Popular Crime

by Bill James

  It was a nice apartment, upscale. A week earlier she had pawned some of her jewels to buy Christmas presents for her family. Her apartment was stocked with letters and cards from the most prominent men in Philadelphia, politicians and lawyers, actors and businessmen and athletes. Valuables in plain sight ruled out burglary; this was an act of passion. All of those men had to be questioned. One by one the police approached them, delicately, and struck them from the list.

  The building superintendent remembered that on the previous day, early Friday morning, he had been pulled from his bed by an irate cab driver who had left a fare near the Wilton Apartments, where Maizie lived, in the middle of the night. The fare told him to wait, but had never returned. The cab driver was owed $19.60.

  Police located the cab driver, who gave them a description of the scofflaw, as well as a name, “Bernie.” The driver had picked up a handsome young man and two ladies at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, and had driven the girls to their home in Germantown, then taken Bernie to the Wilton, where he had disappeared.

  Police found a picture signed “Love, Bernie” in Maizie’s apartment. The cab driver ID’d the man, who turned out to be Bernard M. Lewis of Pittsburgh. The girls from Germantown, the Kyle sisters, confirmed the identification. They were schoolteachers. Lewis had begun recently to court one of them.

  Like Harry K. Thaw, who had murdered Stanford White in 1906, Bernard M. Lewis was the spoiled son of a wealthy Pittsburgh family. Bernie and Harry had known one another back in Pittsburgh, years ago. Lewis’ father had made a fortune in coal. Bernie attended Yale from 1897 to 1899, dropped out to begin spending his money in earnest. By 1916 it was gone. He had been arrested in New York City for swindling a woman, and sued in Pittsburgh for bilking a theater promoter. He was separated from his wife, and had dated Grace Roberts a few times, but then who hadn’t?

  Lewis was registered at the Hotel Adelphia, but had skipped out on his bill before the police arrived. On January 4, 1917, Lewis phoned the Kyle sisters. They were being interviewed by a reporter at the time of the call. Lewis complained that his “business” was being ruined by the Maizie Colbert investigation, and said that he had never met Miss Colbert. They urged him to surrender to police. He said that he would.

  Police traced the call back to Atlantic City, where Lewis’ family had a summer home. A woman in Atlantic City called police, and told them he was staying at a hotel a few blocks from the summer home. He had borrowed $10 from a hotel maid that morning, and had used it to buy a .22 rifle equipped with a silencer.

  On January 5, 1917, one week after the murder, police knocked on his door. They heard a sound inside, like the banging of an inner door. They thought Lewis was headed out of a window. They broke into his room through a bathroom that was shared with an adjoining room. Bernard Lewis was hanging over the edge of the bathtub, his hand still on the trigger of the .22, his brains all over the walls.

  One of Maizie Colbert’s handkerchiefs was found in the room, caked with dried blood. Lewis’ hands and arms were scratched and bloodied, as if Ms. Colbert had fought for her life.

  Harry K. Thaw was back in the news. In the murder of Stanford White he had been found innocent by reason of insanity. Declared sane and released in 1915, he had been arrested in the first week of January, 1917—perhaps the day Lewis died—for assaulting a teenager in New York. Thaw was so upset by Lewis’ death that he attempted suicide himself, slitting his throat. He was convinced that police had hounded Lewis to his demise. Thaw seriously injured himself in the attempt, but did recover, and went on with his nutty life.

  It is my view that the events surrounding the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti represent the American radical movement flaming out. Exploding. Bursting into a million little red-hot pieces like an exploding firework, each fading quickly. I’m not a real historian; there are people who know more about this than I do, so if you’re really interested, take their word rather than mine. My view is that the American radical movement began to fall apart at the seams in 1912–1914, around the time of the trials of Clarence Darrow. Prior to that time the radicals had broad and consistently growing public support, and a realistic chance to bring on the revolution they desired. But, in the same general way that the radical movement of the 1960s had broad and growing support until 1968, but became a hollow shell after that, the radical movement of fifty years earlier began to degenerate some years before the revolution in Russia and America’s involvement in World War I, then, finding itself marginalized after those events, flamed out violently from 1918 through 1922.

  The violence of that era was much more widespread than the violence that accompanied the decay of the 1960s revolution. There were dozens of incidents involving the deaths of scores of people—the anarchist bombings of 1917–1919, the Palmer raids, a race riot in Chicago in 1919, Matewan (1920), a horrific race riot in Tulsa in 1921. There was a large labor strike in Seattle in 1919, a police strike in Boston leading to the firing and replacement of the entire Boston police force, and there were strikes in many other places. Gary, Indiana, was put under martial law due to a progression of violent incidents.

  These events may not be connected by anything more than the zeitgeist, something in the wind. The violence of this era was much greater than the violence at the end of the 1960s revolution for three reasons:

  1) The nation was more violent,

  2) The grievances of the underclass were much more tangible, involving more real suffering and less self-indulgent whining, and

  3) The radical leaders of the earlier era were much more accepting of violence as an agent of change than were the 1960s radicals, who were half revolutionaries and half pacifists. The radical leaders of the 1910s were also pacifists, at least in the sense that they wanted nothing to do with the war in Europe, but they were … well, violent pacifists.

  Luigi Galleani was born in Italy in 1861. By age 17 he had adopted the worldview that he was to champion for the rest of his life. He was an anarchist, a revolutionary, and a dedicated opponent of whatever government he happened to live under. He fled Italy in his late teens to avoid prosecution for radical activities, was expelled from France, kicked out of the University of Geneva, arrested back in Italy, escaped from prison, fled to Egypt, left there under threat of extradition, went to England, and finally, in 1901, to New Jersey. Indicted for inciting a riot in New Jersey, he fled to Canada, and was quickly kicked out of Canada. He snuck back into Vermont, settled in Massachusetts and started a newspaper, Cronaca Sovversiva, which is Italian for Subversive Chronicle.

  An excellent writer and a spellbinding speaker if you like that sort of thing, he developed a following in the Italian-American community. His followers were small in number, but they had lots of bombs. Cronaca Sovversiva sold a 46-page booklet entitled Health Is In You!, which was actually a detailed description of how to build a bomb. In 1916 one of Galleani’s followers, a chef named Nestor Dondoglio, poisoned 200 people at a banquet in Chicago. Fortunately he used too much arsenic; everybody vomited up the soup and nobody died, but I’m told that it totally ruined the banquet.

  Sacco and Vanzetti were Galleanisti. The Galleanisti had been sending bombs to people that they thought needed bombs since at least 1914. Cronaca Sovversiva advocated violence against the rich and powerful, sold 25¢ pamphlets on bomb making, and printed the home addresses of famous capitalists and government officials.

  At the outbreak of the First World War Galleani urged his supporters to flee to Mexico, rather than registering for the military draft. Sacco met Vanzetti in Mexico in 1917, at the Galleanist camp. The camp in Mexico was such a miserable hellhole that almost everybody filtered back into the United States after a couple of months. In June, 1917, Luigi Galleani was arrested for conspiracy to obstruct the draft. Outraged, Galleani’s supporters began sending bombs to powerful people whom they perceived as their enemies, including J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Oliver Wendell Holmes, the U.S. Postmaster General, and the United States Attorney General, A. Mitchell
Palmer. On June 2, 1919, a bomb blew out the windows of Palmer’s house and his neighbors’ houses all up and down the block, killed the bomber, and terrified Palmer’s wife and children—not to mention Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, who lived across the street and were walking near their house when the bomb went off. Several other bombs exploded the same day in other cities.

  The bomber who died planting a bomb at Palmer’s house was an editor of Cronaca Sovversiva; it was a small publication, and the employees had to double up on their duties. Palmer reacted by ordering a series of aggressive and sometimes extra-legal raids, the Palmer raids, aimed at shutting down the Galleanisti and any other radicals with bombs.

  Palmer has received heavy criticism in history for the Palmer raids, but realistically, what would you expect the man to do? The American public overwhelmingly supported the Palmer raids—as they would now under the same circumstances. Do you want him to say, “Go ahead, kill the rich people, kill the Supreme Court justices, kill my wife and kids; this is just the price we pay for our respect for civil liberties”? I don’t think so.

  The Palmer raids, at some cost to civil liberties, sent the Galleanisti scurrying for cover. Many of them left the country. Galleani himself was deported. It seems an astonishingly moderate penalty under the circumstances. Sacco’s alibi for the day of the murders was that he was at that very moment visiting the Italian consulate in Boston, trying to get his papers in order for his return to Italy.

  There were several payroll robberies around Boston, and in one of these, down in South Braintree, two payroll guards were killed. The police tracked the car which was involved in the fiasco. They found the car—Mario Buda’s car—being held by a third party. Sacco and Vanzetti were among a group of men who tried to pick up the car for Buda. The man holding the car stalled, and the group dispersed. Sacco and Vanzetti were both carrying concealed handguns at the time of their arrest, and pled guilty to carrying concealed weapons. Vanzetti was tried and convicted of an attempted payroll robbery at a shoe company in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, on December 24, 1919, and Sacco and Vanzetti were tried and convicted for a completed payroll robbery at a shoe company in South Braintree, Massachusetts, on April 15, 1920—the crime involving the two dead payroll guards.

  Vanzetti’s first trial, for the Bridgewater robbery, drew little attention from the media, and attracted only a minimal show of concern from their colleagues on the left. After that first conviction, however, a few leading radicals organized the framework of a defense for Sacco and Vanzetti, bringing in a high-profile activist lawyer named Fred H. Moore.

  It was 1920, but Fred Moore could party like it was 1999. Like Earl Rogers and Moman Pruiett, he was an alcoholic, usually divorced, who would go on binges and disappear for days, sometimes in the middle of a trial. Moore, however, was a purposeful partier. He was a public relations savant who invited into his home night after night journalists, radicals, artists, bohemians, and people who could bring booze and broads. With no rules of evidence and no one there to cross-examine the witnesses, he peddled his story unhindered: Sacco and Vanzetti were simple, peace-loving, immigrant peasants who were going about their daily lives when they were jerked rudely off of a streetcar and persecuted for their political beliefs.

  On one level this was a total crock; the Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti of 1919, who saw themselves as cutting-edge revolutionaries, would either have been amused or annoyed to see themselves portrayed as simple men swept up in an onrushing tide of events. It was rather like Che Guevara and Fidel, arrested and put on trial, finding themselves portrayed by their lawyer as Gilligan and the Skipper. At the same time there is something to the defense, as it is not really clear that the revolutionaries had anything to do with the South Braintree debacle. I simply do not know whether the South Braintree robbery was a part of Galleani’s armed insurrection, or whether the police had half of a case against the anarchists, and they had an armed robbery with two people dead, and when they put them together and added some spackling and pounded it flat, it all sort of fit together. In my view there are solid arguments and serious problems on both sides of the issue.

  On September 16, 1920, a car bomb exploded at the corner of Wall and Broad streets in lower Manhattan; actually it was a horse and buggy bomb, but the same concept. The bomb killed 33 people, and is often cited as the worst terrorist act on American soil until the 1990s.

  It is now generally believed that this bomb was built and delivered by Mario Buda. Buda’s car had been used in the robbery—or so the police claimed—and Buda had gone on the lam after the robbery, sending his friends to pick up his car.

  Buda was never found by the American police, eventually re-surfacing in Italy, and it was not until years later that enough facts emerged to make it fairly clear that the Wall Street bomb was Buda’s doing, in revenge for the indictment of Vanzetti a few days earlier. Thirty-three dead people. To express his great and righteous anger at the indictment of his friend, he killed more people than Ted Bundy.

  There were, then, two very different campaigns being waged on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti: a campaign of terror, which was a hapless effort to intimidate the government into backing off the prosecution of the anarchists, and a PR campaign, which was an exceedingly clever effort to paint Sacco and Vanzetti as warm and fuzzy day laborers with an unpopular philosophy. Had it been known at the time that the two campaigns were intimately connected, of course, neither could have succeeded.

  It is the opinion of many people who have written about the case that Fred Moore might have served his clients better had he paid less attention to the PR campaign and more attention to the boring lawyer stuff. He didn’t, in any case, and, on July 14, 1921, Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted of murder. There was no immediate outcry from the public, which still had only a passing interest in what was at that time a local crime story.

  Gradually, however, Moore’s public relations offensive began to pay off. Finding the American mainstream media unresponsive, Moore peddled his narrative to the fringe and foreign newspapers. There he received a better hearing; the French, after all, think that Leonard Peltier is innocent, and Jerry Lewis is a genius. Like a saucepan of water, the Sacco and Vanzetti story began bubbling at the outer edges of the media, and continued to heat up until a rolling boil had engulfed the whole. The Sacco-Vanzetti defense committee, given seed money by leftists and eccentric dowagers, was eventually pulling in substantial resources, sufficient to fund not only Fred Moore’s legal defense but his ever-expanding partying, and eventually his drug habit.

  Sacco hated Fred Moore, and Vanzetti wasn’t crazy about him, either. Eventually Moore got fired, replaced by a lawyer who was more into the nuts and bolts of the case. Moore whispered to writers, after the executions, that Sacco was guilty in fact. Felix Frankfurter entered the case, eventually becoming the accused’ most visible defender.

  Sacco and Vanzetti were executed on August 23, 1927, to a chorus of international protest so loud that it has yet to stop echoing. What may safely be said about the case, looking at it strictly as a criminal event, is that no one should be executed on the basis of evidence such as that which was presented at trial against these two men … that looked like him, that looked like his car, that looked like his gun.

  Cases like Sacco and Vanzetti tend to draw us away from the central focus of our book, which is popular crime. (We are trying to have a serious discussion about Trash here. Stop distracting us with serious topics.) Political crime stories tie us into social issues like a ground wire, yet in the way that most people think about famous crimes they are a part of the same subject, and we can’t really ignore them. One of my arguments is that crime stories—not political crime stories, but popular crime stories—are much more central to American history than most people understand. When we dismiss these stories as trivial distractions we blind ourselves to the real and serious consequences of these events.

  The political story surrounding Sacco and Vanzetti, which is the story of the effo
rt to save them from a probably unjust execution … that story is often told, and that’s the story that people assume is the important one. But the crime story, which ended in 1920, may actually have been of more significance to the country. The Galleanisti were a small group of nut cases very much like the Palestinian terrorists of today. Mario Buda is credited with inventing the car bomb. But the violence of the Galleanisti contributed heavily to the anti-immigrant sentiment that culminated in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, sharply curtailing immigration. The sudden cutoff of immigration caused a rapidly growing economy to slam into a wall a few years later, helping to bring about one of the central traumas of twentieth century America, the Great Depression. Thus, this little group of violent loonies which included Sacco and Vanzetti contributed very directly to one of the greatest afflictions of the century.

  Crime stories are one thread in a dense net that we spread over ourselves in our effort to be safe. They are like doors, locks, security cameras, doormen, police, security guards, banks, courts and prosecutors, jails, fines, probation officers, handguns in a safe by the bed, sign-in procedures and calling your mom when you get there. By propagating crime stories and by taking an interest in them, we are trying to figure out how we can defeat the criminal population.

  Dreyfus stories, on the other hand, are almost the opposite: they are about protecting ourselves from our own security apparatus. A Dreyfus case is one in which an innocent person’s foot is caught in the net, and he finds himself suddenly dangling from the canopy of the judicial jungle. This reverses the poles. The cops and prosecutors who were previously heroes become persecutors. Our friends become our enemies. People who are above taking an interest in crime stories become interested.

  In the American political structure the right advocates Law and Order—thus advocating that more resources be put into the security net—while the left is perennially convinced that our rights are being strangled by the security net. All of this is immature thinking. Pulling the net tighter does not make us more secure; making the net stronger does not make us less free. Exposing the flaws in the criminal justice system does not weaken the criminal justice system. All of that nonsense is just gut-level thinking. Sacco and Vanzetti’s innocence does not justify their philosophy; the violence of their friends and associates does not justify their execution for crimes of which they were possibly innocent.