One Summer: America, 1927

Today little remains from that afternoon. The factory buildings are long gone, as are the cafés and small businesses that stood scattered along the street. Braintree is no longer a factory town but a pleasant suburb, twelve miles south of Boston. Pearl Street is a busy thoroughfare with turning lanes and traffic lights on gantries above the road. Where Parmenter and Berardelli fell is the site of a neighbourhood shopping centre, Pearl Plaza, anchored by a Shaw’s supermarket and Office Max supplies store. Beside a railway bridge that wasn’t there in 1927 is a small memorial to the two victims of the crime, erected in 2010 on the ninetieth anniversary of the robbery.
    Berardelli died at the scene. He was forty-five years old and, like the two men eventually convicted of his killing, from Italy. He had worked for Slater & Morrill for about a year, and left a wife and two children. Parmenter died at Quincy City Hospital the next morning. A devoted churchgoer who was popular with his workmates, he also left a wife and two children. That is about all that is known of the two victims.
    The getaway car, a stolen Buick, was found abandoned at a place called Manley Woods two days later. Police at that time were looking for the perpetrators of a similar, botched hold-up in nearby Bridgewater the previous Christmas Eve. Chief Michael E. Stewart of the Bridgewater Police Department decided, for reasons unattached to evidence, that the culprits in both cases were Italian anarchists. He discovered that a man of radical sympathies named Ferruccio Coacci lived near where the getaway car was found and for that reason made him the chief suspect. As the New Yorker archly noted some time later, Stewart concluded ‘that after a holdup and murder, the murderer would naturally abandon the car practically in his own front yard’.
    Although Stewart was indeed the chief of police for Bridgewater, the title suggests a scale of operations that considerably exceeded the reality. Stewart’s ‘force’ was a single part-time assistant. Stewart himself had no training in investigating murders and almost no experience of serious crimes. That is no doubt why he investigated with such enthusiasm. This was the chance of a lifetime for him.
    Coacci was quickly eliminated as a suspect: he had gone back to Italy. Living in the house now was a man named Mario Buda, and Stewart, in his dogged way, transferred his suspicions to him. On learning that Buda had a car in for repairs in the Elm Square Garage in West Bridgewater, Stewart left strict instructions with the proprietor to phone him the moment Buda called for it.
    One evening three weeks later that call came. The garage owner told Stewart that Buda and three other men had just come for the car, but had left directly because it wasn’t ready – Buda and one man on a motorcycle with a sidecar, the other two on foot. The two on foot were thought to be travelling to Brockton by streetcar, so Stewart alerted the police there. When the streetcar reached Brockton, a policeman boarded it, surveyed the few passengers and detained two uneasy-looking Italian men: Bart Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco. They were found to be carrying loaded pistols and a gooddeal of ammunition, some of it for guns other than the kinds they carried. They also possessed anarchist literature.
    For Chief Stewart that was enough. Though neither man had been arrested for anything before and though Stewart had no evidence to suggest that either had been anywhere near South Braintree at the time of the murders, he had them charged.
     
    It was not a good time to be either a radical or an alien in America, and a positively dangerous time to be both. America was in the grip of something known as the Great Red Scare. In 1917 and 1918 Congress had enacted two startlingly restrictive laws, an Espionage Act and a Sedition Act. Together these provided severe penalties for anyone found guilty of displaying almost any kind of disrespect to the American government, including its symbols – the flag, military uniforms, historic documents or anything else in which was deemed to repose the glory and dignity of the United States of America – and these were imposed with a harsh and punitive zeal. ‘Citizens were imprisoned for criticizing the Red Cross at their own dinner tables,’ one commentator noted. A clergyman in Vermont was given a fifteen-year jail term for handing out half a dozen pacifist leaflets. In Indiana, a jury took just two