Part 1Cold Open
“Parmenter dropped his box and ran. He was hit running.”
Four words. And they are everything that newspaper had to say about the death of a man named Frederick Parmenter.
He was forty-five years old. Five feet eight, about a hundred and thirty pounds. Brown moustache, brown hair thinning on top, and a one-inch scar under his chin.
He was the paymaster for a shoe company in Braintree, Massachusetts — the man whose job, every payday, was to get the money from the train down to the office. He was married. He had two children at home.
On the afternoon of the fifteenth of April, 1920, somebody shot him twice. He died the next morning, at six o'clock.
He was hit running.
The other one got a sentence.
“The first bullet caught Berardelli. He dropped his box as he fell.”
Alessandro Berardelli. Forty-four years old. A special officer of the Braintree police — and he wore a badge of the Braintree police. Under his shirt, a truss, for a hernia on his left side. In his pocket, a cigar case with his own name on it: Alex Berardelli.
Married. Lived in Quincy.
He was shot, and he died where he fell — on the pavement, in the middle of the afternoon, before anybody could get him anywhere.
One sentence.
And that street, and that afternoon.
Thursday, the fifteenth of April, 1920. A payday — the same payday these men had worked a hundred times before. Two of them come out of a building carrying a payroll in two boxes, to walk it a few hundred yards down the street to the other office.
And they never get there.
Thirty-three years later, a newspaper in New York gave that street a full page.
Sunday morning, the nineteenth of July, 1953. Across the top of the page, a photograph: two men in dark suits and high collars, manacled to each other at the wrist. Below that, a map of the street, drawn like a floor plan, with numbered arrows on it — where the car was parked, where the men came out with the money, where they were shot, where the killers ran.
And under the map, the story starts. It does not start with a fact.
It starts with a question.
“WHO were Sacco and Vanzetti? What did they do?”
Two names. Not Parmenter's. Not Berardelli's.
And then the paper does something newspapers almost never do. It explains why it is asking.
“Those questions about the celebrated 32-year-old case have been asked over and over since the execution last month of the atom spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.”
Thirty days. On the nineteenth of June, 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had died in the electric chair at Sing Sing — a husband and a wife, convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. And thirty days after that, a Sunday paper in New York gave a full page to a case from 1920, and printed the reason on the page.
People keep asking.
Then it tells the reader what to do with it. Three words, set on their own line at the end of the opening.
“Read—and judge.”
So.
Two men were murdered on a street in Massachusetts, on a Thursday afternoon in April, 1920.
One of them got four words.
The other one got a sentence.
And then, for the next two pages, the newspaper wrote about two other men.
Part 2Show Introduction
Hello everyone, and welcome to Forgotten True Crime. My name is Trevor Shelby — and we're recording this one from a ship, somewhere with a lot of water and a very small desk, which is honestly the correct venue for the story you're about to hear.
A newspaper gave a murdered man four words.
So we went and found his file.
And it's there. In Massachusetts there is a record of the deaths of Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli, and it runs to twenty-one pages — the autopsy reports on both men, written out in April 1920, the day after they were shot.
What the bullets did. Where they went in. And how long each man took to die.
It says things that newspaper could not, because that newspaper never saw it.
The doctor who wrote the first one described the path of a bullet through a man's chest with a probe and a protractor. He measured the angle. He wrote down the name of the vein it opened.
That is what four words looks like when somebody actually writes it all down.
Now. The paper.
It's the Daily News — a New York tabloid. And the page in that cold open came from a weekly feature it ran for decades: “A Justice Story,” a column that had been retelling famous criminal cases since 1923. The writer that Sunday was Ruth Reynolds, who worked on that column for thirty years.
And here is the thing about the case she was retelling. The Sacco-Vanzetti case.
It is one of the most famous murder cases in American history — and almost nobody remembers the men who were murdered.
Say the name and you get two faces, immediately, from anybody in the country. But ask them who Frederick Parmenter was, or Alessandro Berardelli, and you will get nothing at all. Because the case got famous for the two men who were accused — and the two men who were killed became a detail in it.
That is what this episode is about.
So here's the shape of it.
First, we tell the story the way that page told it — the crime, and the trial, and the two men whose names everybody knows.
And before any of that: we spend a while with the two men whose names nobody does.
Then we open the file. The autopsies. The ballistics. The court papers. The burial records. And an urn, on a shelf, in a library in Boston.
Twenty-one pages of a doctor's handwriting, against four words in a newspaper.
Real quick, before we start. If you're a first-time listener — hit that subscribe button, so when we have new episodes you'll be the first to know. And then head over to Section29.com, where you'll find my case file on this one and everything we dug up.
A few words before we go, the way we always do. Everything in this episode is a true story, and it's built from the record — the newspapers of the day, the autopsy reports, the court documents, the archival papers. Some scenes are recreated the way they must have played out, because that's the best way to live a story. The opinions you hear are my opinions. And this one carries a payroll robbery, two men shot in the street, and an execution — so, listener discretion. It always has been, and this one earns it.
All right.
Two men were murdered on a street in Massachusetts, and a newspaper gave them four words and a sentence.
This is what the file says instead.
Now let's get on with the show.
Part 3Two Men on a Street
Every payday, the money came in on the train.
It arrived at the station at South Braintree, Massachusetts, a little after half past nine in the morning, and a man from the railway express carried it down the street to the offices of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company — and it was counted, and logged, and packed into boxes.
And then, later in the day, it went out again.
Two boxes. Carried from one company building to another, a few hundred yards away, by two men walking.
That was the arrangement. Not a convoy, not an armoured car. A paymaster and a guard, walking a payroll down a public street in the middle of the afternoon.
And on the fifteenth of April, 1920, the payroll was fifteen thousand, seven hundred and seventy-three dollars and fifty-nine cents.
They had done this before. Many times.
The paymaster was Frederick Parmenter.
He was forty-five. He was married — to a woman named Hattie — and there were two children in that house: a son born in 1909, and a daughter born in 1913. And his job, the thing he did for the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company over and over on every payday, was to be the man who carried the money.
That is what he was. A man whose name appears in the public record in exactly two places: as the paymaster on a payroll run, and on a marble headstone in Brockton, Massachusetts.
A wife. Two children. A job. Thirty-three years later, four words.
The guard was Alessandro Berardelli.
And this is the part of this story that the newspaper never touches, and that almost nothing written about this case ever mentions.
Alessandro Berardelli was born in Casacalenda, in the Molise region of Italy.
A mountain village in the south of Italy. Six thousand kilometres from Braintree, Massachusetts.
And he came to America, and he became a police officer.
A special officer of the Braintree police. Sworn in, on the force, with a badge — and on the afternoon of the fifteenth of April, 1920, he was doing a job he did on every payday: walking a payroll down a street beside the paymaster.
And he had registered for the American draft.
An Italian immigrant, in a Massachusetts town, who put his name down when the United States asked him to.
And on his own person, that afternoon, there was a small thing worth stopping on.
A white leather cigar case — and inscribed on it, in script:
Alex Berardelli.
Not Alessandro. Alex.
That is what he called himself. That is the name he had cut into the thing he carried in his pocket every day. And on the autopsy table the next morning, the record written by three doctors would give him back his other name: Alessandro.
Both of them were his. He was a man who had one name for a village in Molise and another for a street in Massachusetts.
So: that is the pair of them.
A paymaster of forty-five with a wife and two children. And a police officer of forty-four, from Casacalenda, who carried a cigar case with his own American name on it, and who had put his name down for the draft.
Two men carrying boxes down a street, on a Thursday afternoon in April, in the way they had done it many times before.
And here is the thing about the two men who were shot on Pearl Street that afternoon.
Neither of them is going to be the reason this case is famous.
Part 4The Afternoon of April 15, 1920
Thursday, April the fifteenth, 1920. Three o'clock in the afternoon.
The payroll came in on the train that morning, and it has been counted, and logged, and packed into two boxes. And now the paymaster and his guard walk out of the shoe company building, each of them carrying one box, to take it a few hundred yards down the street to another branch of the company.
And that morning, on his way up from the station, the express agent had noticed a car — a seven-passenger Buick touring car, with two men sitting in it. It is the only description of either man in the entire piece.
“One of them was blonde, and emaciated.”
The paymaster and the guard get a few feet down Pearl Street.
And somebody fires.
The newspaper's next two sentences are these.
“The first bullet caught Berardelli. He dropped his box as he fell.”
And then:
“Parmenter dropped his box and ran. He was hit running.”
That is the whole of the shooting. One sentence for the first man, four words for the second.
There is an autopsy report for the guard — thirteen pages of it, typed by a stenographer named Rebecca Sullivan, sitting in the archives of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. And the first thing it tells you is how many times he was shot.
Four.
The man the newspaper kills in a single sentence was shot four separate times. And the report doesn't just count them. It follows every one of them, from the hole it made going in to the place the bullet stopped.
The first hit him in the back of the left upper arm — through the arm, through the chest, through the left lung — and it stopped against the inside of a rib on the other side of his body.
The second went into his back on the left, and stopped in the muscle of his chest.
The third went into his back again, lower. It punched through the bone of his pelvis and came to rest in the muscle of his abdomen on the opposite side.
And the fourth went in at the back of his right shoulder. It broke a rib. It went through his right lung. It tore through his aorta — the main artery of the body. Then through his intestine. It lacerated his left kidney and the artery feeding it, and stopped in the muscle at the top of his left leg.
Four bullets. And when they opened his chest, the right side of it held a hundred and twenty-five cubic centimetres of blood.
He died where he fell. The form puts the hour of death at about three o'clock in the afternoon — the same hour the newspaper gives for the shooting. And the doctor's phrase for it is four words long.
“He died soon after.”
And then there is the line at the top of the form, where it asks what the dead man did for a living.
Special Officer, Braintree Police.
The newspaper calls him the guard. He was a police officer — on duty with the paymaster that afternoon, in the service of the shoe company. And the report notes what he was wearing when he died: “Attached to the waistcoat, left front, is a badge of the Braintree Police.”
And when they went through his pockets, they found the ordinary things a working man carries.
A cheap gilt watch. Four dollars and fifty cents in a leather purse. A wire tenpenny nail. A gold cameo ring. A pair of police twisters.
And two things that are not ordinary at all.
A white leather cigar case, with his own name written on it.
And a pay envelope — marked with his name, and the amount. Thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents.
It was sealed. He had not opened it.
His own week's pay was still in his pocket when he was shot. Thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents, earned, drawn, put in his coat, and never spent.
And there is one more number on this street to correct.
The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, in its own written opinion on this case, gives the payroll as fifteen thousand, seven hundred and seventy-six dollars and fifty-one cents. The newspaper printed fifteen thousand, seven hundred and seventy-three dollars and fifty-nine cents.
Two dollars and ninety-two cents apart. Which is what happens to a number when a story gets retold for thirty years.
And then, two days later, they found the car. Abandoned in a wood near West Bridgewater.
And what the police found in it — as reported by the Sunday News, and the detail that other accounts of that car don't carry — was a twelve-gauge shotgun shell.
The paper reports what the police said about it. And then what the police said next.
“The murder car!” said the police.
And they added, “Dirty Wops!”
And then, with no comment at all, the paper prints this line.
“Every eye witness agreed that the bandits looked like Italians.”
Two sentences. And in them, the entire case — the evidence, and the reason it was believed.
And the guard who died on that street that afternoon — the special officer with a badge of the Braintree Police attached to his waistcoat — was born in Casacalenda, in the Molise region of Italy.
Part 5He Was Hit Running
Parmenter dropped his box and ran.
He was hit running.
Four words. That is all the newspaper gives this man. And they are good words — they are what a reporter writes when he has stood on the street where it happened and watched a man run and fall.
And here is the second file.
Eight pages, typed the next day. It opens on a table in a room in Quincy — the premises of an undertaker — at twenty past seven in the evening. It begins the way these documents begin: with the body.
And the first thing it notices about him is that his chest — the lower two-thirds of it — has been shaved.
The way a chest gets shaved before a surgeon opens it.
Because a surgeon did open it. That comes later.
The first thing the autopsy establishes is that this man was shot twice. Not once. Twice — and the two wounds are on opposite sides of his body.
The first one went in at the front of his chest, on the left, three inches below the nipple. A probe was passed into the wound, and the report says it “lies at an angle of about 5 degrees above the horizontal plane.”
Almost flat. Almost level. In at the front of the chest and out at the front of the chest — the bullet went through him and kept going.
That wound did not kill him.
The second one did.
It went in at his back, on the right-hand side, four and a half inches above the crest of his hip. And the probe, passed into that wound, “lies at an angle of about 40 degrees from the sagittal plane” — which is a doctor's way of saying the bullet was travelling forward, and inward, and slightly up.
It went through the muscle of his back. It went through the fat around his kidney. And then it opened the vena cava inferior — the largest vein in the human body, the one that carries the whole lower half of the blood supply back to the heart.
And then it kept going. Through the tissue that holds the intestines. Through the fatty apron over the stomach. And it stopped under the skin at the front of his abdomen, on the left — which is where a surgeon found it and took it out.
The report's own summary, at the back, puts it in one line. This is the anatomical diagnosis, and it is the line that matters.
Bullet wound of the Back, right side, with penetration of the Skin, Subcutaneous Tissues, Muscles of the back, Psoas Muscle, right, Perinephritic Fat, Vena Cava Inferior…
He was shot from behind.
And that is the thing about the newspaper's four words.
“He was hit running” is true. It is exactly true. He was hit in the back, by a bullet that came from behind him and travelled forward and slightly upward — the way a bullet travels when it is fired at a man who is moving away.
Four words, and the forensics agree with every one of them.
They just don't tell you what happened next.
Because he did not die in the street.
He was shot at about three o'clock in the afternoon. And he died at about six o'clock the next morning.
Fifteen hours.
Here is the record of them.
He was brought into the Quincy Hospital at about four o'clock in the afternoon, in the hospital ambulance, from the premises of the company. On admission he was conscious — in shock, pale, his pupils small. He was given a quarter of a grain of morphine. And the report adds: “a previous dose having been administered before admission.”
Somebody had already tried to help him.
At five o'clock, a surgeon named Dr. Nathaniel S. Hunting opened him up. Ether was given by a Dr. Edwin E. Smith. The operation ran from five in the afternoon until a quarter to seven — an hour and three-quarters. It was done in two parts: first they explored the wound through the chest; then they went after the bullet. They found it, and they removed it — a steel-jacketed bullet, and the report notes it was “without deformity.”
And then the clinical history ends. And the last line of it is this.
“He died April 16, at about 6:00 a.m., about twelve hours after entrance.”
Twelve hours after he reached the hospital.
Fifteen hours after he was shot.
The document counts from the moment he was carried through the doors. Nobody was counting from the street.
He was forty-five years old. He was married. And he had two children at home.
His wife's name was Hattie.
And she died in 1925 — two years before the Commonwealth of Massachusetts executed the two men it had convicted of killing her husband.
She never saw the end of it.
Four words, and a family.
So: two men, on one street, on one afternoon.
One of them was shot four times and died where he fell, at about three o'clock.
The other was shot twice, and lived for fifteen hours, and died at six the next morning.
And the newspaper gave them a sentence and four words — and then moved on to the trial.
Part 6Who Sacco and Vanzetti Were
In the spring of 1920, the police looking for the South Braintree bandits had their eye on a car.
It was an Overland, and it belonged to a man named Mike Boda, of West Bridgewater — and it was sitting in a garage there, being repaired. The police thought the bandits might come back for it. So they told the garage man, Simon Johnson, to telephone them if anybody did.
On the night of the fifth of May, 1920 — three weeks after the shooting — four men came for the car.
Boda arrived on the back of a friend's motorcycle. Two more came by trolley. And while Johnson stalled them at the door — the car had no 1920 plates, he said; better leave it where it was — Mrs. Johnson slipped out of the house to telephone the police.
Boda rode off on the motorcycle. The two men who had come by trolley walked back to the line and caught a car for Brockton.
And on that trolley, a police officer named Connolly and a second officer climbed aboard and arrested them — in the newspaper's words, “on some pretext or other.”
They were Italian. They were carrying guns. In one man's coat: a circular, a .32 Colt pistol, and twenty-three cartridges. In the other's: a .38 revolver, and a pocketful of shotgun shells. Twelve-gauge.
That is how they came into this case — by walking up to a car the police were already watching.
Their names were Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
And the first thing to say about them is the thing the newspaper says, and it is the most important sentence in its account of either man.
“So far as anybody knew, never associated with criminals, never been involved in or suspected of a crime of violence.”
Neither of them had a record. Not a robbery. Not an assault. Nothing.
And then the paper says the other thing.
They were “knee-deep in the activities of an Italian radical society.”
Nicola Sacco came from Torremaggiore — a town in the south of Italy, in the province of Foggia, down in the heel of the boot.
He emigrated at seventeen.
He settled in Milford, Massachusetts, and he worked as a labourer. He married. He had a son.
And he was a socialist — a man who, in the newspaper's own words, “dreamed of an era when conditions would be better for himself, his family and his fellow man.”
The paper reaches for something more precise than "socialist," and this is what it lands on:
“Perhaps we should say he was a philosophical anarchist — he believed anarchy was right although he hadn't raised a hand in violence.”
And then, in 1917, he did the thing that would be held against him for the rest of his life.
He fled to Mexico — to avoid the draft.
And then he came back. Under an assumed name. To be with his wife and his child.
Then Cambridge, Massachusetts, saving his money. And after the Armistice, his own name again — and a job in a shoe factory at Stoughton, Massachusetts.
Bartolomeo Vanzetti was older. Thirty-two that year, to Sacco's twenty-nine.
He came from Villafalletto, in the north of Italy — the Piedmont, up against the Alps. He emigrated at twenty.
And in America he worked as a kitchen helper — and then as a fish peddler.
A man who sold fish door to door in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
He had also left Massachusetts rather than be drafted.
Now put that beside the man who died on Pearl Street.
Alessandro Berardelli had registered for the American draft. An Italian immigrant in a Massachusetts town, who put his name down when the United States asked him to.
These two men had run from it.
They were anarchists who opposed the war. That is why they ran from it — and it is the reason they later gave for the errand that night: the society they belonged to expected another round of Government raids, Sacco had come back from New York saying the literature had to be hidden, and Boda's car was for collecting it.
Two men with no records, no violence, and no money.
Sacco was twenty-nine. He had a wife and a son, and a job in a shoe factory.
Vanzetti was thirty-two. He sold fish out of a cart in Plymouth.
Neither of them had ever been accused of anything.
At the police station, they were asked where they had been on the afternoon of the fifteenth of April.
Vanzetti told them he had been peddling fish in Plymouth. Sacco's account — that he had been in Boston that day, at the Italian consulate, about a passport — would come at the trial.
That is what they said. Whether it was true is the question this case has been asking for a hundred years.
Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli had been dead for twenty days when these two were pulled off that trolley car.
Part 7Four Bullets
Before the trial, before the appeals, before the seven years — there is a page in the Berardelli autopsy report that is almost blank.
Page two, of thirteen. Page one ends in the middle of a sentence — “On August 3, at 4:40 p.m., at his office at the State House, and” — and then the typescript breaks, and page two carries four lines and nothing else.
Here they are.
“…at the request of District Attorney Katzmann, I delivered to Captain Proctor, of the Massachusetts District Police, four bullets marked for identification, removed by me at autopsy.”
Four bullets. Marked for identification. Out of a dead man's body, into the hands of a police ballistics expert, on the third of August, 1920 — three and a half months after the shooting.
That page is the chain of custody for the most argued-over physical evidence in this entire case. And it is on a page somebody added to the report afterwards — because the sentence starts on the sheet before it and finishes on a blank one.
Now. Here is the newspaper, thirty-three years later, describing what that evidence proved.
“A ballistics expert, Capt. William H. Proctor, said that a bullet taken from Berardelli's body was ‘consistent’ with those fired in tests from Sacco's .32.”
Three things about that sentence.
The first one: “a bullet.” The paper says one. The record says four.
The second: “consistent with.” Not fired from. Proctor did not say that bullet came out of Sacco's gun. He said it was consistent with test firings. And the newspaper — give it credit — prints the quotation marks exactly where the hedge is.
And the third thing is what the paper does next, which is the most honest paragraph in the piece. It gives you the other expert. “Another expert, Charles Van Amburgh, was ‘inclined to believe’ the bullets that killed Berardelli were fired from Sacco's gun.”
Consistent with. Inclined to believe. Two experts, two hedges, no identification.
And then the paper hands you the defence. “The bullets taken from Parmenter's and Berardelli's bodies were not from the guns of Sacco or Vanzetti, said these experts.”
Two against two. And the paper reports it as a draw — because it was one.
But there is a name missing from the newspaper's account. A name that does not appear anywhere in those two pages.
Frederick Katzmann. The District Attorney.
Go back to the first page of that autopsy. On the night of the killing — at 8:25 in the evening, eight minutes after his own telephone call — the district attorney spoke to the medical examiner and asked him to perform the post mortem. And he added one instruction, which the report records.
“with the provision that the body should remain dressed.”
Which is why, twelve pages later, there is a section headed CLOTHING — an overcoat described hole by hole, every bullet hole in the fabric matched to the wound underneath it.
The district attorney ordered the autopsy. The district attorney took delivery of the bullets. And the newspaper that told this story for thirty years never printed his name.
Two more things.
The first is a cap.
At the trial, a cap was produced — found near Berardelli's body on the street. It was shown to George Kelley, the superintendent of the shoe factory where Sacco worked — the job he had taken after he came back from Mexico under his own name.
And Kelley said that Sacco wore one similar in colour.
Then the newspaper writes this.
“He tried on the cap. It didn't fit.”
He tried it on. In court. In front of the jury.
And the second is the widow.
Mrs. Berardelli — the widow of the man who died on that street, and whose first name the record never gives — took the stand. For the prosecution.
She testified that her husband's gun had a repaired broken spring. Then she was shown the .38 revolver taken out of Vanzetti's pocket on the trolley car, and she said it looked like the one her husband had carried.
And the paper tells you exactly what that was for. “Thus intimating,” it says, “that Vanzetti picked it up along with the money box.”
That was the State's theory of the revolver. The guard's own gun, taken off the pavement by one of the men who shot him — and found, three weeks later, in Vanzetti's coat. It is the one piece of evidence that put Vanzetti on Pearl Street, and it hangs on a broken spring that somebody had once repaired.
And here is the newspaper's own next sentence.
“No one examined the spring in court to say it had, or had not, been repaired.”
So.
The State said a dead man's gun was in Vanzetti's pocket — and nobody checked the one thing that would have proved it.
A man put a dead man's cap on his own head, and it did not fit.
And four bullets, marked for identification, went into a police expert's hands — and the newspaper that quoted him said a bullet.
Part 8The Witnesses Who Improved
Vanzetti was tried first, and he was tried on his own.
In June, 1920 — a month after the trolley car, and two months after the shooting — he went on trial at Plymouth, for a holdup attempt at Bridgewater on Christmas Eve, 1919. The paper says his defence was sixteen Plymouth residents, all of them Italian, who accounted for the fish peddler's whereabouts on the twenty-third, the twenty-fourth and the twenty-fifth of December.
They accounted for him on three days. And the paper's next three words are:
“But that wasn't enough.”
He was convicted on both counts. And he was sentenced to twelve to fifteen years in state prison.
The judge was Webster Thayer.
And three months after that, in September 1920, both men were indicted for the murders at South Braintree.
The trial opened at Dedham — a residential suburb of Boston — on the thirty-first of May, 1921.
Judge Webster Thayer presiding. The same judge who had sent Vanzetti to prison the year before.
And the newspaper gets that date right.
Shelley Neal — the express agent from the morning of the robbery — took the stand, and identified the Buick as the one found abandoned in the wood.
And then eleven people identified the defendants. Seven of them picked out Sacco. Four picked out Vanzetti.
And then the newspaper does something remarkable. It sets a sentence apart from the column, in italics, and writes this.
“Which of these witnesses were accurate, which imaginative, which mistaken, and which downright liars—who knows?”
Two paragraphs after telling you that eleven people identified these men, the paper tells you it has no idea whether any of them were right.
And then it shows you why. Two examples.
The first is a lady bookkeeper who had looked out of a factory window for an instant. At the preliminary hearing she said of Sacco: “I will not swear positively that he is the man but if he is, he was firing a gun.”
By the trial, she was positive.
The second is Mrs. Lola Andrews, who testified that ten months earlier — three hours before the murders — she had spoken to a man working underneath a car outside the shoe factory. She was now ready to swear that the man was Sacco.
And then there is the policeman.
Officer Connolly — and here the paper spells his name two different ways inside the same article, which tells you something about how carefully the rest of it was put together. Connolly swore that when he arrested Vanzetti on the trolley car, Vanzetti had put his hand in his pocket, as if to draw a gun.
And the paper notes, in brackets: “Connolly had not mentioned this when he testified during the trial of the Bridgewater case.”
A detail that appears at the second trial and not the first. The newspaper prints it, in brackets, and moves on.
And in the courtroom, Vanzetti shouted one word at him.
“Liar!”
The verdict came on the fourteenth of July, 1921. Both men guilty.
The paper says the trial took fourteen days — it ran from the end of May to the middle of July, about six and a half weeks. It says the jury took seven and a half hours — the record doesn't support that; the verdict was reported at half past seven in the evening, after about five.
But those are numbers. Here is the moment.
Sacco, hearing it, held up two fingers — like a schoolboy asking to be called on — and cried out, first in Italian and then in English:
“I am innocent!”
And the newspaper gives his wife a line, and never gives her a name. She rushed at him, screaming:
“Oh! They kill my man! What am I going to do—my two children?”
And then, in brackets, the only mention anywhere in the piece of the second child: She had given birth to a sister for the son shortly before the trial opened.
Then the years go by, at the paper's pace.
The sentence is withheld. There are protest meetings in Paris and Montevideo. A bomb is thrown in Paris. Police guard the judge's house.
Celestino Madeiros — a Portuguese convict already under sentence of death — confesses that he was one of the South Braintree gang. And Judge Thayer says he “confessed” only to prolong his own life. The paper puts that word in quotation marks, and they are the judge's quotation marks, and the paper says so.
Felix Frankfurter writes in the Atlantic Monthly that the judge's opinion “stands unmatched for discrepancies between what the record discloses and what opinion conveys,” and that his twenty-five-thousand-word document “cannot be accurately described otherwise than as a farrago of misquotations, misrepresentations, suppressions, and mutilations.”
And the paper's very next sentence is four words long.
“This didn't disturb the judge.”
On the ninth of April, 1927, Judge Webster Thayer sentenced Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti to die in the electric chair.
Part 9The Last Night
Governor Alvan T. Fuller appointed a committee. The committee heard the counsel and the witnesses, and it reported that Sacco and Vanzetti had had a fair trial. And so the Governor set a date.
The newspaper never names the three men on that committee. It calls it “a three-man advisory committee,” and moves on to the end.
Sunday, the twenty-first of August, 1927.
Large crowds gathered in Boston. Pickets paraded. The police put a stop to all meetings, for fear of riots. A large section of the town around the prison was closed off, and the people who lived there were ordered to stay in their homes.
And as the evening wore on, the newspaper says, the excitement mounted — not only in Boston, but all over the country.
“People sat at their radios waiting and wondering whether, after so many, many years, Massachusetts would finally take these two lives.”
Now. The Governor had set the executions for Monday, the twenty-second of August. And the paper says so. And that is true.
But the dates in this case are not as simple as they look, and this is the best thing in the file.
The Governor's final reprieve — his last act of clemency in the case — ran “to and including Monday, August 22.”
Which means the Commonwealth could not touch those men until that reprieve expired. And a reprieve is counted in days. So it expired at midnight, at the end of Monday.
The executions happened in the first minutes of Tuesday, the twenty-third of August, 1927.
Both dates are correct. August the twenty-second is the last day they were alive by order of the Governor. August the twenty-third is the day they died. And the two are separated by nine minutes.
Which also means that Vanzetti's last statement — the one the newspaper prints — is dated Monday, the twenty-second of August. He gave it before midnight. He gave it with the reprieve still running.
Three men died that night. The newspaper only tells you about two.
Celestino Madeiros went first — the third man condemned for this crime, and the one the paper never puts in the room. He was pronounced dead at nine minutes past midnight.
Nicola Sacco went second. Pronounced dead at twelve-nineteen.
And Bartolomeo Vanzetti last, at twenty-six minutes past midnight.
The newspaper — which had named Madeiros four paragraphs earlier — does not put him in that room at all.
Before he died, Sacco cried out — in Italian.
“Long live anarchy!”
And Vanzetti, the paper calls him the gentler of the two, said this.
“I want to thank you for everything you have done for me, Warden. I have never committed any crime, but sometimes some sin. I am innocent of all crime, not only of this, but of all. I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me.”
Three men. One room. The same half-hour of the same night.
The newspaper counts two.
Part 10The Ending
So the two men died before dawn on the twenty-third of August, 1927.
And what was left of them was divided.
Part of Sacco went home to Italy. And part of both men never left Massachusetts at all — because in the Rare Books Department of the Boston Public Library, in a box marked MS 2030, there is a cylinder about twenty inches tall.
It is wrapped in pale silk. It is stitched shut at both ends, with a black ribbon tied around it in a loose bow, and the fabric at one corner has frayed.
It is a sewing job, not a monument. And it is about the height of a man's forearm.
The library's catalogue entry gives it a title — Crematorium ashes — and then a description in the library's own words.
“Comingled ashes of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.”
Comingled. Both men. Given to that library in March of 1979 by the family of the man who had run their defence committee — fifty-two years after the executions.
So. Were they innocent?
Here is what the record holds, and it holds it on both sides.
For the prosecution: a payroll was taken. The car was found. Two men were arrested carrying guns — and one of them had a pocketful of twelve-gauge shotgun shells, and a twelve-gauge shell had been found in the Buick. Eleven people identified them. And a man already under sentence of death confessed that he had been one of the gang.
For the defence: the ballistics expert the State called said a bullet was “consistent with” Sacco's gun — not fired from it. The second said he was “inclined to believe.” And the two experts the defence called said the bullets came from neither gun.
Two against two.
And then there is the rest of it.
A cap was produced, found near Berardelli's body. They put it on Sacco's head in front of the jury. It did not fit.
And the revolver in Vanzetti's pocket. The State said it was the dead guard's own gun, picked up off the pavement with the money box — and its proof was a widow who said her husband's gun had once had a broken spring repaired.
Nobody ever examined that spring.
So: were they innocent?
Nobody knows.
Not the jury. Not the judge. Not the men who wrote about it for the next seventy years. There is no document anywhere that settles it — and after a century of argument, there is still no answer that everybody will accept.
Then: was there enough to convict?
The witnesses. Eleven identifications, “which were accurate, which imaginative, which mistaken, and which downright liars” — and the paper that printed them said, in its own italics, that it had no idea.
A lady bookkeeper who had looked out of a factory window for an instant. At the preliminary hearing she said she would not swear positively. By the trial, she was positive.
A policeman who swore that Vanzetti had reached for his pocket on the trolley car — and who had not mentioned it at the earlier trial.
And the judge. His own written opinion was called a farrago of misquotations, misrepresentations, suppressions and mutilations — by a man who would end up on the Supreme Court of the United States.
And in fairness — the men who looked at it at the time did not agree either.
The Governor appointed a committee. The committee heard the counsel and the witnesses, and it reported that Sacco and Vanzetti had had a fair trial.
And the jurors never recanted. The committee questioned ten of them in 1927 and found them unshaken. In 1950 the seven who were still living were interviewed again — and the feature that ran was headlined “Jurors Unshaken in Verdict, Sacco and Vanzetti Guilt.”
So: did they get it right?
Fifty years later — on the nineteenth of July, 1977 — the Governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, signed a proclamation. And it is worth hearing what it says, because it is the closest the Commonwealth has ever come to an answer.
It declares that “any stigma and disgrace should be forever removed from the names of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, from the names of their families and descendants, and so, from the name of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”
It says the atmosphere of their trial and appeals was “permeated by prejudice against foreigners and hostility toward unorthodox political views.”
And it says the conduct of many of the officials involved “shed serious doubt on their willingness and ability to conduct the prosecution and trial of Sacco and Vanzetti fairly and impartially.”
Now — read that carefully, because of what it does not say.
It never says they were innocent.
It says they were not fairly tried. And after fifty years, that was as far as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was prepared to go.
And then there is the last clause of that proclamation — the one almost nobody quotes — and it is the thing that actually happened.
It notes that the situation “was later rectified as a direct result of their case.”
By the adoption of Chapter 341 of the Acts of 1939 — a change in Massachusetts law that allowed the Supreme Judicial Court to order a new trial not merely when the verdict was contrary to law, but when it was against the weight of the evidence, or contradicted by newly discovered evidence, or “for any other reason that justice may require.”
Sacco and Vanzetti never got a new trial.
They got a rule that would have given them one.
And it was written because of them. That is what this case did. It changed the law of the state that killed them.
And here is where everybody ended up.
Nicola Sacco. Torremaggiore — the town in the south of Italy where he was born. His ashes are at the base of a monument that town put up in 1998. And every year, on the twenty-third of August, Torremaggiore still holds a memorial day there.
Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Villafalletto, in the north. Not a monument. He is buried with his mother.
Frederick Parmenter, the paymaster — Melrose Cemetery, in Brockton, Massachusetts. His wife Hattie died in 1925, two years before the executions, and never saw how it ended. Their son Richard lived to 1966. Their daughter Jeannette lived to 2005 — ninety-two years old. She outlived her father by eighty-five years.
Alex Berardelli, the Braintree police officer — buried in Waterbury, Connecticut, in a cemetery called Brass City Lodge. His headstone reads Alexander Berardell. No i. The stone is deteriorating, and the name is flaking off it.
Mike Boda — the man whose car the police were watching, who rode away from the garage on the back of a motorcycle while the other two walked to the trolley — was never charged with anything. His name was Mario Buda, and he went home to Italy. And on the first of June, 1963, he died at home, aged seventy-eight. A free man.
So: the newspaper asked its question in July of 1953 — a lifetime after the trial, and thirty days after two other people were executed in a case that had nothing to do with this one.
“WHO were Sacco and Vanzetti? What did they do?”
They were two Italian immigrants who were convicted of a murder on evidence that hedged, and identified by witnesses who improved, and sentenced by a judge whose opinion was called a farrago.
They were executed in the first minutes of the twenty-third of August, 1927. Fifty years later, the Governor of Massachusetts said the trial had been permeated by prejudice, and did not say they were innocent.
And more than a hundred years after two men carried a payroll down a street in Braintree, the question the newspaper asked is still the question.
Was there enough to convict them?
Did the Commonwealth of Massachusetts get it right?
And were they innocent?