One Summer: America, 1927

older. Neither would ever see his homeland again. Though both settled in New England, they would not meet until 1917.
    Sacco was small, lithe and handsome – ‘clean cut as a Roman coin’, in the words of one contemporary. Descriptions make him sound rather like the young Al Pacino – small, good-looking, quiet-spoken. He didn’t drink or gamble. He got a job in a shoe factory and soon was a skilled craftsman on good wages. Four years after his arrival in America he married and started a family. At the time of his arrest he was thirty years old and a good, hard-working family man. He didn’t seem an obvious candidate for anarchy.
    Vanzetti was a different matter. Though he had trained as a pastry chef – a respectable profession – in Italy, in America he worked as a common labourer on the lowest wages, almost as if he were seeking out privation to prove a point about the evils of capitalism. He was frequently unemployed, always hard up and occasionally near starvation. In the spring of 1919, however, his economic circumstances and, it would seem, his entrepreneurial spirit took a sudden turn for the better when he bought a fish cart, complete with knives, weighing scales and a bell for attracting custom, and became a mobile fish vendor in Plymouth, Massachusetts. At the time of his arrest, he was thirty-three years old and doing rather well.
    Vanzetti was an intellectual by nature. He read a great deal and lived quietly and soberly. He never had a girlfriend. He had a melancholy air and a sad, gentle smile. His eyes had ‘a tenderness that haunted one’, one friend recalled. His most conspicuous attribute, after 1917, was a vast, drooping moustache. Although his manner was affable and even sweet-natured, he was a bitter foe of the state. ‘Vanzetti was anarchism personified,’ one associate said.
    Vanzetti and Sacco were not especially great friends. They lived thirty miles apart – Sacco in Stoughton, near Bridgewater, and Vanzetti in Plymouth – and had known each other for less thanthree years when they became eternally yoked by the payroll murders in South Braintree.
    Arrested and taken in for questioning, they didn’t do at all well. They were unable to explain why they needed to be so extravagantly armed for a visit to a car repair shop. They claimed not to know Buda or the other man, and said they knew no one with a motorcycle – lies that were easily disproved. They denied that they were anarchists, and offered inconsistent and unpersuasive explanations for what had brought them to West Bridgewater. The suspicion has always been that they were there to move illicit materials – possibly explosives, possibly anarchist literature – and didn’t wish to incriminate themselves.
    Buda and the fourth man, subsequently identified as Riccardo Orciani, were arrested and brought in for questioning but released: Orciani because he could prove he was at work at the time of both robberies and Buda, who was very short and stocky, because he did not fit any of the witness descriptions. By default, therefore, Sacco and Vanzetti became the chief and only suspects, even though neither had a criminal record or links to any criminal gangs. All that the police had against them was that they were armed and untruthful when arrested.
    Nearly all the evidence pointed away from them. They were the mildest of men. Nothing in their natures suggested the least capacity for violence. They had never even been known to raise their voices. No evidence of any kind, such as fingerprints on the stolen car, placed them at the scene of the crime.
    Three witnesses, shown photographs, identified one of the gunmen as Anthony Palmisano – but Palmisano, it turned out, had been in prison in Buffalo since the previous January. At least two witnesses said that the principal gunman had a pencil-thin moustache, whereas Sacco had none and Vanzetti was famous for the luxuriant, drooping shag that all but covered his mouth. When Sacco and Vanzetti were paraded before witnesses they were not presented as part of a line-up, as procedures required, but shownindividually to the witnesses, to whom it was made clear that these were the prime suspects. Even so, the woman who would be one of the chief witnesses at the subsequent trial failed to identify Sacco or Vanzetti when standing right in front of them.
    No one at first saw their arrest as a big story. A reporter from New York sent to Massachusetts to look into the case reported back to his