Sacco and Vanzetti - Later Evidence and Investigations

Later Evidence and Investigations

In 1941, anarchist leader Carlo Tresca, a member of the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee, told Max Eastman, "Sacco was guilty but Vanzetti was innocent", although it is clear from his statement that Tresca equated guilt only with the act of pulling the trigger, i.e., Vanzetti was not the principal triggerman in Tresca's view, but was merely an accomplice to Sacco. This conception of innocence is in sharp contrast to the legal one. Both The Nation and The New Republic refused to publish Eastman's revelation, which Eastman said occurred after he pressed Tresca for the truth about the two men's involvement in the shooting. The story finally appeared in National Review in October 1961. Others who had known Tresca confirmed that he had made similar statements to them, but Tresca's daughter insisted her father never hinted at Sacco's guilt. Others attributed Tresca's revelations to his disagreements with the Galleanists.

Labor organizer Anthony Ramuglia, an anarchist in the 1920s, said in 1952 that a Boston anarchist group had asked him to be a false alibi witness for Sacco. After agreeing, he had remembered that he had been in jail on the day in question, so he could not testify.

Both men had previously fled to Mexico, changing their names in order to evade draft registration, a fact the prosecutor in their murder trial used to demonstrate their lack of patriotism and which they were not allowed to rebut. Sacco and Vanzetti's supporters would later argue that the men fled the country to avoid persecution and conscription, their critics, to escape detection and arrest for militant and seditious activities in the United States. However, a later Italian history of anarchism written by anonymous colleagues revealed a different motivation:

Several dozen Italian anarchists left the United States for Mexico. Some have suggested they did so because of cowardice. Nothing could be more false. The idea to go to Mexico arose in the minds of several comrades who were alarmed by the idea that, remaining in the United States, they would be forcibly restrained from leaving for Europe, where the revolution that had burst out in Russia that February promised to spread all over the continent.

In October 1961, ballistic tests were run with improved technology using Sacco's Colt automatic. The results confirmed that the bullet that killed Berardelli in 1920 was fired from Sacco's pistol. The Thayer court's habit of mistakenly referring to Sacco's .32 Colt pistol as well as any other automatic pistol as a 'revolver' (a popular custom of the day) has sometimes mystified later-generation researchers attempting to follow the forensic evidence trail.

In 1987, Charlie Whipple, a former Boston Globe editorial page editor, revealed a conversation that he had with Sergeant Edward J. Seibolt in 1937. According to Whipple, Seibolt said that "we switched the murder weapon in that case", but indicated that he would deny this if Whipple ever printed it. However, at the time of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, Seibolt was only a patrolman, and did not work in the Boston Police ballistics department; Seibolt died in 1961 without corroborating Whipple's story. In 1935, Captain Charles Van Amburgh, a key ballistics witness for the prosecution, wrote that Thayer told him that he had caught the defense ballistics expert Albert Hamilton attempting to leave a 1923 hearing with Sacco's gun in his pocket. Following the hearing, Van Amburgh kept Sacco's gun in his house where it remained until the Boston Globe did an expose in 1960.

Sacco's .32 Colt pistol is also claimed to have passed in and out of police custody and to have been dismantled several times between 1925 and 1961 for the conduct of various examinations, most notably in the demonstration performed by defense firearms expert Albert H. Hamilton in which he removed the original barrel from Sacco's .32 Colt. It has been alleged that this dismantling and the exchange of barrels between Hamilton's two .32 Colt Automatic pistols and Sacco's gun effectively interrupted the chain of custody of the evidence; if so, it is an example of gross misconduct on the part of the defense, and rebuts the claim that the men were framed by the prosecution. The central problem with these charges is that the evidence tying Sacco's gun to the South Braintree murders was based not only on the .32-caliber Colt pistol barrel and the .32-caliber Bullet III, the fatal bullet that killed Berardelli, but also the spent .32 Auto cartridge cases (shell casings) found at the scene. Hamilton himself acknowledged that the new .32 barrel in Sacco's Colt pistol must have come from one of Hamilton's own brand-new two .32 Colt automatics that he had used for his demonstration. The fact that Bullet III and one of the South Braintree .32-caliber empty shell casings were both independently linked to Sacco's Colt means that a conspirator determined to fabricate evidence linking Sacco's gun to Berardelli's murder would have to access police evidence lockers and switch the barrel that fired Bullet III into Sacco's gun as well as substitute a spent .32 Auto shell casing fired from Sacco's Colt of the same type as the obsolete loading retrieved by police at the murder scene, or else obtain the actual murder weapon, then transfer that weapon's barrel and firing pin into the .32 Colt pistol taken from Sacco, all before Calvin Goddard's first microscopic examination in 1927 when the first scientific comparative match was made to Sacco's gun.

Critics of the prosecution's evidence emphasize that while four bullets were recovered from Berardelli, the slain guard, only one bullet was linked to Sacco's pistol, the other three bullets were found to have been fired from a .32 Savage automatic pistol that was never recovered. Several witnesses insisted that one gunman fired four bullets into Berardelli, which might have been the man wielding the .32 Savage. "I seen this fellow shoot this fellow," one witness told the court. "It was the last shot. He put four bullets into him." In 1927, the defense suggested that the bullet had been planted, noting the scratches on the base of the one bullet unlike those found on the others. The Lowell Commission dismissed this claim as desperate. One theory is that another gunman, perhaps Mario Buda, must have been involved along with Sacco, and that this unknown gunman used a .32 Savage pistol to shoot Parmenter twice and Berardelli three times, leaving Sacco to fatally shoot Berardelli with the sixth .32 bullet traced to the latter's .32 Colt pistol.

In 1973 a former mobster published a confession by Frank "Butsy" Morelli, Joe's brother. "We whacked them out, we killed those guys in the robbery," Butsy Morelli told Vincent Teresa. "These two greaseballs Sacco and Vanzetti took it on the chin."

Before his death in June 1982, Giovanni Gambera, a member of the four-person team of anarchist leaders that met shortly after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti to plan their defense, told his son that "everyone knew that Sacco was guilty and that Vanzetti was innocent as far as the actual participation in killing."

Russell had originally written about the case, arguing that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, but further research led him to write a 1962 book, asserting that Sacco was, in fact, guilty. Russell used the Gambera revelation as the basis of a new book in 1986, in which he claims that the case is "solved," and presents his view that Sacco was one of the shooters, while Vanzetti was an accessory after the fact. While Russell's 1962 book was praised, even by those who disagreed with his conclusion, for being balanced and well-reasoned, his 1986 book was much more negatively received. In the latter, the accessory after the fact legal theory is incorrect: Massachusetts law, now and at the time of the crime, allowed both men to be charged as joint principals in a robbery-homicide, for which they were convicted; from a legal standpoint, it does not matter how many shots, or even if, Vanzetti fired, to establish his legal culpability for the robbery and murders. This distinction is a source of much confusion to laymen, and of most claims that Vanzetti was "innocent" or had no "actual participation in killing."

Months before he died, the distinguished jurist Charles E. Wyzanski, Jr., who had presided for 45 years on the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, wrote to Russell stating "I myself am persuaded by your writings that Sacco was guilty." The judge's assessment was significant, because he was one of Felix Frankfurter's "Hot Dogs," and Justice Frankfurter had advocated his appointment to the federal bench.