The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

For about twenty-five years, ever since the publication of his Tragedy in Dedham, Francis Russell has unceasingly argued that Nicola Sacco was guilty of the robbery and murder at South Braintree, Massachusetts, for which he was convicted and executed. Now, claiming to draw on new evidence—a statement by Ideale Gambera, and some new firearms discoveries—he restates this claim, arguing that the case is now closed [NYR, March 13].

We do now have a great deal of new firearms evidence relating to the case—indeed, a wealth of new evidence illuminates virtually all the aspects of the case—but Mr. Russell ignores almost all of it. The new evidence is the basis for Postmortem: New Evidence in the Case of Sacco and Vanzetti (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), which I co-authored with the late William Young. It shows not that Sacco was guilty, but that both he and Vanzetti were almost certainly completely innocent of the South Braintree murders.

I shall confine myself here to the points raised by Mr. Russell Mr. Russell argues that bullet III, introduced at the trial as one of four bullets removed from the body of the guard Alessandro Berardelli, and shell W, introduced as having been found at the scene of the crime, have been shown to have been fired by the pistol Sacco was carrying at the time of his arrest—and that these exhibits must be genuine. In fact, virtually conclusive evidence shows that they were not genuine.

To begin with, the testimony of eyewitnesses to the crime, combined with the autopsy report of Dr. George Burgess Magrath, a pioneer in forensic medicine, indicates that bullet III—the only bullet fired from a .32 Colt automatic such as Sacco carried—could not have been fired from a different gun than that which fired the other three bullets that struck Berardelli. The three best witnesses to the crime all saw the murderer stand over a crouching and already wounded Berardelli and fire at least two shots into him. Dr. Magrath’s autopsy report confirmed that two of the four bullets he removed had been fired from above Berardelli and slightly to his right. One of them was the original bullet III. Based upon the testimony of the witnesses, who saw only one gun, these two bullets must have been fired from the same gun. The bullet III introduced in evidence, then, cannot be genuine. The shot some witnesses saw fired at Berardelli’s body from the bandit car, after he was already lying on the ground, could not have taken the track of bullet III. (In his new book, Francis Russell simply ignores Magrath’s autopsy and states, without any evidence, that the bandit standing over Berardelli hit him only once.¹ )

This is not all. Prosecution papers at the Harvard Law School Library and state police files released in 1977 allow us to trace the preparation of the prosecution’s case. These papers could have proved the authenticity of bullet III and shell W, but they do the opposite.

Taking shell W first, Mr. Russell states, “Just after the Braintree shootings a workman picked up four spent shells from the gravel near the guard’s body.” No one ever said this. The machinist James Bostock testified that he found “three or four” shells, and even this statement is suspect. Bostock had to be prompted by Assistant District Attorney Harold Williams to say this, and he had told his story on two earlier occasions without mentioning any shells.

The pre-trial notebook of Assistant District Attorney Williams indicates that Bostock did, indeed, lie. Writing in January or February 1921, Williams noted, “Shay picked up three shells where Ber[ardelli] fell and gave them to Sherlock.” John Shay was a police officer helping to investigate the case. A subsequent entry repeated that Shay had found the shells. Bostock was apparently induced to perjure himself because Shay would not testify to having found four of them. The evidence we have, then, shows that there were originally only three shells—not four.

As for bullet III, an equally important passage occurs in the proceedings of the Grand Jury that indicted Sacco and Vanzetti in September 1920. Dr. Magrath described removing the four bullets from Berardelli’s body, and noted that he had given them to Captain Proctor, the police firearms expert, more than a month earlier. He then told Prosecutor Frederick Katzmann that he had “an opinion that they all may have been fired by the same gun,” and added, “They looked exactly alike.” Moments later Katzmann asked, “You have personally been in consultation with me on experiments as to the type of gun from which the four bullets were discharged? You did not personally experiment to see?” “No, I did not,” replied the doctor.

These statements are significant because the key difference between the bullet III we have today and the other three Berardelli bullets is obvious to the naked eye. Because it came from a Colt, the grooves left by the rifling marks on the barrel slant to the left, while the groves on the other bullets slant to the right. We do not know if Magrath would have noticed this difference, but we know from Proctor’s trial testimony that Proctor surely would have. And although at the time Katzmann asked his questions Proctor had had the bullets for more than a month, Katzmann was still proceeding upon the assumption that the four Berardelli bullets had come from the same weapon, as shown particularly in his use of the phrase, “the type of gun from which the four bullets were discharged.” And when Assistant District Attorney Williams asked Magrath to identify the bullets at the trial, he did so in such a way that Magrath never got the opportunity to see more than one of them at a time.

This evidence indicates that shell W and bullet III were fraudulent, and that a new bullet III was substituted for the original after having been marked, as Magrath’s was, with three scratches upon its base. The switch, in my opinion, was perpetrated by one or both of the two police officers who prepared the prosecution’s case: Michael Stewart, the Chief of Police of Bridgewater who arranged Sacco and Vanzetti’s arrest, and state police officer Albert Brouillard. Stewart had access to Sacco’s pistol during his investigation, and at the trial Williams rather pointedly refrained from asking Proctor whether he had had continuous custody of the bullets. The reason that Katzmann offered before the trial not to argue that a particular bullet had come from a particular gun—and the reason that Proctor and Charles Van Amburgh gave very tentative opinions on the stand—is that they knew they were not competent to match a particular bullet to a particular gun. Russell’s picture of a less competent Proctor and a “more capable” Van Amburgh is utterly without foundation. The testimony of both men, as well as that of the defense experts, was shown fifty years ago to be entirely worthless.²

Mr. Russell then points out that the thirty-two cartridges which Sacco had in his possession when arrested included three types of cartridges also found at the scene of the crime, including Winchesters whose manufacture had been discontinued. He also notes the more recent discovery that some of Sacco’s Peters cartridges were struck with the same tool as cartridges found upon the scene. His argument that these findings tie Sacco to the crime is based on faulty information and logic.

The four shells introduced as evidence included two Peters shells, one UMC, and one old Winchester—shell W, which was probably fraudulent anyway. Sacco’s thirty-two shells included the old Winchester type, some Peters, some UMC, and some US cartridges. But all this proves in itself is that both Sacco and the bandit had obtained mixed lots of cartridges. Sacco’s possession of the same three types is only evidence of his guilt if a random selection of thirty-two. 32 cartridges of different makes would NOT have contained those three makes. And in fact, these were all very common types of cartridges.

A similar argument applies to the 1983 finding that six of Sacco’s sixteen Peters cartridges were made on the same machine that made the two Peters cartridges found at the scene. We cannot evaluate the significance of this finding without knowing how many different machines the Peters company had making. 32 cartridges in the years before the crime, and whether cartridges from different machines were mixed together before sale. If they had fifty machines, this evidence might be significant; if they had two, or five, or eight, it would not, since a random collection of sixteen cartridges might very easily contain six from one machine. Since we lack this information, there is no basis for Francis Russell’s statement that this evidence “links Sacco to the crime.” It has nothing to do with the issue of the authenticity of bullet III.

The “obsolete” Winchester cartridges found upon Sacco, which were of the same type as bullet III, were actually about as obsolete as a 1983 penny is today. They had been manufactured until 1917, when Winchester discontinued civilian production, and the new type was less than two years old. Only one of the four firearms experts who testified at the trial even tried to find any old Winchesters, and his testimony suggests that his efforts were quite halfhearted. The pre-1917 Winchester cartridges actually took a very long time to disappear from circulation. A firearms expert hired by Herbert Ehrmann found several of them for sale in 1962.

Mr. Russell argues, finally, that neither Katzmann, the prosecutor, nor Williams, his assistant, “was of a character to have committed a fraud.” In fact, Postmortem shows beyond any doubt that they used evidence they knew to be false in order to convict Sacco and Vanzetti of murder. The most spectacular instance of this was their claim that Vanzetti’s revolver had been taken from Berardelli during the robbery. State police files show that Michael Stewart had discovered that Berardelli’s revolver was actually of a different caliber and serial number than Vanzetti’s. The prosecution nonetheless used this claim to send Vanzetti to the electric chair. Mr. Russell’s new book argues that Berardelli had gotten a different revolver from Thomas Fraher, but state police files prove that this was not so.

And now, Ideale Gambera.

I recently talked with Ideale Gambera myself, and he put his father Giovanni’s story in a clearer context. Ideale Gambera was an infant when Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. He told me that he never heard the other anarchists he mentions discuss the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and he first discussed the case with his father in the 1960s.

Like any other accusation or confession, Giovanni Gambera’s story can only be accepted if it includes facts which can be independently corroborated, and preferably by evidence of which the speaker was unaware. Gambera’s statements do not pass this test. They provide no new information about the crime itself—who else was in it, why it took place, what happened to the money, etc. Gambera does not claim to have participated in the crime himself, or even to have been a close friend of Sacco’s. We cannot even tell how he claimed to know that Sacco was guilty.