Sacco & Vanzetti Background:

Paymaster Frederick Parmenter and his guard were carrying $16,000 in payroll for a South Braintree, Mass. shoe factory on April 15, 1920 when they were robbed and shot dead. The killers, two men who witnesses described as looking like Italians, leapt into a getaway car that sped to the scene. The crime was similar to a robbery four months earlier in the nearby town of Bridgewater. Bridgewater police chief Michael Stewart, who had been investigating Italian anarchists, saw a link between the two and set a trap. He caught Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, apparently the perfect suspects -- poor Italian immigrants, and anarchists.

But the two men's long ordeal began years earlier when they arrived in America -- separately -- in 1908 and settled in Massachusetts. Sacco became a shoe worker, married and had a child. Vanzetti, less fortunate, shifted from job to job and consoled himself by reading, a poor intellectual in a foreign land. He eventually became a fish peddler in Plymouth, Mass.

As the years passed, the two men fell into the anarchist circles within the Italian-American community. In 1917, they both fled to Mexico to avoid the draft. Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested on May 5, 1920, two days after Italian anarchist Andrea Salsedo fell to his death in New York, an event that sent the anarchist community into turmoil. The two men repeatedly lied during a heavily slanted police questioning, presumably out of fear that their anarchist ties would taint them.
Vanzetti was indicted for the Bridgewater robbery attempt. He was prosecuted by Frederick Katzmann, the district attorney who had interrogated the two men. Vanzetti did not testify at his trial and the prosecution's case rested on eyewitness testimony and descriptions of the thieves that seemed a rough fit for Vanzetti's profile.

Despite an alibi backed up by several witnesses that he was selling eels during the Christmas Eve robbery attempt, the jury found Vanzetti guilty of attempted robbery and attempted murder on July 1, 1920. Judge Webster Thayer gave him 12 to 15 years in prison.

Two months later, both men were indicted for the South Braintree murders. The trial began the following May in Dedham, Mass. Despite clear bias against anarchists, Judge Thayer requested and was granted the case. Famous labor lawyer Fred Moore came to Dedham to defend Sacco & Vanzetti, an unconventional Californian in a staid New England community. Moore repeatedly antagonized Thayer and removed every businessman from the jury pool. Nor was there a single Italian on the jury, though local historians point out that few Italians eligible for jury service lived in the area. One eyewitness for the prosecution hedged his testimony on the stand and lost his shoe factory job shortly thereafter. Another said the shooter spoke good English -- which contrasted against Sacco's heavy accent. Prosecutors argued that one of four bullets introduced as evidence was shot from Sacco's gun -- with the others shot by a mysterious second gunman -- though no one testified they saw another shooter. Then the defendants took the stand. Katzmann was relentless in his questioning about the men's political beliefs. The defense objected time and again but Thayer repeatedly overruled them.

In closings, the prosecution emphasized that the men were armed during their arrest and lied during questioning, but never accounted for the missing stolen money. The jury got the case on July 14, 1921. After five hours of deliberations, they found both men guilty.