The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

by Wilkes, Roger

  The newspapermen, I found, with one exception, felt that the trial had been unfair because of the atmosphere surrounding the case. The men were tried in a steel cage, part of the equipment of Massachusetts courts. An unnecessary show of police force was exhibited when they were led to and from the courtroom. There were needless “searchings” of those entering the courtroom. Newspapermen were “patted” for weapons. The newspapers printed stories of threatening letters sent to the court and the jury. It had been difficult to get jurymen to serve because of the atmosphere of hysteria that preceded the trial. Frank P. Sibley, dean of Boston newspapermen who covered the trial, told me he had never seen anything like it. Four years later he put this in the form of an affidavit in which he told how Judge Thayer had solicited the attention of reporters during the trial, had discussed the case against Sacco and Vanzetti freely, and had even asked Sibley to print a story that he was conducting the trial fairly and impartially.

  Sibley’s standing in the newspaper fraternity was so high that it was presumed that his affidavit would carry considerable weight. Well over six feet, Sibley, with his sombrero type hat and his flowing Windsor tie, was an outstanding figure wherever he went. As war correspondent with the Yankee Division in France he chronicled the deeds of the New Englanders and their commander in their history-making moments.

  From the beginning of the Sacco–Vanzetti trial Sibley saw the gratuitous injection of “patriotism” in the case by the presiding judge and state attorneys. The Globe, for which he worked, was one of the most influential of New England’s dailies, and its management strongly opposed the idea that their star reporter make an affidavit as to his observations. Sibley, too, was reluctant to take himself out of the role of disinterested spectator and align himself on one side of the case. His perplexities on the ethics of such action tormented him for a long time but finally he felt that in signing the affidavit he was yielding to the highest sentiment of justice and fair play. Incidentally, this star reporter found himself covering trivial assignments such as flower shows for some time after he had made the affidavit.

  “What impressed me more than anything else was his [Judge Thayer’s] manner,” said Sibley. “It is nothing you can read of in the record. In my thirty-five years I never saw anything like it … His whole manner, attitude, seemed to be that the jurors were there to convict the men.”

  After I had had an opportunity to acquaint myself with the facts in the case and the testimony for and against the two Italians, I wired Judge Thayer for an appointment. He replied on 22 February, and a few days later I called on him at his home, 180 Institute Road, Worcester. After greeting me cordially the Judge said, “I hope the New York Times is not going to take the side of these anarchists.” He pronounced the first syllable of the word “anarchist” as if it were spelled “on”.

  While I was rather taken aback that he should think the Times would be interested in “crusading” for two convicted radicals, I soon realized his remark was merely an introduction to a denunciation of all radicals. My reply to his question was that the Times was not concerned with taking either side of the case but that it was interested in having prepared a fair and impartial summary of the evidence on which the convictions were returned.

  Judge Thayer then launched into a detailed discussion of the case, making no attempt to conceal his aversion for economic and political dissenters and particularly foreigners. His lips trembled with emotion and his yellow and deeply wrinkled face darkened as he spoke of the need for the defense of American institutions. It was obvious that to him a philosophical anarchist was the same as a murderer. He went on in this way for an hour, jumping from the trial testimony to criticism of aliens, anarchists, and radicals. They all seemed to be lumped together in his mind.

  The Judge stipulated that I was not to quote him. But the measure of his extraordinary prejudice against Sacco and Vanzetti was obvious.

  When I left Judge Thayer that night I was deeply discouraged. To witness at firsthand such expressions of antipathy for aliens and radicals as a group, from one who was called upon to judge his fellow man was disheartening. But Judge Thayer’s attitude was quite mild compared to that of citizens of Boston five years later when I covered the events of the three weeks leading up to the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.

  The next five years were marked by a quickening of interest in the case due to the publicity that followed every attempt to obtain a new trial and to the propaganda of the little group of men and women who assisted the defense committee.

  New evidence was uncovered year after year to prove that the two men were innocent, to prove that they had not had a fair trial, that Judge Thayer had denounced them as “bastards” and anarchists in conversation outside the courtroom. The Judge was begged to allow another member of the Supreme Court to pass on appeals since he was charged with prejudice. He ruled that he was not prejudiced. Affidavits to prove that important witnesses whose testimony helped convict the men had lied were submitted to Judge Thayer. He turned them down. The head of the State Police, who had told the jury that one of the fatal bullets was “consistent” with being fired from Sacco’s pistol, said that the question which elicited this answer had been framed by him and the prosecutor but that if he had been asked directly if the so-called mortal bullet had passed through Sacco’s pistol, “I should have answered then, as I do now without hesitation, in the negative.”

  Celestino Madeiros, a young Portuguese, convicted of the murder of a Wrentham bank cashier and confined in the same jail as Sacco in 1925, signed a “confession” that he had taken part in the South Braintree killing and that Sacco was innocent. In further questioning by the defense he made some admissions that implicated the Morelli gang, well known for freight-car robberies and holdups, but Judge Thayer also rejected this “confession” as ground for a new trial.

  To hear these various motions, sentence was postponed from time to time but finally, on 9 April 1927, Judge Thayer announced that the two men would “suffer the punishment of death by the passage of a current of electricity through” their bodies.

  Asked by the court clerk whether they had “anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed,” the two men addressed the court, and protested their innocence. Sacco spoke briefly, preferring to have Vanzetti, whose English was better, speak for him. Vanzetti, a vibrant figure with drooping walrus mustaches, reviewed the case. His words stirred the courtroom—and the world.

  “I am not only not guilty of these two crimes,” he said in conclusion, “but I never commit a crime in my life. I have never steal and I have never kill and I have never spilt blood and I have fought against the crime and I have fought and I have sacrificed myself even to eliminate the crimes that the law and the church legitimate and sanctify.

  “This is what I say: I would not wish to a dog or to a snake, to the most low and misfortunate creature of the earth—I would not wish to any of them what I have had to suffer for things that I am not guilty of. But my conviction is that I have suffered for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian and indeed I am an Italian; I have suffered more for my family and for my beloved than for myself; but I am so convinced to be right that if you could execute me two times and if I could be reborn two other times I would live again to do what I have done already.”

  Later he dictated this statement:

  “If it had not been for these things, I might have live out my life talking at street corner to scorning men. I might have die unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of men as now we do by accident. Our words—our lives—our pains—nothing! The taking of our lives—lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler—all! That last moment belongs to us—that agony is our triumph.”

  The sentencing of the men called for another review of the case
, and I wrote a piece for the Sunday section bringing the facts up to date. It was published on 27 April 1927. Fabian Franklin, formerly an associate editor of The New York Evening Post and ex-contributing editor to The Independent, a man of conservative views, read my article and wrote a letter to the Times commenting on it. He was “forced to the conclusion”, he wrote, that the men were convicted “upon utterly inadequate evidence, that this result was brought about in large part by deliberate exploitation of the anti-radical passions dominant at the time … That the conduct of the trial in many respects violated the first principles of justice and that in denying a new trial when new evidence of a most vital and substantial nature was offered, Judge Thayer failed to live up to the duty of a just and impartial judge.”

  Mr Franklin was not alone in his doubts of the way the case was handled. As the days went by the doubts grew. The force of these doubts compelled Governor Fuller to appoint a commission headed by President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard University and comprising former Probate Judge Robert Grant and Dr Samuel Stratton, President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  Many questions have been asked concerning President Lowell’s part in the case. Some have been addressed to him directly but he has made no answers to any of the queries.

  During the Sacco–Vanzetti hysteria, alumni and other potential contributors to the Harvard Law School Endowment Fund were refusing to make contributions because of Professor Felix Frankfurter’s written defense of the two radicals in his widely read book, The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti. It was reported that an offer of $100,000 had been made to the fund on condition that Mr Frankfurter resign.

  Why did Mr Lowell accept the appointment at the hands of Governor Fuller when he knew the strong feeling against Sacco and Vanzetti by many potential contributors? Was he willing, for the sake of truth and justice, to take the risk of jeopardizing these contributions if he found the two men innocent? If that is so, how could he have failed to be impressed by those of his associates who denounced Mr Frankfurter for what they considered the effect of the latter’s writings on the endowment fund?

  Is it possible that in Dr Lowell’s mind the convicted men were intertwined with their defender of his Law School faculty and that his feeling against the latter somehow overflowed into the Sacco–Vanzetti case?

  Judge McAnarney, one of the original defense attorneys, told the Lowell Commission that Joe Rossi, Italian interpreter at the trial, had made incorrect translations. The defense attorneys did not know Italian, and Vanzetti occasionally caught one of the mistranslations, but his command of English was such that he hesitated to pick up Rossi every time.

  Before the Lowell Commission Judge McAnarney, discussing this phase of the case, said that Vanzetti accused the Italian interpreter of helping the government by his misinterpretations.

  President Lowell, at this juncture, said that Rossi had been “pretty careless”. However, he added that Rossi’s attention was usually called to his misinterpretations.

  “I couldn’t see that it did any harm to anybody,” he said; he wasn’t helping the government “very much”.

  Yet at least one of these “slips” was concerned with Sacco’s alibi which was obviously of great importance, and in 1926 Rossi was convicted of larceny and also pleaded guilty to an attempt to bribe a judge.

  During the trial Rossi frequently drove Judge Thayer in and out of Dedham in his car. The Judge was on very familiar terms with him, calling him “Joe” and telling the District Attorney that he was “going riding with Joe today”.

  Rossi named one of his children Webster Thayer Rossi, and District Attorney Katzmann, who prosecuted Sacco and Vanzetti, acted as godfather.

  The Lowell Commission explored the trial events and the post-trial developments. In considering a motion for a new trial based on a statement of one Gould, bystander at the scene of the South Braintree crime, who was within a few feet of one of the bandits and whose coat was pierced by one of the gunman’s bullets, the Commission discarded Gould’s testimony as “merely cumulative”.

  Now Gould positively declared that Sacco had not fired the shot. He had had an excellent opportunity to view the man with the weapon. Even the Lowell Commission said that Gould “certainly had an unusually good position to observe the men in the car”.

  Yet the Commission discarded this affidavit because it was “merely cumulative”. How did they know what the effect of such testimony would have been at the trial? Gould had not been called as a witness, though he had given his name to a police officer and the officer had passed on the name to the State Police. The defense found him after the trial.

  In considering the Gould affidavit filed in connection with the motion for a new trial, the Lowell Commission did a strange thing. It said, “There seems to be no reason to think that the statement of Gould would have had any effect in changing the mind of the jury.”

  Such omniscience calls for no comment.

  A witness, Daly, swore that Ripley, the jury foreman, had said, prior to being called as a juror:

  “Damn them, they ought to hang anyway.”

  The Commission said: “Daly must have misunderstood him [Ripley] or his recollection is at fault.”

  To supplement the Lowell Committee’s report, the Governor also made a personal investigation of the case. In this connection the dramatic and significant incident of the “eel” story is worth telling.

  The Governor closed his inquiry on 1 August 1927. The last witnesses were Gardner Jackson and Aldino Felicani of the Defense Committee.

  “If all the witnesses in the case had been as honest as you two gentlemen are there would have been no trouble in settling it,” he told them. “I know you have been telling the truth.”

  Jackson and Felicani almost leaped with joy as they heard these words. The Governor shook them by the hand and as they turned to go he said to Jackson, “You know I’m a businessman and I’m used to having documentary evidence. You have never produced any paper proving that Vanzetti was selling eels on the day of the Bridgewater crime.”

  The visitors’ hearts fell. Jackson argued that eighteen witnesses had testified that Vanzetti had sold them eels on 24 December 1919. Eels are an Italian delicacy for consumption on the day before Christmas, and the witnesses remembered the man who sold the eels that day, continued Jackson, but the Governor waved aside this testimony with the words, “Oh, but Mr Jackson, they were all Italians,” and asked for documentary proof.

  The Governor wanted “a paper” before he could believe Vanzetti’s alibi that he was selling eels on the day of the Bridgewater holdup. The defense felt it would be impossible to obtain such proof. But perhaps a receipt could be found for the eels. The next day, 2 August, Herbert H. Ehrmann, associate counsel for the defense, and Felicani combed the fish concerns on Atlantic Avenue for record of a shipment of eels to Vanzetti. It was like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. All day they rummaged through old and frayed papers in cellars, garrets, and lofts. But life is sometimes stranger than fiction. If this were a short story I would have them find the receipt, rush to the Governor in triumph, and then be rewarded with a new trial or commutation of sentence. Strangely enough, part of this actually happened. The receipt was actually found, almost eight years after it had been filled out, showing a shipment of eels by the American Express to Vanzetti on 20 December 1919. These were the eels he received two days later, prepared and sold the day before Christmas. It is on record that the receipt was found in a box of old papers in the wholesale fish market of the Corsoa and Gambino Company, 112 Atlantic Avenue.

  Elated with the find, Ehrmann, Felicani, and Jackson rushed the receipt to the Governor’s office. They embraced each other with joy. This would be the proof demanded by the Governor. Surely he would see that the alibi witnesses were not liars.

  On the day Governor Fuller closed his private inquiry in the case, I went to Boston to cover the story. The Governor was due to give out the result of his inquiry and that of the Lowell Co
mmission on 3 August 1927.

  Albert J. Gordon, for years a reporter on The Boston Herald, was assigned to assist me because of his knowledge of the city and its leading personalities. Later, when so many angles developed that we required help, Jonathan Eddy, then a reporter on the Times and now secretary of the American Newspaper Guild, was sent to assist us.

  In Boston we found newspapermen from all parts of the country. The Sacco–Vanzetti drama was about to reach a climax. Wherever you went there was but one topic of conversation, the Sacco–Vanzetti case. What would Governor Fuller do? The air was electric with excitement. On the streets, in restaurants and shops—wherever men gathered—they talked of the two Italians.

  Boston three weeks before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti was a vast whispering gallery. All sorts of rumors were afloat.

  The subject was discussed in Boston’s clubs, where the overwhelming judgment was that the men should be executed. In the east end, where the poor people lived, the prayer was for clemency. “Hope clemency” was the cable received by the Governor from Robert Underwood Johnson, former American ambassador to Italy.

  Gordon and I canvassed the situation. We spoke to nearly everyone available to discuss the case intelligently, secretaries to the Governor, the lawyers in the case, state officials in a position to know what was going on, newspaper editors close to the Governor and to his associates. As a result we came to a conclusion which we embodied in a dispatch to the Times on 2 August. This is what we said in part:

  “Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti will not die in the electric chair on the date set. Neither will they be pardoned. Further reprieve pending steps by the Massachusetts Legislature looking to a new trial was indicated at the State House today as the solution of the historic case of the Italian radicals which Gov. Fuller will place before the Executive Council when it meets tomorrow. The Governor will make known the decision tomorrow night …

  “Since yesterday the idea of a further reprieve and action by the Legislature in January has gained ground, according to information available in authentic quarters. No details are revealed but the meager news that has leaked out is to the effect that Gov. Fuller will propose to the Council that the Legislature be requested to pass an enabling act permitting a new trial for the condemned men. In the meantime they would be reprieved.”