Sacco and Vanzetti

Ferdinando Nicola Sacco (April 22, 1891-August 23, 1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (June 11, 1888-August 23, 1927) were Italian immigrants who were accused and convicted of murdering two men during a 1920 armed robbery in Massachusetts. After a controversial trial and a series of appeals, the men were executed on August 23, 1927.^[1]^[2]

Bartolomeo Vanzetti (left) and Nicola Sacco in handcuffs

The case is controversial along two separate but related lines:

Culpability: Regardless of the verdicts, were the men actually guilty?
Conformance: Regardless of guilt, were the trials fair?^[3]^[4]

The Sacco and Vanzetti case was—and is—highly politicized.

The assessment of either conformance or culpability turns on small details and often contradictory evidence. Many arguments have been made, but historians have still not reached consensus on either issue in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Overview

Sacco and Vanzetti were accused of the murders of Frederick Parmenter, a paymaster, and Alessandro Berardelli, a security guard, and Vanzetti alone of the theft of US$15,776.51 from the Slater-Morrill Shoe Company, on Pearl Street in South Braintree, Massachusetts during the afternoon of April 15, 1920. ^[5]

Police suspicions regarding the South Braintree robbery and a previous one in South Bridgewater centered on local Italian anarchists.^[6] While neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had any previous criminal record, they were known to the authorities as radical militants and adherents of Luigi Galleani. Police speculated about a connection between the crimes and the recent activities of the Galleanist anarchist movement, the idea being that the robberies were committed to gain funds for an ongoing bombing campaign.

The two men were arrested in Brockton, Massachusetts on May 5, 1920, after appearing at a garage to pick up a car that police believed was used in the robberies. Both had pistols on them, along with anarchist literature, and Vanzetti was carrying shotgun shells, such as those used in the holdup.

Vanzetti was tried initially for armed robbery and convicted. Both men were then tried for the murder and convicted. After several failed appeals, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in the electric chair on August 23, 1927, along with a third man, Celestine Madeiros, who had confessed to the murder.

Background

Sacco was a shoe-maker born in Torremaggiore, Foggia, who emigrated to the United States at the age of seventeen.^[7] Vanzetti was a fishmonger born in Villafalletto, Cuneo, who arrived in the United States at age twenty. Both men arrived in the U.S. in 1908, although they did not meet until the middle of 1917.^{[citation needed]}

Sacco and Vanzetti

The men were followers of Luigi Galleani, an Italian anarchist who advocated revolutionary violence, including bombing and assassination. Galleani published Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle), a periodical that advocated violent revolution, and an explicit bomb-making manual called La Salute è in voi!. At the time, Italian anarchists ranked at the top of the American government's list of dangerous enemies and had been identified as suspects in several violent bombings and assassination attempts, including an attempted mass poisoning,^{[citation needed]} going back to 1914. Cronaca Sovversiva was suppressed in July 1918, and Galleani along with eight of his closest associates was deported on June 24, 1919.^[8]

Most of the remaining Galleanists sought to avoid arrest by becoming inactive or going underground. However, some sixty militants considered themselves still engaged in a class war that required retaliation. For three years, they waged an intermittent campaign of violence directed at politicians, judges, and other federal and local officials, especially those who had supported the deportation of alien radicals. Chief among the dozen or more violent acts the Galleanists committed or are suspected of committing was the bombing of US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's home on June 2, 1919. In that incident, one Galleanist, Carlo Valdonoci, a former editor of Cronaca Sovversiva and 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. Incendiary pamphlets titled "Plain Words" found at the scene of this and several other midnight bombings on the same evening were signed by "The Anarchist Fighters."^[8]

Several Galleanist associates had been suspected or interrogated about their roles in the bombing incidents. Two days before Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, a Galleanist named Andrea Salsedo fell to his death from the Justice Department's, Bureau of Investigation offices on 15 Park Row in New York City. There was speculation that Salsedo may have been pushed out the window or possibly dropped as he was held out of the window by his ankles, a well known "third-degree" technique, as he was interrogated. Roberto Elia, another Galleanist under arrest, was later deposed in the inquiry and testified that Salsedo was distraught over his capture and killed himself to avoid betraying the others.^[9] Salsedo worked in the Canzani Printshop in Brooklyn, where federal agents traced the "Plain Words" leaflet.

The Galleanists knew that Salsedo had been held, and reportedly beaten, for two months, which led to rumors that Salsedo and his comrade Roberto Elia had made important disclosures concerning the bomb plot of June 2. The rumors about the confessions were later confirmed by Attorney General Palmer to encourage fear.

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.

Arrests

On April 16, one day after the robbery-murders, the Federal Immigration Service called local police chief Michael E. Stewart to discuss Galleanist anarchist Ferruccio Coacci, whom he had arrested on their behalf two years earlier. Coacci had succeeded in postponing his deportation for advocating the violent overthrow of the government until April 15, 1920, the day of Braintree holdup. The FIS asked Stewart to investigate Coacci's excuse that he had failed to report for deportation because his wife had fallen ill. Stewart sent two policemen to Coacci's house on April 16.

They found Coacci's wife in good health and were surprised that Coacci insisted on being arrested for immediate deportation. He had an alibi for the robbery — his timecard showed he was at work on April 15 — and was deported on April 18. Stewart remained suspicious, and on April 20, he visited the Coacci residence, found a man calling himself "Mike Boda" (an alias of Mario Buda, the chief Galleanist bombmaker) renting the house. Buda told the police he did not like Coacci and volunteered that Coacci's wife had left in a hurry. When questioned, Buda admitted that he owned a .32 caliber Spanish automatic pistol and possessed a diagram of a Savage automatic like the one used in the murders. Buda stated that he owned a 1914 Oakland, which was being repaired. Police were interested in the empty garage at the Coacci house, because it appeared that two cars had been kept there, and they believed a Buick and another smaller car were used during the holdup.

When he later discovered that Coacci had worked for both the plants that had their payrolls robbed, Stewart came back with the Bridgewater police, but Buda had disappeared with his possessions and furniture.

Protest for Sacco and Vanzetti in London, 1921

The police had instructed the proprietors of the Johnson garage, where the impounded cars were held, to notify them when the owners came to collect the 1914 Oakland. On May 5, 1920 Buda arrived at the garage with three other men, later identified as Sacco, Vanzetti and Riccardo Orciani. Police were alerted but the men sensed a trap and fled. Buda escaped on a motorcycle with Orciani and subsequently resurfaced in Italy in 1928. Sacco and Vanzetti were tracked onto a streetcar and soon arrested. Vanzetti was found to be carrying a revolver, which he claimed he had for protection. In apparent attempts to avoid deportation, the pair lied about their political beliefs.

Sacco and Vanzetti are believed to have been involved at some level in the Galleanist bombing campaign, although their precise roles have not been determined.^[10] In particular, the Galleanist's chief bombmaker, Mario Buda, reportedly told a friend in 1955, "Sacco c'era" (Sacco was there).^[11] This fact could account for their suspicious activities and behavior on the night of their arrest, May 5, 1920.^{[original research?]} Anarchists in other countries began a campaign of violent retaliation following the indictment of Sacco and Vanzetti. In 1921, a booby trap bomb mailed to the American ambassador in Paris exploded, wounding his valet.^[12] Other bombs sent to American embassies were defused. In 1926, a bomb destroyed the house of Samuel Johnson, the brother of the Simon Johnson who had called police the night of Sacco and Vanzetti's arrest.

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, who had criticized the jury for acquitting an anarchist named Sergei Zabraff in a trial he presided at just two months before. Vanzetti's lawyer was James Vahey, a distinguished Boston trial lawyer and former two-time candidate for governor in Massachusetts. Vahey and Vanzetti produced sixteen witnesses — Italians from Plymouth who claimed they had bought eels for the Christmas holiday from him — but as a fishmonger he had no time-card.^{[citation needed]}^[when?]^[who?]

The jury was swayed by several witnesses who identified Vanzetti as being at the scene of the attempted robbery and by shotgun shells found on Vanzetti when he was arrested five months after the Bridgewater crime.^{[citation needed]} Vanzetti expressed anger^[when?] with his lawyer who, he claimed, "sold me for thirty golden money like Judas sold Jesus Christ."^[13]

Vanzetti also claimed his lawyer convinced him not to testify on his own behalf, fearing that his anarchist politics might sway the jury against him. Vanzetti's failure to take the witness stand is thought to have convinced the jury of his guilt.^{[citation needed]} Vanzetti was found guilty and Judge Thayer sentenced him to 12–15 years imprisonment, the maximum sentence allowable.^{[citation needed]}

The judge in the case, Webster Thayer, allegedly^[who?] stated to the jury "This man, (Vanzetti) although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless culpable, because he is the enemy of our existing institutions."^[14] There is no record of this statement in the full trial transcript.

Second trial

Later Sacco and Vanzetti both stood trial for murder in Dedham, Massachusetts for the South Braintree killings, with Webster Thayer again presiding. (Thayer had asked to be assigned the trial.) 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. Each day during the trial, Sacco and Vanzetti were escorted in and out of the courtroom under a heavy armed guard.

Vanzetti again claimed that he had been selling fish at the time of the Braintree robbery. Sacco claimed that he had been in Boston in order to gain a passport from the Italian consulate. He had claimed to have had lunch in Boston's North end with several friends, each of whom testified on his behalf. Prior to the trial, Sacco's lawyer, Fred Moore, went to great lengths to contact the consulate employee Sacco said he had talked with on the afternoon of the crime. Moore's friend found the man back in Italy. The clerk said he remembered Sacco because of the unusually large passport photo he presented. The clerk also remembered the date — April 15, 1920. Moore's friend tried to get the clerk to return to America to testify but the clerk, in ill health, refused. What could have been key alibi testimony by a reputable clerk was reduced to a sworn deposition read aloud in court and quickly questioned by the prosecution, which claimed Sacco's visit to the consulate could not be established with certainty. The prosecution also pointed out that Sacco's dinner companions were fellow anarchists.

Much of the trial focused on material evidence, notably bullets, guns, and a cap. 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.^{[citation needed]} Yet ballistics evidence, which was presented in exhaustive detail, was equivocal. Prosecutor Frederick Katzmann, after initially promising he would not try to link any fatal bullet with Sacco's gun, changed his mind after the defense arranged test firings of the gun. Sacco, claiming he had nothing to hide, had allowed his gun to be test-fired, with experts for both sides present, during the trial's second week. The prosecution then matched bullets fired through the gun to those taken from one of the slain guards. In court, two prosecution experts swore that one of the fatal bullets, quickly labeled Bullet III, matched one of those test-fired. Two defense experts said the bullet did not match.^{[citation needed]} Years later, defense lawyers would suggest that the fatal bullet had been substituted by the prosecution. Noting that witnesses swore to seeing one gunman pump bullets into Berardelli, they asked how only one of four bullets found in the deceased could have come from Sacco's gun.

Even more doubt surrounded Vanzetti's gun. Since all of the bullets found at the scene were .32 caliber and Vanzetti's gun was .38 caliber, there was no direct evidence tying Vanzetti's gun to the crime scene.^[15] The prosecution claimed it had originally belonged to the slain guard and that it had been stolen during the robbery. No one testified to seeing anyone take the gun, but the guard, while carrying $15,776.51 in cash through the street, had no gun on him when found dead. The prosecution traced the gun to a Boston repair shop where the guard had dropped it off a few weeks before the murder. The defense, however, was able to raise doubts, noting that the repair shop had no record of the gun ever being picked up and that the guard's widow had told a friend that he might not have been killed had he claimed his gun. Still, the jury believed this link as well.

The prosecution's final piece of material evidence was a flop-eared cap claimed to have been Sacco's. Sacco tried the cap on in court and, according to two newspaper sketch artists who ran cartoons the next day, it was too small, sitting high on his head. But Katzmann insisted the cap fitted Sacco and continued to refer to it as his.

Further controversy clouded the prosecution witnesses who identified Sacco at the scene of the crime. One, a bookkeeper named Mary Splaine, precisely described Sacco as the man she saw firing from the getaway car. Yet cross examination revealed that Splaine had refused to identify Sacco at the inquest and had seen the getaway car for only a second and from nearly a half-block away. While a few others singled out Sacco or Vanzetti as the men they had seen at the scene of the crime, far more witnesses, both prosecution and defense, refused to identify them.

After deliberating for only three hours, then breaking for dinner, the jury returned with a guilty verdict. Supporters later insisted Sacco and Vanzetti had been convicted for their anarchist views, yet every juror insisted anarchism had played no part in their decision. First degree murder in Massachusetts was a capital crime. Sacco and Vanzetti were therefore bound for the electric chair unless the defense could find new evidence.

Motions and appeals

Appeals and protests continued for the next six years. While the prosecution staunchly defended the verdict, the defense, led by radical attorney Fred Moore, continued to develop evidence that raised doubts. Three key prosecution witnesses stated that they had been coerced into identifying Sacco at the scene of the crime, but when confronted by District Attorney Katzmann they denied any coercion. One of them, Lola Andrews, a nurse, told authorities that she was forced to sign an affidavit stating she had wrongfully identified Sacco and Vanzetti. She signed a counter-affidavit the following day. Another, Lewis Pelser, described how he had submitted to alleged prosecutorial coercion while drunk and signed a counter-affidavit shortly thereafter.

In 1924, controversy continued when it was discovered that someone had switched the barrel of Sacco's gun with that of another Colt automatic used for comparison.^[16] Other appeals focused on the jury foreman and a prosecution ballistics expert. In 1923, the defense filed an affidavit from a friend of the jury foreman who swore that prior to the trial, the man had said of Sacco and Vanzetti, "Damn them, they ought to hang them anyway!" That same year, a state police captain retracted his trial testimony linking Sacco's gun to the fatal bullet. Captain William Proctor claimed that he never meant to imply the connection and had repeatedly told Katzmann there was no such connection, but that the prosecution had crafted its trial questioning to disguise his true assessment.

The conduct of trial judge Webster Thayer also buttressed calls for a new trial. During the trial, many had noted how Thayer seemed to loathe defense attorney Fred Moore. Thayer frequently denied Moore's motions, lecturing the California-based lawyer on how law was conducted in Massachusetts. Once Thayer told astonished reporters that "No long-haired anarchist from California can run this court!" According to the sworn affidavits of eyewitnesses, Thayer also lectured members of his clubs, calling Sacco and Vanzetti "Bolsheviki!" and saying he would "get them good and proper". Following the verdict, Boston Globe reporter Frank Sibley, who had covered the trial, wrote a scathing protest to the Massachusetts attorney general condemning Thayer's blatant bias. The New York World attacked Thayer as "an agitated little man looking for publicity and utterly impervious to the ethical standards one has the right to expect of a man presiding in a capital case."^[17]

Then in 1924, after denying all five motions for a new trial, Thayer confronted a Massachusetts lawyer at his alma mater, Dartmouth. "Did you see what I did with those anarchistic bastards the other day?" the judge said. "I guess that will hold them for a while! Let them go to the Supreme Court now and see what they can get out of them!" The outburst was only disclosed until 1927.

For their part, Sacco and Vanzetti seemed to alternate between moods of defiance, vengeance, resignation, and despair. 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 the article, Vanzetti stated "I will try to see Thayer death [sic] before his pronunciation of our sentence" and asked fellow anarchists for "revenge, revenge in our names and the names of our living and dead."^[18] In a reference to Luigi Galleani's bomb-making manual (covertly titled La Salute è in voi!), the article concluded "Remember, La Salute è in voi!". Both Sacco and Vanzetti wrote dozens of letters sincerely expressing their innocence. Sacco, in his awkward prose, and Vanzetti in his eloquent but flawed English, insisted they had been framed because they were anarchists.

While in Dedham prison, Sacco met a Portuguese convict named Celestino Madeiros. Late in 1925, Madeiros claimed to have committed the crime of which Sacco was accused. Medeiros, whose vague confession contained many anomalies, provided the defense with an alternative theory of the Braintree murders, that they had been the work of a gang.

Prior to April 1920, gang leader Joe Morelli and his men had been robbing shoes from factories in Massachusetts, including the two in Braintree where the murders occurred. Morelli, investigators discovered, bore a striking resemblance to Sacco, so striking that several witnesses for both prosecution and defense mistook his mug shot for Sacco's. When questioned in 1925, while in prison, Morelli denied any involvement, but six years later he allegedly confessed to a New York lawyer.^[19] Judge Thayer denied the appeal for a new trial based on the Madeiros confession, and further appeals to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court were also denied.

Vanzetti said in his last speech to Judge Webster Thayer on April 19, 1927:

"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."

Many famous socialists and 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, without success. Harvard Law Professor and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter also argued for a retrial for the two men, writing a scathing criticism of Thayer and the trial in the Atlantic Monthly in 1927. Some who thought Sacco and Vanzetti guilty, including Chief Justice of the Supreme Court William Howard Taft later pointed to Frankfurter’s article as the foundation of most criticism of the Sacco and Vanzetti case on the part of intellectuals throughout the world.^[20]

On April 8, 1927, their appeals exhausted, Sacco and Vanzetti were finally sentenced to death in the electric chair.

Governor’s Advisory Committee

Massachusetts Governor
Alvin T. Fuller

In response to public protests that greeted the execution order, Massachusetts Governor Alvin T. Fuller faced last minute appeals to grant clemency to Sacco and Vanzetti. He appointed an Advisory Committee of three: President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, President Samuel Wesley Stratton of MIT, and Probate Judge Robert Grant. They were tasked with reviewing the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti to determine whether the trial had been fair. Lowell's appointment was generally well received, for though he had controversy in his past he had also at times demonstrated an independent streak. The defense attorneys considered resigning when they determined that the Committee was biased against the defendants, but some of the defendants' most prominent supporters, including Harvard Law Professor Felix Frankfurter and Judge Julian W. Mack of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, persuaded them to stay because Lowell "was not entirely hopeless."^[21]

One of the defense attorneys, though ultimately very critical of the Committee's work, thought the Committee members were not really capable of the task the Governor set for them: "No member of the Committee had the essential sophistication that comes with experience in the trial of criminal cases....The high positions in the community held by the members of the Committee obscured the fact that they were not really qualified to perform the difficult task assigned to them." He also thought that the Committee, particularly Lowell, imagined it could use its fresh and more powerful analytical abilities to outperform the works of those who had worked on the case for years, even finding evidence of guilt that professional prosecutors had discarded.^[22]

Grant was another establishment figure, a probate court judge from 1893 to 1923 and an Overseer of Harvard University from 1896 to 1921, and the author of a dozen popular novels.^[23] Some criticized Grant's appointment to the Committee, with one defense lawyer saying he "had a black-tie class concept of life around him," but Harold Laski in a conversation at the time found him "moderate." Others cited evidence of xenophobia in some of his novels, references to "riff-raff" and a variety of racial slurs. His biographer allows that he was "not a good choice," not a legal scholar, and handicapped by age. Stratton, the one member who was not a Boston Brahmin, maintained the lowest public profile of the three and hardly spoke during its hearings.^[24]

After two weeks of hearing witnesses and reviewing evidence, the trio determined that the trial had been fair and a new trial was not warranted. They assessed the charges against Thayer as well. Their criticism, using words provided by Judge Grant,^[25] would hardly sound harsh to those outside the legal profession: "He ought not to have talked about the case off the bench, and doing so was a grave breach of judicial decorum." But they also found some of the charges about his statements unbelievable or exaggerated, and they determined that anything he might have said had no impact on the trial. The panel's reading of the trial transcript convinced them that Thayer "tried to be scrupulously fair." The Committee also reported that the trial jurors were almost unanimous in praising Thayer’s conduct of the trial.^[26]

A defense attorney later noted ruefully that the release of the Committee's report "abruptly stilled the burgeoning doubts among the leaders of opinion in New England."^[27] Supporters of the convicted men denounced the Committee. Harold Laski said the decision represented Lowell's "loyalty to his class."

Execution and aftermath

Both Sacco and Vanzetti famously refused a priest but both men went peacefully and proudly to their deaths. Sacco's final words were "Viva l'anarchia!" and "Farewell, mia madre."^{[citation needed]} Vanzetti, in his final moments, gently shook hands with guards and thanked them for their kind treatment, read a statement proclaiming his innocence, and finally said, "I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me."^{[citation needed]}

Fellow Galleanists did not take news of the executions with equanimity. At the funeral parlor in Hanover Street, a wreath announced Aspettando l'ora di vendetta (Awaiting the hour of vengeance).^{[citation needed]}

A few days after the executions, Di Giovanni received a letter from Sacco's widow thanking him for his actions and informing him that the director of the tobacco firm Combinados had proposed her a contract to produce a cigarette brand named "Sacco & Vanzetti".^[28] On November 26, 1927, Di Giovanni and his comrades duly bombed a Combinados tobacco shop.^[28]

On December 24, 1927, the headquarters of the Citibank and of the Bank of Boston in Buenos Aires were blown up by the Italian anarchist Severino Di Giovanni, in apparent protest of the execution.^[28] Di Giovanni, one of the most vocal supporters of Sacco and Vanzetti in Argentina, had already bombed the US embassy in Buenos Aires a few hours after Sacco and Vanzetti were condemned.^[28] Later, Di Giovanni and his comrades would unsuccessfully attempt to bomb the train in which president Herbert Hoover travelled during his stay in Argentina, in December 1928.^[28]

Following the sentencing of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, 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. Less than a year after the executions, a bomb destroyed the front porch of the home of executioner Robert Elliott. As late as 1932, Judge Thayer's home was wrecked and his wife and housekeeper injured in a bomb blast.^[29] Afterward, Thayer lived permanently at his club in Boston, guarded 24 hours a day until his death.

Intellectual and literary supporters of Sacco and Vanzetti continued to speak out. In 1936, on the day when Harvard celebrated its 300th anniversary, 28 Harvard alumni issued a statement attacking the University's retired President Lowell for his role on the Governor's Advisory Committee in 1927. They included Heywood Broun, Malcolm Cowley, Granville Hicks, and John Dos Passos.^[30]

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."^[31]

Both men had previously fled to Mexico, changing their names in order to evade draft registration required for citizenship application, 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.^[32]

Some critics felt that the authorities and jurors were influenced by strong anti-Italian prejudice and prejudice against immigrants widely held at the time, especially in New England. Fred Moore compared the chances of an Italian getting a fair trial in Boston to a black person getting one in the American South.^{[citation needed]} Against charges of racism and racial prejudice, others pointed out that both men were known anarchist members of a militant organization, members of which had been conducting a violent campaign of bombing and attempted assassinations, acts condemned by the Italian-American community and Americans of all backgrounds. Though in general anarchist groups did not finance their militant activities through bank robberies, a fact noted by the investigators of the Bureau of Investigation, this was not true of the Galleanist group, as Mario Buda readily admitted to an interviewer: "Andavamo a prenderli dove c'erano" ("We used to go and get it [money] where it was") — meaning factories and banks.^[33]

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. 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.

When the letters Sacco and Vanzetti wrote appeared in print in 1929, journalist Walter Lippmann commented: "If Sacco and Vanzetti were professional bandits, then historians and biographers who attempt to deduce character from personal documents might as well shut up shop. By every test that I know of for judging character, these are the letters of innocent men."^[34]

Later investigations

One additional 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. Others pointed to an ongoing feud between Tresca and the Galleanisti, claiming the famous anarchist was just trying to get even.

In 1952, labor organizer Anthony Ramuglia admitted that a Boston anarchist group had asked him to be a false alibi witness for Sacco. Though he had agreed, he had then remembered that he had been in jail at that time, and his perjury could therefore be proven, so he was removed from the alibi list.

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 was fired from Sacco's pistol.^[35] Subsequent investigations in 1983 also supported this finding ^{[citation needed]}. This resulted in some scholars of the case to conclude that Sacco may in fact be guilty ^[who?].

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 it is not known if Seibolt was actually recalling Albert Hamilton's testimony and behavior on the stand when Hamilton apparently switched Sacco's gun barrel with that of another Colt automatic.

Sacco's .32 Colt pistol is also claimed to have passed in and out of police custody, and to have been dismantled several times, both in 1924 prior to the gun barrel switch, and again between 1927 and 1961. The central problem with these charges is that the match to Sacco's gun was based not only on the 0.32 Colt pistol but also on the same-caliber bullet that killed Berardelli as well as spent casings found at the scene.

In addition to tampering with the pistol, the gun switcher/dismantler would have had also 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. However, doubters of Sacco's guilt have repeatedly pointed to a single anomaly — that several witnesses to the crime insisted the gunman, alleged to be Sacco, fired four bullets into Berardelli. "He shot at Berardelli probably four or five times," one witness said. "He stood guard over him."^{[citation needed]} If this was true, many ask,^[who?] how could only one of the fatal bullets be linked to Sacco's gun? In 1927, the defense raised the suggestion that the fatal bullet had been planted, calling attention to the awkward scratches on the base of the bullet that differed from those on other bullets. The Lowell Commission dismissed this claim as desperate but in 1985, historians William Kaiser and David Young made a compelling case for a switch in their book Post-Mortem: New Evidence in the Case of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Further evidence concerning the Morelli gang came to light in 1973 when a former mobster published a confession by Frank "Butsy" Morelli, Joe's brother. "We whacked them out, we killed those guys in the robbery," Butsy Morelli told Vincent Teresa. "These two greaseballs Sacco and Vanzetti took it on the chin."^{[citation needed]}

Yet there are others who revealed different opinions, further muddling the case. In November, 1982 Francis Russell, author of a book on the case, received a letter from Ideale Gambera. 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."

Russell had originally written about the case, arguing that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, but further research led him to write a 1975 book, asserting that Sacco was, in fact, guilty. Russell used the Gambera revelation as the basis of a new book in 1986, in which he claims that the case is "solved," and presents his view that Sacco was one of the shooters, while Vanzetti was an accessory after the fact. While Russell's 1975 book was praised, even by those who disagreed with his conclusion, for being balanced and well-reasoned, his 1986 book was much more negatively received.^{[citation needed]}

Months before he died, the distinguished jurist Charles E. Wyzanski, Jr., who had presided for 45 years on the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, wrote to Russell stating "I myself am persuaded by your writings that Sacco was guilty." The judge's assessment was significant, because he was one of Felix Frankfurter's "Hot Dogs," and Justice Frankfurter had advocated his appointment to the federal bench.^[36]

On August 23, 1977, exactly fifty years after their execution, Governor of Massachusetts Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation stating that Sacco and Vanzetti had been treated unjustly and that "any disgrace should be forever removed from their names." Controversy arose as a result of his action, and Dukakis later expressed regret, not for the proclamation itself, but for not also reaching out to the families of the victims of the crime. "It was a terrible gap in my judgment; we didn't seem to focus on that," said the former Governor in a 2005 newspaper article.^[37]

On August 23, 1997, on the 70th anniversary of their execution, Thomas Menino, the first Italian-American mayor of Boston, presided over an official ceremony at the Boston Public Library to formally "accept" a bas-relief memorializing Sacco and Vanzetti, designed by the same sculptor who created Mount Rushmore. This move also generated some controversy, and, like Governor Dukakis, Mayor Menino purposefully avoided addressing the issue of whether the pair were guilty or innocent. Also speaking at the artwork acceptance ceremony was the Italian-American Acting Governor of Massachusetts, Paul Cellucci. A memorial committee had attempted to present the relief to Massachusetts governors and Boston mayors in 1937, 1947, and 1957, but it had been refused each time.

Sacco was quoted as saying before his death, "It is true, indeed, that they can execute the body, but they cannot execute the idea which is bound to live."^{[citation needed]}

The involvement of Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair maintained a consistent position in asserting the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti. In 2005, a letter from Upton Sinclair to his attorney John Beardsley, Esq., became public. Some claimed^[who?] that the contents of the letter were a new or "original" development,^{[citation needed]}, though everything in the letter was mentioned in a 1975 biography of Upton Sinclair.^[which?]

Writing the letter in 1929, Sinclair revealed that he had talked to Fred Moore, one of Sacco and Vanzetti's attorneys, after the executions. "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." Sinclair also said he was "completely naïve about the case, having accepted the defense propaganda completely."^[38]

In January 2006, more of the Sinclair-Beardsley letter became public. It showed that Sinclair doubted Moore: "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."^[39] Sinclair also spoke with Moore's former wife who assured him that her husband had never expressed doubts about his clients' innocence either during or after the trial.^{[citation needed]}