March 2, 2024 • 55 mins
The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, two anarchists accused of murder, was one of the first "crimes of the century." But did they do it? To this day there is speculation that they did not. Learn all about this famous case in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
How toy everybody.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
This is Chuck here the Stuff You Should Know Podcast,
and it is Saturday. It's actually Wednesday in my real
time world, but in the future it will be Saturday
when you're listening to this, because it is my charge
to deliver it to you. A classic Stuff you Should
Know episode handpicked and curated by yours truly, and this
week we're going with a pretty good history up from
(00:24):
March twenty nineteen, the case of Seco and ven Zette.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's guest producer Josh
over there. So you put the three of us together there,
and we're gonna get a little true crime history on
you with the trial of Sacco and Benzetti.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah, these guys, I mean a little backstory on I
guess the time. We're talking about the nineteen twenties in
the United States. We're talking about two gentlemen that were
both anarchists, that were both Italian immigrants and both supposedly
(01:23):
followers of this really notable anarchist named Luigi Galliani. Who
this guy was sort of an anarchist leader. He put
out anarchist rag he was called for violence. He has
a history of authorizing like bombings, assassination attempts, like really
(01:45):
tough stuff. And so this is who supposedly Saco and
Vinzetti were, you know, I guess by association advocating advocating sure,
advocating for this type of violence them as immigrant anarchists.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Do you remember in our anarchism episode, Like during this period,
in like a ten year period, anarchists assassinated like five
or six major heads of state around the world, including
McKinley in the United States. It was a big deal.
And I mean there was also a struggle going on
(02:25):
for the soul of America. Where we're going to be socialists,
where we're going to be capitalists? Should we just go
with anarchism. There was a lot of a lot of
debate over you know, which which economy we should go with,
or what what politics we should go with, And there
was something of a red scare because communism was on
(02:47):
the table too. There was a red scare at the
time too. So it wasn't like the kind of time
you would walk around like, yeah, I'm an anarchist, now
get on board, you know. But and at the same time,
if you weren't an anarchist, you're probably scared of our
anarchists because they would bomb stuff and they were well
known for it too.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
So I mean this is not just the United States.
Like all over the world there were political radicals that
was violence from anarchy and riots, and like you said,
people trying to take down like politicians or judges that
were deporting, at least in the United States, deporting immigrant
anarchists back to their home countries like as quickly as
(03:25):
they could root them out.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Basically.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
So this is sort of the stage in the early
nineteen twenties. And I guess we should hop in the
way Back machine.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Oh yes, let's and head on over to bast In Town. Okay,
that's Boston by the way.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Yeah, no, I know, Okay, it doesn't matter if I know.
Just make sure the way Back Machine knows.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Oh, the way Back Machine knows it can read my
silly accents.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
So here we are. It's nineteen twenty around Boston. And
actually we're not in Boston proper. We're about ten miles
south in a little town of Braintree, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Which is these days would be Boston proper, so I
mean you know more.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
Yeah, yeah, it's like the metro Boston area. Right. And
Braintree was known as a shoe manufacturing center. It had
more than one shoe company, which meant it was a
shoe manufacturing center. And on this particular day in April
of nineteen twenty, I think it was April fifteenth, right, correct,
(04:30):
In Braintree, there was a dude named Shelley Neil who
was an agent for the American Express Company. And the
function I got of Shelley Neil was that he would
he was kind of like a Brinks armed guard.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yeah, a courier for money.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
And not just some money, like a lot of money.
On this day, from the nine eighteen AM train from Boston,
Shelley Neil went to the brain Tree, the brain Tree
train depot and picked up thirty thousand dollars thirty grand
in cash, which is about four hundred and twenty seven
thousand dollars in twenty eighteen money.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Yeah, he did this every week.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Right. He picked it up, and he took it back
to his office, and he opened up a metal box
and inside had two canvas bags and each was the
payroll for one of the two shoe companies that he
picked up money for, one of which was called Slater
and Morel. I'm not sure what the other one was.
(05:37):
Maybe it was three K. Definitely Slater and Morell it
was one of them.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
The other was New Balance.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Okay, yes, so Slater and Morell and New Balance were
the ones whose payroll he had on him that day.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Yeah, And it's it's so amazing how that stuff used
to work back then, Like how payroll was just so
lo fi. It would literally be a huge amount of
cash delivered it in a box that he would take
to an office and someone would sit there and stuff
cash into envelopes to then go to like a factory
to pay off employees, not pay off, but.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
To pay right to pay them. There they're legit check
from working.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
You didn't see nothing right this week.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
This is for all the shoe leather. So that's how
it worked back then. And so this is what he
was doing. It's just like any other Thursday. However, on
this day, as he went in, he noticed a car
out front that he had not seen before, this big
car that had like these little curtains on the inside
windows that were pulled shut and other people in Braintree
(06:41):
later on would report seeing that car kind of tooling around,
and they said, it looks like it's got like four
or five men inside that look Italian and they're just
sort of driving around brain Tree, which I guess to
raise some suspicions.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
Sure, because again, if you were Italian, you may have
been associated with anarchists who were associated with bomb throwing.
So four or five of them kind of aimlessly driving
around the town a brain Tree, this little tiny town,
I'm sure aroused some suspicions, and definitely did because there
were a lot of people who later on said that
(07:17):
they saw this car driving around between nine am and
twelve pm.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
That's right, so about three that afternoon. Here's what happened next.
For payroll, these people had to get these envelopes, so
what's known as a paymaster. And this is also sort
of part of the arm guard thing because the paymaster
a has a gun and then has a guard with
a gun. This guy's name was Freddie Parminter and the
(07:45):
guard was Alessandro Erredelli. And so they stop by, they
pick up all these envelopes. They're going down to the factory.
They're going to pay everybody, and all of a sudden,
bam bam, bam bam, gunfire and mayhem ensues.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
I didn't realize there's going to be special effects in
this episode, So you did, man, it has been brought it.
So these guys are on Pearl Street and when these
shots suddenly just ring out and the first guy's hit,
Barredelli's hit and he goes down. I believe it was
(08:24):
Barredelli who was hit first. Oh no, he wasn't hit.
It was Parmenter who was hit. Barredelli is on the
ground and he has lost his gun, and he's being
approached by a man with a gun on him, and
Barredelli apparently has begged for his life to no avail.
The man shoots him in the chest at least once,
(08:45):
and the bullet punctures his lungs, one of his major
arteries to his heart, and then lodges itself and its
hip to be fished out later on by a corner
and used in the case against Ssacho and van z Eddie.
The other guy, parman or the paymaster, he gets hit
a few times, staggers across the street and collapses. And
(09:10):
this car, a blue touring car, which is you know,
a big sedan that you would think of today like
a touring. We'll call it a Lincoln town car, even
though it's not at all what it was. That blue
car that had been seen driving around right, Okay, that's
another way to put it. It was abu. Yeah, but
the same one that had been seen driving slowly around
(09:31):
Braintree all morning suddenly pulls up and the guys who
had shot these two men and taken the money about
fifteen thousand dollars hopped in and that drove off and
everyone lost sight of it.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Yeah, and very importantly, the man who shot Baradelli had
a hat a felt cap on, right, So just remember
that little fact. There were eyewitnesses all over the place.
It's not like no one saw this happen. Like dozens
of people saw this.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Yeah, it was a daring daylight robbery at three o'clock
in the afternoon.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Daring do right man named Jimmy Bostock was one of
the witnesses. Apparently, Bearadelli like died in his arms, and
like all people in the nineteen twenties didn't know any better,
he immediately started messing with a crime scene, started picking
up gun shells.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Another guy came.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
By and picked up the hat, and you know, they
just didn't know any better at the time, I.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Guess, right, So this crime scene has been totally messed up.
But the cops show up because again, this is a
big deal. This is a small town and something close
to two hundred and twenty thousand dollars has just been
stolen and two men murdered for it in this little,
tiny town. So it's a big deal. And the cops
(10:49):
showed up, and probably the first thing they said was anarchists.
Maybe I'll bet that's kind of what they would say,
I think at the time.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Yeah, should we take a break?
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Geez?
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Okay already, yeah, I think so.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
I mean this falls into uh acts and that's definitely
act one. Okay, all right, so dead men in the street.
The cops are on the scene.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
Message and and scene and shot.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
Shot? Is it and scene or end scene?
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Chuck, We've talked about this a lot. And scene.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
En scene? Nope, because it makes sense, you know, you
do in the.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Scene, right, So by saying and scene.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
So the cops had shown up, they're investigating the place.
They're not really finding anything aside from what the witnesses
have already kind of gathered up and are now holding
out to them in their outstretched palms, like, here's your evidence, Copper.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
But the.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
Cars searched for all over and it's not found. It
just totally disappears for a couple of days, and it
turns up a couple of days later in the woods,
I believe, south of Braintree, in a place called Bridgewater,
which is a little even further south from Boston. I
think it's another like ten or so miles down south
(12:45):
from Braintree, right.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
I think Bridgewater only had seven dunkin Donuts, so it
was a small town, right.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
And so remember when I said the cops were probably
like anarchists. I knew it. There was another daylight robbery
of payroll, and I found somewhere that it said it
was successful. I found somewhere else that it was unsuccessful.
But both of them agreed there had been no loss
of life whatsoever. But it was similar enough, and it
had happened like two years or a year before. It
(13:16):
was similar enough that the cops immediately thought of the
people they'd been thinking of for this, for this earlier crime.
They thought, this is clearly the work of the same people.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Yeah, And when they found this car in the woods.
Very importantly, the license plates had been ripped off, and
there were other tire tracks nearby, so it seemed pretty
obvious that, you know, they ditched this car get in
another one. The officer on the scene said, Maddie, I
think this is a car from the brain Tree meta.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
All I can think of is Jeremy Renner in the town. Sure,
that's that's what I think of when I think Boston.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Yeah, everyone thinks of that. So another thing's going on
in parallel, so we need to set this up. Also,
on April fifteenth, which is the day of those maritas,
there was a guy named Ferruccio Cocchi and he lived
in Bridgewater.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
He was an anarchist.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
He was being deported, so he quits his job, you know,
to be deported, does not show up to be deported.
He calls the Immigration service after that on the sixteenth
and said, uh, you know, my wife is as sick
and so I have to tend to her.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
And they said, am I going to get in trouble
for that? Now?
Speaker 3 (14:38):
No, you won't coet control. Everybody loves your Italian accent.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Please tell me you can still do an Italian accent.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
Right, I think, so we're going to find out after
this episode.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Because I'm just doing the accent.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Sure, not saying like they're all mobsters, because like, you know,
the Sopranos got in trouble for that.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Oh yeah, did they did they say all Italians are mobsters?
Speaker 2 (14:59):
No, but I mean I remember there just being hay
about from the Italian American community, like why is it
every time in movies were just mobsters.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Oh I could see that, you know, sure, I mean
I could see them. Yeah, but these aren't even mobster now.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
They're anarchists.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
Right.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
So he's being deported, he doesn't go. He calls them
and says, my wife is sick, and they said, fine,
we're going to check out your story. Though they found
that his wife was not sick, and that all of
a sudden he's saying, okay, it's fine. Actually I'm really
ready to go, Like now.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Yeah, come on, come on, can you get.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Me out of the country quickly? And they're like, well,
you should probably like leave some money with your wife.
He's like, no, no, no, she's good.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
Let's just go.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Yeah, And so they're like, hmm, all right, this is
a little odd, So maybe he's involved.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Can I can. I paint the scene a little bit, though.
I want to go back over and highlight two things
that you've mentioned so far. Sure, One, this is a
time where to cover up a crime, all you had
to do was remove the license plates on the car
you ditched. That was it. You just confounded the forever.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Well, that helped.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
And then secondly, if you were to be deported, all
you had to do is not show up, but then
call him the next day and say your wife was sick,
and Immigration and Naturalization would say, sure, no problem.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
Well no were they investigated immediately.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
Okay, But I'm just saying, like this is things have changed, attack,
I think, is what I'm trying to say. Hold on,
let me let me see, Josh, what are you say
You're trying to say that, Yeah, I'm trying to say that. Okay, Yes,
that's exactly what I'm trying to say.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
It's weird because you looked on both of your shoulders
at the devil and the angel.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
They won't shut up, Chuck, so.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
They summarize, you know, it's all coming together. This guy's
acting weird. Well, he's also sixteenth.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
He's also took one of those people that they liked
for that that robbery the year before, which is one
of the reasons why they they had their intent up
about this guy in the first place.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Right, so he's a suspect.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
The co ops go to specifically, Michael Stewart, police chief, said,
I'm going to go back to his house. I'm going
to see what else I can find out from this guy.
He shows up and there's a dude there named Mike Boda.
He says, yeah, sure, you can look around. You can
look in the house, go back and look in the garage.
Two car garage shed, no problem. I usually have my
(17:20):
car there. It's an Overland, but it's in the shop
getting repaired. And Stewart goes out there and it's like,
all right, so here's where the Overland parks. But there's
some really big tire tracks next to the Overland and
the second stall that looked like they would probably fit
this large buick that was so mysteriously kind of tooling
around around the time of this murder.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
Right, and this cop Stuart goes, hmm, I'm going to
make a mental note of that, and that's what he did.
He asked about the other car. I don't know if
you said, Boda said, that his other car was at
the garage being repaired. Correct, So so Stuart, who's the
(18:02):
police chief of Bridge Order. I think I get the
impression that was kind of new. There was another one
who kind of factors into this case tangentially later on,
who is the former police chief. So I get the
impression that Michael Stewart was fairly new, but he's investigating
this case. He likes Kowachi. He's now met Mike Boda,
who is suspicious of too. He goes back to talk
to Boda some more to this place where Koachi lived
(18:25):
as Boda's roommate, I guess away from his wife and kids.
I'm not sure why Kowachi was running this place.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Are we going with Kai? Now?
Speaker 3 (18:32):
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's it. I took Italian in
college and I'm almost one hundred percent sure it's Kowachi.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
Do you remember from our Dyslexi episode where Italian is
extremely easy to learn because there's just very few ways
to write things, to write the phone memes. One of
the reasons it is easy is because it's kind of
like Polish. It's in most cases it's actually easier than Polish,
but it's pronounced just like it's spelled, except for the
ci as a sound. Okay, so kowa chi okay, okay,
(19:02):
all right, that was your Italian lesson.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
I appreciate that after all these years.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
The other little ushuck. Not all Italians or Italian Americans
or mobsters. That's your other Italian lesson. No, okay, So.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
I've known a bunch of Italians Italian Americans and none
of them were mobsters.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
Damn, there you go. So police Chief Stewart goes back
to talk to Boda, and things get really suspicious too,
don't they, Because he shows up and knocks on the
door and the door just swings open onto an empty apartment.
And Stuart spends about fifteen minutes going Bda, mister Bona, Hello,
(19:42):
mister Boda, and he finally takes a couple of steps
in and realizes Boda's gone.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
So he he goes by the garage where the guy
said that his car was in the shop, goes over there.
The car is still there, so that checked out, and
he told the owner his name was Simon Johnson. He said, hey,
if anyone comes to get this car, just give us
a call. And the guy says, mental note, call cops
if someone comes.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
To get this car.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
Jeremy Renner.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
So on May fifth, this is what. A couple of
weeks later, a man comes to the door and this
is it. I believe this is it says nine o'clock.
But that's at night, right.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
Yeah, I couldn't tell it first, and then it feels
like night. Yeah. It says also that the wife is
illuminated by a motorcycle headlights. Yeah, I guess at night.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Yeah, all right, so it's and let's it's very dark
in the morning, right, So at nine o'clock at night,
this guy shows up to the owners of the garage's door,
knocks on the door. His young wife answers. The guy
says that he's Mike Boda. I'm here to pick up
my car that ovaland over there, and the owner of
(20:54):
the garage comes and tells his wife, and he says,
go call the police. You know, we don't have a phone.
Go next door, call the cops. She leaves out the
back door and is caught, Like you said, there's this
motorcycle sitting outside. She also sees with a side car,
also sees a couple of guys that she said were
speaking Italian kind of hanging around. So it's all sort
of adding up at this point to something fishy.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
Yeah, so I guess the fact that that Simon Johnson,
the shop owner or the mechanic was stalling made Boda
a little uneasy. Sure, so he took off without the car, right.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
Yeah, he jumped in the sidecar and was out of there.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
Okay, here's where things get super critical. For a pair
of guys named Saco and Vanzetti, there were two other
those two other guys that Ruth Johnson, Simon Johnson, the
mechanic's wife said she saw hanging out waiting for Mike
Boda to get his car. They split two. Now they're
suddenly like on foot. There's no motorcycle or car for them,
(22:00):
so they have to leave on foot. So they walk
over toward the direction of the Bridgewater rail line, and
she says that she saw them get on the train
or at least go toward the train station or another railcar.
So I think it might have been like a street
car kind of thing. So somehow Chief Stewart gets word
of this. I think he shows up. He gets word
(22:22):
of this, and he calls the police chief in the
next town over in Brockton and says, hey, there's going
to be a pair of Italian guys on the street
car when the streetcar stops and or the railcar stops
in your town. Get them. They are wanted for questioning
in a murder robbery. And so the Brockton police board
(22:44):
the train when it arrives in Brockton, and there are
two Italian men sitting there. And the two men's names
were Nicolasaco and Bartolomeo Venzetti, and they just happen to
be Italian, and they just happen to be anarchists, and
they both happen to be strapped when the cop came
on the rail car and started asking them questions.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Yeah, Saco had a thirty two cult and Van City
had a thirty eight Harrington and Richardson, which very uniquely
had five.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Chambers instead of six.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
It's very unusual, seems unique.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Yeah, yeah, I don't even know how that works.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
I would have to see this kind of revolver because
six is a nice even number for a round thing.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
I don't get it.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
But yeah, no one ever says like, don't point that
five shooter at me. It's always six shooter, you know. Yeah,
that's weird, although maybe maybe a five shooters what they're
talking about when they call it a pea shooter.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
No, let's not what they mean.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
But it was the nineteen twenties and there were all
kinds of weird guns back.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Then, right, Okay, So these two Italian immigrants who were
anarchists and who were carrying guns had one other big problem.
They were giving some pretty weak and ever evolving stories
an answer to the questions that the cops are asking them.
They get hauled into the police station I believe in
(24:08):
Bridgewater or Braintree. Do you know which one it was?
I think it was. I think it was Braintree. Actually
they got taken to Braintree because it was Stuart who
was investigating them. So they get taken to Braintree and
police Chief Stewart questions them. But then so too does
the chief prosecutor for the area, a guy named Frederick Katzman,
(24:30):
who would play an enormous role in this case as well.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Yeah, so he was the DA and I think the
key fact that really sold him was he found out
that on April fifteenth, on the day of these murders,
Sokka was not at work at the three K shoe factory,
and he said, you know what, that's enough for me.
We have no real evidence or anything else, but you
(24:55):
are Italian Italian American anarchists. You weren't work that day,
so let's go ahead and haul you in here.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
Right, Because yeah, we left off the fact that they
found like anarchist pamphlets on the on the men when
they when they took them off the train. So there
was a lot against them going against them at this
point just from the outside of this, but you kind
of touched on it. All of this is very very circumstantial.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Yeah, So right away the anarchists of the area come
on board. They formed the Saco Vinsetti Defense Committee, and
one of their leaders, one of the anarchist leaders in
the area named Carlo Tresca, said all right, let's hire
this this lawyer from California and this guy's a radical.
He's going to lead our defense and more comes on board.
(25:47):
Fred Moran's like, here's the way we're going to do
this is let's like let's get everyone worked up, like
not only in this area but all over the world.
Let's get radicals and let's get anarchists, and let's get
at union members let's paint these guys is just like
hard working, blue collar union dudes, and let's get people
all over the world paying attention to what's going on
(26:09):
over here.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Yes, which is a very common tactic still in use today.
Just turn public sentiment against the government and the prosecutors
in their case and basically paint it like Socco and
VINZEEDI where just a couple of normal dudes who are
being railroaded for political reasons and probably out of a
certain amount of xenophobia as well.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
Sure, so let's take a break.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
The trial opens in May of nineteen twenty one with
Judge Webster theayer, and we'll be back with what happens
next right after.
Speaker 3 (26:42):
This shot sho check. Before we get back into I
(27:11):
want to give a shout out to Doug Linder. Douglas Linder,
who's a law professor and historian who wrote a paper
that we used as a source. So it was pretty
pretty handy, pretty good stuff.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
Yeah, law professors.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
I mean, there's a lot of good information out here
on this, but you get a law professor on the
on the typewriter and they're going to condense it into
a nice, readable, workable document.
Speaker 3 (27:33):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
That's what they do. They're very good at that. Yes,
So all right, trials underway.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Like I said before, Judge Webster, there proceeds over this trial. Katsman,
that's the DA that's prosecuting. He has got a lot
of circumstantial evidence, he has eyewitnesses, but not really a
lot of hard.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Evidence going on.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Right, It's sort of a tough case for him to
like solidly prove.
Speaker 3 (28:01):
Yeah, And that was another reason why Fred Moore was
able to run around drumming up public sentiment not just
in the United States or even just Boston or Massachusetts,
but around the world that that Socco and Vanzetti were
being railroaded. Is that the evidence against them was really,
really weak. The eyewitness testimony was super if you if
(28:28):
you had the luxury like historians like Douglas Linder have
had to compare, you know, the original notes or the
original statements made by eyewitnesses against the the types of
statements they made in court. The statements they made in
court were much more certain, much more sure. And this
(28:48):
was after a year of reading the newspaper and being
exposed to pictures of Socco and Vanzetti. So when they
see Socco and Vanzetti in the courtroom, they're like, yes,
I saw that man holding that gun and he was
one that pulled the trigger. The thing is, there was
not one witness, but there were witnesses who placed both
of them at the crime scene or at least in
the buick around town on that day. But there was
(29:12):
not one single witness who placed both of them there.
That's just the eyewitnesses. They also had the other big
piece of circumstantial evidence were the guns that they were
found with, and they used ballistic experts to come in
and say, yes, this bullet came from this gun. But
again looking at it with history, the benefit of history,
(29:34):
this was at a time when ballistics comparison was just
beginning to come around, and the people that they employed
as ballistics experts were self taught amateurs who just basically
had an interest in this field, were in no way,
shape or form genuine experts, because you could make a
case there was no such thing as a genuine ballistics
comparison expert at the time. It was too new as
(29:56):
far as forensic goes.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Yeah, so on the defense side, immediately they say those
guys weren't even in Braintree. SOCCO was in Boston, Vancetti
was in Plymouth, both sides. It's interesting to look back
on this trial because both the prosecution and the defense
were like being very hinky with the truth themselves, influencing
(30:21):
people on both sides to testify kind.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Of behind the scenes.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Fred Moore, the defense attorney, trotted out a bunch of
witnesses that say, no, like Vanzetti was definitely in Plymouth,
he's a fishmonger, bought fish from him. And then later
on it was found out that some of these people,
well all of them basically were friends of his. And
then some of the people came out even later and said, yeah,
he kind of told me to say this, But that
happened on the prosecution side too.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
Yeah. Supposedly later on they would allege that the prosecutor, Catsman,
and the chief or the lead ballistics or the star
ballistics witness had kind of coordinated the answer that the
ballistics witness would give at trial, and that it would
be much more stronger and much much more certain than
(31:12):
than the actual conclusion he came to prior to the
trial based on his original ballistics tests.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Yeah, so there's there's hinkiness on both sides. Katzman has
this hat. And remember one of the gunmen definitely had
on a gray cap, so he has this great cap.
He said, this is Saco's. He gets together with an
expert behind the scenes and says and again with this
like like you were saying, the sort of the beginnings
of not ballistics in.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
This case, but just forensics, any kind of forensics. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
He looked at the hairs in the hat, got a
hair from Soco, and Soco was like, oh that hurt.
And he compared him and he said, yeah, these hairs
are identical. I'm telling you, they're the same hairs. But
Catzman was like, you know what, I don't want to
go to court and present this because this stuff is
all new. They're going to paint you as unreliable because
(32:06):
no one knows anything about hair comparison yet. So instead
of doing that, he goes to the boss of the
shoe factory, George Kelly, and was like, have you seen
this hat before? And Kelly said, yes, that's Soaco's hat.
I've seen him wear that hat and the hole in
it is from the nail that he hangs it on
(32:26):
every day, when in fact that was definitely not the case.
Speaker 3 (32:29):
No, that earlier the previous police chief later testified that
he had actually accidentally punched the hole in the hat
while he was examining it for any kind of identifying marks.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
Which is weird.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
He also testified that the hat had a very questionable providence,
that it hadn't come into police custody for thirty hours
after the crime, so he couldn't say he as far
as he knew, it was not found at the crime scene,
that it hadn't been secured by the police. He didn't
know exactly where it came from. And then finally I
(33:02):
read elsewhere in a final twist, and to me if
this sounds familiar, but they asked Sacho to put the
hat on in court and it was too small for
his head. It didn't fit.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
You must acquit. They did not acquit though, Well, he
just ruined it.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Oh, I'm sorry, Sorry everybody. It's funny. There's probably a
lot of people out there who have no idea how
this is going to turn out, because if you search
on Google just Socco and Vanzetti. One of the suggested
questions is what is Soacho and Vanzetti? Not who what?
Speaker 1 (33:35):
It's a nice apartee, right, so.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
I don't know if we mentioned, but like Soco had
definitely much more evidence against him, even if it was
circumstantial than Venzetti did.
Speaker 3 (33:49):
Eyewitnesses. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
So Vanzetti is has the thinnest case against him, but
he like he lied to the cops he had that, remember,
and on the stand he said, yeah, actually I got
that gun just a few days ago.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
I bought it for four or five bucks.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
And they're like, well, you told us that you bought
it four or five years ago for eighteen dollars, right,
you said there were six chambers in it and only
had five.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
And what's going on here? You're lying, Jimmy Vanzetti.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
The whole thing with the gun, I don't know if
we've said or not yet. The reason why the gun
was so suspicious and was basically like these central piece
of evidence used against Vanzetti is that it was supposedly
the exact same kind of gun that Alessandro Barredelli had
on and when he was killed. Yeah, So the whole
idea was that Vanzetti had been at the at least
(34:45):
at the crime seeing, if not one of the killers,
who had taken Barredelli's gun after he had killed him
and made off with it, which would explain why he
wasn't very familiar with the gun and how many chambers
it had and didn't have a very solid story about
where he'd gotten it. How long you owned it too.
That was the implication of the whole thing, and that
was basically the That was it. That was the crux
(35:07):
of the prosecution's case against Vanzetti. Fanzetti's big problem was
he was sitting next to Saco when Soco got taken
off the train, and they had a lot more of
Soco and they were tried together rather than separately.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah, in Soco, that ballistics evidence made a big, big
difference in the trial because they found out for sure
that that bullet that killed Bearadelli was definitely fired from
a cult automatic and your cult automatic is what they alleged, right,
And well, we'll hold on to that last bit until later.
(35:42):
But about what was found out later about that, But
I think even some of the jurors said that that
was really some of the most compelling evidence against Socco
for us in deciding this case.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Yeah, and again, like they're listening to forensic evidence from
a field that's still in the very and it's cradle
from testimony given by people who are not experts. But
that was, like you said, the juror said, was that
was it for me? That was what convinced me was
the ballistics of it.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
It's basically so they go to jury and they go
to deliberations and just five and half five and a
half hours later the jury said guilty is charged.
Speaker 3 (36:26):
About six weeks after the trial started, I believe.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Yeah, so it was a big deal, you know, like
Saco's crying out I'm innocent and Italian in the court.
There were like protests all over the world, like South America, France, Lisbon.
It's just crazy how much this at the time in
the nineteen twenties became an international thing and basically they
(36:52):
were due for the electric chair. So people all over
the world were protesting, that were bombings.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
It was nuts.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
Yeah, this is I mean, this is a time when
labor was unionized, so you could arouse the sympathy of
a lot of people at once by going to the
union hall and saying like, hey, your brothers in arms
over there in America are being railroaded into a murder rap.
They're going to be electrocuting the electric chair for something
they didn't commit. Simply because of their political beliefs. How
(37:21):
messed up is that? And they you could arouse some
people pretty quickly back then by saying that as opposed
to today.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
More immediately starts the defense attorney immediately starts filing motions trying.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
To get like new trials.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
He had an assistant named Eugene Lyons who later would
come out and say, man, like this guy basically would
do anything. He was framing evidence, he was telling witnesses
what to say, like once he had up in his
mind that and keep in mind, this was like a
radical lawyer from California. He said, once he had in
(38:00):
mind that these guys were innocent, he was like he
basically would do anything to try and get them off.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
Yeah, he'd suborn perjury, he'd intimidate witnesses, he'd do whatever
if he thought that somebody was being innocently prosecuted. Fred
Moore would stop at nothing to yeah, to get them off.
And this article, I think kind of paints an incomplete
picture of Eugene Lyons and Fred Moore's relationship. Like Eugene
Lyons was also very much an admirer of Fred Moore too,
(38:28):
like he considered Fred Moore to have the heart of
an artist, but he was that. He had dedicated his
life to getting people who were being steamrolled by the
system or unfairly treated by the courts out from under
these these charges. He was a he was an early
civil libered, civil liberties lawyer, basically was what he was.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
Yeah, so none of these motions work. He files a
bunch of them. We're not going to detail them all,
but none of them, Uh, none of them worked. They
were basically all turned down. Thayer was still the presiding judge.
He was turning down all these things. Then they went
to like federal court, they were turning down motions. Eventually
(39:11):
they went to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court
was like, why are you asking us about this? Like
this is a state case, Like we don't even do
this kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (39:20):
Yeah. The court at the time was very much against
or the majority I should say it was against applying
the federal Constitution to state issues, so they wouldn't get involved.
But I mean it did go all the way to
at least petitioning the Supreme Court. They wouldn't hear it
and they wouldn't stay the execution either. But he as
(39:42):
much as a lawyer can exhaust petitions and appeals for
clemency and the stay of execution. Fred Moore did, and
then later on another defense lawyer named William Thompson, who
took over for fred Moore after Saco fired Fred Moore,
did the same thing. Like up to the eve the
eve of the execution, they were relentless and filing appeals
(40:05):
with anything, anything they could get their hands on. They
filed an entire motion for a new trial based strictly
on Judge Thayer's perceived prejudice against anarchists. Apparently he did
not like anarchists, and he treated Socaco and Vinzetti as
such throughout the trial. And as you're if you're just
(40:26):
watching watching this from the outside, if you're reading about
this in the press, and you're already on Socco and
Vinzetti's side, Judge Theayer turning down motion after motion after
motion after motion looks really bad. It looks very much
like this judge is bent on railroading these two immigrant
anarchists into an early and unjust death by electric chair.
(40:50):
So the public's sympathies were aroused even further for Socco
and Vanzetti, and that would last for decades after this
trial up century almost now.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
Yeah. So Socho's in jail and another weird thing happens
while he's in jail. In Dedham d e d h
a M.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
There was another prisoner there who passed a note on
and said basically, I'm confessing to this crime. My name
is Celestino Madeiros And they were like, all right, well.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
Let's talk to this guy.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
He's confessing to this crime and saying that Socco and
Vince Eddie are innocent. He said, I was there. I
was with four other guys, so that kind of checks out.
As far as the five Italians. He said, we met
in Providence at a bar and we just came up
with this plan.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
He said.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
There was a guy named Mike, a gun named Bill.
I don't know the other guys. I was scared. We
switched cars in the woods. Like all this stuff was
sort of making sense, but it really didn't. Like in
the end, there were too many other things that were wrong,
Like he said that they didn't get there until afternoon
and everyone was like, no, that car was there like
(42:08):
maybe between nine am and noon. He also said that
the payroll money was in a bag when it was
in a metal box, and so there were enough inconsistencies
basically where he wasn't really a major suspect like they
considered it. Thompson tried to use it as the basis
(42:29):
for a new trial, but none of this worked because
there was still kind of calling the shots this before
they ran it up the flag bowl.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Yeah, but again news made made its way out into
the international press that someone had confessed, and not only confessed,
said that Socco and Vanzetti weren't there, and this this
judge who had it out for Socco and Vanzetti refused
to even hear this, this motion to have a new trial.
So it looked it looked bad as well too.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
It did so it looked bad enough that the governor
at the time, Alvin Fuller, said, you know what, we
have to do something here. There's just too much public
pressure going on from around the world. He said, so
here's what we'll do. We'll get a three person advisory committee.
They're going to investigate this. He said, hey, you Lawrence Lowell,
you're the president of HAVID. You had this thing up.
(43:17):
And then what was known as the Lowell Commission finally
issued a report which said basically beyond a reasonable doubt,
Soco is guilty, and Voncetti said on the whole it's
our opinion that he's also guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
And everyone was like, well, why'd you say all those
(43:38):
other words then?
Speaker 3 (43:40):
And they're like, what other words?
Speaker 1 (43:42):
Yeah? Really kind of a strange final report.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
What's funny is in the Boston area if they're like,
we need somebody smart, get me the president of Harvard, Well.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
Yeah, and in the end he's like, you are definitely
guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and so are you more
or less in our opinion?
Speaker 3 (44:00):
Right? No, I know. It was weird and it remains weird.
But apparently years later, when Loll was asked about that,
he was saying, like, no, that wasn't any indication that
we thought Vanzetti had any kind of any kind of
innocence to him or that he wasn't guilty. I'm not
sure exactly how he explained it, but he basically said, no,
(44:20):
that wasn't that's not what that was. Oh interesting, I
don't know what he thought it was. There was a
weird way to put it, but that was I think
the other thing that kind of arouses people's interest in
that or suspicion maybe even is that that's what a
lot of people think that Socco was definitely guilty. Yeah,
I shouldn't say a lot, but some people that Socco
(44:41):
was definitely guilty and if anyone was innocent, it was Vanzetti.
So the idea that this Loll Commission came up with
this back in the twenties, even it is significant, but yeah,
Loell was like, no, that's not what we meant by that.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
So none of these stays of execution go through. So
they are reunited. They were split up in jail for many,
many years, six years, and then they were finally reunited
at Charlestown State Prison for execution in April, and they had,
like you wouldn't believe how many cops they have in
(45:15):
this town to cover this thing because it was sort
of one of the first crimes of the century, I think,
and people were mad all over the country and all
over the world, like we've been talking about. They didn't
know if they're going to be more bombings, people were
going to like literally storm the prison and trying to
overtake them and free them. So they had tons and
tons of cops everywhere. Socho is first to go, and
(45:41):
as they are strapping him in, he's crying out in Italian,
long live anarchy, and then in English very quietly says,
farewell my wife and child and all my friends. And
right when they finally threw the switch, he screamed out, mama.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
And I don't think like that. No, no, I'm not
making light of it. I don't think he was like,
whoa mama.
Speaker 3 (46:04):
No, I don't think so either. I think he was
calling for his mother. Yes, just pretty sad but also
kind of sweet.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (46:11):
And then Vanzetti comes in and he's like, oh, it's
my turn, all right, Well, okay, I want to make
sure everybody knows that I am innocent. So I think
it's significant that Saka was the one that shouted in
the courtroom that he was innocent, but didn't during his execution,
and Vanzetti didn't say anything in the courtroom, but during
(46:32):
his execution he's like, I'm innocent. And not only that,
he really turned the screwdriver. He said, I want to
make it known that I forgive all of you who
are about to do this to.
Speaker 1 (46:42):
Me, and he started crying.
Speaker 3 (46:44):
Well, the wardens started crying when he gave the switch,
gave the nod to turn to throw the switch on
the electric chair and kill Vanzetti.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
Tears flying everywhere. Highdrama.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
Yes, I'm surprised there's movie. Surely it has been, but
I'll bet it wasn't like the seventies or something. We
just aren't aware of it. Like Warren Batty played Socco
and Venzetti in some weird casting.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
And somehow Jeremy Renner played all the.
Speaker 3 (47:11):
Cops right exactly. So Socco and Venzetti are dead like
they're dead. The state took their lives. They executed them,
these conceivably innocent men who were railroaded to the electric
chair on circumstantial evidence and the testimony of some ballistic
experts who were not experts by anyone's measure. These men
(47:35):
are now dead, and the world reacts predictably. There were riots.
Six people died in a riot in Germany. The American
embassy in Paris had already been bombed, so they brought
tanks out on the night of the execution and surrounded it.
This time, and there were no bombings. There were riots
(47:57):
in Geneva, Switzerland. This may have been the only time
anyone ever rided in Geneva, Switzerland, there were like five
thousand protesters who destroyed everything that was even passingly American,
and Socco and Vinzetti went into the history books as
a couple of innocent men who were executed wrongfully by
(48:18):
the state because of their political beliefs. They were political
prisoners who were executed for their beliefs. Basically is how
most people have come to see Socco and Vanzetti.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
Yeah, but many years later a couple of a few
notable things happened in nineteen forty one that gentleman I
mentioned earlier, Carlo Tresca, the anarchist leader a couple of
years before he died in the nineteen forties, basically said,
you know what, Socca was guilty, he was a triggerman,
but Vanzetti was not guilty. Other people had heard the
(48:51):
same thing from Tresca. And then in nineteen sixty one
they had actual ballistics tests done and it was concluded
that that was in fact a bullet from Socho's gun.
But people still were saying, no, you know what, I
think that bullet was planted, So we render that inconclusive.
Speaker 3 (49:15):
But I think Doug Linder does a pretty good job
of taking the planted bullet theory fatal bullet or bullet
number three is what it's called in the trial and
basically saying, though, this is why that doesn't really hold up.
And probably the biggest one is when those ballistics witnesses
gave their testimony, both of the prosecutions star ballistic witnesses
(49:38):
said yes, I would conclude probably that it came out
of this gun, or yes, it's probable or possible or
something like that. They couched their expert opinions when they
gave their testimony, And if they were part of a
conspiracy to frame Soco in the planting of this bullet,
they would have given much more forceful testimony, which in
(50:00):
and of itself is a circumstantial evidence against this planted
bullet theory. But it draws so closely on common sense
that I think it makes sense to me, it undermines
the idea that the bullet was planted.
Speaker 2 (50:13):
Yeah, there was another gentleman named Giovanni Gambera who said,
you know what, my dad, before he died in nineteen
eighty two, he told me he was on this team
of anarchists that met after their arrest to get their
defense mounted. And he told me, and everyone said basically
that Soaka was guilty and Venzetti was innocent. And then, weirdly,
(50:38):
in two thousand and five, Upton Sinclair, the very famous author,
said that he was researching a book and he was
going to he was writing a book about this whole thing,
and he met with Fred Moore, that the radical defense
attorney that mounted the defense for basically most of the case.
And he said he met with him in a hotel
(50:59):
room and was like, dude, give me the real story.
And he said that Moore told him, Yeah, Socco was
guilty and Vanzetti was innocent, and I basically came up
with this whole defense on my own, like made all
this stuff up.
Speaker 3 (51:14):
Yeah. Yeah. Years later it came out that the seven
eye witnesses for the defense, who said that they saw
Soco eating lunch in Boston at the time of the
robbery and Braintree, had all been set up by the defense,
or at least by an anarchist group who had asked
(51:36):
them to go perjure themselves. And yeah, I think that
kind of jibes with the Eugene Lions quote that like,
if he thought these guys were innocent, they would do
he would do anything to get them off, including you know,
putting witnesses on the stand knowing that they were going
to lie, and telling them to lie. And this was
a letter from Upton Sinclair based on an interview with
(51:59):
Fred Moore, So it has a lot of teeth. But
the thing there was another letter from Upston Sinclair, another
quote from Upton Sinclair where he said that Fred Moore
had confessed to him that Vanzetti was innocent, and he
knew he was innocent, but he was pretty sure Soacho wasn't.
(52:19):
But all he had to do was go to the
jury and say, hey, we all know that you don't
have anything on Vanzetti. There's no reason for you to
prosecute this man. But he knew that if he did that,
the jury would be like, well, you're probably right, but
we're going to come down really hard on Soaco. So
he had this dilemma and he took it to Vanzetti,
(52:40):
he said, and Vanzetti said, you know what, try to
save Nick Nicholas Sacho. He has the wife, he has
the child. I don't try to get him off. So Vanzetti,
in this retelling by Fred Moore, gave his life on
the chance that Fred Moore could get Soacho off because
if he Scaco off, hed get Vanzetti off, if he
(53:01):
got Vanzetti off, he would almost surely sink Soco and
Vinzetti wouldn't take the take the opportunity to be acquitted
at the expense of Socco, which is pretty.
Speaker 1 (53:13):
Amazing, amazing.
Speaker 3 (53:15):
Yep. So that's Soacho and Vanzetti, everybody. That's what a
Socaco and Vanzetti is.
Speaker 1 (53:20):
Now, you know, I guess one guilty and one innocent.
Speaker 3 (53:24):
That's what it sounds like.
Speaker 1 (53:25):
That's what it sounds like.
Speaker 3 (53:27):
If you want to know more about Socco and Vanzetti,
go look up Doug Linder. I believe he has a
whole site on true crime. And there's plenty of other
stuff out there that we found too on the internet
about Socco and Vanzetti and their famous trial. And since
I said Socco and Vanzetti like eighty times, it's time
for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (53:47):
I'm gonna call this response to a short stuff. Yeah right, Hey, guys, your.
Speaker 2 (53:52):
Show's one of my favorite podcasts, so much so that
I've taken to listening to it while I get ready
for work.
Speaker 1 (53:57):
WHOA, we know that as your acred time. Nadine I just.
Speaker 2 (54:03):
Finished the episode on Black Loyalists and immediately started to
write the email. I'm a Rhode Islander in Nova Scotia
for work and got so excited to hear a little
piece of Nova Scotia's history on there. I looked into
the Loyalist Heritage Museum, but it only has weekday operation,
so I don't think I'll be able to make it there.
I will definitely do some exploring of halifaxx SO in
(54:24):
the coming weeks, and we'll be on the lookout for
more information. I just wanted to mention on the show
that it was Josh said that Rhode Island may not
have ever had slaves.
Speaker 1 (54:34):
Actually, we were the.
Speaker 2 (54:34):
First state to abolish slavery in sixteen fifty two, but
the law was mostly ignored and we ended up with
the most slaves per capita of any colony. I did
not know that we also had a pretty booming slave
trade in Newport, Rhode Island, now known for their gilded
aged splendor. A piece of Rhode Island history I'm sure
most don't learn in history class that I wanted to
(54:55):
shed light on. Thanks for always putting out a funny
and informative and entertaining. That is from Nadine Greed.
Speaker 3 (55:03):
Thanks a lot, Nadine, that was great. Thanks for listening
while you get ready for work. Hope work's going well
up there in Nova Scotia. Just thinks bring to you
and everybody up there in Nova Scotia. Frankly, if you
want to get in touch with us, you can join
us on Stuffishould Know dot com. Check out our social
links there, and you can just send us a good
(55:24):
old fashioned email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom,
and send it off to stuff Podcasts at HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 1 (55:33):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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How toy everybody.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
This is Chuck here the Stuff You Should Know Podcast,
and it is Saturday. It's actually Wednesday in my real
time world, but in the future it will be Saturday
when you're listening to this, because it is my charge
to deliver it to you. A classic Stuff you Should
Know episode handpicked and curated by yours truly, and this
week we're going with a pretty good history up from
(00:24):
March twenty nineteen, the case of Seco and ven Zette.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's guest producer Josh
over there. So you put the three of us together there,
and we're gonna get a little true crime history on
you with the trial of Sacco and Benzetti.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah, these guys, I mean a little backstory on I
guess the time. We're talking about the nineteen twenties in
the United States. We're talking about two gentlemen that were
both anarchists, that were both Italian immigrants and both supposedly
(01:23):
followers of this really notable anarchist named Luigi Galliani. Who
this guy was sort of an anarchist leader. He put
out anarchist rag he was called for violence. He has
a history of authorizing like bombings, assassination attempts, like really
(01:45):
tough stuff. And so this is who supposedly Saco and
Vinzetti were, you know, I guess by association advocating advocating sure,
advocating for this type of violence them as immigrant anarchists.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Do you remember in our anarchism episode, Like during this period,
in like a ten year period, anarchists assassinated like five
or six major heads of state around the world, including
McKinley in the United States. It was a big deal.
And I mean there was also a struggle going on
(02:25):
for the soul of America. Where we're going to be socialists,
where we're going to be capitalists? Should we just go
with anarchism. There was a lot of a lot of
debate over you know, which which economy we should go with,
or what what politics we should go with, And there
was something of a red scare because communism was on
(02:47):
the table too. There was a red scare at the
time too. So it wasn't like the kind of time
you would walk around like, yeah, I'm an anarchist, now
get on board, you know. But and at the same time,
if you weren't an anarchist, you're probably scared of our
anarchists because they would bomb stuff and they were well
known for it too.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
So I mean this is not just the United States.
Like all over the world there were political radicals that
was violence from anarchy and riots, and like you said,
people trying to take down like politicians or judges that
were deporting, at least in the United States, deporting immigrant
anarchists back to their home countries like as quickly as
(03:25):
they could root them out.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Basically.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
So this is sort of the stage in the early
nineteen twenties. And I guess we should hop in the
way Back machine.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Oh yes, let's and head on over to bast In Town. Okay,
that's Boston by the way.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Yeah, no, I know, Okay, it doesn't matter if I know.
Just make sure the way Back Machine knows.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Oh, the way Back Machine knows it can read my
silly accents.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
So here we are. It's nineteen twenty around Boston. And
actually we're not in Boston proper. We're about ten miles
south in a little town of Braintree, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Which is these days would be Boston proper, so I
mean you know more.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
Yeah, yeah, it's like the metro Boston area. Right. And
Braintree was known as a shoe manufacturing center. It had
more than one shoe company, which meant it was a
shoe manufacturing center. And on this particular day in April
of nineteen twenty, I think it was April fifteenth, right, correct,
(04:30):
In Braintree, there was a dude named Shelley Neil who
was an agent for the American Express Company. And the
function I got of Shelley Neil was that he would
he was kind of like a Brinks armed guard.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yeah, a courier for money.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
And not just some money, like a lot of money.
On this day, from the nine eighteen AM train from Boston,
Shelley Neil went to the brain Tree, the brain Tree
train depot and picked up thirty thousand dollars thirty grand
in cash, which is about four hundred and twenty seven
thousand dollars in twenty eighteen money.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Yeah, he did this every week.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Right. He picked it up, and he took it back
to his office, and he opened up a metal box
and inside had two canvas bags and each was the
payroll for one of the two shoe companies that he
picked up money for, one of which was called Slater
and Morel. I'm not sure what the other one was.
(05:37):
Maybe it was three K. Definitely Slater and Morell it
was one of them.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
The other was New Balance.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Okay, yes, so Slater and Morell and New Balance were
the ones whose payroll he had on him that day.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Yeah, And it's it's so amazing how that stuff used
to work back then, Like how payroll was just so
lo fi. It would literally be a huge amount of
cash delivered it in a box that he would take
to an office and someone would sit there and stuff
cash into envelopes to then go to like a factory
to pay off employees, not pay off, but.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
To pay right to pay them. There they're legit check
from working.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
You didn't see nothing right this week.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
This is for all the shoe leather. So that's how
it worked back then. And so this is what he
was doing. It's just like any other Thursday. However, on
this day, as he went in, he noticed a car
out front that he had not seen before, this big
car that had like these little curtains on the inside
windows that were pulled shut and other people in Braintree
(06:41):
later on would report seeing that car kind of tooling around,
and they said, it looks like it's got like four
or five men inside that look Italian and they're just
sort of driving around brain Tree, which I guess to
raise some suspicions.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
Sure, because again, if you were Italian, you may have
been associated with anarchists who were associated with bomb throwing.
So four or five of them kind of aimlessly driving
around the town a brain Tree, this little tiny town,
I'm sure aroused some suspicions, and definitely did because there
were a lot of people who later on said that
(07:17):
they saw this car driving around between nine am and
twelve pm.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
That's right, so about three that afternoon. Here's what happened next.
For payroll, these people had to get these envelopes, so
what's known as a paymaster. And this is also sort
of part of the arm guard thing because the paymaster
a has a gun and then has a guard with
a gun. This guy's name was Freddie Parminter and the
(07:45):
guard was Alessandro Erredelli. And so they stop by, they
pick up all these envelopes. They're going down to the factory.
They're going to pay everybody, and all of a sudden,
bam bam, bam bam, gunfire and mayhem ensues.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
I didn't realize there's going to be special effects in
this episode, So you did, man, it has been brought it.
So these guys are on Pearl Street and when these
shots suddenly just ring out and the first guy's hit,
Barredelli's hit and he goes down. I believe it was
(08:24):
Barredelli who was hit first. Oh no, he wasn't hit.
It was Parmenter who was hit. Barredelli is on the
ground and he has lost his gun, and he's being
approached by a man with a gun on him, and
Barredelli apparently has begged for his life to no avail.
The man shoots him in the chest at least once,
(08:45):
and the bullet punctures his lungs, one of his major
arteries to his heart, and then lodges itself and its
hip to be fished out later on by a corner
and used in the case against Ssacho and van z Eddie.
The other guy, parman or the paymaster, he gets hit
a few times, staggers across the street and collapses. And
(09:10):
this car, a blue touring car, which is you know,
a big sedan that you would think of today like
a touring. We'll call it a Lincoln town car, even
though it's not at all what it was. That blue
car that had been seen driving around right, Okay, that's
another way to put it. It was abu. Yeah, but
the same one that had been seen driving slowly around
(09:31):
Braintree all morning suddenly pulls up and the guys who
had shot these two men and taken the money about
fifteen thousand dollars hopped in and that drove off and
everyone lost sight of it.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Yeah, and very importantly, the man who shot Baradelli had
a hat a felt cap on, right, So just remember
that little fact. There were eyewitnesses all over the place.
It's not like no one saw this happen. Like dozens
of people saw this.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Yeah, it was a daring daylight robbery at three o'clock
in the afternoon.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Daring do right man named Jimmy Bostock was one of
the witnesses. Apparently, Bearadelli like died in his arms, and
like all people in the nineteen twenties didn't know any better,
he immediately started messing with a crime scene, started picking
up gun shells.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Another guy came.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
By and picked up the hat, and you know, they
just didn't know any better at the time, I.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Guess, right, So this crime scene has been totally messed up.
But the cops show up because again, this is a
big deal. This is a small town and something close
to two hundred and twenty thousand dollars has just been
stolen and two men murdered for it in this little,
tiny town. So it's a big deal. And the cops
(10:49):
showed up, and probably the first thing they said was anarchists.
Maybe I'll bet that's kind of what they would say,
I think at the time.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Yeah, should we take a break?
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Geez?
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Okay already, yeah, I think so.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
I mean this falls into uh acts and that's definitely
act one. Okay, all right, so dead men in the street.
The cops are on the scene.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
Message and and scene and shot.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
Shot? Is it and scene or end scene?
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Chuck, We've talked about this a lot. And scene.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
En scene? Nope, because it makes sense, you know, you
do in the.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Scene, right, So by saying and scene.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
So the cops had shown up, they're investigating the place.
They're not really finding anything aside from what the witnesses
have already kind of gathered up and are now holding
out to them in their outstretched palms, like, here's your evidence, Copper.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
But the.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
Cars searched for all over and it's not found. It
just totally disappears for a couple of days, and it
turns up a couple of days later in the woods,
I believe, south of Braintree, in a place called Bridgewater,
which is a little even further south from Boston. I
think it's another like ten or so miles down south
(12:45):
from Braintree, right.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
I think Bridgewater only had seven dunkin Donuts, so it
was a small town, right.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
And so remember when I said the cops were probably
like anarchists. I knew it. There was another daylight robbery
of payroll, and I found somewhere that it said it
was successful. I found somewhere else that it was unsuccessful.
But both of them agreed there had been no loss
of life whatsoever. But it was similar enough, and it
had happened like two years or a year before. It
(13:16):
was similar enough that the cops immediately thought of the
people they'd been thinking of for this, for this earlier crime.
They thought, this is clearly the work of the same people.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Yeah, And when they found this car in the woods.
Very importantly, the license plates had been ripped off, and
there were other tire tracks nearby, so it seemed pretty
obvious that, you know, they ditched this car get in
another one. The officer on the scene said, Maddie, I
think this is a car from the brain Tree meta.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
All I can think of is Jeremy Renner in the town. Sure,
that's that's what I think of when I think Boston.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Yeah, everyone thinks of that. So another thing's going on
in parallel, so we need to set this up. Also,
on April fifteenth, which is the day of those maritas,
there was a guy named Ferruccio Cocchi and he lived
in Bridgewater.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
He was an anarchist.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
He was being deported, so he quits his job, you know,
to be deported, does not show up to be deported.
He calls the Immigration service after that on the sixteenth
and said, uh, you know, my wife is as sick
and so I have to tend to her.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
And they said, am I going to get in trouble
for that? Now?
Speaker 3 (14:38):
No, you won't coet control. Everybody loves your Italian accent.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Please tell me you can still do an Italian accent.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
Right, I think, so we're going to find out after
this episode.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Because I'm just doing the accent.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Sure, not saying like they're all mobsters, because like, you know,
the Sopranos got in trouble for that.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Oh yeah, did they did they say all Italians are mobsters?
Speaker 2 (14:59):
No, but I mean I remember there just being hay
about from the Italian American community, like why is it
every time in movies were just mobsters.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Oh I could see that, you know, sure, I mean
I could see them. Yeah, but these aren't even mobster now.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
They're anarchists.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
Right.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
So he's being deported, he doesn't go. He calls them
and says, my wife is sick, and they said, fine,
we're going to check out your story. Though they found
that his wife was not sick, and that all of
a sudden he's saying, okay, it's fine. Actually I'm really
ready to go, Like now.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Yeah, come on, come on, can you get.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Me out of the country quickly? And they're like, well,
you should probably like leave some money with your wife.
He's like, no, no, no, she's good.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
Let's just go.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Yeah, And so they're like, hmm, all right, this is
a little odd, So maybe he's involved.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Can I can. I paint the scene a little bit, though.
I want to go back over and highlight two things
that you've mentioned so far. Sure, One, this is a
time where to cover up a crime, all you had
to do was remove the license plates on the car
you ditched. That was it. You just confounded the forever.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Well, that helped.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
And then secondly, if you were to be deported, all
you had to do is not show up, but then
call him the next day and say your wife was sick,
and Immigration and Naturalization would say, sure, no problem.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
Well no were they investigated immediately.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
Okay, But I'm just saying, like this is things have changed, attack,
I think, is what I'm trying to say. Hold on,
let me let me see, Josh, what are you say
You're trying to say that, Yeah, I'm trying to say that. Okay, Yes,
that's exactly what I'm trying to say.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
It's weird because you looked on both of your shoulders
at the devil and the angel.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
They won't shut up, Chuck, so.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
They summarize, you know, it's all coming together. This guy's
acting weird. Well, he's also sixteenth.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
He's also took one of those people that they liked
for that that robbery the year before, which is one
of the reasons why they they had their intent up
about this guy in the first place.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Right, so he's a suspect.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
The co ops go to specifically, Michael Stewart, police chief, said,
I'm going to go back to his house. I'm going
to see what else I can find out from this guy.
He shows up and there's a dude there named Mike Boda.
He says, yeah, sure, you can look around. You can
look in the house, go back and look in the garage.
Two car garage shed, no problem. I usually have my
(17:20):
car there. It's an Overland, but it's in the shop
getting repaired. And Stewart goes out there and it's like,
all right, so here's where the Overland parks. But there's
some really big tire tracks next to the Overland and
the second stall that looked like they would probably fit
this large buick that was so mysteriously kind of tooling
around around the time of this murder.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
Right, and this cop Stuart goes, hmm, I'm going to
make a mental note of that, and that's what he did.
He asked about the other car. I don't know if
you said, Boda said, that his other car was at
the garage being repaired. Correct, So so Stuart, who's the
(18:02):
police chief of Bridge Order. I think I get the
impression that was kind of new. There was another one
who kind of factors into this case tangentially later on,
who is the former police chief. So I get the
impression that Michael Stewart was fairly new, but he's investigating
this case. He likes Kowachi. He's now met Mike Boda,
who is suspicious of too. He goes back to talk
to Boda some more to this place where Koachi lived
(18:25):
as Boda's roommate, I guess away from his wife and kids.
I'm not sure why Kowachi was running this place.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Are we going with Kai? Now?
Speaker 3 (18:32):
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's it. I took Italian in
college and I'm almost one hundred percent sure it's Kowachi.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
Do you remember from our Dyslexi episode where Italian is
extremely easy to learn because there's just very few ways
to write things, to write the phone memes. One of
the reasons it is easy is because it's kind of
like Polish. It's in most cases it's actually easier than Polish,
but it's pronounced just like it's spelled, except for the
ci as a sound. Okay, so kowa chi okay, okay,
(19:02):
all right, that was your Italian lesson.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
I appreciate that after all these years.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
The other little ushuck. Not all Italians or Italian Americans
or mobsters. That's your other Italian lesson. No, okay, So.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
I've known a bunch of Italians Italian Americans and none
of them were mobsters.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
Damn, there you go. So police Chief Stewart goes back
to talk to Boda, and things get really suspicious too,
don't they, Because he shows up and knocks on the
door and the door just swings open onto an empty apartment.
And Stuart spends about fifteen minutes going Bda, mister Bona, Hello,
(19:42):
mister Boda, and he finally takes a couple of steps
in and realizes Boda's gone.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
So he he goes by the garage where the guy
said that his car was in the shop, goes over there.
The car is still there, so that checked out, and
he told the owner his name was Simon Johnson. He said, hey,
if anyone comes to get this car, just give us
a call. And the guy says, mental note, call cops
if someone comes.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
To get this car.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
Jeremy Renner.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
So on May fifth, this is what. A couple of
weeks later, a man comes to the door and this
is it. I believe this is it says nine o'clock.
But that's at night, right.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
Yeah, I couldn't tell it first, and then it feels
like night. Yeah. It says also that the wife is
illuminated by a motorcycle headlights. Yeah, I guess at night.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Yeah, all right, so it's and let's it's very dark
in the morning, right, So at nine o'clock at night,
this guy shows up to the owners of the garage's door,
knocks on the door. His young wife answers. The guy
says that he's Mike Boda. I'm here to pick up
my car that ovaland over there, and the owner of
(20:54):
the garage comes and tells his wife, and he says,
go call the police. You know, we don't have a phone.
Go next door, call the cops. She leaves out the
back door and is caught, Like you said, there's this
motorcycle sitting outside. She also sees with a side car,
also sees a couple of guys that she said were
speaking Italian kind of hanging around. So it's all sort
of adding up at this point to something fishy.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
Yeah, so I guess the fact that that Simon Johnson,
the shop owner or the mechanic was stalling made Boda
a little uneasy. Sure, so he took off without the car, right.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
Yeah, he jumped in the sidecar and was out of there.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
Okay, here's where things get super critical. For a pair
of guys named Saco and Vanzetti, there were two other
those two other guys that Ruth Johnson, Simon Johnson, the
mechanic's wife said she saw hanging out waiting for Mike
Boda to get his car. They split two. Now they're
suddenly like on foot. There's no motorcycle or car for them,
(22:00):
so they have to leave on foot. So they walk
over toward the direction of the Bridgewater rail line, and
she says that she saw them get on the train
or at least go toward the train station or another railcar.
So I think it might have been like a street
car kind of thing. So somehow Chief Stewart gets word
of this. I think he shows up. He gets word
(22:22):
of this, and he calls the police chief in the
next town over in Brockton and says, hey, there's going
to be a pair of Italian guys on the street
car when the streetcar stops and or the railcar stops
in your town. Get them. They are wanted for questioning
in a murder robbery. And so the Brockton police board
(22:44):
the train when it arrives in Brockton, and there are
two Italian men sitting there. And the two men's names
were Nicolasaco and Bartolomeo Venzetti, and they just happen to
be Italian, and they just happen to be anarchists, and
they both happen to be strapped when the cop came
on the rail car and started asking them questions.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Yeah, Saco had a thirty two cult and Van City
had a thirty eight Harrington and Richardson, which very uniquely
had five.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Chambers instead of six.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
It's very unusual, seems unique.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Yeah, yeah, I don't even know how that works.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
I would have to see this kind of revolver because
six is a nice even number for a round thing.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
I don't get it.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
But yeah, no one ever says like, don't point that
five shooter at me. It's always six shooter, you know. Yeah,
that's weird, although maybe maybe a five shooters what they're
talking about when they call it a pea shooter.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
No, let's not what they mean.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
But it was the nineteen twenties and there were all
kinds of weird guns back.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Then, right, Okay, So these two Italian immigrants who were
anarchists and who were carrying guns had one other big problem.
They were giving some pretty weak and ever evolving stories
an answer to the questions that the cops are asking them.
They get hauled into the police station I believe in
(24:08):
Bridgewater or Braintree. Do you know which one it was?
I think it was. I think it was Braintree. Actually
they got taken to Braintree because it was Stuart who
was investigating them. So they get taken to Braintree and
police Chief Stewart questions them. But then so too does
the chief prosecutor for the area, a guy named Frederick Katzman,
(24:30):
who would play an enormous role in this case as well.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Yeah, so he was the DA and I think the
key fact that really sold him was he found out
that on April fifteenth, on the day of these murders,
Sokka was not at work at the three K shoe factory,
and he said, you know what, that's enough for me.
We have no real evidence or anything else, but you
(24:55):
are Italian Italian American anarchists. You weren't work that day,
so let's go ahead and haul you in here.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
Right, Because yeah, we left off the fact that they
found like anarchist pamphlets on the on the men when
they when they took them off the train. So there
was a lot against them going against them at this
point just from the outside of this, but you kind
of touched on it. All of this is very very circumstantial.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Yeah, So right away the anarchists of the area come
on board. They formed the Saco Vinsetti Defense Committee, and
one of their leaders, one of the anarchist leaders in
the area named Carlo Tresca, said all right, let's hire
this this lawyer from California and this guy's a radical.
He's going to lead our defense and more comes on board.
(25:47):
Fred Moran's like, here's the way we're going to do
this is let's like let's get everyone worked up, like
not only in this area but all over the world.
Let's get radicals and let's get anarchists, and let's get
at union members let's paint these guys is just like
hard working, blue collar union dudes, and let's get people
all over the world paying attention to what's going on
(26:09):
over here.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Yes, which is a very common tactic still in use today.
Just turn public sentiment against the government and the prosecutors
in their case and basically paint it like Socco and
VINZEEDI where just a couple of normal dudes who are
being railroaded for political reasons and probably out of a
certain amount of xenophobia as well.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
Sure, so let's take a break.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
The trial opens in May of nineteen twenty one with
Judge Webster theayer, and we'll be back with what happens
next right after.
Speaker 3 (26:42):
This shot sho check. Before we get back into I
(27:11):
want to give a shout out to Doug Linder. Douglas Linder,
who's a law professor and historian who wrote a paper
that we used as a source. So it was pretty
pretty handy, pretty good stuff.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
Yeah, law professors.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
I mean, there's a lot of good information out here
on this, but you get a law professor on the
on the typewriter and they're going to condense it into
a nice, readable, workable document.
Speaker 3 (27:33):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
That's what they do. They're very good at that. Yes,
So all right, trials underway.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Like I said before, Judge Webster, there proceeds over this trial. Katsman,
that's the DA that's prosecuting. He has got a lot
of circumstantial evidence, he has eyewitnesses, but not really a
lot of hard.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Evidence going on.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Right, It's sort of a tough case for him to
like solidly prove.
Speaker 3 (28:01):
Yeah, And that was another reason why Fred Moore was
able to run around drumming up public sentiment not just
in the United States or even just Boston or Massachusetts,
but around the world that that Socco and Vanzetti were
being railroaded. Is that the evidence against them was really,
really weak. The eyewitness testimony was super if you if
(28:28):
you had the luxury like historians like Douglas Linder have
had to compare, you know, the original notes or the
original statements made by eyewitnesses against the the types of
statements they made in court. The statements they made in
court were much more certain, much more sure. And this
(28:48):
was after a year of reading the newspaper and being
exposed to pictures of Socco and Vanzetti. So when they
see Socco and Vanzetti in the courtroom, they're like, yes,
I saw that man holding that gun and he was
one that pulled the trigger. The thing is, there was
not one witness, but there were witnesses who placed both
of them at the crime scene or at least in
the buick around town on that day. But there was
(29:12):
not one single witness who placed both of them there.
That's just the eyewitnesses. They also had the other big
piece of circumstantial evidence were the guns that they were
found with, and they used ballistic experts to come in
and say, yes, this bullet came from this gun. But
again looking at it with history, the benefit of history,
(29:34):
this was at a time when ballistics comparison was just
beginning to come around, and the people that they employed
as ballistics experts were self taught amateurs who just basically
had an interest in this field, were in no way,
shape or form genuine experts, because you could make a
case there was no such thing as a genuine ballistics
comparison expert at the time. It was too new as
(29:56):
far as forensic goes.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Yeah, so on the defense side, immediately they say those
guys weren't even in Braintree. SOCCO was in Boston, Vancetti
was in Plymouth, both sides. It's interesting to look back
on this trial because both the prosecution and the defense
were like being very hinky with the truth themselves, influencing
(30:21):
people on both sides to testify kind.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Of behind the scenes.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Fred Moore, the defense attorney, trotted out a bunch of
witnesses that say, no, like Vanzetti was definitely in Plymouth,
he's a fishmonger, bought fish from him. And then later
on it was found out that some of these people,
well all of them basically were friends of his. And
then some of the people came out even later and said, yeah,
he kind of told me to say this, But that
happened on the prosecution side too.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
Yeah. Supposedly later on they would allege that the prosecutor, Catsman,
and the chief or the lead ballistics or the star
ballistics witness had kind of coordinated the answer that the
ballistics witness would give at trial, and that it would
be much more stronger and much much more certain than
(31:12):
than the actual conclusion he came to prior to the
trial based on his original ballistics tests.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Yeah, so there's there's hinkiness on both sides. Katzman has
this hat. And remember one of the gunmen definitely had
on a gray cap, so he has this great cap.
He said, this is Saco's. He gets together with an
expert behind the scenes and says and again with this
like like you were saying, the sort of the beginnings
of not ballistics in.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
This case, but just forensics, any kind of forensics. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
He looked at the hairs in the hat, got a
hair from Soco, and Soco was like, oh that hurt.
And he compared him and he said, yeah, these hairs
are identical. I'm telling you, they're the same hairs. But
Catzman was like, you know what, I don't want to
go to court and present this because this stuff is
all new. They're going to paint you as unreliable because
(32:06):
no one knows anything about hair comparison yet. So instead
of doing that, he goes to the boss of the
shoe factory, George Kelly, and was like, have you seen
this hat before? And Kelly said, yes, that's Soaco's hat.
I've seen him wear that hat and the hole in
it is from the nail that he hangs it on
(32:26):
every day, when in fact that was definitely not the case.
Speaker 3 (32:29):
No, that earlier the previous police chief later testified that
he had actually accidentally punched the hole in the hat
while he was examining it for any kind of identifying marks.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
Which is weird.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
He also testified that the hat had a very questionable providence,
that it hadn't come into police custody for thirty hours
after the crime, so he couldn't say he as far
as he knew, it was not found at the crime scene,
that it hadn't been secured by the police. He didn't
know exactly where it came from. And then finally I
(33:02):
read elsewhere in a final twist, and to me if
this sounds familiar, but they asked Sacho to put the
hat on in court and it was too small for
his head. It didn't fit.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
You must acquit. They did not acquit though, Well, he
just ruined it.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Oh, I'm sorry, Sorry everybody. It's funny. There's probably a
lot of people out there who have no idea how
this is going to turn out, because if you search
on Google just Socco and Vanzetti. One of the suggested
questions is what is Soacho and Vanzetti? Not who what?
Speaker 1 (33:35):
It's a nice apartee, right, so.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
I don't know if we mentioned, but like Soco had
definitely much more evidence against him, even if it was
circumstantial than Venzetti did.
Speaker 3 (33:49):
Eyewitnesses. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
So Vanzetti is has the thinnest case against him, but
he like he lied to the cops he had that, remember,
and on the stand he said, yeah, actually I got
that gun just a few days ago.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
I bought it for four or five bucks.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
And they're like, well, you told us that you bought
it four or five years ago for eighteen dollars, right,
you said there were six chambers in it and only
had five.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
And what's going on here? You're lying, Jimmy Vanzetti.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
The whole thing with the gun, I don't know if
we've said or not yet. The reason why the gun
was so suspicious and was basically like these central piece
of evidence used against Vanzetti is that it was supposedly
the exact same kind of gun that Alessandro Barredelli had
on and when he was killed. Yeah, So the whole
idea was that Vanzetti had been at the at least
(34:45):
at the crime seeing, if not one of the killers,
who had taken Barredelli's gun after he had killed him
and made off with it, which would explain why he
wasn't very familiar with the gun and how many chambers
it had and didn't have a very solid story about
where he'd gotten it. How long you owned it too.
That was the implication of the whole thing, and that
was basically the That was it. That was the crux
(35:07):
of the prosecution's case against Vanzetti. Fanzetti's big problem was
he was sitting next to Saco when Soco got taken
off the train, and they had a lot more of
Soco and they were tried together rather than separately.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah, in Soco, that ballistics evidence made a big, big
difference in the trial because they found out for sure
that that bullet that killed Bearadelli was definitely fired from
a cult automatic and your cult automatic is what they alleged, right,
And well, we'll hold on to that last bit until later.
(35:42):
But about what was found out later about that, But
I think even some of the jurors said that that
was really some of the most compelling evidence against Socco
for us in deciding this case.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Yeah, and again, like they're listening to forensic evidence from
a field that's still in the very and it's cradle
from testimony given by people who are not experts. But
that was, like you said, the juror said, was that
was it for me? That was what convinced me was
the ballistics of it.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
It's basically so they go to jury and they go
to deliberations and just five and half five and a
half hours later the jury said guilty is charged.
Speaker 3 (36:26):
About six weeks after the trial started, I believe.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Yeah, so it was a big deal, you know, like
Saco's crying out I'm innocent and Italian in the court.
There were like protests all over the world, like South America, France, Lisbon.
It's just crazy how much this at the time in
the nineteen twenties became an international thing and basically they
(36:52):
were due for the electric chair. So people all over
the world were protesting, that were bombings.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
It was nuts.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
Yeah, this is I mean, this is a time when
labor was unionized, so you could arouse the sympathy of
a lot of people at once by going to the
union hall and saying like, hey, your brothers in arms
over there in America are being railroaded into a murder rap.
They're going to be electrocuting the electric chair for something
they didn't commit. Simply because of their political beliefs. How
(37:21):
messed up is that? And they you could arouse some
people pretty quickly back then by saying that as opposed
to today.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
More immediately starts the defense attorney immediately starts filing motions trying.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
To get like new trials.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
He had an assistant named Eugene Lyons who later would
come out and say, man, like this guy basically would
do anything. He was framing evidence, he was telling witnesses
what to say, like once he had up in his
mind that and keep in mind, this was like a
radical lawyer from California. He said, once he had in
(38:00):
mind that these guys were innocent, he was like he
basically would do anything to try and get them off.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
Yeah, he'd suborn perjury, he'd intimidate witnesses, he'd do whatever
if he thought that somebody was being innocently prosecuted. Fred
Moore would stop at nothing to yeah, to get them off.
And this article, I think kind of paints an incomplete
picture of Eugene Lyons and Fred Moore's relationship. Like Eugene
Lyons was also very much an admirer of Fred Moore too,
(38:28):
like he considered Fred Moore to have the heart of
an artist, but he was that. He had dedicated his
life to getting people who were being steamrolled by the
system or unfairly treated by the courts out from under
these these charges. He was a he was an early
civil libered, civil liberties lawyer, basically was what he was.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
Yeah, so none of these motions work. He files a
bunch of them. We're not going to detail them all,
but none of them, Uh, none of them worked. They
were basically all turned down. Thayer was still the presiding judge.
He was turning down all these things. Then they went
to like federal court, they were turning down motions. Eventually
(39:11):
they went to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court
was like, why are you asking us about this? Like
this is a state case, Like we don't even do
this kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (39:20):
Yeah. The court at the time was very much against
or the majority I should say it was against applying
the federal Constitution to state issues, so they wouldn't get involved.
But I mean it did go all the way to
at least petitioning the Supreme Court. They wouldn't hear it
and they wouldn't stay the execution either. But he as
(39:42):
much as a lawyer can exhaust petitions and appeals for
clemency and the stay of execution. Fred Moore did, and
then later on another defense lawyer named William Thompson, who
took over for fred Moore after Saco fired Fred Moore,
did the same thing. Like up to the eve the
eve of the execution, they were relentless and filing appeals
(40:05):
with anything, anything they could get their hands on. They
filed an entire motion for a new trial based strictly
on Judge Thayer's perceived prejudice against anarchists. Apparently he did
not like anarchists, and he treated Socaco and Vinzetti as
such throughout the trial. And as you're if you're just
(40:26):
watching watching this from the outside, if you're reading about
this in the press, and you're already on Socco and
Vinzetti's side, Judge Theayer turning down motion after motion after
motion after motion looks really bad. It looks very much
like this judge is bent on railroading these two immigrant
anarchists into an early and unjust death by electric chair.
(40:50):
So the public's sympathies were aroused even further for Socco
and Vanzetti, and that would last for decades after this
trial up century almost now.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
Yeah. So Socho's in jail and another weird thing happens
while he's in jail. In Dedham d e d h
a M.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
There was another prisoner there who passed a note on
and said basically, I'm confessing to this crime. My name
is Celestino Madeiros And they were like, all right, well.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
Let's talk to this guy.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
He's confessing to this crime and saying that Socco and
Vince Eddie are innocent. He said, I was there. I
was with four other guys, so that kind of checks out.
As far as the five Italians. He said, we met
in Providence at a bar and we just came up
with this plan.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
He said.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
There was a guy named Mike, a gun named Bill.
I don't know the other guys. I was scared. We
switched cars in the woods. Like all this stuff was
sort of making sense, but it really didn't. Like in
the end, there were too many other things that were wrong,
Like he said that they didn't get there until afternoon
and everyone was like, no, that car was there like
(42:08):
maybe between nine am and noon. He also said that
the payroll money was in a bag when it was
in a metal box, and so there were enough inconsistencies
basically where he wasn't really a major suspect like they
considered it. Thompson tried to use it as the basis
(42:29):
for a new trial, but none of this worked because
there was still kind of calling the shots this before
they ran it up the flag bowl.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Yeah, but again news made made its way out into
the international press that someone had confessed, and not only confessed,
said that Socco and Vanzetti weren't there, and this this
judge who had it out for Socco and Vanzetti refused
to even hear this, this motion to have a new trial.
So it looked it looked bad as well too.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
It did so it looked bad enough that the governor
at the time, Alvin Fuller, said, you know what, we
have to do something here. There's just too much public
pressure going on from around the world. He said, so
here's what we'll do. We'll get a three person advisory committee.
They're going to investigate this. He said, hey, you Lawrence Lowell,
you're the president of HAVID. You had this thing up.
(43:17):
And then what was known as the Lowell Commission finally
issued a report which said basically beyond a reasonable doubt,
Soco is guilty, and Voncetti said on the whole it's
our opinion that he's also guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
And everyone was like, well, why'd you say all those
(43:38):
other words then?
Speaker 3 (43:40):
And they're like, what other words?
Speaker 1 (43:42):
Yeah? Really kind of a strange final report.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
What's funny is in the Boston area if they're like,
we need somebody smart, get me the president of Harvard, Well.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
Yeah, and in the end he's like, you are definitely
guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and so are you more
or less in our opinion?
Speaker 3 (44:00):
Right? No, I know. It was weird and it remains weird.
But apparently years later, when Loll was asked about that,
he was saying, like, no, that wasn't any indication that
we thought Vanzetti had any kind of any kind of
innocence to him or that he wasn't guilty. I'm not
sure exactly how he explained it, but he basically said, no,
(44:20):
that wasn't that's not what that was. Oh interesting, I
don't know what he thought it was. There was a
weird way to put it, but that was I think
the other thing that kind of arouses people's interest in
that or suspicion maybe even is that that's what a
lot of people think that Socco was definitely guilty. Yeah,
I shouldn't say a lot, but some people that Socco
(44:41):
was definitely guilty and if anyone was innocent, it was Vanzetti.
So the idea that this Loll Commission came up with
this back in the twenties, even it is significant, but yeah,
Loell was like, no, that's not what we meant by that.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
So none of these stays of execution go through. So
they are reunited. They were split up in jail for many,
many years, six years, and then they were finally reunited
at Charlestown State Prison for execution in April, and they had,
like you wouldn't believe how many cops they have in
(45:15):
this town to cover this thing because it was sort
of one of the first crimes of the century, I think,
and people were mad all over the country and all
over the world, like we've been talking about. They didn't
know if they're going to be more bombings, people were
going to like literally storm the prison and trying to
overtake them and free them. So they had tons and
tons of cops everywhere. Socho is first to go, and
(45:41):
as they are strapping him in, he's crying out in Italian,
long live anarchy, and then in English very quietly says,
farewell my wife and child and all my friends. And
right when they finally threw the switch, he screamed out, mama.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
And I don't think like that. No, no, I'm not
making light of it. I don't think he was like,
whoa mama.
Speaker 3 (46:04):
No, I don't think so either. I think he was
calling for his mother. Yes, just pretty sad but also
kind of sweet.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (46:11):
And then Vanzetti comes in and he's like, oh, it's
my turn, all right, Well, okay, I want to make
sure everybody knows that I am innocent. So I think
it's significant that Saka was the one that shouted in
the courtroom that he was innocent, but didn't during his execution,
and Vanzetti didn't say anything in the courtroom, but during
(46:32):
his execution he's like, I'm innocent. And not only that,
he really turned the screwdriver. He said, I want to
make it known that I forgive all of you who
are about to do this to.
Speaker 1 (46:42):
Me, and he started crying.
Speaker 3 (46:44):
Well, the wardens started crying when he gave the switch,
gave the nod to turn to throw the switch on
the electric chair and kill Vanzetti.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
Tears flying everywhere. Highdrama.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
Yes, I'm surprised there's movie. Surely it has been, but
I'll bet it wasn't like the seventies or something. We
just aren't aware of it. Like Warren Batty played Socco
and Venzetti in some weird casting.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
And somehow Jeremy Renner played all the.
Speaker 3 (47:11):
Cops right exactly. So Socco and Venzetti are dead like
they're dead. The state took their lives. They executed them,
these conceivably innocent men who were railroaded to the electric
chair on circumstantial evidence and the testimony of some ballistic
experts who were not experts by anyone's measure. These men
(47:35):
are now dead, and the world reacts predictably. There were riots.
Six people died in a riot in Germany. The American
embassy in Paris had already been bombed, so they brought
tanks out on the night of the execution and surrounded it.
This time, and there were no bombings. There were riots
(47:57):
in Geneva, Switzerland. This may have been the only time
anyone ever rided in Geneva, Switzerland, there were like five
thousand protesters who destroyed everything that was even passingly American,
and Socco and Vinzetti went into the history books as
a couple of innocent men who were executed wrongfully by
(48:18):
the state because of their political beliefs. They were political
prisoners who were executed for their beliefs. Basically is how
most people have come to see Socco and Vanzetti.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
Yeah, but many years later a couple of a few
notable things happened in nineteen forty one that gentleman I
mentioned earlier, Carlo Tresca, the anarchist leader a couple of
years before he died in the nineteen forties, basically said,
you know what, Socca was guilty, he was a triggerman,
but Vanzetti was not guilty. Other people had heard the
(48:51):
same thing from Tresca. And then in nineteen sixty one
they had actual ballistics tests done and it was concluded
that that was in fact a bullet from Socho's gun.
But people still were saying, no, you know what, I
think that bullet was planted, So we render that inconclusive.
Speaker 3 (49:15):
But I think Doug Linder does a pretty good job
of taking the planted bullet theory fatal bullet or bullet
number three is what it's called in the trial and
basically saying, though, this is why that doesn't really hold up.
And probably the biggest one is when those ballistics witnesses
gave their testimony, both of the prosecutions star ballistic witnesses
(49:38):
said yes, I would conclude probably that it came out
of this gun, or yes, it's probable or possible or
something like that. They couched their expert opinions when they
gave their testimony, And if they were part of a
conspiracy to frame Soco in the planting of this bullet,
they would have given much more forceful testimony, which in
(50:00):
and of itself is a circumstantial evidence against this planted
bullet theory. But it draws so closely on common sense
that I think it makes sense to me, it undermines
the idea that the bullet was planted.
Speaker 2 (50:13):
Yeah, there was another gentleman named Giovanni Gambera who said,
you know what, my dad, before he died in nineteen
eighty two, he told me he was on this team
of anarchists that met after their arrest to get their
defense mounted. And he told me, and everyone said basically
that Soaka was guilty and Venzetti was innocent. And then, weirdly,
(50:38):
in two thousand and five, Upton Sinclair, the very famous author,
said that he was researching a book and he was
going to he was writing a book about this whole thing,
and he met with Fred Moore, that the radical defense
attorney that mounted the defense for basically most of the case.
And he said he met with him in a hotel
(50:59):
room and was like, dude, give me the real story.
And he said that Moore told him, Yeah, Socco was
guilty and Vanzetti was innocent, and I basically came up
with this whole defense on my own, like made all
this stuff up.
Speaker 3 (51:14):
Yeah. Yeah. Years later it came out that the seven
eye witnesses for the defense, who said that they saw
Soco eating lunch in Boston at the time of the
robbery and Braintree, had all been set up by the defense,
or at least by an anarchist group who had asked
(51:36):
them to go perjure themselves. And yeah, I think that
kind of jibes with the Eugene Lions quote that like,
if he thought these guys were innocent, they would do
he would do anything to get them off, including you know,
putting witnesses on the stand knowing that they were going
to lie, and telling them to lie. And this was
a letter from Upton Sinclair based on an interview with
(51:59):
Fred Moore, So it has a lot of teeth. But
the thing there was another letter from Upston Sinclair, another
quote from Upton Sinclair where he said that Fred Moore
had confessed to him that Vanzetti was innocent, and he
knew he was innocent, but he was pretty sure Soacho wasn't.
(52:19):
But all he had to do was go to the
jury and say, hey, we all know that you don't
have anything on Vanzetti. There's no reason for you to
prosecute this man. But he knew that if he did that,
the jury would be like, well, you're probably right, but
we're going to come down really hard on Soaco. So
he had this dilemma and he took it to Vanzetti,
(52:40):
he said, and Vanzetti said, you know what, try to
save Nick Nicholas Sacho. He has the wife, he has
the child. I don't try to get him off. So Vanzetti,
in this retelling by Fred Moore, gave his life on
the chance that Fred Moore could get Soacho off because
if he Scaco off, hed get Vanzetti off, if he
(53:01):
got Vanzetti off, he would almost surely sink Soco and
Vinzetti wouldn't take the take the opportunity to be acquitted
at the expense of Socco, which is pretty.
Speaker 1 (53:13):
Amazing, amazing.
Speaker 3 (53:15):
Yep. So that's Soacho and Vanzetti, everybody. That's what a
Socaco and Vanzetti is.
Speaker 1 (53:20):
Now, you know, I guess one guilty and one innocent.
Speaker 3 (53:24):
That's what it sounds like.
Speaker 1 (53:25):
That's what it sounds like.
Speaker 3 (53:27):
If you want to know more about Socco and Vanzetti,
go look up Doug Linder. I believe he has a
whole site on true crime. And there's plenty of other
stuff out there that we found too on the internet
about Socco and Vanzetti and their famous trial. And since
I said Socco and Vanzetti like eighty times, it's time
for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (53:47):
I'm gonna call this response to a short stuff. Yeah right, Hey, guys, your.
Speaker 2 (53:52):
Show's one of my favorite podcasts, so much so that
I've taken to listening to it while I get ready
for work.
Speaker 1 (53:57):
WHOA, we know that as your acred time. Nadine I just.
Speaker 2 (54:03):
Finished the episode on Black Loyalists and immediately started to
write the email. I'm a Rhode Islander in Nova Scotia
for work and got so excited to hear a little
piece of Nova Scotia's history on there. I looked into
the Loyalist Heritage Museum, but it only has weekday operation,
so I don't think I'll be able to make it there.
I will definitely do some exploring of halifaxx SO in
(54:24):
the coming weeks, and we'll be on the lookout for
more information. I just wanted to mention on the show
that it was Josh said that Rhode Island may not
have ever had slaves.
Speaker 1 (54:34):
Actually, we were the.
Speaker 2 (54:34):
First state to abolish slavery in sixteen fifty two, but
the law was mostly ignored and we ended up with
the most slaves per capita of any colony. I did
not know that we also had a pretty booming slave
trade in Newport, Rhode Island, now known for their gilded
aged splendor. A piece of Rhode Island history I'm sure
most don't learn in history class that I wanted to
(54:55):
shed light on. Thanks for always putting out a funny
and informative and entertaining. That is from Nadine Greed.
Speaker 3 (55:03):
Thanks a lot, Nadine, that was great. Thanks for listening
while you get ready for work. Hope work's going well
up there in Nova Scotia. Just thinks bring to you
and everybody up there in Nova Scotia. Frankly, if you
want to get in touch with us, you can join
us on Stuffishould Know dot com. Check out our social
links there, and you can just send us a good
(55:24):
old fashioned email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom,
and send it off to stuff Podcasts at HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 1 (55:33):
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