Tragedy in Dedham

A week after Stewart’s visit, Simon Johnson received a long-distance telephone call at his garage from Boda asking if the Overland was ready. Johnson told him it was. Boda said he would pick it up next day. Next day he did not appear. Another week passed, and Johnson began to worry about his bill. He asked Stewart if he could sell the car for what was owing on it. Stewart told him to wait.

On the evening of May 5 Johnson had felt out of sorts and gone to bed early. At a little after nine o’clock his wife, Ruth, was sitting in the front bedroom of their one-story wooden house on North Elm Street, a quarter of a mile from the garage, when she heard a knock at the front door. Going to the vestibule, she asked who it was. A voice replied that it was Mike Boda and that he had come for his car. From the bedroom Johnson recognized the foreign voice. As his wife came back, he whispered to her to go next door and telephone. She nodded, then said loudly enough to be heard outside: “Mr. Boda is here for his car. While you’re getting up I’ll go over for the milk.”

As she opened the front door and stepped outside she found herself caught in a beam of light. At first she could make out nothing beyond the whiteness, then she saw Boda vaguely outlined against a telephone pole ten feet away. As her eyes grew more used to the glare, she noticed two strangers walking toward her from across the railroad bridge thirty feet south of the house. She could hear them talking—in Italian, she thought. The glare caught them. They looked foreign. One was wearing a derby and an overcoat. The other, who wore a felt hat, Ruth Johnson remembered afterward because of his drooping mustache. Boda called out something to them and then walked toward her.

“Mr. Johnson isn’t feeling good,” she told him, “but he’s getting out of bed to get your car for you.”

Boda nodded as she walked past him toward the Bartlett house next door. The light, she now saw, came from a motorcycle. A man in a checked mackinaw with a hat pulled over his eyes was sitting in the saddle with one hand resting on the empty sidecar. After she had passed into the darkness she had the uneasy feeling that the men were following her. But there were no steps behind her as she turned up the Bartletts’ driveway. To her relief, the lights in the house were still on downstairs.

One of the Bartlett children let her in. Over the hall telephone, in a voice barely under control, she told the operator to get through to the police. For the moment that was all she could think of to say. West Bridgewater then had no police force, only two part-time policemen. The operator connected her with the house of one of them, Warren Laughton, who was also fire chief and water commissioner. Laughton had just stepped out, his wife said, but she took the message that the Johnsons had agreed on with Stewart: “Boda has come for his car.”

Johnson dressed slowly. When he finally stepped out of his house the first thing he noticed was Boda walking toward him from the bridge. Farther off he saw the motorcycle with the indeterminate outlines of the driver and the two other men. The usually dapper Boda was wearing a crumpled brown suit and an old slouch hat. He said he wanted to take the Overland away at once. Johnson asked him if he had brought license plates. Boda said he had not. Johnson told him he could not drive without plates. “I will take the chance,” Boda said. Johnson said that when his wife got back, they would go down to the garage.

Boda, watching Mrs. Johnson return, said he guessed it was too late for the car now, that he would send someone with plates for it next day. He said good night and turned away. The man in the mackinaw kicked the motorcycle’s starter pedal and the other two men stepped back. Ruth Johnson, as she passed, sensed that they were watching her and she thought she caught the word telephone mixed in their foreign speech.

Boda stepped into the sidecar, squatted down, and the motorcycle spluttered off north toward Brockton. The taillight was out, but Johnson had already noted the license plate: 871. As the motor echoed away, the two strangers, the man in the derby and the man with the drooping mustache, started back over the railroad bridge. The Johnsons watched them hesitate, turn, and disappear in the direction the motorcycle had taken.

Along empty North Elm Street they trudged for a mile, following the Bridgewater-Brockton trolley line. Meeting a solitary woman, they asked her where the car stop was. She pointed just beyond them to a white-striped pole on the corner of Sunset Avenue. They thanked her. A few minutes later the electric car from Bridgewater hummed along the track. It was 9:40 when the two men stepped aboard it.

Until he had a closer look at him, Austin Cole, the twenty-three-year-old conductor, thought that the man in the derby and the walrus mustache was a Portuguese named Tony. Cole asked if they were going to Brockton and the other man, who was clean-shaven, said yes. At that hour the car was almost empty. The newcomers walked stiffly down the aisle and sat in the first cross-seat at the rear. Somehow they reminded Cole of a pair who had got on at the same place about the same time a few weeks back.

The car swayed and rattled through the darkness. Where North Elm Street crossed the Brockton line it became Copeland Street, and the houses—most of them with their lights out now—began to give way to small shops and an occasional church. Cole, counting transfers, eyed the strangers in the back seat. They were aliens. Anyone could see that. The high-cheek boned man with the drooping mustache was easy to spot, but beyond his obviousness there was a quality about them both—a stiffness of feature, a fixed look to the eyes, just the awkward way they wore their clothes—that set them apart. Americans were put together more loosely.

When Warren Laughton arrived home and received Ruth Johnson’s message, he had no idea what was back of it but called Chief Stewart at once. However, by the time Stewart arrived at the Johnson house the two strangers were already on the Brockton car.

How Stewart knew they were on that car is not wholly clear. One account has it that Johnson followed them and saw the car stop at Sunset Avenue. It may be that the unnamed woman at the corner of Sunset Avenue reported them. In any case, Stewart went to the Bartlett house and called the Brockton police headquarters.

A few minutes before 10 P.M. Michael Connolly, the officer on duty at Station 2, Campello, received a call from the Brockton central station telling him that two foreigners on the trolley from Bridgewater had just tried to steal an auto. The trolley was due in Brockton any minute. Connolly put down a sandwich, nodded to the sergeant at the desk, and hurried off to Main Street with Officer Earl Vaughn. Vaughn walked north, Connolly headed south. It was four minutes past ten. Connolly saw the trolley’s headlight as it turned into Main Street from Keith Avenue. A hulking, florid, pugnacious man who liked a good pinch, he hoped that the suspects had not got off. He signaled to the motorman and swung aboard while the trolley was still moving.

As Connolly steadied himself and glanced down the aisle he saw the foreigners in the rear seat. A year later at the Dedham trial he gave his version of the arrest:

I went down through the car and when I got opposite the seat I stopped and I asked them where they came from. They said, “Bridgewater.” I said, “What was you doing in Bridgewater?” They said, “We went down to see a friend of mine.” I said, “Who is your friend?” He said, “A man by the—they call him Poppy.” “Well,” I said, “I want you, you are under arrest.” Vanzetti was sitting on the inside of the seat ... and he went, put his hand on his hip pocket and I says, “Keep your hands on your lap, or you will be sorry.”

They wanted to know what they were arrested for and I says, “Suspicious characters.” We went on—oh, it was maybe about three minutes’ ride where ... Officer Vaughn got on ... and I told Officer Vaughn to fish Vanzetti, and I just gave Sacco a slight going over, just felt him over, did not go into his pockets, and we led them out the front way of the car.

Vaughn found a loaded revolver in the hip pocket of the man with the mustache and gave it to Connolly, who kept it in his hand all the way to the Brockton central station. Officers Spear and Snow of the central station had driven down to meet the trolley.

I put Sacco and Vanzetti in the back of our light machine [Connolly continued], and Officer Snow got in the back seat with them. I took the front seat with the driver, facing Sacco and Vanzetti.... I told them when we started that the first false move I would put a bullet in them. On the way to the station Sacco reached his hand to under his overcoat and I told him to keep his hands outside of his clothes and on his lap.... I says to him, “Have you got a gun there?” He says, “No.” He says, “I ain’t got no gun.” “Well,” I says, “keep your hands outside your clothes.” We went along a little further and he done the same thing. I gets up on my knees on the front seat and I reaches over and I puts my hand on his coat but I did not see any gun. “Now,” I says, “Mister, if you put your hand in there again you are going to get into trouble.” He says, “I don’t want no trouble.” We reached the station, brought them up to the office and searched them.

The revolver taken from the mustached man was a 38-caliber Harrington & Richardson, its five chambers loaded with two Remington and three U. S. cartridges. Taken from him at the Campello station were four shotgun shells, a pocket knife, a handkerchief, twenty dollars, and several pamphlets. The smooth-faced man was searched by Officer Spear, who found a 32-caliber Colt automatic tucked in his waistband. The Colt had eight cartridges in the clip and one in the chamber. In the man’s pocket were twenty-three loose cartridges. Though all 32-caliber, the cartridges were of assorted makes—sixteen Peters, seven U. S., six Winchesters, and three Remingtons. In addition the man had in his pocket a penciled announcement in Italian that read:

Proletarians, you have fought all the wars. You have worked for all the owners. You have wandered over all the countries. Have you harvested the fruits of your labors, the price of your victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like a human being? On these questions, on this argument, and on this theme, the struggle for existence, Bartolomeo Vanzetti will speak. Hour____Day____Hall____Admission free. Freedom of discussion to all. Take the ladies with you.

Within a quarter of an hour Chief Stewart arrived at the station, heady with excitement at the springing of his trap. With him were his night patrolmen Frank LeBaron and Warren Laughton, and Simon Johnson. Johnson at once identified the prisoners as the men he had seen standing by the motorcycle. Stewart then questioned them individually. He talked to the mustached man first, taking care to repeat the cautionary formula that the latter did not have to answer questions but that anything he said might be held against him. The prisoner did not hesitate. He said his name was Bartolomeo Vanzetti, that he was an Italian, thirty-two years old and a fish peddler, and that he lived at 35 Cherry Street, Plymouth. For the last two days, he said, he had been visiting his friend, Nick Sacco, in South Stoughton. The two of them had gone to Bridgewater that evening to see Vanzetti’s friend Poppy, but it was so late by the time they arrived that they decided Poppy had probably gone to bed and they might as well go home. They were on their way back to South Stoughton when the police picked them up. As for Poppy, that was only the man’s nickname. Vanzetti did not know his real name or even his address in Bridgewater, but he was a big man who usually wore a blue shirt. They had worked together in the Plymouth Cordage plant.

Vanzetti denied knowing anyone named Boda or Coacci. He said he had never before been in West Bridgewater. He had walked some distance before he had taken the trolley, but he had seen no motorcycle all evening. Stewart suddenly asked Vanzetti if he was an anarchist, if he approved of the government. All Vanzetti would admit was that he was a little different and that he liked things different. As to why he was carrying a revolver, he said that he was in business and needed it for protection. He had no permit.

Stewart’s questioning of the second man followed the same line. The suspect said his name was Nicola Sacco, that he was married, lived in South Stoughton, and had been in America eleven years. For the last two years he had worked at the Three-K factory in Stoughton. He had once looked for a job in Bridgewater, but he had never been in West Bridgewater until tonight. He did not know any Boda or Coacci. He had not seen a motorcycle. He was not an anarchist or Communist. As for the automatic in his waistband, he carried it because there were a lot of bad men about. He had bought it a long time ago at some shop near Hanover Street in Boston. The cartridges were from a box he had bought and they just happened to be in his pocket. He had planned to shoot them off in the woods with his friends.

Stewart’s questioning of both men lasted about ten minutes. They were then locked up.

Neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had been behind bars before. Now, in adjoining cells under the shadowless glare of the overhead light, with a wooden shelf to sleep on and a seatless toilet in the corner, they sensed the isolating fear of arbitrary impersonal force. To the policemen going on and off duty they were curiosities and as such subject to a certain amount of crude horseplay. When the two men requested blankets the reply was that they would find it warm enough when they were lined up in the hall for a little live target practice, and one patrolman showed Vanzetti a cartridge which he then slipped into the barrel of his revolver, cocking it and pointing between the bars. When Vanzetti did not move, the other spat on the floor contemptuously and turned away.

According to the Registry of Motor Vehicles records the motorcycle in which Boda had ridden off belonged to Ricardo Orciani. A molder in a Norwood foundry, Orciani boarded at 1532 Hyde Park Avenue with Angelo Ventola, whose brother, Joseph Ventola, lived across the street. Orciani was picked up in his room the night of May 6 and taken to Brockton. Still wearing the checked mackinaw of the night before, he was identified by Simon and Ruth Johnson as the driver of the motorcycle. A short, cocky Italian with an assured round face and clipped mustache, he was unperturbed by his arrest. He refused to answer questions. Where he went, he told the police, was his own business. The revolver found in his bureau was one he just happened to have.

On Thursday, May 6, the district attorney for Norfolk and Plymouth counties, Frederick Gunn Katzmann, appeared at the Brockton station to take over the questioning, bringing with him a stenographer and an interpreter.

Katzmann was then in his late forties, a plump, ambitious man whose presence seemed underlined by the smartness of his dress, his snap-brim hat, and his raglan Burberry coat. He had grown up on one of the poorer streets of Hyde Park, a gray semi-industrial adjunct of Boston, attending the Boston Latin School and then crossing the Charles River to enter Harvard with the class of 1896. As an unathletic poor boy from Hyde Park, his years at Harvard were obscure. He belonged to no clubs, took part in no sports or undergraduate activities. Nor, on the other hand, was he a scholar. At the end of his senior year his one distinction was an honorable mention in engineering. Returning to Hyde Park with his diploma, he worked for several years as a meter-reader for the local electric-light company. What he really wanted was to be a lawyer. If he had had the money he would have gone on to the Harvard Law School. Instead he attended night sessions at Boston University, receiving his bachelor of laws degree in 1902.

For the next year he served as an apprentice with one of the established firms of Boston’s Pemberton Square. But the staid legal world of Beacon Hill and State Street was a fenced-off Brahmin preserve. A Hyde Park boy with a B.U. law degree and a dubious name would not penetrate that circle.

Katzmann was sensitive about his name. His mother’s maiden name—his own middle one—was Gunn, and he tried to emphasize its Anglican propriety in his signature. After his year at Pemberton Square he returned to the familiar puddle of Hyde Park and set up his office on the second floor of a wooden building on River Street. There, in a small ocher room with a creaking floor smelling of oil, he hung his two diplomas and filled several sectional bookcases with secondhand volumes of Corpus Juris. He prospered. From 1907 to 1908 he represented Hyde Park in the Massachusetts legislature. The following year he was appointed assistant district attorney. From 1909 until Hyde Park was absorbed by Boston in 1912 he served on the school committee. In November, 1916, he ran for district attorney and was elected to a three-year term. In 1919 he was re-elected.

Katzmann’s personality, like his figure, expanded with success. He could plan to go back to his Harvard twenty-fifth reunion with pride, the chill of his undergraduate years forgotten. As an active, conforming Republican, the prospect of a judgeship in the superior court or even, with luck, the state attorney-generalship lay ahead of him. The drawback of his name scarcely bothered him now. He lived with his wife and two young daughters in a Victorian frame house on the Mattapan side of River Street, within walking distance of his office. He was a member of the Hyde Park Lodge of Masons, the Cebra Tennis Club, and the Wollaston Golf Club. He became Hyde Park counsel for the Family Welfare Society of Boston. As district attorney he was popular if undistinguished, a routine prosecutor addicted to the McKinley-baroque style of oratory. The district had re-elected him in spite of the war-fanned prejudice against German names. As with many criminal lawyers, the law was for him, like politics, a game where at times one might have to cut a few corners, but in the end the best man usually won, and the loser congratulated the winner. It was a game played with other men’s years and sometimes with their lives—but still a game. Such was the man, soon to become a symbol of chicanery and deceit for indifferently informed protestors all over the world, as he arrived at the Brockton police station for the routine questioning of two holdup suspects.

Especially in questioning foreigners the district attorney favored the disarming approach, bluff, fatherly, confidential—you deal straight with me and I’ll deal straight with you. It is particularly effective after a suspect has spent a night in a cell. Katzmann first questioned Sacco. For some time he put merely routine questions to him about his acquaintances, about the gun and the cartridges. Sacco said he had bought his gun two years before in the North End. He had not given his right name then because he was afraid. As to Orciani, yes, he knew him but Vanzetti did not. Boda he had never heard of. Boda did not sound like an Italian name. Suddenly Katzmann asked if he knew anyone named Berardelli. Sacco asked him who Berardelli was. In the course of the interrogation Sacco said that his mother had died recently and that he was planning to return to Italy. When Katzmann asked if he had heard about the South Braintree murders, he said he had read in the Post “there was bandits robbing money.” He had worked in various shoe factories, he admitted, but never in Braintree. He had taken a day off early in April to go to Boston for his passport, but thought he had been working in Stoughton on April 15, the day of the holdup. That was all—the opening gambit—but both men were now aware of the South Braintree crime in relation to each other.

When Vanzetti appeared, Katzmann asked him if he spoke English. He said that he spoke a little. When reminded that he was free not to answer questions, he said he was willing to answer any. He had known Sacco for a year and a half. He told of taking the trolley from Stoughton to Bridgewater with him to see a friend, and of changing cars at Brockton. During the wait he had gone into a fruit store to buy some cigars and to a lunchroom for a cup of coffee. At no time, the evening of May 5, had he seen a man on a motorcycle. The name Boda meant nothing to him. His revolver he had bought four or five years before for eighteen or nineteen dollars at a shop on Hanover Street. At the same time he had bought a box of cartridges. Some of these he had fired off on the Plymouth beach. The remaining six were in the revolver. Katzmann led him indirectly to the date of the South Braintree crime. Vanzetti remembered Patriot’s Day, the nineteenth of April, because it had fallen on a Monday. He had no particular recollection of what he had done the preceding Thursday.

Katzmann had already discovered, before questioning the men, that Sacco had been absent from his work on April 15. When he left the police station he was convinced that Sacco had been involved in the South Braintree murders. Of Vanzetti he was not so sure.

After their questioning, the two Italians, unshaven and bedraggled, were photographed. They were then taken to the Brockton police court and charged with carrying concealed weapons. A local lawyer, William Callahan, was engaged for them. They pleaded guilty. The judge, after consulting with the district attorney’s office, held them without bail under an unrepealed wartime act that empowered him to hold men suspected of major crimes.

Later in the day several dozen witnesses were brought from South Braintree and Bridgewater to see if they could identify the prisoners as participants in either of the holdups. In the small Brockton police station there was no attempt to have the two Italians mixed with other suspects in a lineup. They were merely led into the emergency room by themselves where they stood docilely until ordered to kneel, put on and take off their hats, raise their arms, and assume the crouching position of a man firing a pistol. The various witnesses walked around them slowly observing them from every angle.

Mary Splaine, Frances Devlin, Minnie Kennedy, Louise Hayes, Mark Carrigan, Albert Frantello, Frank Burke, Hans Behrsin, Louis DeBeradinis, Jimmy Bostock, Mike Levangie, and Lewis Wade were among those who came from South Braintree. Minnie, Louise, Carrigan, Burke, and Bostock could not identify either man. Frantello was certain that they were not the ones he had seen on April 15. Wade thought Sacco resembled the man he saw shooting Berardelli.

Frances Devlin and Mary Splaine studied the two men separately several times. Sacco was again ordered to raise his arm as if holding a pistol. The two women finally decided that he might possibly have been the man they saw leaning out of the car and shooting, but they were certain they had never seen Vanzetti before. Of all the South Braintree witnesses only Levangie, the gate-tender, picked Vanzetti as the driver of the getaway car. Jenny Novelli, coming to the station with a later group of witnesses, said that Sacco resembled the man she had seen in the bandit car, but she could not be positive about him.

The shotgun bandit in the Bridgewater holdup had been described by Constable Bowles as having a close-cropped mustache, and Slip Harding had so described him to a detective the afternoon of the crime, adding “I did not get much of a look at his face, but I think he was a Pole.” Nevertheless, he no sooner caught sight of the droop-mustached Vanzetti in the Brockton station than he pointed to him with great positiveness as the man with the shotgun. Cox, on the other hand, was inclined to think Vanzetti was not the man. Bowles thought that he might have been.

While these identifications were being made, Chief Stewart and Assistant District Attorney William Kane took the handcuffed but still unperturbed Orciani on an identification marathon from Brockton to Needham to Braintree to Bridgewater. Faced with Sacco and Vanzetti, Orciani smilingly declared that he had never seen them before in his life. In Needham George Hassam said Orciani was not the man who had tried to borrow his dealer’s plates in December. When Orciani was displayed in the Braintree town hall, three witnesses identified him as one of the April 15 gunmen. In Bridgewater Harding was positive that Orciani had been one of the gunmen in the December 24 holdup.

Back in Brockton, Orciani was taken to court and charged with exceeding the speed limit on his motorcycle and not having a taillight, the only things the police could pin on him for the moment. Like Sacco and Vanzetti, he was held without bail. Although state and local police combed their districts for Boda they could find no trace of him.

The headlines of the Boston Evening Globe of May 6 announced that Governor Calvin Coolidge had vetoed the 2.75 Beer Bill. Tucked away on page six were several short paragraphs about “Bert Vanzetti, 32, of Plymouth, and Mike Sacco, 34, of South Stoughton ... arraigned this morning in the Brockton Police Court charged with carrying concealed weapons.” The last paragraph mentioned that an unnamed witness was almost sure that one of the men under arrest had driven the getaway car the day of the South Braintree murders.

These few lines were the first notice in print of what would in the next seven years become the Sacco-Vanzetti case.