Sacco and Vanzetti

Bartolomeo Vanzetti (left) and Nicola Sacco (right)

Nicola Sacco (real name: Fernando) (April 22, 1891 – August 23, 1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (June 11, 1888 – August 23, 1927) were two Italian-born American anarchists, who were arrested, tried, and executed via electrocution in the American state of Massachusetts. There is much doubt regarding their guilt, stirred in part by Upton Sinclair's 1928 novel Boston. The blind anti-Italianism, anti-immigrant, and anti-anarchist feelings of the time undoubtly contributed to the two men's sentence and execution.

Overview

Sacco and Vanzetti were accused of the killings of Frederick Parmenter, a shoe factory paymaster, and Alessandro Berardelli, a security guard, and of robbery of $15,766.51 from the factory's payroll on April 15, 1920. Sacco was a shoe-maker born in Torremaggiore, Foggia. Vanzetti was a fish seller born in Villafalletto, Cuneo.

It is unquestioned that both Sacco and Vanzetti were militant followers of Luigi Galleani, an anarchist who advocated revolutionary violence, including bombing and assassination. He published Subversive Chronicle, a periodical that advocated violent revolution, as well as an explicit bomb-making manual (La Salute è in voi!) that was widely distributed among his followers.

At the time, Italian anarchists ranked at the top of the government's list of dangerous enemies, and had been identified as suspects in several violent bombings and assassination attempts (even an attempted mass poisoning), going back to 1913. Cronaca Sovversiva was suppressed in July 1918, and Galleani and eight of his closest associates were deported on 24 June 1919. Most of the remaining Galleanists sought to avoid arrest by becoming inactive or going underground. However, some sixty militants considered themselves engaged in a class war that required retaliation. For three years, they waged an intermittent campaign of terrorism directed at politicians, judges, and other federal and local officials, especially those who had supported deportation of alien radicals. Chief among the dozen or more terrorist acts the Galleanists committed or are suspected of committing was the bombing of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's home on 2 June 1919. In that incident, one Galleanist, Carlo Valdinoci (an associate of Sacco and Vanzetti), was killed when the bomb intended for Attorney General Palmer exploded in his hands as he was placing it on the porch of Palmer's home.

The Events

In South Braintree, Massachusetts, on the 15 April 1920, Frederick Parmenter, a shoe factory paymaster, and Alessandro Berardelli, a security guard, were taking the wage payroll to the factory when they were attacked by five men. Parmenter and Berardelli were killed in the raid. One of the shooters shot Parmenter, while the other, armed with a .32 Colt automatic, fired several shots at Berardelli, who was killed with one bullet that severed a major artery. Berardelli's gun was then taken from his holster by the robbers. The robbers escaped in a car along with an accomplice. The total amount taken was $15,766.51.

The police suspected that the robbery was connected to an earlier unsuccessful payroll robbery committed at South Bridgewater, on December 24, 1919, involving four men. One of the men was armed with a shotgun, which he fired at the fleeing payroll truck. The police kept watch on radical members of the Italian community and eventually arrested two immigrants who were also known to be Galleanist anarchists: Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

Sacco and Vanzetti had been involved at some level in the Galleanist bombing campaign, although their precise roles have not been determined. This fact explains much about their suspicious activities and behavior on the night of their arrest, 5 May 1920. Two days earlier they had learned that an anarchist named Andrea Salcedo had plunged to his death from the Bureau of Investigation offices on Park Row in New York. Salcedo worked in a Brooklyn print shop, where federal agents had traced a revolutionary leaflet found at Palmer's bombed house. The Galleanists knew that Salcedo had been held for several weeks and reportedly beaten, and could infer that Salcedo and his comrade Roberto Elia had made important disclosures concerning the bomb plot of 2 June 1919, disclosures later confirmed by Attorney General Palmer. The Galleanist plotters realized that they would have to go underground and dispose of any incriminating evidence. Sacco and Vanzetti were found to be in receipt of correspondence with several Galleanists, and one letter to Sacco specifically warned him to destroy all mail after reading.

On the evening of their arrest, Sacco and Vanzetti, in the company of other anarchists, may have been transferring Italian anarchist literature or bomb-making materials to a safe place. Though both men denied possessing a gun at the time of the arrest, both were later found to be carrying pistols and ammunition: Sacco, a .32 Colt automatic (almost a badge of identification with the Galleanists), and Vanzetti had a revolver that matched that of the dead guard, which Vanzetti said he purchased just before his arrest, but could not give a bill of sale. Vanzetti also had shotgun shells in his pockets. Initially, both were questioned about their radical activities, not the payroll robberies and murders. Both men gave contradictory statements to the police. Sacco's .32 Colt Automatic was the same type and caliber as the Berardelli murder weapon. Sacco also had several .32 Colt Auto cartridges on him made by the three different manufacturers matched to the .32 Colt Auto casings found at the scene of the crime. Sacco, a shoemaker, later explained that he was armed because of his occasional job as a night-watchman at the factory in which he worked.

At this time Michael Stewart, the police chief of Bridgewater, Massachusetts, had been assisting the Justice Department in rounding up Italian anarchists for deportation. When one of the anarchists, Ferrucio Coacci, failed to report for deportation at the East Boston immigration station on 15 April 1920 (the same day of the payroll robbery and killings at the shoe factory in South Braintree), Stewart concluded that the robbery and murders must have been committed by Coacci and his group, which included Sacco, Vanzetti, Riccardo Orciani, and Mario Buda. Stewart also felt that the men were probably responsible for a failed holdup of a shoe factory in Bridgewater the previous Christmas Eve. Justice Department agents in Boston disagreed, believing the South Braintree crime had been committed by professional robbers, not anarchists, but since Sacco and Vanzetti were known associates of the unlucky Palmer house bomber Carlo Valdinoci, the agents gave information to the prosecuting authorities about Sacco and Vanzetti's radical activities, placed a spy in a cell adjacent to Sacco's, and infiltrated one or more informants into the Sacco-Vanzetti defense committee.

Of the five suspects, Coacci was deported, Orciani was released without charge (his time-card indicated that he was at work during the hold-up). Buda disappeared, and is suspected of being involved in the Wall Street bombing as revenge for the indictment of the remaining two anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, as well as the deportation of their leader, Luigi Galleani.

First Trial

Vanzetti was tried for the South Bridgewater robbery, though not Sacco, who was able to prove by a time-card that he had been at work all day. The presiding judge was Webster Thayer. Although Vanzetti produced (fellow anarchist) witnesses to claim that he too had been working and selling fish all day, he of course did not have a time-card, nor could he explain the shotgun shells in his possession. Vanzetti was found guilty and sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment.

Second Trial

Later Sacco and Vanzetti both stood trial for murder in Dedham, Massachusetts for the South Braintree killings, with Thayer again presiding. Well aware of the Galleanists reputation for constructing dynamite bombs of extraordinary power, Massachusetts authorities took great pains to defend against a possible bombing attack. Workers outfitted the Dedham courtroom where the trial was to be held with cast-iron bomb shutters (painted to match the wooden ones fitted elsewhere in the building) and heavy, sliding steel doors that could protect that section of the courthouse from blast effect in the event of a bomb attack.

Vanzetti again claimed that he had been selling fish at the time. Sacco for his part claimed that he was in Boston in order to gain a passport from the Italian consulate and have dinner with friends. The date of Sacco's visit to the consulate could not be established with certainty, and the prosecution pointed out that Sacco's dinner companions were friends and fellow anarchists.

DA Frederick Katzmann raised the political views of the two accused, and the fact that Sacco had changed his name. Though both men as resident aliens were not eligible for the draft, only to register, Katzmann nevertheless implied the men had fled to Mexico to avoid conscription during World War I. Under cross-examination, Sacco did admit to lying to Katzmann during interviews in Brockton prison, and made a lengthy speech attacking the treatment of the working-class by the ruling class of America.

Prosecution witnesses testified that the .32-caliber bullet that had killed Berardelli was of a brand so obsolete that the only bullets similar to it that anyone could locate to make comparisons were those in Sacco's pockets.

The defense had hired Albert H. Hamilton to make an examination of the firearms. Hamilton, a former purveyor of patent medicines who described himself as a 'doctor', testified that based on his microscope examination of the bullet taken from Berardelli and the .32 Colt automatic in Sacco’s possession, Sacco's pistol was not the murder weapon. Hamilton was a self-described firearms expert with a questionable history of court testimony dating from the Charles Stielow case of six years before, where his firearms testimony on the behalf of the prosecution had nearly sent a man to the electric chair on what later proved to be erroneous conclusions. In court, Hamilton attempted to discredit the prosecution’s firearms testimony by surreptitiously exchanging the barrel of Sacco’s pistol. He brought forward Sacco's .32 automatic and two new Colt pistols of the same make. There in court, he disassembled them all and then tried to exchange one of the new barrels with the one from Sacco's gun. Judge Thayer noticed the deception and demanded he return the original barrel for Sacco's gun. Thayer then denied a motion for a new trial.

Sacco and Vanzetti were both found guilty of first degree murder, and defense motions for a new trial were denied.

Motions, Appeals, and Clemency Investigation

While in Dedham prison, Sacco met a Portuguese convict called Celestino Madeiros. Madeiros claimed to have committed the crime of which Sacco was accused. However, Sacco's motion for a new trial was again denied.

In 1927, Governor Alvin T. Fuller finally agreed to postpone the executions and set up a committee to reconsider the case. By this time, firearms examination had improved considerably, and it was now known that an automatic pistol could be traced by several different methods if both bullet and casing were recovered from the scene (as in Sacco’s case). Automatic pistols could now be traced by unique markings of the rifling on the bullet, by firing pin indentations on the fired primer, or by unique ejector and extractor marks on the casing. The committee appointed to review the case used the services of Calvin Goddard in 1927, who had worked with Charles Waite at the Bureau of Forensic Ballistics in New York. Goddard was a genuine firearms expert trained in ballistics and forensic science. He had originally offered his services to the defense, who had rejected his assistance, continuing to rely on Hamilton's testimony which they felt best fit their view of the case.

Goddard used Philip Gravelle's newly-invented comparison microscope and helixometer, a hollow, lighted magnifier probe used to inspect gun barrels, to make an examination of Sacco’s .32 Colt, the bullet that killed Berardelli, and the spent casings recovered from the scene of the crime. In the presence of one of the defense experts, he fired a bullet from Sacco's gun into a wad of cotton and then put the ejected casing on the comparison microscope next to casings found at the scene. Then he looked at them carefully. The first two casings from the robbery did not match Sacco’s gun, but the third one did. Even the defense expert agreed that the two cartridges had been fired from the same gun. The second original defense expert also concurred. The committee upheld the convictions.

Reaction and Response

For their part, Sacco and Vanzetti seemed defiant. The June 1926 issue of Protesta Umana published by their Defense Committee, carried an article signed by Sacco and Vanzetti that appealed for retaliation by their colleagues. In an ominous reference to Luigi Galleani's bomb-making manual (covertly titled La Salute è in voi!), the article concluded Remember, La Salute è in voi!.

Neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had any previous criminal record, but they were known to the authorities as radical militants and adherents of Luigi Galleani who had been widely involved in the anarchist movement, labor strikes, political agitation, and anti-war propaganda. Sacco and Vanzetti both claimed to be victims of social and political prejudice and both claimed to be unjustly convicted of the crime for which they were accused. However, they did not attempt to distance themselves from their fellow anarchists nor their belief in violence as a legitimate weapon against the government. As Vanzetti said revealingly in his last speech to Judge Webster Thayer:

"I would not wish to a dog or 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 am an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian... 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". (Vanzetti spoke on 19 April, 1927, in Dedham, Massachusetts, where their case was heard in the Norfolk County courthouse.[1])

Many famous socialist intellectuals, including Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Bertrand Russell, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, campaigned for a retrial, but were unsuccessful. Famed lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter also argued for a retrial for the two men, writing a scathing criticism of Thayer's ruling.

In spite of major protests and strikes all over the world, Celestino Madeiros, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were all three executed in the electric chair on August 23, 1927. The execution sparked riots in London and Germany. The American Embassy in Paris was bombed by protestors. Sacco famously refused a priest and read an incendiary statement calling for anarchist victory before he was electrocuted.

Fellow Galleanists did not take news of the executions with equanimity. One or more followers of Galleani, especially Mario Buda, had been suspected as the perpetrators of the infamous and deadly Wall Street bombing of 1920 after the two men were initially indicted. At the funeral parlor in Hanover Street, a wreath announced Aspetando l'ora di vendetta (Awaiting the hour of vengeance). A violent bombing campaign soon followed. Galleanist-attributed bombings continued for a full five years after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Samuel Johnson, the brother of the man who had called police the night of Sacco and Vanzetti's arrest (Simon Johnson), had his house destroyed by a bomb. A package bomb addressed to Governor Fuller was intercepted in the Boston post office. Three months later, bombs exploded in the New York subway, in a Philadelphia church, and at the home of the mayor of Baltimore. One of the jurors in the Dedham trial had his house bombed, throwing him and his family from their beds. Several court and prison officials were specifically targeted, including the trial judge, Webster Thayer, and even the executioner, Robert Elliott. After Thayer's home was wrecked in the bomb blast, he lived permanently at his club in Boston, guarded 24 hours a day until his death.

Historical Viewpoints

Many historians, especially legal historians, have concluded the Sacco and Vanzetti prosecution, trial, and aftermath constituted a blatant disregard for political civil liberties, especially Thayer's decision to deny a retrial. Judge Webster Thayer, who heard the case, allegedly described the two as "anarchist bastards".

Both men had previously fled to Mexico, changing their names, a fact used against them by the prosecutor in their trial for murder. This implication of guilt by the commission of unrelated acts is one of the most persistent criticisms leveled against the trial. Sacco and Vanzetti's supporters would later argue that the men merely fled the country to avoid persecution and conscription, their critics, to escape detection and arrest for militant and seditious activities in the United States. But other anarchists who fled with them revealed the probable reason in a 1953 Book:

Several score Italian anarchists left the United States for Mexico. Some have suggested they did so because of cowardice. Nothing could be more false. The idea to go to Mexico arose in the minds of several comrades who were alarmed by the idea that, remaining in the United States, they would be forcibly restrained from leaving for Europe, where the revolution that had burst out in Russia that February promised to spread all over the continent.^[1]

Some critics felt that the authorities were partially influenced by strong anti-Italian prejudice against immigrants. Against charges of racism and racial prejudice, others pointed out that the both men were known anarchist members of a militant organization that had been conducting a violent campaign of bombing and attempted assassinations, acts condemned by the Italian-American community and Americans of all backgrounds.

Others believe that the government was really prosecuting Sacco and Vanzetti for the robbery-murders as a convenient excuse to put a stop to their militant activities as Galleanists, whose bombing campaign at the time posed a lethal threat, both to the government and to many Americans. Faced with a secretive underground group whose members resisted interrogation and believed in their cause, Federal and local officials using conventional law enforcement tactics had been repeatedly stymied in their efforts to identify all members of the group or to collect enough evidence for a prosecution.

Today, their case is seen as one of the earliest examples of using widespread protests and mass movements to try to win the release of convicted persons. [1]. The Sacco-Vanzetti case also exposed the inadequacies of both the legal and law enforcement system in investigating and prosecuting members and alleged members of secret societies and terrorist groups, and contributed to calls for the organization of national data collection and counterintelligence services.

Later investigations

One piece of evidence supporting the possibility of Sacco's guilt arose in 1941 when anarchist leader Carlo Tresca, a member of the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee, told Max Eastman, "Sacco was guilty but Vanzetti was innocent." Eastman published an article recounting his conversation with Tresca in National Review in 1961. Later, others would confirm being told the same information by Tresca.

In addition, in October 1961, ballistics tests were run with improved technology using Sacco's Colt automatic. The results confirmed that the bullet that killed Berardelli in 1920 came from the same .32 Colt Auto taken from the pistol in Sacco's possession. Subsequent investigations in 1983 also supported Goddard's findings.

The relevance of this evidence was challenged in 1988, when Charlie Whipple, a former Globe editorial page editor, revealed a conversation he had with Sergeant Edward J. Seibolt when he worked as a reporter in 1937. According to Whipple, Seibolt admitted that the police ballistics experts had switched the murder weapon, but Seibolt indicated that he would deny this if Whipple ever printed it. At the time, Whipple was unfamiliar with the specific facts of the case, and is not known if Seibolt was actually recalling Hamilton's testimony and behavior on the stand when Hamilton attempted to switch gun barrels.

Sacco's .32 Colt pistol is also claimed to have passed in and out of police custody, and to have been dismantled several times between 1927 and 1961. The central problem with these charges is that the match to Sacco's gun was based not only the .32 Colt pistol, but also to the same-caliber bullet that killed Berardelli, as well as to spent casings found at the scene. In addition to tampering with the pistol, the gun switcher/dismantler would also have had to access police evidence lockers and exchange the bullet from Berardelli's body and all spent casings retrieved by police, or else locate the actual murder weapon, then switch barrel, firing pin, ejector, and extractor, all before Goddard's examination in 1927 when the first match was made to Sacco's gun.

Evidence against Sacco's involvement included testimony by Celestino Madeiros, who confessed to the crime and indicated that neither Sacco nor Vanzetti took part. Madeiros was also in possession of a large amount of money ($2,800) immediately following the robbery, whereas no links to the stolen money were ever found with Sacco or Vanzetti. Judge Thayer rejected this testimony as a basis for a retrial, calling it "unreliable, untrustworthy, and untrue."

Further evidence on the Sacco and Vanzetti case came in November, 1982 in a letter from Ideale Gambera to Francis Russell. In it, Gambera revealed that his father, Giovanni Gambera, who had died in June 1982, was a member of the four-person team of anarchist leaders that met shortly after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti to plan for their defense. In his letter to Russell, Gambera claimed, "everyone [in the anarchist inner circle] knew that Sacco was guilty and that Vanzetti was innocent as far as the actual participation in killing."

On August 23, 1977, exactly fifty years after their execution, Governor of Massachusetts Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation stating that Sacco and Vanzetti had not been treated justly and that "any disgrace should be forever removed from their names."

The involvement of Upton Sinclair

In 2005, a 1929 letter from Upton Sinclair to his attorney John Beardsley, Esq., was publicized (having been found in an auction warehouse ten years earlier) in which Sinclair revealed that he was told at the time he wrote his book Boston, that both men were guilty. Some years after the trial Sinclair met with Sacco and Vanzetti's attorney Fred Moore.

Sinclair revealed that "Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth, ... He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them. ... I faced the most difficult ethical problem of my life at that point, I had come to Boston with the announcement that I was going to write the truth about the case". A trove of additional papers in Sinclair's archives at Indiana University show the ethical quandary that confronted him (Pasco 2005).

In January 2006, more of the text of the Beardsley letter became public casting some doubt on the conclusion that Sinclair believed Moore's statement:"I realized certain facts about Fred Moore. I had heard that he was using drugs. I knew that he had parted from the defense committee after the bitterest of quarrels. ... Moore admitted to me that the men themselves, had never admitted their guilt to him; and I began to wonder whether his present attitude and conclusions might not be the result of his brooding on his wrongs"CNN.

If Sinclair did not give any credibility to Moore's statement, it would not have been "the most difficult ethical problem of [his] life". On the other hand, Sinclair's public position was consistent in asserting the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti. Both Moore's statement and Sinclair's skepticism of it were mentioned in a 1975 biography of Upton Sinclair, despite claims that the contents of the letter were a new or "original" development.