Boston a novel
meant nothing special, for there was hardly a day that papers did not
report hold-ups from some part of the country; and in this case the
news-service had not thought it worth while to mention that the names
of the two arrested men were Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
CHAPTER VIII
THE DETECTIVE MACHINE
I
O fates that hold us at your choice,
How strange a web ye spin!
Thus the poet; and never more aptly than of that web which the fates
wove about the lives of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Their two
friends Cornelia and Betty were to spend the better part of seven years
trying to disentangle this web; laying bare a story which for mystery
and melodrama has few equals. The narrative goes back to the previous
Christmas, two days prior to Cornelia’s last visit to Plymouth.
At six o’clock on the morning of December 24, 1919, Bartolomeo Vanzetti
had been asleep, when one of his customers, Balboni, coming home from
night-work, stopped by to get his Christmas eels. Mrs. Fortini, Bart’s
landlady, woke him up, and he sold the eels to Balboni, and then
dressed, and swallowed his bread soaked in coffee, and got out his
little hand-cart and his scales and his basket and his packages of live
eels, all weighed and wrapped the day before. He had more than forty
orders to fill, because he was selling Christmas eels for thirty-five
cents a pound, whereas in Boston the Italians were paying as high as a
dollar and a quarter. He delivered several packages before daylight;
Mrs. Augusta Niccoli was still in bed, and called to him to put the
package on the kitchen table; she would pay later.
Soon after seven o’clock came Beltrando Brini, having gobbled his
breakfast, excited because he was to have the baker’s horse to drive.
He met Bart on the street, expecting to go with him to the baker’s; but
Bart insisted that the ground was wet, and Trando must run back home
and get his rubbers. It took the boy fifteen or twenty minutes to find
them in the attic; meantime Bart met the elder Brini, coming home from
night-work; and then went to Bastoni, the baker, and was told that the
latter could not spare the horse and wagon--a development which caused
much grief to the twelve-year-old Trando. This was at seven-forty-five,
as the baker remembered, because at the moment Bart entered his home
the whistle of the cordage company blew, and no one who has guided his
life by that whistle ever thereafter fails to hear and heed it. “The
whistle is our bread and butter,” said Bastoni.
It was during those same fateful minutes between seven-thirty and
seven-forty-five that there occurred what is known to history as “the
Bridgewater crime.” In the town of Bridgewater, some twenty-two miles
from Plymouth, a truck belonging to a shoe-company came rolling down
Broad Street. It contained the payroll for the week, and was driven
by a chauffeur and guarded by two other men. As it neared the corner
of Hale Street, there was an automobile standing, and two bandits
sprang out and opened fire. The guards returned the fire, and there
was a battle for a minute or two; until a street-car came down the
slight grade--the motorman having run back into the car to hide from
the bullets. The street-car came between the bandits and the truck,
and frightened the bandits so that they ran, and leaped into their
auto, and sped away. No one was hurt, so the “Bridgewater crime” was
classified as “attempted robbery.”
The shoe-company employed the Pinkerton agency, and within a few hours
the Pinkerton men were on the spot, interviewing every one who had
witnessed the attempt. Their reports were known to the prosecution,
but not to the defense in the case until six or seven years later.
The reports proved that the witnesses of the crime could not agree
upon essentials, not even as to the make of the bandit-car. As for
description of the bandits, there was a wide range of choice, and the
statements of all four leading witnesses varied greatly from what they
were later to testify on the witness-stand concerning the crime.
Being balked of clues, and at the same time hounded by clamor and
tempted by rewards, the authorities resorted to that method which
is the mainstay of American police procedure--the “stool pigeon.”
Underworld characters are paid to bring the gossip of their cafés and
hang-outs. So-and-so has got a new car; So-and-so-other has given a
diamond ring to his girl; So-and-so-else was heard to say that he
did such-and-such a job. It is manifest that such clues are open to
suspicion; jealousy and revenge play a large part in them; yet,
reënforced by the “third degree,” they form the method by which a good
part of the population of capitalist prisons is recruited.
The “stools” were active in this Bridgewater crime; and what they
brought affords a problem for students of the occult and the mystical.
Let historians investigate and psychologists weigh and philosophers
speculate and make what they can of the fact: the Sacco-Vanzetti case,
which echoed like a series of detonations around the world, which was
destined to cause windows to be smashed in American legations in Buenos
Ayres and Geneva, and taxi-cab drivers to throw their fares into the
faces of American ladies in Paris--this cause célèbre had its origin in
a “detective machine” invented by an underworld character, and looked
into by an unnamed Italian woman in East Boston.
To the Pinkerton agents came a “stool” with the rumor that a certain
A. C. Barr could tell about the Bridgewater crime. So there was a hunt
for A. C. Barr--height five-feet-ten, weight 175 pounds, age forty,
eyes dark, hair black, and so on. When found, the person proved to be
an Italian--Angelo Christoforo Barragini, or words to that effect. He
was questioned, and said, yes, he did know about the crime. How had he
learned it? He had invented a “detective machine,” with which you could
solve crime mysteries. It consisted of a crystal globe into which you
looked, and you there saw the crimes happening. A woman in East Boston
had used it and had seen the Bridgewater hold-up, committed by Italians
who lived in a little house on the outskirts of a town; there were four
or five of them, and they were dark, and had a car which they kept in a
shed in back of the house.
Now, detectives are paid by the day while they are working, and this
has a tendency to stretch out their assignments. They followed up this
“detective machine” clue, taking into their confidence Mike Stewart,
the worried chief of police who kept the town of Bridgewater in order
between bandit-raids. Mike, a burly “small-town cop,” red-faced,
heavy-lidded, good-natured but not abnormally brilliant, took the
detectives in his car, and they drove about inspecting little houses
inhabited by Italians on the outskirts of towns. They found several,
and were suspicious of one, and caused alarm to the occupants; but
they found nothing definite. The Pinkerton reports were turned in,
and the Bridgewater crime was listed among the unsolved mysteries
in Massachusetts police history. The “detective machine” was stowed
away in the subconsciousness of Mike Stewart, ready to pop up again
sometime--according to the laws of the subconsciousness, understood in
all psychological laboratories.
II
Three months later, on April fifteenth, came another sensation, known
to history as “the South Braintree crime.” In another “shoe-town,”
at three o’clock in the afternoon, the paymaster of the Slater and
Morrill company took the pay-money, about $16,000 in two steel boxes,
and accompanied by a guard, started to carry it from the office to the
factory, a distance of a couple of blocks. They were passing another
factory, the Rice and Hutchins, when two foreign-looking men who
had been lounging by the railing suddenly drew guns and opened fire
point-blank. They put four bullets into one victim, killing him at
once, and so wounded the other that he died the next day. They picked
up the boxes of money, and at the same instant an automobile came
rushing up the street and slowed, and the two bandits sprang in and
were driven away at high speed, shooting at the bystanders as they went.
This very brutal and successful crime caused great excitement in the
factory towns which lie to the south of Boston. So many raids had
occurred during the past year, no town knew when its turn might come.
Rewards were offered, and again the Pinkerton detectives came and made
their investigations and turned in reports. Just as in the Bridgewater
case, the numerous witnesses disagreed about essential details of what
they had seen. They could not describe the car. One said Hudson, others
said Buick; one said green, another said dark blue, others said black;
one said shiny, another said spattered with mud. Many witnesses made
statements quite different from what they afterwards made on the stand.
So here was another unsolved crime--and a great clamor of the public,
demanding to know what police were for. There was no clue--save only a
memory lurking in the subconsciousness of Mike Stewart, waiting for a
chance to pop up!
It so happened that the day after the South Braintree crime, while
all the countryside was ringing with the horror of it, there came to
see Mike Stewart a Federal immigration officer, looking for an Italian
anarchist by the name of Coacci, a shoe-worker sentenced to deportation
and out on bail; his time was up, but he had failed to appear, and the
officer had come to arrest him, and according to the custom he asked
for Mike’s help. So Mike sent a man with him to the Coacci home, which
happened to be a little house on the outskirts of a near-by village.
They found the shoe-worker with an oval-shaped tin suitcase strapped
and ready, the inevitable green umbrella on top. Also there was another
Italian, a boarder by the name of Boda. Coacci had pleaded for delay
because his wife was sick; but here was his wife, she wasn’t sick,
and Coacci admitted that that had been a pretext, he had wanted a few
more days to settle his affairs. Now he was ready to go. It was late
at night, and the immigration officer said to wait till to-morrow; but
Coacci said no, he would go now and get it over with. Some one was
taking his wife to stay with relatives, and he was all packed up, and
would like to get the next day’s steamer from New York.
They went, and Mike Stewart heard about it, and sat in his office
and thought it over. It was midnight, a time for ghosts and goblins.
Strange that a man should insist upon being taken away from a country
so great and so rich as America! This fellow Coacci was a Red, and the
weekly paper in Bridgewater was running a series of articles, prepared
by the Department of Justice, telling the small-town population of
America the crimes which the Reds were committing all over the world.
Mike pondered; and suddenly there occurred a phenomenon understood in
all psychological laboratories--there popped into his memory the woman
in East Boston who had looked into the “detective machine”! Here was
a little house on the outskirts of a town, occupied by Italians! In a
flash the whole story came to Mike: Coacci had been in on the South
Braintree crime, and the reason he was so anxious to get away was that
he had the sixteen thousand dollars!
With another officer Mike went to the Coacci house, and there was Boda,
five feet-two inches high, swarthy, with a little black mustache,
soft-spoken, polite, chatty; a macaroni salesman, he told Mike; and his
car was an Overland, a small car, just now laid up for repairs. Yes, he
had a gun, and he let Mike examine it--a .32 Colt. There were no signs
of crime, so Mike went off and pondered some more, and then telephoned
to New York and learned that Coacci had sailed for Italy. They found a