across North Main and keep going. He grunted, reversed the car jerkily, and started back the way he had come. She could see both men in the front seat clearly, but not the others.

Not quite two miles farther, a mile beyond Tower Hill where Chestnut Street merges with the Stoughton Post Road, John Lloyd and Wilson Dorr, working in a sandpit, saw the car jouncing south along the road that was “all hills and hollows and ruts.” Dorr noticed that the glass was missing from the back window. On the sharp gradient of Tucker Hill leading into Stoughton it overtook Francis Clark and Elmer Pool in their bakery wagon, veered out, and continued on the left-hand side of the road and over the crest. Clark, too, noticed the oblong gap in the back of the cloth top and told Pool to copy the license plate. All Pool could spot was 49.

The car disappeared south in the isolation of the old turnpike and was not glimpsed again until it reached the outskirts of Brockton at a quarter to four. A high school girl, Julia Kelliher, saw it coming down very fast over the hill from Brockton Heights, churning the dust behind it, the curtains fluttering in the wind. As it went over a bump she saw something tossed up in the back seat behind the curtains. There were two men in front. After the car passed she tried to take down the license number. She could made out an 83 at the end and a 9 and a 7, and these she wrote in the sand beside the road.

At 4:15 Austin Reed, the railroad-crossing tender at Matfield, a small settlement on the outskirts of West Bridgewater, eight and a half miles southeast of Brockton Heights and twenty-two miles from South Braintree, stepped out of his shanty at the approach of the train from Westdale. As he stood in the middle of the road with the yellow Stop sign in his hand, he saw a touring car racing down the hill from West Bridgewater. He walked toward it holding up his sign. The driver did not seem to want to stop, but finally he pulled up about forty feet away. A man sitting next to the driver leaned out and shouted, “What the hell are you holding us up for?” Then the train passed between them. After it had rumbled by, the car started up over the crossing and the man in the front seat pointed his finger at Reed as if it were a pistol and bellowed again: “What the hell did you hold us up for?” He was only four feet away.

The rattling car took the right fork on Matfield Street, then, as if it had made a circle, returned three minutes later on the left fork of Belmont Street and recrossed the track. Reed saw it edge over the hill and watched the cloud of dust that slowly settled behind it. That was the last seen that day of the touring car.

Parmenter lay propped up on the sofa in the front room of the Colbert house. Scarcely conscious, he managed to whisper that one gunman was dark, short, and stocky and the other short and thin.

When the Weymouth medical examiner, Dr. John Chisholm Frazer, arrived at four o’clock there were several other doctors already in the room with Parmenter. Frazer stopped by Berardelli’s body—it had been carried into the Colbert kitchen—only long enough to note that he was dead and that blood was oozing from his back and arms. Shortly after the medical examiner’s arrival, the ambulance from the Quincy City Hospital came for Parmenter. As the paymaster was carried down the steps the onlookers surged in toward the stretcher. They surged in again twenty minutes later when Berardelli’s body was taken away in a wicker basket.

After the hearse had disappeared the crowd began to thin. Most of the workers headed home, leaving behind a diminishing core of the young and idle. The long shadow of the afternoon moved along the factory fronts and the sun turned the Slater & Morrill windows orange. A group—mostly boys in corduroy knickers—still stood around the stains in the gravel where Berardelli had fallen.

Later, as the sun edged toward the Blue Hills and the light began to fade, the crowd increased again. Workers and their wives strolled down Pearl Street after supper for a second look, voluble witnesses repeated the details, and as the news spread to the neighboring towns the curious and the morbid began to arrive from the compass points—Randolph, Quincy, Holbrook, Weymouth.

Dr. Nathaniel Hunting operated on Parmenter shortly after his arrival in the hospital. A bullet that had apparently glanced off his ribs, causing an elongated but superficial wound, was shaken out of his jacket. The second bullet, the one that had struck him after he turned, had cut horizontally through his abdomen, perforating the vena cava, the body’s largest vein. Hunting was able to remove it easily from a mass of blue flesh just below the surface of the abdomen. He marked the bullet with a cross on the base. After the operation Parmenter recovered consciousness for a few minutes and managed to tell Assistant District Attorney George Adams, who had been waiting at his bedside, that he did not recognize the men who shot him. Then he drifted off again. He died at five in the morning, some fourteen hours after he was shot.

Dr. George Burgess Magrath, the medical examiner of Suffolk County, made the autopsy on Berardelli, assisted by the Norfolk County examiner, Dr. Frederick Jones. He found four visible wounds: the first in the left back upper arm, the second near the left armpit, the third lower down on the left side, and the fourth at the right shoulder. According to Dr. Magrath, Berardelli might have recovered from the first three wounds, but not from the fourth. The bullet there had pierced the right lung, severed the great artery issuing from the heart, and continued down through the intestines until it lodged in the hipbone.

All four bullets had remained in the body. As Dr. Magrath recovered them he took a surgical needle and scored each in turn on the base with a Roman numeral. The mortal bullet he marked with three vertical scratches.

The shell cases that Jimmy Bostock had picked out of the gravel he handed to Thomas Fraher, the Slater & Morrill superintendent. These consisted of two Peters shells, one Remington, and one Winchester—the last identifiable by a W stamped on its base. Fraher in turn gave them to Captain William Proctor, the head of the State Police, who had driven down from Boston as soon as he heard of the shootings. Several hours later Fred Loring gave the cap he had picked up to Fraher, who kept it overnight and then passed it on to Chief Gallivan.

Over that week end South Braintree bubbled with gossip. State Police and Pinkerton detectives, occasionally at crosspurposes, combed the town, interviewing and filling out their reports. Chief Gallivan spent Sunday with a state policeman searching the Braintree woods for abandoned cashboxes. He found nothing. That was his last discouraged gesture in the case.

A rumor floated round that Berardelli had recognized the man who shot him, that he had known in advance something was up, and that was why he had been killed. There was a lot of such talk in the Hampton House. Mary Splaine and Jimmy Bostock told a young Pinkerton operative, Henry Hellyer, they thought a man named Darling who worked in the order department might have been the front man for the bandits. Darling had a bad reputation. Two of his friends had been arrested some years back for stealing shoes from the factory, and only a few weeks ago the police had found some stolen shoes at his house. Mary Splaine supposed that Darling had probably hatched the scheme and tipped off his accomplices as to the time the payroll went out. But when Hellyer asked Fraher about this, the superintendent told him that Darling was completely trustworthy and that Mary Splaine was too irresponsible for anyone to take her seriously.

On Saturday, when the inquest was held before Judge Albert Avery in the Quincy District Court, several witnesses said they had seen two cars during the holdup, a large touring car and a small sedan. Levangie, the gate-tender, described the driver of the touring car as having a “dark complexion, dark brown mustache, soft hat, and brown coat.” Everyone else described him as a pale, fair-haired man with a smooth yellowish face.

Detectives brought down a selection of rogues’-gallery pictures from Boston. Bostock, Wade, and several others who riffled through the assortment picked out a New York bank robber, Anthony Palmisano, as one of the South Braintree bandits. On April 23 a group that included Bostock, Wade, Albert Frantello, and Mary Splaine was taken to Captain Proctor’s office in the State House and shown a number of photographs, including Palmisano’s. Mary Splaine positively identified his picture as that of the man she had seen leaning out of the car with the revolver. Frantello and Bostock said it was an excellent likeness.

Unfortunately for their promising identification, it was soon learned that Palmisano—also known as Tony the Wop and Baby Tony—had been arrested in Buffalo in January and was still in jail there.

CHAPTER FOUR
BRIDGEWATER AND
WEST BRIDGEWATER

The attempted robbery of the L. Q. White Shoe Company payroll in Bridgewater, on Wednesday, December 24, 1919, resulted neither in loss of money nor life. At twenty minutes to eight on that freezing overcast morning Alfred Cox, the company paymaster, was taking the week’s payroll of $33,113.31 in his delivery truck from the Bridgewater Trust Company to the factory at the foot of the hill by the railroad station. The truck, a Ford with a tarpaulin top and solid rubber tires, was driven by Earl Graves, with Constable Benjamin Bowles beside him. Cox sat just behind Graves, on a large galvanized-iron box containing the money.

Craves drove from the bank along Summer Street to the square, then turned down Broad Street—divided in the middle by a single streetcar track—moving at a cautious ten miles an hour because of the ice on the road. A streetcar moving in the same direction had just stopped at the corner of Hale Street, seventy-five yards away. At the same moment a curtained touring car swung over the tracks and pulled up on the corner, its wheels on the sidewalk. Three men jumped out and dog-trotted toward the oncoming truck. The man in the lead, bareheaded, with a dark mustache and wearing a long black coat, carried a shotgun. The two behind him held pistols.

Graves had first noticed the touring car—a Hudson, he thought it was—while he was passing Harlow’s blacksmith shop. He watched the men get out and start running, but it was not until the mustached man knelt and took aim that he realized he was in for a holdup. Yanking on the gas lever, he veered the truck across the tracks. Bowles reached for his revolver. When the truck was some twenty-five yards away the mustached man fired both barrels. A few pellets rattled against the truck’s metal body without doing any damage. One of the men with pistols, standing eight feet behind the man with the shotgun, exchanged random shots with Bowles until the streetcar came between them. Then the mustached man dashed across the street and fired again at the slithering truck.

Cox, from his seat on the cashbox, saw the kneeling figure and the smoke from the discharged shotgun, “everything like the snap of a camera.” As the truck skidded, Graves lost control of the wheel. Bowles grabbed it out of his hands. Wavering from one side of the street to the other, the truck finally crashed against a telephone pole, smashing headlights and radiator. In the meantime the three gunmen had scurried back to their car with its waiting driver and spun out of sight down Hale Street in the direction of the normal school.

When Frank (“Slip”) Harding, an auto-parts salesman on his way to Bassett’s Garage just across from the corner of Hale Street, first saw the men carrying guns, he thought it was some kind of movie stunt. He was only four feet away as they began firing and he watched them, too astonished to move. Then within seconds they had run back to their car and driven off. Harding later described the car as a black Hudson Six with the license number 01173C.

Dr. John Murphy, a young general practitioner with his house and office at 76 Broad Street, was getting dressed when he heard the shots. He looked out his window just in time to glimpse the touring car moving away. By the time he reached the street, about the only thing he could see was the litter of glass where the truck was rammed against the pole. Then he noticed a spent shotgun shell in the gutter. He picked it up and put it in his pocket.

For Bridgewater’s police chief, Michael Stewart, the robbery attempt lay outside the range of small-town peccadilloes with which he was used to dealing. His force consisted of two officers, one patrolman, and one night patrolman. In addition there were the specials, one at the normal school, one for the night performances at the Princess Theater, one at the L. Q. White factory, and six for the Fourth of July only. Stewart, in his forties, had held his job since 1915. Before this he had spent four years as chief of the two-man force in Rockland, another of the flat semirural manufacturing towns lying inland between Boston and Cape Cod. In Rockland most of his trouble had come from the foreign workers. The same was true in Bridgewater, where a third of the population was now made up of Poles, Russians, Greeks, and Armenians. As a second-generation Irish-American Stewart tended to be suspicious of these newcomers. He had an idea that the holdup men might be Russians, with a confederate working in the factory. Inspector Albert Brouillard of the State Police, who was sent down to Bridgewater to work with Stewart, was more inclined to think the holdup the work of one of the gangs that had moved into the area after the recent Boston police strike. Graves thought the men were Italians.

The license number that Harding had written down was traced through the Registry of Motor Vehicles to George Hassam’s garage in Needham, a Boston suburb, twenty-three miles northwest of Bridgewater. It turned out to be a dealer’s plate. Hassam owned five sets of them.

On Monday, December 22, a foreigner had come into Hassam’s office and asked if he could borrow a set of plates. In broken English he told Hassam he had just bought a car in Wellesley and wanted to take it away. When Hassam said he could not lend his dealer’s plates, the man left. He was a surly man of about forty, as Hassam remembered him, dark, with a close-cropped mustache.

Hassam forgot about him until the police telephoned regarding the plates on the Bridgewater car. Then, as he went to the back of his garage to look at a secondhand Hupp that had been carrying a set of his dealer’s plates, he found them missing. When or how they had been taken he did not know.

On December 26 the Pinkerton operative Henry Hellyer noted in his report that on Sunday evening, December 21, a Buick touring car belonging to Daniel H. Murphy of Natick had been stolen from 115 Fair Oaks Street, Needham, not far from Hassam’s Garage. Hellyer was right about the Buick though not about some of his other details. The car, belonging to a Francis J. Murphy had actually been stolen in Needham a month earlier, on November 23, from in front of a house in Fair Oaks Park.

That same November night a Dedham police officer, Warren Totty, standing under the arc light in the granite shadow of Memorial Hall, had seen the car speeding across Dedham Square. He had stepped out with his hand raised, but the car swung past him down the hill and under the railroad bridge toward Hyde Park. The license number that Totty managed to copy down turned out to be Murphy’s.

“It is thought,” Hellyer reported, “that this car may have been used by the men last Wednesday.” The connection between the Murphy Buick and the Needham license plates appealed to Stewart, even though both Graves and Harding had said that the car was a Hudson. Hellyer now interviewed Richard Casey, a student at Rhode Island State College, who had seen the car on Main Street before the shooting, and John King, who noticed it afterward near the normal school. Whether or not Chief Stewart had prompted them, both said it was a Buick.

Stewart and Brouillard had managed to trace the car as far as Stoughton. Beyond that point, although they called at all the garages in the vicinity, their leads came to nothing. Chief Shine of Dedham had a notion that an Italian gang in East Dedham might be involved. Stewart visited Dedham, Needham, even some suspects in Newton, and arranged meanwhile for circulars describing the car to be distributed to the local garages and gas stations. He now began to think the car was hidden somewhere between Stoughton and Dedham.

Meanwhile the Pinkerton agents had been spreading out through the Italian districts of Quincy and Boston. On December 30 Assistant Superintendent Henry Murray reported:

Today informant telephoned in; later met him at supper and in the course of conversation stated that he had learned that the Italian mentioned yesterday had said that the men who were implicated in the Bridgewater holdup had occupied temporarily a shack in close proximity to Bridgewater and that the car that had been used was left there along with some overalls or disguise of a similar nature, used by one of the men implicated in the holdup; that these men were Italians, had deserted the car, returned to Quincy by trolley; that they are believed to be residing in the vicinity of Fore River Shipyard and are known as Anarchists.

The “Italian mentioned yesterday” was a floater who spent most of his time hanging around the Boston American Building near Summer Street or in Monahan’s Bar in the North End. It took the Pinkerton agents several days to track him home to 31 Waverly Street, in the massed tenement district of Brighton. The house was a brick three-flatter, and there was a SCARLET FEVER card on the front door. Hellyer, Stewart, and Brouillard went there the afternoon of January 3, 1920. By ringing the three doorbells until they got an answer they learned that the man they wanted had left for Allston earlier in the day. They waited almost five hours on the upper landing until he came back. He turned out to be a flashily dressed Sicilian, Carmine Barasso, who had anglicized his name to C. A. Barr. Quite willing to talk, he invited the three men in to his flat. According to Hellyer’s report:

Barr related a rambling statement about a machine that he had invented with which he could detect who had committed a crime no matter where it was committed. He stated that one Mrs. Vetilia of 2 Lexington Street East Boston, had looked into the machine and saw the holdup happening and saw the man plainly but did not know who they were.

As Stewart drove back to Bridgewater along the empty snow-edged roads of the Blue Hills he added another piece to the puzzle he was fitting together in his mind. If the Pinkerton information was right, the holdup men were anarchists. It was not a difficult conclusion to come to in the winter of 1919-1920. A group of 249 anarchist and Communist aliens that included Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman had just been deported to Russia. That very day, January 3, the headlines of the papers were flaring with the news of Attorney General Palmer’s raids that had taken place all over the country the previous evening. RAIDS TO HEAD OFF REVOLUTION was the heading of the weekly Bridgewater Independent. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE MAKES PUBLIC COMMUNISTS’ PLAN TO OVERTHROW GOVERNMENT. ARRESTS IN FIFTY TOWNS.

But such incidents and antagonisms, the social change and struggle of the postwar period, were sensed only vaguely in Bridgewater. By the time the wave of history reached the inland cape towns it was scarcely a ripple. The same issue of the Independent made Charlotte Randall’s twenty-first birthday party in West Bridgewater the subject of its editorial.

When the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect on January 16 the December holdup no longer seemed worth discussing. The Pinkerton men had gone. The thousand-dollar reward posted by Loring Q. White for the gunmen’s capture was unclaimed. At his headquarters in the back room of the wooden-pilastered town hall, Chief Stewart still thought about the crime, but he could find no more pieces to add to his puzzle.

It was the snowiest winter in fifty years. The weeks followed into the lengthening afternoons of February. On the sixth a mockingbird was seen by the members of the Bridgewater Bird Club. Five days later a blizzard swirled in from the northeast and the town was snowed under again. In the Superior Court in Brockton Judge Webster Thayer fined a young Brava (the local name for the colored Cape Verde Island Portuguese) two hundred dollars for manslaughter under extenuating circumstances, and asked that the fine be turned over to the victim’s family for funeral expenses. The thaw began on March 19, and the basement of the Bridgewater Central Square Congregational Church was flooded.

Then on April 15 a South Braintree paymaster and his guard were killed during a holdup. Having already gone to press, the April 17 edition of the Independent made no mention of the murders. Yet the event had already impinged on Bridgewater. Shortly after the passage of the 1918 Deportation Act, Chief Stewart had assisted the Immigration Service in arresting six Italians charged with spreading literature advocating the overthrow of the government. The six were marked down for deportation and released on bail. Stewart supposed they had all long since been sent back to Italy.

But that spring at least one of the six, Ferruccio Coacci, was still living in a section of West Bridgewater called Cochesett. Coacci, sometimes known as Ercole Parrecca, had come to Quincy in 1915 and taken up with a woman named Ersilia Buongarzone. Ersilia had borne him two children, both delivered at the state almshouse in Tewksbury. For a period Coacci was employed at the L. Q. White Company. At the time of his arrest, Joseph Ventola, an anarchist friend from Hyde Park, had posted the thousand-dollar bond, and Coacci was released on condition that he marry Ersilia and support her children. While awaiting his deportation order he worked for Slater & Morrill in South Braintree. Early in April 1920, after receiving his notice to report on the fifteenth at the East Boston Immigration Station, he quit his job.

Since the first of the year Coacci had been living in Puffer’s Place, at the corner of Lincoln and South Elm Street, in the empty flatland about a mile from West Bridgewater’s Elm Square. Puffer’s Place was a small, decayed two-story structure with a rust-colored mansard roof and irregularly spaced gables. Once it had been the office of the long-since-defunct Alger Iron Foundry. Then Clarence Puffer, a local handyman, had turned it into a dwelling. Mario Buda, a young Italian who called himself Mike Boda, had rented it early in the winter, and a month or so later Coacci had moved in from Quincy. Ersilia, who was pregnant again, kept house and did the cooking.

The Italians in Puffer’s Place were scarcely noticed by their scattered Yankee neighbors. At times cars would be parked on the corner on Sunday afternoons and talk and singing would echo from inside, but for the most part the newcomers were orderly enough. No one knew what Boda did for a living. With the Eighteenth Amendment in force, some people on South Elm Street suspected the Italians might be engaged in selling liquor. In this they were right. At one time Boda and his brother had run a dry-cleaning shop in Wellesley, adjoining Needham, but after prohibition he became a bootlegger. His avocation was anarchism. All his spare time and his enthusiasm he devoted to distributing radical pamphlets and journals to the Italian colonies of eastern Massachusetts.

Boda was a dapper man, five feet six inches tall, with a short mustache, aquiline nose, and deep-set hazel eyes. If anyone happened to ask him what he did, he replied that he was a salesman for a New York fruit-importing firm. Since coming to West Bridgewater from Hyde Park he had bought a green Overland which he kept in a shed beside the house. The car was a 1912 model, more often than not laid up for repairs. Boda had not registered it for 1920.

During the two years he had been out on bail Coacci had maintained that he wanted to go back to Italy and that he was just waiting for a free ride. When his bondsman, Ventola, learned from the Immigration Service that Coacci had not turned himself in on April 15, he was as surprised as he was dismayed. He drove at once to West Bridgewater, arriving at Puffer’s Place at half past four. There was no one home but the door was open. He went into the kitchen to wait. About five o’clock he at last saw Boda coming down the road from Elm Square, wearing a green velour hat and carrying a leather bag.

Boda said he had just come back on the trolley from Brockton. Ventola told him that Coacci had not reported at the immigration station and that he was worried about his bond. Boda assured him that Coacci would report next morning. For the time being Ersilia and the children would stay in the United States. Ventola, relieved, offered to help them.

The following afternoon Coacci telephoned the Immigration Service and told Inspector Root that he could not come in. His wife was sick, he said, and he needed a few extra days to take care of her. Root in turn called Chief Stewart in Bridgewater and suggested they both drop in on Coacci that evening. But Stewart had to attend a dress rehearsal of Aunt Jerusha’s Quilting Party, a play in which he had a part. Besides, West Bridgewater was a separate town outside his jurisdiction. However, he agreed to send his night patrolman, Frank LeBaron.

Root and LeBaron arrived at Puffer’s Place after dark. Coacci admitted them and announced that he was ready to leave. There seemed to be nothing wrong with his wife. Root, who had a lodge meeting that night, offered to have the deportation postponed another week, but Coacci refused, saying that he wanted to get back on the first steamer to his sick father. When Root suggested that Coacci leave his wife some money, Coacci—who had two hundred dollars with him—said she did not need any. As the inspector led him down the steps with his baggage, Ersilia and the children stood in the doorway crying.

After his rehearsal, Chief Stewart hurried back to headquarters. LeBaron was already there, behind the desk. “That Dago,” he said. “There wasn’t nothing wrong with his wife. Just a stall.” As Stewart walked home from the town hall, under the elms of the deserted common, he kept mulling over LeBaron’s remark. He suddenly recalled what Barr-Barasso had said in December about some anarchists living in a shack near Bridgewater. On April 15 these anarchists had been—where? It was in this evening moment, in Chief Stewart’s responding mind, that the Sacco-Vanzetti case had its origin.

On the afternoon of April 17, Charles Fuller, the business manager of the Brockton Enterprise, locked his office, walked over to the Fair Grounds where he kept his horse, and started out with his friend Max Wind on their usual Saturday ride. They left the Fair Grounds at half past two, riding out the back gate toward West Bridgewater. Once over the railroad track on Manley Street, not far from the Poor Farm, they headed down a bridle path through the thick secondary growth of maple and scrub oak and alder known as the Manley Woods. Fuller rode ahead. About six hundred feet in from the road, he came face to face with a Buick touring car. So close were the bushes that he and Wind had to dismount and lead their horses past it. The car had apparently been there overnight, for the windshield and hood and fenders were streaked with dew. Fuller glanced in as he went by and saw a few coins on the front seat and a coat in the back. A moment later when he looked back to see if Wind could get by, he noticed that the glass was missing from the rear window.

Before remounting the two men stopped to look at the smeared dark-blue car. It had no license plates, but otherwise it seemed to resemble the holdup car they had read about the day before. Just ahead of the car they made out the thin tracks of a smaller car, perhaps a Ford, leading to Manley Street. They rode back the way they had come, stopped at the first house, and called the Brockton police. Within fifteen minutes City Marshal Ryan arrived with Officer William Hill.

Together the four men examined the car inside and out. Besides the coins and the old brown overcoat, they found a phial that was thought afterward to have contained dope, and on the floor the glass from the rear window. Since Fuller was more familiar with a Buick than the others he drove it out through the snagging bushes. Reaching Manley Street, he turned the car over to Hill, who drove it to the police garage in Brockton. The next morning the police, examining the car a second time, found a bullet hole in the rear door.

Stewart and Brouillard were notified, and they inspected the car Sunday evening. The Buick’s spare tire was missing, and the maker’s number near the gas tank had been chiseled off. The engine number, however, was still intact: 560,490. It was the number of the Murphy car stolen in Needham on November 23. The Registry of Motor Vehicles had reported that the license plate, 49783, had been stolen from a Ford belonging to Warren H. Ellis of 602 Webster Street, Needham. Just after ten o’clock on the night of January 6 Ellis had put his car in his garage. Next morning the plates were gone.

Stewart learned about the Ellis plates on Monday. In December he had connected the missing Needham Buick with the Bridgewater holdup. Now it turned out to be the car used in South Braintree. And both the Bridgewater and the South Braintree license plates had been stolen in Needham within an interval of about two weeks. The two crimes now seemed to him to be the work of the same gang—another piece added to his puzzle. It was curious too—a kind of corroboration of his theory of the other night—that the car should have been found less than two miles from Puffer’s Place. Coacci again!

Unfortunately, Coacci was at this point somewhere on the Atlantic. Nevertheless Stewart felt there might still be some evidence to be found in the South Elm Street house. He telephoned Brouillard and they arranged to go over to Puffer’s Place on Tuesday.

That same Monday Joseph Ventola turned up at Puffer’s with a truck to move Ersilia, her children, and her belongings to a house in South Braintree. Not long after he had gone Simon Johnson and his brother Samuel arrived from their Elm Square Garage with a tow truck to haul away Boda’s broken-down Overland. Boda helped them push the car out of the shed at the side of the house. After they had hitched it up, Boda, who had known the Johnsons ever since he had moved to Cochesett, rode the mile to Elm Square with them in the truck. The Italian wore his velour hat and was carrying his leather bag. The Johnsons let him off at the car stop and he boarded the Brockton trolley.

Tuesday afternoon Stewart picked up Brouillard and they drove to Puffer’s Place. In the fading light, the ramshackle gabled house with the gnarled apple tree in front of it and the leafless grapevine in the rear looked as if it might have been cut out of cardboard. Broken windows in the shed had been tacked over with burlap.