Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti

CRIMES OF THE CENTURY
Where injustice prevailed, debate lingers
By John Yemma, Globe Staff, 11/01/99

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were not heroes. At least one of them - Sacco - might actually have been connected with the crime for which both were executed. But what happened to them at the hands of the Massachusetts judicial system, say scholars and historians, stands as one of the great legal controversies of the century.

''It is pointless to debate their guilt or innocence,'' said Peter W. Agnes Jr., presiding judge of Charlestown District Court and a leading expert on the case that riveted Boston and much of the world in the 1920s. ''Whether they were or were not responsible for murder, they did not receive a fair trial, in part because of popular hysteria, a biased judge, and a flawed legal system.''

Like the millions of immigrants who had entered the United States in the opening decades of the century, Sacco and Vanzetti worked in menial jobs. They were, Vanzetti later wrote, ''nameless, in the crowd of nameless ones.'' Sacco, 32 at the time he was arrested, was a shoemaker living in Stoughton; Vanzetti, 29, was a fish peddler in North Plymouth.

But their hearts were with socialism, labor rights, and anarchism. And they ran with a dangerous political crowd. They were followers of Luigi Galleani, one of the most radical Italian anarchists of the day, a man who was advocating the violent overthrow of the US government and had instigated a wave of terrorist bombings against public officials just after World War I.

Nor did Sacco and Vanzetti look especially innocent on May 5, 1920, when they were arrested in connection with an armed robbery three weeks earlier in South Braintree in which two men had been killed. The arresting officer testified that Sacco and Vanzetti appeared to be reaching for their weapons when apprehended. And they lied to police. And they changed their stories. And Sacco's gun was linked to the crime.

But even now, no assumptions are safe in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, not evidence, not testimony, not judicial impartiality. Especially not judicial impartiality.

Copies of Sacco's and Vanzetti's death certificates are housed in an inner sanctum of the Boston Public Library, along with a canister of their ashes, their death masks, a box of bullets, and other personal items. The death certificates contain the most chilling words of all the millions that have been said in the case since 1920. Cause of death: ''Electric shock. Judicial homicide.''

To millions of people around the world - especially to liberals, labor activists, and Italian-Americans in the 1920s and 1930s - judicial homicide sums up what Judge Webster Thayer of Dedham committed when he ordered the two men strapped into the electric chair in Charlestown State Prison.

''The Sacco and Vanzetti case was one of the great trials and one of the great causes of the century, especially for those of us from immigrant backgrounds,'' said former governor Michael S. Dukakis, who issued a proclamation in 1977 acknowledging the injustice done to the men. ''It remains poignant, sensitive, and very important in our history.''

Deep anti-immigrant sentiment

The actual crime for which the men were accused was the April 15, 1920, murder of a paymaster and guard during a daring daylight robbery outside the Slater and Morrill shoe factory. It was a scene made for silent movies: a shootout in the street, an escape in a sputtering Buick with curtains blowing from the windows, tacks scattered to deter pursuers.

No one got a good look at the assailants. Neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had a criminal record. They were political activists who spoke at labor rallies and followed the fevered imaginings of an anarchist movement that most people would find hopelessly arcane today.

A gang led by Joseph Morelli had been carrying out similar armed robberies in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and a confederate of the Morellis later confessed to the gang's involvement in the South Braintree job. (Longtime New England mob boss Raymond L. S. Patriarca was a member of the gang in his youth.) Police, judge, jury, and media were obsessed with a Red Scare and deeply concerned about labor unrest in the factories of New England. The Justice Department had just conducted the notorious ''Palmer raids,'' rounding up radicals, most of them Italian immigrants, for deportation. This led authorities to try to link the South Braintree crime to local anarchists, to stake out a garage where a tipster said the car used in the crime was being repaired (it was a different car), and to arrest Sacco and Vanzetti when they showed up. As radicals feeling the heat from the Palmer crackdown, Sacco and Vanzetti looked and acted nervous to police when they were apprehended. And they were armed. But the way in which police connected the two men to the South Braintree slayings, especially the coaching of witnesses, has appalled legal specialists for decades. Agnes called the eyewitnesses to the crime ''extremely confusing and contradictory'' and said forensic evidence linking Sacco's gun to the crime was ''overstated.'' There are persistent claims that police tampered with the evidence and the Justice Department colluded with local authorities as part of the antiradical campaign.

All of this was compounded by deep anti-immigrant sentiment in the country. It was especially directed at the dark-complexioned southern Europeans with accents who poured into the country in the early years of the century.

Felix Frankfurter, then a law professor at Harvard University and later a Supreme Court justice, published a scathing critique of the criminal case in the Atlantic Monthly in 1927, while the case was still on appeal.

''Every reasonable probability points away from Sacco and Vanzetti,'' Frankfurter wrote. ''Every reasonable probability points toward the Morelli gang.''

Thayer would not be swayed. History has cast the white-haired judge as the great villain. Thayer had unsuccessfully prosecuted an anarchist earlier (he chastised that jury for returning an acquittal). He assigned himself to the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Throughout the trial in the summer of 1920, he seemed to be leading the jury toward conviction. His instruction to jurors on how to judge the immigrant radicals included urging them to remember their ''loyalty'' and their ''true American citizenship.''

That was just in case they were not influenced by the iron cage in which the men were kept during the trial. After sentencing the men to death, Thayer was quoted as telling an acquaintance: ''Did you see what I did to those anarchist bastards the other day? I guess that will hold them for a while.''

Thayer turned down every appeal. The law gave the trial judge sole discretion over ''fact questions'' such as those involving new evidence; this law was changed in 1939 as a result of the case.

Finally, when new evidence seemed overwhelming and public outrage was peaking, Governor Alvan T. Fuller appointed a commission headed by Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell to review the case. The Lowell commission supported Thayer's conduct.

''The Brahmins had an agenda to show that the radical Italians did it,'' said Alan M. Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School and a scholar on the case. ''I think that kind of thing could happen again. The `they' and the `we' would be different, but ethnic politics is alive and well, especially in Massachusetts.'' The execution went forward. The scene that night, Aug. 23, 1927, was surreal for the onetime ''Athens of America.''

State Police set up machine gun nests atop the walls of the prison, now the site of Bunker Hill Community College, to keep watch over streets that had been blocked off to keep out protesters.

Gunboats patrolled Boston Harbor. Partisans greeting each other with ''comrade'' and wearing hammer-and-sickle emblems milled about Boston Common. From Beacon Hill, society matrons who had been won over to the Sacco and Vanzetti side watched the lights of the prison dim then brighten as each man was electrocuted.

Thousands marched in the funeral procession that took the bodies from Joseph A. Langone's funeral home in the North End to Forest Hills Cemetery, where they were cremated.

''My grandfather buried those two people,'' recalled Fred Langone, a former city councilor who was 6 years old at the time. ''I remember watching the funeral from across the street, but really it was more a political than an Italian-American affair.'' The executions so outraged people around the world that Paris was in a state of siege the day afterward; the American Embassy was ringed by tanks to protect it from being sacked. Mobs rampaged in Geneva, and there were demonstrations in Europe and South America.

Literati such as Edna St. Vincent Millay and John Dos Passos campaigned for the men's freedom. In the aftermath of the executions, they heaped scorn on Boston for ''legalized murder'' by ''lynchers in frockcoats.'' Poet Harry Crosby penned a fire-breathing curse, the mildest lines of which were ''City of Swan Boats, City of Frog-Ponds, you are an Abomination.''

The case that will not die

Today, an Italian-American sits in the governor's office. Another is in his second term as mayor of Boston. ''It is a vastly different, much more tolerant, diverse, and accepting society today,'' Dukakis said. Italian-Americans occupy positions in business, civic, social, and religious circles throughout Boston. Many would just as soon see the Sacco and Vanzetti case go away.

''The prominent have always been uneasy with Sacco and Vanzetti because the men were anarchists and militant revolutionaries,'' said Robert D'Atillio, a historian.

''Also, many Italians just wanted to assimilate and didn't want to be concerned with radical politics.''

But the case still will not die. Every few years there is a new revelation. In 1988, for example, Charlie Whipple, a former Globe editorial page editor, recalled how when he was a cub reporter in 1937 he bumped into Sergeant Edward J. Seibolt, a police ballistics expert. As they chatted, Seibolt told Whipple he had worked on the Sacco and Vanzetti case. ''You know,'' he said, ''we switched the murder weapon.''

It was stunning news, because Sacco's gun was the one piece of physical evidence that connected the men to the murders. ''Can I print that?'' Whipple asked. ''If you do, I'll call you a liar,'' Seibolt replied. Whipple kept quiet for 51 years. Agnes, the Charlestown judge, is hoping for more revelations as scholars examine the 42 boxes of material at the Boston Public Library.

David Rothauser, who teaches television and film production at Newbury College, has spent almost 30 years developing a screenplay on Sacco and Vanzetti. Next year he hopes to begin production on an independent film. ''It has absorbed me all these years,'' he said.

Rothauser was once warned by a woman who had stood on Beacon Hill that August night 72 years ago that ''Once you start on this case it will follow you for the rest of your life.''

This story ran on page B01 of the Boston Globe on 11/01/99.
Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.

Used here WITHOUT permission.