One Summer: America, 1927

business. It turned out that Ponzi had cashed in only $30 worth of postal coupons. All the rest was money taken from one lot of investors and given to another. Altogether, it is thought, Ponzi ended up some $10 million in the hole, equivalent to more than$100 million today. About 40,000 people had invested with him.
    From beginning to end, Ponzi’s scheme lasted just eight months. Ponzi was charged, convicted and sent to a federal prison for three and a half years. Upon his release, he faced additional state charges in Massachusetts, but absconded to Florida while out on bail. Florida was in the midst of its celebrated property boom, and Ponzi, irrepressible, very nearly succeeded in setting up a bogus real estate scheme there. He offered real land, but failed to tell investors that it was all deep seabed. In the summer of 1927, he was back in prison at Charlestown awaiting deportation.
     
    If most Americans were indifferent to the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti, a shadowy handful showed that they were not. On the evening of 5 August, two New York subway stations, a church in Philadelphia and the home of the mayor of Baltimore were noisily rent with bombs. One person was killed and several injured in the subway bombings. The Baltimore bombing puzzled many because Sacco and Vanzetti had no connection with that city, and the mayor, William F. Broening, had never expressed a view one way or another on the case.
    As ever, the police were clueless as to the perpetrators. For a time the chief suspect in New York was a man, identified only as a dental assistant, who was caught peering into St Paul’s Cathedral in New York in what police thought was a suspicious manner. When searched he was found to be carrying an anarchist leaflet. He was arrested and held without bail. His fate beyond that is not known, but he was not charged with any of the bombings. No one was.
    Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution was scheduled for the night of 10 August, the day that President Coolidge dedicated Mount Rushmore. Outside, angry crowds thronged the streets and mounted police strained to maintain order. ‘The air seemed charged with electricity,’ Robert G. Elliott noticed as he arrived in the early evening. Machine guns had been placed along the prison walls, and those manning them were authorized, it seems, to fire into thecrowd if things got ugly. Inside, Sacco, Vanzetti and a third condemned inmate, Celestino Madeiros – the young man whose confession to the Braintree robbery Judge Thayer had dismissed in 1925 – were given their last meals and offered last rites. Madeiros had nothing to do with the Sacco and Vanzetti case. He was just part of a job lot, and was being put to death now for the murder of a bank clerk in another robbery.
    At about 11 p.m., the witnesses assembled and Elliott readied his apparatus, but just thirty-six minutes before the scheduled execution a reprieve arrived from Massachusetts Governor Alvan Fuller, granting the condemned men’s defence team – which was essentially the lone, harried lawyer Fred Moore – twelve days to find a court prepared to grant a retrial or hear new evidence. Madeiros, though unconnected, got a stay, too, for convenience’s sake.
    More bombs went off. The home of one of the jurors, in East Milton, Massachusetts, was blown up in the middle of the night of 16 August. Happily, no one was killed. Across the country in Sacramento, California, a bomb blew the roof off a cinema. Why Sacramento and why a cinema were questions no authority could answer.
    Fred Moore could find no one to come to Sacco and Vanzetti’s rescue. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, the most likely saviour, had to recuse himself because of ‘personal relations with some of the people interested’. His wife had formed a sympathetic friendship with Sacco’s wife, Rose. Chief Justice William Howard Taft refused to cross the border from his summer home in Canada to make a ruling. Justice Harlan Fiske Stone likewise declined to come ashore from his cottage off the Maine coast.
    On the evening of 22 August, Sacco’s wife and Vanzetti’s sister went to the Massachusetts State House to plead with Governor Fuller. Fuller spent an hour and a half with the women, but would not change his position. ‘My duties are outlined by law,’ he said sadly. ‘I am sorry.’ The executions would proceed, as required by law, from midnight.
    Once again, the crowds assembled – though this time they were noticeably smaller