"Suosso's
Lane," a book named after a street in North Plymouth, has some considerable
history in West Bridgewater. The prosecution theory, to use the word
loosely, of how Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco were involved in the
robbery of the shoe factory payroll in South Braintree Square and the killing
of two payroll officials, goes back to a house in West Bridgewater that was
rented to an Italian anarchist -- not Vanzetti, not Sacco, not anyone they were
involved with.
I spoke on
the book at West Bridgewater library on Thursday, Oct. 27, and left that
informative gathering with more local knowledge than I went in with. Apparently, the pleasure was mutual. "Your presentation
was terrific," library director Ellen Snoeyenbos wrote me afterwards. "I couldn't have asked for a better event!"
I'm looking forward to speaking about "Suosso's Lane" again this week at Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth on
Wednesday, Nov. 2, at 7 p.m.It's free. I hope to see some friendly faces there.
The house
in West Bridgewater that played a crucial role in the notorious Sacco-Vanzetti case was known as Puffer's Place (after an original owner) and was rented in the spring of 1920 to Ferruccio Coacci, one of the many
foreign radicals caught up in the Red Scare repression of 1918-1920 and
scheduled for deportation to Italy. Bridgewater police chief Michael
Stewart, who hated foreign radicals -- as law enforcement personnel and other
Americans were then being encouraged to do by their government, their
newspapers, and politicians -- was asked by federal officials to visit Coacci
and remind him to report for deportation. Coacci alibied; he was perfectly
content to return to Italy, he told police, but his wife was sick. A couple
days later Stewart's men visited the house a second time and found not Coacci,
but another Italian anarchist, Mario Buda, there. Buda, who went by an
anglicized version of his name, Mike Boda, said he was sharing the rent with
Coacci. Coacci and his recovered wife walked out of the story at this point by
taking a boat back to Italy.
However,
what happens next is that the car used by the Braintree payroll robbers is found
abandoned in the woods in another part of Bridgewater, two miles away from
Puffer's Place. Chief Stewart puts these two facts together -- in the one hand
I have an anarchist, and in the other the car used in the crime (two miles away) -- and
concludes, ah ha, anarchists must have committed that crime.
So now he
is interested in 'Mike Boda.' He goes back to Puffer's Place and this time
Buda, developing suspicions of his own, sees
the police coming and climbs out a window in the back of the house to escape
their attentions. However, he has already left his automobile to be repaired in
the nearby shop of a mechanic named Simon Johnson.
(Last Thursday
when I spoke on "Suosso's Lane" at the West Bridgewater Library, one
of the men in attendance gave me a local place name for the location of Johnson's s garage. It remained in business there long afterwards.)
Chief
Stewart, committed to his anarchist suspicions, learns of this and tells
Johnson that if anyone comes for that car to call the police immediately. The
police want to talk to him.
What
happens next is what I call 'The Nightmare Scenario.'
Buda
apparently attends a meeting of the anarchist gruppo that meets in East Boston.
Sacco and Vanzetti attend this meeting regularly, and the group decides that any
literature in the possession of their anarchist comrades should be collected and
hidden somewhere so that the police do not find it and connect them to the
bombings that took place a year ago. Sacco, who has already bought tickets for
himself, his wife and son on a boat back to Italy because of a death in his
family, and Vanzetti, who is staying with his friend in Stoughton to help him
pack up his household, agree to go with Buda and a fourth anarchist to collect
this anarchist literature.
Buda
persuades them to meet him one night at Simon Johnson's house to retrieve his
car and make the job easier to do. Buda arrives with another anarchist
comrade, Ricardo Orciani, on the latter's motorbike. Sacco and Vanzetti, who
lack any transport, take a streetcar that brings them to West Bridgewater and the the four men
rendezvous at Johnson's house. The car mechanic stalls, while his wife slips
out to call the police from a neighbor's house.
The
anarchists grow nervous.
In
"Suosso's Lane" I dramatize this encounter. When Johnson tries to talk
Buda out of taking his car away, contending the vehicle has no plates, Sacco voices
his suspicions over his wife's departure from the house.
He says the
situations smells to him like "di
trappola."
That's how
it turns out. Buda and Orciani ride away
on the latter's motorbike, and the police never get their hands on either of
them. Sacco and Vanzetti walk back to the streetcar stop and board a car to
take them to Brockton, where they can catch a second streetcar to Stoughton.
The police arrive at Johnson's house after the four men have departed, but
hearing that two of the men were on foot, they call the Brockton police and ask
them to stop the car from West Bridgewater and arrest "two
foreigners." That's what happens. A Brockton officer arrives in time to stop the street car and finds Sacco and
Vanzetti on board.
They are
'foreigners' to his eye. And that's why they're arrested.
And they
are "indeed anarchists," as Vanzetti would later tell the court. That combination -- anarchist beliefs and Italian birth -- turns out
to be enough to get them convicted, and eventually executed, after a trial
widely regarded as a travesty of justice and still studied by trial lawyers today as a
classical example of the problems with capital punishment.
I look
forward to sharing 'the nightmare scenario' and other elements of "Suosso's
Lane" on Wednesday evening at Pilgrim Hall.
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