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Howdy everybody. This is Chuck here of 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 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 ep for March 2019, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.

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 and we're going to get a little true crime history on you with the trial of Sacco and Van Zetti.

Yeah, these guys. A little backstory on, I guess, the time. We're talking about the 1920s in the United States. We're talking about two gentlemen that were both anarchists that were both italian immigrants and both supposedly followers of this really notable anarchist named Luigi Galliani, who this guy was sort of anarchist leader. He put out an anarchist rag. He was called for violence. He has a history of authorizing, like, bombings, assassination attempts, like, really tough stuff. And so this is who supposedly sacco and, you know, I guess by association, advocating. Advocating, sure. Advocating for this type of violence themselves as immigrant anarchists.

Do you remember in our anarchism episode 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.

It was a big deal. And, I mean, there was also a struggle going on for the soul of America. Were we going to be socialists? Were we going to be capitalists? Should we just go with anarchism? There was a lot of debate over which economy we should go with or what politics we should go with. And there was something of a red scare, because communism was on 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. No, get on. But. And at the same time, if you weren't anarchist, you're probably scared of anarchists, because they would bomb stuff, and they were well known for it, too.

Yeah. So, I mean, this is not just the United States. Like, all over the world, there were political radicals. There 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 as quickly as they could root them out, basically.

Right.

So this is sort of the stage in the early 1920s, and I guess we should hop in the wayback machine.

Oh, yes, let's.

And head on over to Bastintown.

Okay.

That's Boston, by the way.

Yeah, no, I know.

Okay.

It doesn't matter if I know. Just make sure the way back machine knows.

Oh, the way back machine knows. It can read my silly accents.

So here we are. It's 1920, around Boston. Actually. We're not in Boston proper. We're about 10 miles south in the little town of Braintree, which is these.

Days, would be Boston proper.

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 1920, I think it was April 15, right?

Correct.

In Braintree, there was a dude named Shelley Neal who was an agent for the American Express Company. And the function I got of Shelley Neal was that he was kind of like a brinks armed guard.

Yeah. Like a courier for money.

And not just some money, like, a lot of money. Yeah. On this day, from the 09:18 a.m. Train from Boston, Shelley Neal went to the Braintree train depot and picked up $30,000.30 grand in cash, which is about $427,000 in 2018. Money. Yeah.

He did this every week.

Right. He picked it up, and he took it back to his office, and he opened up a metal box, and inside it 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. Maybe it was three k. Definitely Slater and Morel was one of them.

The other was new balance.

Okay.

Yeah.

So Slater and Morell and new balance were the ones whose payroll he had on him that day.

Yeah. And 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 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 payoff, but to pay them their legit check from working.

You didn't see nothing, right this week.

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 these little curtains on the inside, windows that were pulled shut. And other people in Braintree 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 Braintree, which I guess to raise some suspicions.

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 of Braintree, 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 they saw this car driving around between 09:00 a.m. And 12:00 p.m. 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 armed guard thing, because the paymaster a has a gun and then has a guard with a gun. This guy's name was Fredie par mentor, and the guard was Alessandro Berradelli. 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.

I didn't realize there's going to be special effects in this episode.

Hey, well, you know, I try to.

You did, man. It has been brought it. So these guys are on Pearl street when these shots suddenly just ring out. And the first guy's hit. Baradelli's hit, and he goes down. I believe it was Baradelli who was hit first. Oh, no, he wasn't hit. It was parminter who was hit. Baradelli is on the ground, and he has lost his gun, and he's being approached by a man with a gun on him. And Baradelli apparently has begged for his life, to no avail. The man shoots him in the chest at least once, and the bullet punctures his lungs, one of his major arteries to his heart, and then lodges itself in its hip to be fished out later on by a coroner and used in the case against Sacco and Van Zetti. The other guy, parminer, the painmaster, he gets hit a few times, staggers across the street and collapses. And this car, a blue touring car, which know, a big sedan that you would think of today like a touring, we'll call it a Lincoln town car, even though that'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 a Buick, but the same one that had been seen driving slowly around Braintree all morning, suddenly pulls up. And the guys who had shot these two men and taken the money, about $15,000, hopped in and it drove off. And everyone lost sight of it.

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.

Yeah, it was a daring daylight robbery at 03:00 in the afternoon.

Daring do.

Right.

A man named Jimmy Bostock was one of the witnesses. Apparently, Baradelli died in his arms, and all people in the 1920s didn't know any better? He immediately started messing with the crime scene, started picking up gunshells. Another guy came by and picked up the hat, and they just didn't know any better at the time, I 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 $220,000 has just been stolen and two men murdered for it in this little tiny town. So it was a big deal, and the cops 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.

Yeah. Should we take a break?

Jeez. Okay. Already?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, this falls into acts, and that's definitely act one.

Okay.

All right. So dead men in the street, the cops are on the scene.

Message and scene.

It.

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Hi, I'm Martha Stewart, and we're back with a new season of my podcast. This season will be even more revealing and more personal with more entrepreneurs, more trailblazers, more live events, more Martha, and more questions from you. I'm talking to my cosmetic dermatologist, Dr. Dan Belkin, about the secrets behind my skincare. Walter Isaacson about the geniuses who change the world. Encore Jane about creating a billion dollar startup. Dr. Elisa Pressman about the five basic strategies to help parents raise good humans. Florence Fabricant, about the authenticity in the world of food writing. Be sure to tune in to season two of the Martha Stewart podcast. Listen and subscribe to the Martha Stewart podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Josh and Chuck.

Is it? And scene or end scene?

Chuck, we've talked about this a lot. And scene. What that means?

Not end scene.

Nope.

Because it makes sense.

You know, you do end the scene, right, by saying and scene.

So the cops have 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. But the car is 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 from Braintree.

Right? I think Bridgewater only had seven Dunkin donuts. So it was a small town.

Right? 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 was similar enough that the cops immediately thought of the people they'd been thinking of for this earlier crime. They thought, this is clearly the work of the same people.

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. Know they ditched this car. Get in another one. The officer on the scene said, maddie, I think this is the car from the Braintree meta.

All I can think of is Jeremy Renner in the town?

Sure.

That's what I think of when I think Boston.

Yeah, everyone thinks of that. Sure. So another thing is going on in parallel. So we need to set this up. Also on April 15, which is the day of those murders, there was a guy named Ferruccio Cochi and he lived in Bridgewater. He was anarchist. He was being deported. So he quits his job to be deported. Does not show up to be deported. He calls the immigration service after that on the 16th and said, my wife is a sick, so I have to tend to her.

And they said so much email about that.

Am I going to get in trouble for that now?

No, you won't get in trouble. Everybody loves your italian accent.

Please tell me you can still do an italian accent, right?

I think so. We're going to find out after this.

Episode because I'm just doing the accent.

Sure.

Not saying like, they're all mobsters because the sopranos got in trouble for that.

Oh, yeah. Did they? Did they say all Italians were mobsters?

No, but I mean, I remember they're just being hay about from the italian american community. Like, why is it every time in movies we're just mobsters?

Oh, I could see that, sure. But these aren't even mobsters.

No, they're anarchists.

Right.

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.

Come on, come on.

Can you get me out of the country quickly? And they're like, well, you should probably leave some money with your wife. He's like, no, she's good.

Let's just go.

Yeah. And so they were like, all right, this is a little OD. Maybe he's involved.

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 cops forever.

Well, that helped.

And then secondly, if you were to be deported, all you had to do was not show up, but then call them the next day and say your wife was sick. And immigration and naturalization would say, sure, no problem.

Well, no, they investigated immediately.

Okay, but I'm just saying things have changed a tad, I think, is what I'm trying to say. Hold on. Let me see. Josh, what are you trying to say? You trying to say that? Yeah, I'm trying to say that. Okay, cool. Yes, that's exactly what I'm trying to say.

That's weird because you looked on both of your shoulders at the devil and.

The angel, but they won't shut up, Chuck.

So they summarize. It's all coming together. This guy's acting weird. Well, he's also 16th.

He's also choked one of those people that they liked for that robbery the year before, which is one of the reasons why they had their antenna up about this guy in the first place.

Right. So he's a suspect the cops 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 car there. It's an overland, but it's in the shop getting repaired. And Stuart 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 look like they would probably fit this large buick that was so mysteriously kind of tooling around around the time of this murder.

Right. And this cop, Stuart, goes, 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 he said, boda said that his other car was at the garage. Being the, who's the police chief of Bridgewater, I get the impression that he's kind of new. There was another one who kind of factors into this case tangentially later on who was the former police chief. So I get the impression that Michael Stewart was fairly new, but he's investigating this case. He likes Kawachi. He's now met Mike Boda, who he's suspicious of, too. He goes back to talk to Boda some more, to this place where Kawachi lived as Boda's roommate, I guess, away from his wife and kids. I'm not sure why Kawachi was running this place.

Are we going with Kawachi now?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's it. I took Italian in college and I'm almost 100% sure it's Kawachi.

Okay.

Do you remember from our dyslexia episode where Italian is extremely easy to learn because there's just very few ways to write things to write the phonemes. One of the reasons it is easy is because it's kind of like polish. In most cases, it's actually easier than polish, but it's pronounced just like it's spelled, except for the CI is a ch sound. Okay, so Kawachi. Okay.

All right.

That was your italian lesson.

I appreciate that after all these years.

The other lesson, not all Italians or Italian Americans are mobsters. That's your other italian lesson.

No.

Okay.

I've known a bunch of Italian Americans, and none of them were mobsters.

Bam. 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 Stewart spends about 15 minutes going, Boda? Mr. Boda? Hello, Mr. Boda. And he finally takes a couple of steps in and realizes Boda is gone.

That's right. So 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, whose 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 co ops if someone comes to get this car.

Jeremy Renner.

So on May 5, this is what, a couple of weeks later, a man comes to the door. And this is at, I believe this is, it says 09:00 but that's at night, right?

Yeah, I couldn't tell at first. And then it feels like night. Yeah. It says also that the wife is illuminated by a motorcycle headlight. Well, there, you guess at night. Yeah.

All right, so it's. Unless it's very dark in the morning.

Right.

So at 09:00 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 the garage comes and tells his wife, and he says, go call the police. 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 sidecar, 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.

Yeah. So I guess the fact 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?

Yeah, he jumped in the sidecar and was out of there.

Okay, here's where things get super critical for a pair of guys named Sacco and Van Zetti. 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, too. Now they're suddenly, like, on foot. There's no motorcycle or car for them, 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, no, the rail car. So I think it might have been like a streetcar kind of thing. So somehow Chief Stewart gets word of this. I think he shows up, he gets word 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 streetcar when the streetcar stops or the rail car stops in your town. Get them. They are wanted for questioning in a murder robbery. And so the Brockton police board the train when it arrives in Brockton, and there are two italian men sitting there.

And the two men's names were Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Venzetti. And they just happened to be italian, and they just happened to be anarchists. And they both happened to be strapped when the cops came on the rail car and started asking them questions.

Yeah, Sacco had a. 32 Colt and Van City had a. 38 Harrington and Richardson, which, very uniquely had five chambers instead of six. It's very unusual.

Seems unique.

Yeah, I don't even know how that works. I would have to see this kind of revolver because six is a nice even number for a round thing. I don't get it.

But, yeah, no one ever says, like, don't point that five shooter at me. It's always six shooter.

Yeah, it's weird.

Although maybe a five shooter is what they're talking about when they call it a p shooter.

No, that's not what they mean. But it was the 1920s, and there were all kinds of weird guns back 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 in answer to the questions that the cops were asking them, they get hauled into the police station, I believe, in Bridgewater or Braintree. Do you know which one 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, who would play an enormous role in this case as well.

Yeah. So he was the DA. And I think the key fact that really sold him was he found out that on April 15, on the day of these murders, Saka was not at work at the three K shoe factory.

Right.

And he said, you know what? That's enough for me. We have no real evidence or anything else. But you are italian american anarchists. You weren't at work that day. So let's go ahead and haul you in here.

Right, because, yeah, we left off the fact that they found, like, anarchist pamphlets on the men when they took them off the train. So there was a lot against them, going against them at this point, just from the outset of this. But you kind of touched on it. All of this is very circumstantial.

Yeah. So, right away, the anarchists of the area come on board. They form the Sacco Vencetti 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 lawyer from California. This guy's a radical. He's going to lead our defense. And Moore comes on board. Fred Morin's like, here's the way we're going to do this, is let's get everyone worked, like, not only in this area, but all over the world. Let's get radicals, and let's get anarchists, and let's get union members. Let's paint these guys as just, like, hardworking, blue collar union dudes, and let's get people all over the world paying attention to what's going on over here.

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 Sacco and Vincetti were just a couple of normal dudes who were being railroaded for political reasons and probably out of a certain amount of xenophobia as well.

Sure. Let's take a break. The trial opens in May of 1921 with judge Webster Thayer. And we'll be back with what happens next right after this.

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Hi, I'm Martha Stewart, and we're back with a new season of my podcast. This season will be even more revealing and more personal with more entrepreneurs, more trailblazers, more live events, more Martha, and more questions from you. I'm talking to my cosmetic dermatologist, Dr. Dan Belkin about the secrets behind my skincare. Walter Isaacson about the geniuses who change the world. Encore Jane about creating a billion dollar startup. Dr. Elisa Pressman about the five basic strategies to help parents raise good humans Florence fabricant about the authenticity in the world of food writing. Be sure to tune in to season two of the Martha Stewart podcast. Listen and subscribe to the Martha Stewart podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My name is Rachel, and this is my new podcast, Rachel goes rogue. You think you know me because you've seen and heard the stories. I was most recently involved in one of the biggest reality tv scandals, coined scandalval. I'm ready to divulge the details, and you may be shocked by what you hear. I'm here to tell my story, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I've made some terrible decisions, but I continue to learn and grow. I've chosen to protect others by keeping secrets for far too long, and I'm ready to come clean. I've taken some time away to reflect on my actions, and I'm finally in a place where I can share what I've discovered about myself and some of the tools that I've learned. As I tell my story, I will bring on guests who have knowledge and expertise on a variety of topics. Listen to Rachel goes rogue on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Josh and Chuck.

Chuck, before we get back into it, I 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. That was pretty handy. Pretty good stuff.

Yeah. Law professors. I mean, there's a lot of good information out here on this, but you get a law professor on the typewriter, and they're going to condense it into a nice, readable, workable document.

That's right.

That's what they do. They're very good at that.

Yes.

So, all right, trials underway. Like I said before, Judge Webster Thayer proceeds over this trial. Katzman, 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 evidence going on.

Right.

It's sort of a tough case for him to solidly prove.

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 Sacco and Van Zetti were being railroaded is that the evidence against them was really weak. The eyewitness testimony was super if you had the luxury, like historians like Douglas Linder have had to compare the original notes or the original statements made by eyewitnesses against the types of statements they made in court. The statements they made in court were much more certain. Much more sure. And this is after a year of reading the newspaper and being exposed to pictures of Sacco and Van Zetti. So when they see Sacco and Van Zetti in the courtroom, they're like, yes, I saw that man holding that gun, and he was the 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 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, 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 far as forensic goes.

Yeah. So on the defense side, immediately, they say those guys weren't even in Braintree. Saka was in Boston, Vansetti 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 people on both sides to testify kind of behind the scenes. Fred Moore, the defense attorney, trotted out a bunch of witnesses that say no. Like, van Zetti 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.

Yeah. Supposedly later on, they would allege that the prosecutor, Katzman 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 more certain than the actual conclusion he came to prior to the trial based on his original ballistics tests.

Yeah. So 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 gray cap. He said, this is Sako's. He gets together with an expert behind the scenes and says, and again with this, like you were saying, sort of the beginnings of not ballistics in this case, but just forensics. Any kind of forensics. Yeah, he looked at the hairs in the hat, got a hair from Sacco, and Sako was like, ow, that hurt. And he compared them, and he said, yeah, these hairs are identical. I'm telling you, they're the same hairs. But Katzman 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 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 Sako's hat. I've seen him wear that hat. And the hole in it is from the nail that he hangs it on every day, when, in fact, that was definitely not the case.

No. The previous police chief later testified that he had accidentally punched the hole in the hat while he was examining it for any kind of identifying marks, which is weird. He also testified that the hat had a very questionable providence that it hadn't come into police custody for 30 hours after the crime. So he couldn't say, 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 read elsewhere in a final twist, and stop me if this sounds familiar, but they asked Sacco to put the hat on in court, and it was too small for his head. It didn't fit.

You must acquit.

They did not acquit, though.

Well, you just ruined it.

Oh, I'm sorry.

That's okay.

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 Sacco and Vanzetti, one of the suggested questions is, what is Sacco and van Zetti not who, what?

It's a nice.

Right.

So I don't know if we mentioned, but Sako had definitely much more evidence against him, even if it was circumstantial, than a lot more eyewitnesses.

Yeah, for sure.

So van Zetti has the thinnest case against him, but he lied to the cops. He had that gun, remember? And on the stand, he said, yeah, actually, I got that gun just a few days ago. I bought it for four or $5. And they're like, well, you told us that you bought it four or five years ago for $18, right? You said there were six chambers in it and only had five. And what's going on here? You're lying. Jimmy. Vanzetti, 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 the central piece of evidence used against Van Zetti is that it was supposedly the exact same kind of gun that Alessandro Baradelli had on him when he was killed. So the whole idea was that Vanzetti had been at least at the crime scene, if not one of the killers who had taken Baradelli'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 and how long he'd owned it, too. That was the implication of the whole thing. And that was it. That was the crux of the prosecution's case against Vanzetti. Van Zetti's big problem was he was sitting next to Sako when Sako got taken off the train. And they had a lot more on Sako. And they were tried together rather than separately.

Yeah. In Sako, that ballistics evidence made a big, big difference in the trial because they found out for sure that that bullet that killed Baradelli was definitely fired from a cult automatic. And your cult automatic is what they alleged. Right. Well, we'll hold on to that last bit till later 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 Sacco for us in deciding this case.

Yeah. And again, they're listening to forensic evidence from a field that's still in its cradle, from testimony given by people who are not experts. But like you said, the juror said that was it for me. That was what convinced me was the ballistics evidence, basically.

So they go to jury and they go to deliberations, and just five and a half hours later, the jury said guilty is charged.

About six weeks after the trial started, I believe. Yeah.

So it was a big deal. Sacco is 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 1920s, became an international thing. And basically they were due for the electric chair. So people all over the world were protesting. There were bombings. It was.

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 messed up is that? And you could arouse some people pretty quickly back then by saying that. As opposed to today.

Yeah, for sure. Moore immediately starts, the defense attorney immediately starts filing motions, trying to get new trials. He had an assistant named Eugene Lyons who later would come out and, man, this guy basically would do anything. He was framing evidence. He was telling witnesses what to say. Once he had it up in his mind. And keep in mind this was like a radical lawyer from California. He said once he had in mind that these guys were innocent, he was like, he basically would do anything to try and get them off.

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 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 Moore, too. Like, he considered Fred Moore to have the heart of an artist. But 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 charges. He was an early civil liberties lawyer, basically, is what he was.

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 worked. They were basically all turned down. Thayer was still the presiding judge. He was turning down all these things. Then they went to federal court. They were turning down motions. Eventually, they went to the supreme Court. And the Supreme Court was like, why are you asking us about this? This is a state case. We don't even do this kind of thing.

Yeah. The court at the time was very much against, or the majority, I should say, 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 as 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 Sacco fired Fred Moore, did the same thing. Like, up to the eve. The eve of the execution, they were relentless in filing appeals 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 Sacco and Van Zetti as such throughout the trial. And if you're just watching this from the outside, if you're reading about this in the press and you're already on Sacco and Vanzetti's side, judge Thayer 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. So the public's sympathies were aroused even further for Sacco and Van City. And that would last for decades after this trial. A century almost now.

Yeah. So Sacco's in jail, and another weird thing happens while he's in jail in Dedham. D-E-D-H-A-M. 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, let's talk to this guy. He's confessing to this crime and saying that Sacco and Vincetti 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. He said, there was a guy named Mike, a guy named Bill. I don't know the other guys. I was scared. We switched cars in the woods. 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 till afternoon, and everyone was like, no, that car was there, like, maybe between 09:00 a.m. 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 for a new trial, but none of this worked because Thayer was still kind of calling the shots. This is before they ran it up the flagpole.

Yeah. But again, news made its way out into the international press that someone had confessed, and not only confessed, said that Sacco and Van Zetti weren't there. And this judge who had it out for Sacco and Van Zetti refused to even hear this motion to have a new trial. So it looked bad as well, too.

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 Hovid. You head this thing up. And then what was known as the Lowell commission finally issued a report which said, basically, beyond a reasonable doubt, Sacco is guilty. And Vanzetti 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 other words then?

And they're like, what other words?

Yeah, really kind of a strange final report.

What's funny is, in the Boston area, they're like, we need somebody smart. Get me the president of Harvard.

Well, 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.

Right. No, I know it was weird, and it remains weird, but apparently, years later, when Lowell was asked about that, he was saying, like, no, that wasn't an indication that we thought Van Zetti had 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, 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 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 Sacco was definitely guilty. Yeah, I shouldn't say a lot, but some people that Sacco was definitely guilty. And if anyone was innocent, it was Van Zetti. So the idea that this Lowell commission came up with this back in the 20s, even, is significant. But, yeah, Lowell was like, no, that's not what we meant by that.

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 you wouldn't believe how many cops they have in 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 there were going to be more bombings. People were going to literally storm the prison and try and overtake them and free them. So they had tons and tons of cops everywhere. Sacco is first to go, and 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. And I don't think like that. No, I'm not making light of it. I don't think he was like, whoa, mama.

No, I don't think so either. I think he was calling for his mother.

Yes.

Just pretty sad, but also kind of sweet.

Yes.

And then Van Zetti 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 Van Zetti didn't say anything in the courtroom, but during 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 me.

And he started crying.

Well, the warden started crying when he gave the switch. Gave the nod to throw the switch on the electric chair and kill Van Zetti.

Tears flowing everywhere. High drama.

Yes.

I'm surprised.

But there's a movie. Surely it has been. But I'll bet it was in like the. We just aren't aware of it. Like Warren Beatty played Sacco and Van Zetti in some weird casting and somehow.

Jeremy Renner played all the cops.

Right, exactly. Very strange movie. So Sacco 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 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 in Geneva, Switzerland. This may have been the only time anyone ever rioted in Geneva, Switzerland. There were like 5000 protesters who destroyed everything that was even passingly american. And Sacco and Vanzetti went into the history books as a couple of innocent men who were executed wrongfully by 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 Sacco and Vincetti.

Yeah. But many years later, a few notable things happened. In 1941. That gentleman I mentioned earlier, Carlo Tresca, the anarchist leader a couple of years before he died in the 1940s basically said, you know what? Asaka was guilty. He was a trigger man. But Vancetti was not guilty. Other people had heard the same thing from Tresca. And then in 1961, they had actual ballistics tests done and it was concluded that that was in fact a bullet from Sacco's gun. But people still were saying, no, you know what? I think that bullet was planted. So we render that inconclusive.

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, no, 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 prosecution star ballistic witnesses said, yes, I would conclude probably that it came out of this gun or 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 Sako in the planting of this bullet, they would have given much more forceful testimony, which in and of itself is 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.

Yeah. There was another gentleman named Giovanni Gambera who said, you know what, my dad, before he died in 1982, 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 Saka was guilty and Vanzetti was innocent. And then, weirdly, in 2005, Upton Sinclair, the very famous author, said that he was researching a book, and he was writing a book about this whole thing. And he met with Fred Moore, the radical defense attorney that mounted the defense for basically most of the case. And he met with him in a hotel room and was like, dude, give me the real story. And he said that Moore told him, yeah, Sako was guilty and Van Setti was innocent. And I basically came up with this whole defense on my own, like, made all this stuff.

Yeah, yeah. Years later, it came out that the seven eyewitnesses for the defense who said that they saw sacco eating lunch in Boston at the time of the robbery, and Braintree had all been set up by the defense, or at least by anarchist group who had asked them to go perjure themselves. And, yeah, I think that kind of jives with the Eugene Lyons quote, that if he thought these guys were innocent, he would do anything to get them off, including 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 Fred Moore. So it has a lot of teeth. But there was another letter from Upton 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 Sacco wasn't. But all he had to do was go to the jury and say, hey, we all know that you don't have anything on van Zetti. 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 Sacco.

So he had this dilemma, and he took it to van Zetti. He said, and van Zetti said, you know what? Try to save Nick. Nicholas Sacco. He has the wife, he has the child. I don't try to get him off. So van Zetti, in this retelling by Fred Moore, gave his life on the chance that Fred Moore could get Sacco off, because if he got Sako off, he'd get van Zetti off. If he got van Zetti off, he would almost surely sink Sacco, and van Zetti wouldn't take the opportunity to be acquitted at the expense of Saco, which was pretty amazing.

Amazing.

Yep. So that's Sako and van Zetti, everybody. That's what a saco and van Zetti is now.

You know, I guess one guilty and one innocent.

That's what it sounds like.

That's what it sounds like.

If you want to know more about Sacco and van Zetti, 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 Sacco and van Zetti and their famous trial. And since I said Sacco and Van Zetti, like, 80 times, it's time for listener mail.

I'm going to call this response to a short stuff. Yeah, right. Hey, guys, your show is one of my favorite podcasts, so much so that I've taken to listening to it while I get ready for work. Whoa. We know that is your sacred time, Nadine. I just finished the episode on black Loyalist 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 operations, so I don't think I'll be able to make it there. I will definitely do some exploring of Halifax, though, in the coming weeks, and we'll be on the lookout for more information. Just wanted to mention on the show that it was Josh said that Rhode island may not have ever had slaves. Actually, we were the first state to abolish slavery in 1652, 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 shed light on. Thanks for always putting out a funny and informative and entertaining show. That is from Nadine grieg.

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 think spring to you and everybody up there in Nova Scotia. Frankly, if you want to get in touch with us, you can join us on stuffyshoodnow.com. Check out our social links there and you can just send us a good old fashioned email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com.

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Hey everyone, it's Sophia Bush, host of the podcast work in progress, and I am thrilled to tell you that work in progress is back for a third season. It has never been more important than right now to have these conversations with all of you so that we can get educated, enlightened, and we can all be entertained. I will be sitting down and having deep conversations with thought leaders, newsmakers, celebrities, elected officials, and more. Listen to work in progress on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.