One Summer: America, 1927

people – ‘the greatest throng that has ever gathered in this city to greet any man or body of men’, in the words of one commentator. Though the crowd was good-natured, it was so vast and rolling as to be essentially beyond control. When the Lindbergh motorcade arrived at the Common, the mass instinctively surged forward for a better view. Such was the momentum, reported the correspondent for the New York Times , that ‘those nearest the middle were lifted bodily from their feet by the human pressure … Many women and children fainted and were saved from serious injury because the very weight of others round them prevented them from falling to the ground and being trampled under foot.’
    Two soldiers and a policeman who tried to go to the aid of a woman who had fainted were themselves carried away, as if on a great tide. Others struggled not to be pushed under the wheels of the cautiously advancing motorcade. It was a wonder that many weren’t crushed or asphyxiated. As it was, one man died of a heart attack and over a hundred were injured seriously enough to need treatment at field stations that had been set up around theCommon. Fourteen people required hospitalization, and nearly everyone, according to the Times correspondent, ‘returned home with bruised bodies and torn clothing’.
    None of this would get better as the tour proceeded. Jostled, pounded on the back, tearfully adored, Charles Lindbergh was beginning to realize that this was not a passing thing. This was now his life.
    It must have seemed as if nothing could eclipse the intensity of interest in him, but in fact something was about to, at least temporarily. In a prison nearby – close enough that those inside could clearly hear the cheers that greeted Lindbergh’s arrival – two mild-mannered Italian anarchists sat on death row awaiting execution for murders that millions of people across the planet were certain they did not commit.
    Their names were Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and because of them the world was about to light up once more.

A UGUST
     

T HE A NARCHISTS
     

     
    ‘I never know, never heard, even read in history anything so cruel as this court.’
     
    Nicola Sacco on being sentenced to death

C HAPTER 20
     

     
    JUST AFTER 3 P.M. on a mild, sunny afternoon in April 1920, two employees of the Slater & Morrill Shoe Company in South Braintree, Massachusetts, set off along a dusty, sloping road from the company’s offices on Railroad Avenue to a separate factory building about two hundred yards away on Pearl Street. Frederick Parmenter was a payroll clerk, Alessandro Berardelli was his guard. They were carrying $15,776.51 in cash in two metal boxes, the week’s wages for five hundred employees. Their route took them past another shoe factory, Rice and Hutchins, which occupied a five-storey building hard by the road, giving it a dark and looming air.
    As Parmenter and Berardelli passed the Rice and Hutchins factory, two men who had been loitering nearby stepped forward and demanded the cash boxes. Before Berardelli could respond, one of the robbers shot him three times. Berardelli sank to his knees and fell forward on to his hands, head hanging. He coughed up blood and struggled to breathe. The gunman then turned to Parmenter, who was looking on aghast, and shot him. Stunned and gravely wounded, Parmenter dropped the cash box and staggered into the road in a reflexive attempt to get away. One of the robbers – it is not clear from witness accounts which it was, or even whether a thirdgunman now appeared – followed Parmenter into the road and calmly dropped him with a single shot in the back. A gunman – again, witnesses could not agree which – turned to the crouching Berardelli and fired two shots into him from above, killing him.
    A blue car containing two or possibly three other men screeched up, collected the robbers and cash boxes, and sped off across the tracks of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, firing at onlookers as it went. The entire incident lasted no more than a minute. It is testament to how swift and shocking the robbery was that witnesses could not agree even roughly on how many gunmen they saw or which did the shooting.
    No one would ever have guessed that this cold-blooded but fairly commonplace killing on a back lane of South Braintree would capture the world’s attention, but what happened there that day made it the most consequential crime scene on earth in the 1920s.