Sacco and Vanzetti - Arrests and Indictment

Arrests and Indictment

Police suspicions regarding the Braintree robbery-murder and an earlier attempted robbery of another shoe factory on December 24, 1919 in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, centered on local Italian anarchists. While neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had a criminal record, the authorities knew them as radical militants and adherents of Luigi Galleani. Police connected the crimes and the recent activities of the Galleanist anarchist movement, speculating that the robbers were motivated by the need to finance more bombings.

On April 16, one day after the robbery-murders, the Federal Immigration Service called local police chief Michael E. Stewart to discuss Galleanist and anarchist Ferruccio Coacci, whom he had arrested on their behalf two years earlier. Coacci had succeeded in postponing his deportation until April 15, 1920, the day of the Braintree holdup. The FIS asked Stewart to investigate Coacci's excuse that he had failed to report for deportation on April 15 because his wife had fallen ill. Stewart sent two policemen to Coacci's house on April 11.

Then asked if Coacci owned a gun, Boda stated that Coacci owned a .32 Savage automatic pistol, which he kept in the kitchen. A search of the kitchen revealed no gun, but Chief Stewart found a manufacturer's technical diagram for a Model 1907 .32 Savage automatic pistol - the exact pistol type and caliber used to shoot Parmenter and Berardelli - in a kitchen drawer. Stewart then asked Boda if he himself owned a gun, and Boda produced a .32-caliber Spanish-made automatic pistol. Boda also related that he owned a 1914 Oakland automobile, which was being repaired. From tracks found near the abandoned Buick getaway car, Chief Stewart surmised that two cars had been used in the getaway, and that Boda's car might have been the second car.

When Stewart discovered that Coacci had worked for both the plants that had been robbed, he returned with the Bridgewater police, but 'Mike' Boda (aka Mario Buda) had since disappeared, along with his possessions and furniture.

The police had instructed the Johnson garage, where the impounded cars were held, to notify them when the owners came to collect the 1914 Oakland. On May 5, 1920 Mario Buda arrived at the garage with three other men, later identified as Sacco, Vanzetti and Riccardo Orciani. The four men knew each other well; Buda would later call Sacco and Vanzetti "the best friends I had in America." Police were alerted, but the men sensed a trap and fled. Buda escaped on a motorcycle with Orciani. He later resurfaced in Italy in 1928. Sacco and Vanzetti jumped onto a streetcar, but were tracked down and soon arrested. When searched by police, both denied owning any guns, yet both were found to be in possession of loaded pistols. Sacco was found to have an Italian passport, anarchist literature, a loaded .32 Colt Model 1903 automatic pistol, and twenty-three .32 Automatic cartridges in his possession, several of these being of the same obsolescent type as the empty Winchester .32 casing found at the crime scene, and the others manufactured by the firms of Peters and Remington, whose cases also were found at the crime scene. Vanzetti had four 12-gauge shotgun shells and a five-shot nickle-plated .38-caliber Harrington & Richardson revolver, the latter identical to that carried by Berardelli, the slain Braintree guard, but which had gone missing after the robbery. Under questioning, the pair denied any connection to anarchists.

Following the indictment for murder of Sacco and Vanzetti for the Braintree robbery, Galleanists and anarchists in the United States and abroad began a campaign of violent retaliation. On September 16, 1920, two days after the men's indictment, Mario Buda allegedly orchestrated the Wall Street Bombing, where a time-delay dynamite bomb packed with heavy iron sash-weights in a horse-drawn cart exploded, killing 38 people and wounding 134. In 1921, a booby trap bomb mailed to the American ambassador in Paris exploded, wounding his valet. For the next six years, bombs exploded at other American embassies the world over.