The Penny Ferry - Rick Boyer (37 page)

•
that Vahey, the defense lawyer, and
Katzmann, the prosecuting attorney, were in cahoots. No surprise then
that they later became law partners.

•
that the trial was rigged from the
start, with the prosecution and defense planning and executing an
entire scenario that would railroad Sacco and Vanzetti straight to
the electric chair. This, then, was the origin of the orchestration,
the smoke-filled room and the mysterious "third hand" that
I had sensed from the moment I began to read the histories of the
case.

•
that Judge Webster Thayer knew of this
cabal and perhaps even had a hand in its formation. The letter was
not clear specifically as to the second point, but left no doubt as
to the first one.

•
finally, that Katzmann and Vahey owed
much of their plan's inspiration and execution to a brilliant and
energetic young industrialist-lawyer: Joseph Carlton Critchfield.

We read and reread the letter, which was copied in
typescript underneath the original photographed copy of the
handwritten note. Brian broke the silence with a low whistle.

"Unbelievable! Dynamite, eh? The whole damn
thing was rigged. Except I can't believe that stuff about
Critchfield. That's hooey. Pure bull."

Joe looked at me quickly. We didn't say anything. We
read the next letter. This was typed, and bore the letterhead of
Whitney & Steele, a textile firm in Fitchburg, now defunct. The
letter was written to a Mr. Lloyd Prill, Katzmann's assistant, and
was dated January 23, 1927. It explained that the greatest obstacle
to the final conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti, which, as the
assistant prosecutor knew, was vital to the interests of' American
democracy and industry, lay in the broad sympathy the pair of
renegades had managed to stir up in the working class. This must be
undermined, the author of the letter said, and at the same time the
alibis of both men must be discredited. He then proceeded to outline
two alternative plans to accomplish these goals. The letter mentioned
several other actors in the drama of Dedham by name, among them
Brockton Police Chief Stewart; Harry Ripley, the jury foreman who
hated Italians; Judge Thayer, who apparently was a close family
friend of the letter writer; and others. It was signed by the house
counsel for Whitney & Steele: Joseph Carlton Critchfield.

Underneath, instead of a typed copy of the letter,
which was unnecessary, were three affidavits from
handwriting-analysis institutes in Albany, Paris, and Toronto,
stating to Mr. Dominic Santuccio that the signature affixed to the
letter matched other specimens known to be those of Mr. Critchfield
and that it was genuine. Below these were two notarized statements,
one from a museum and one from a laboratory, attesting to the
authenticity and age of the letterhead, paper, and typeface.

We stood in silence reading and rereading this second
tidbit.

"I still don't buy it," said Brian. "The
Critchfield family . . . it's as big as the Adamses, the Lowells, the
Peabodys, His grandson's going to be governor. Hell, the old man
wouldn't be involved in this."

"There's a good reason for you to start buying
it, Brian," said Joe. "Just before he died from Sam's
bullet, Carmen DeLucca whispered the name of the man who paid him to
put the hit on Johnny Robinson and Andy Santuccio. Tell him what
Carmen said, Doc."

"He said three words to me: Old Joe Critchfield.
Then he died. Where does Critchfield live, anyway?"

"I think he's got a big estate up in Danvers or
Andover," said Mary. "Someplace like that."

"It's Andover. When they had you locked in the
john, DeLucca mentioned that they had nowhere to go, not even
Andover. Well Brian?"

Our police chief paced back and forth as if doing a
slow waltz step, looking at the floor.

"Hmmmph! I'll be damned. Well, assuming that
only part of it's true, it's no wonder old Critchfield wanted the
film. I wonder how he knew it even existed, unless Santuccio himself
told him. But I wonder why Santuccio didn't make it public."

"We'll never, ever know those answers,"
said Joe. "In fact, we still don't know the answer to the most
important question of all: were Sacco and Vanzetti guilty? We know
now that their trial was rigged, their lawyer was crooked, and so on.
But we've always suspected that. But were they guilty?"

Then we examined the last two prints. One was a typed
page. It was not a letter; it was a typed explanation of the
photograph, which was the fourth and final frame in the negative
strip. And
that was the heartbreaker.

The photograph was an old one. It was a street scene
in Boston. We could tell it was taken a long time ago by the old
landmarks, now gone, and the absence of present-day buildings. Also,
of course, we could tell by the clothes the people in the photograph
were wearing. It didn't take us long to fix the location: Boston's
North End, right along Atlantic Avenue at the Commercial Street
intersection, looking northeast across the harbor to East Boston. The
warehouses of Battery Wharf were unmistakable. The picture was filled
with pedestrians, some faintly blurred because of their walking. A
lot of the harbor was visible, including many boats and ships that
spouted great black plumes of coal smoke as they headed out to sea or
up toward the Mystic and Chelsea river channels. In fact, we soon
decided the picture was of the harbor, not the street. Two old tin
lizzies were parked along the Atlantic Avenue curb. In the foreground
was a group of three men who stood chatting, oblivious of the camera.
They were standing quite still, because there was no blur about them.
They stood out clear and crisp.

"That's him," said Mary, "on the far
right. See? He's holding his derby hat in his right hand."

She was right. There stood Nick Sacco, bare-headed
and instantly recognizable, talking with two friends. In his left
hand, the one nearest the camera, he held a piece of paper that was
not newsprint. It appeared to be a picture. If it was, then I knew
the tremendous significance of the old photograph, for Sacco's errand
to the North End on April 15, 1920, had been to take a family
photograph to the Italian consulate as the first step toward applying
for passports to Italy. As it turned out, the photo he took to the
consulate office was too big. He was turned down, and consequently
had no written proof of his visit that day. I explained this to Joe
and Brian. Both were slightly skeptical.

"
Too pat," said Joe. "That picture was
taken from about twenty feet away. Why would anybody do that? And it
just so happens that you've got Sacco in the picture, posing, with
his passport photo very conveniently displayed. Nah. Sacco was a
typical southern Italian type. Somebody got a ringer for him and
posed that shot"

"I agree," said Brian. "I'd like to
think it was genuine, but I guess I want to know how come a passerby
just happened along at just the right time and decided to snap that
shot."

"But wait," said Mary. "The shot isn't
of the men; they just happened to be in the foreground. The picture
is of the harbor. It's a good view too."

We all stared at the scene in silence. Sam's finger
went to the very center of the picture and rapped on it.

"What's this?" he asked in a low voice.
"What's goin' on here?"

He had pointed to a steamboat, bow toward the camera,
that was heading for a pier abutting Atlantic Avenue. Directly in the
path of the steamer, and broadside to it, was a smaller steam launch.
Upon looking more closely, we finally saw what it was that had drawn
Sam's sharp eyes. The launch was canted over unnaturally. It was then
clear to us that the bigger vessel was in fact colliding with the
smaller one, about two hundred yards out in the harbor. And the
collision scene, though by no means major, had been sufficient to
draw the attention of a sightseer with a camera at hand, for the
picture was framed around the two boats. They were the object of the
picture, though casual inspection wouldn't reveal it.

"That's one of the old penny ferries," said
Joe. "I've seen a lot of pictures of them. They operated between
Eastern Avenue in the North End and Lewis Street in East Boston. Fare
was only a penny for foot passengers. It was before the Callahan
Tunnel was built."

"I remember the penny ferries," said Sam.
"They were for the working people, the people who worked in the
factories . . . it was the only way they could get to their jobs, so
they kept the fare low."

"Listen to this," I said, laying out the
dripping print of explanatory text on the worktable. I then read
aloud to them the following explanation:

This photo was taken on the afternoon of
April 15, 1920, by Mr. Louis Perez of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, during
a visit to Boston. Mr. Perez's widow claims he was walking down
Commercial Street when he came within view of the harbor. Having his
camera ready for a panoramic picture, he planned to walk to the
water's edge. However, at the intersection of Commercial and
Atlantic, just opposite the old ferry landing, he saw that a
collision between the ferryboat Ashbumam, inward bound from East
Boston, and the cargo launch Grenadier appeared to be imminent. He
took the picture, unaware that Nicola Sacco was standing on a nearby
corner talking to his friends Dentamore and Guadagni, who promptly
left the scene for a coffeehouse. Unfortunately, they were also
unaware of the photographer.

Damage to the vessel Grenadier was minor,
and the incident, in spite of delaying the Ashburnam's four-minute
channel run by eight minutes, was soon forgotten by both crews.
However, the Coast Guard, which dispatched the rescue vessel Felicia
to stand by, recorded the collision as having occurred at
approximately 3:26 P.M., April 15, 1920.

* * *

I replaced the print into the washing tray with the
others. Nobody said anything. Sam went to the tray and picked up the
wet print again. He held it up, and I looked over his shoulder at the
face of the little dark man holding the picture. He was smiling. He
was smiling because he was going on vacation to Italy to see members
of his family whom he hadn't seen in years. But at the very instant
the shutter was released, Alex Berardelli and Fred Parmenter lay
dying on the roadside twelve miles away in South Braintree while the
Morelli gang piled into the big touring car and sped away with the
loot. And probably at the same instant Bart Vanzetti was sitting on
an overturned dory on the beach at North Plymouth, thirty-five miles
southeast, talking with Melvin Corl, the Yankee fisherman. They were
probably talking politics, workers' rights, socialism, and all the
other things that got Bart into trouble. And the events in Braintree
would sweep along and engulf these two men who scarcely knew one
another, would sweep them along as if they were in a riptide, so that
within a month they would find themselves taken off a Brockton
trolley car and arrested. And from the police station in Brockton
they would follow an inexorable course that ended in the low,
rambling, dusky hills of Charlestown, in the prison death house.
Ironically, Sacco's ultimate destination lay just outside the photo,
to the left.

And it broke my heart.
 

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

"Thing is," said Joe as he lunged so hard
into an egg roll that the cooking oil ran down his big chin, "thing
is, we gotta make the thing stick." He commenced chewing, and
his big soft eyes glazed over in ecstasy.

We sat around a big table in the Yangtze River
Restaurant in Lexington. I had just inhaled a tureen of hot-sour
soup, an egg roll, won-ton shrimp, and four pork dumplings with hot
sesame oil. I had warned my mouth, esophagus, and all parts below
that they were in for trouble, then thrown caution to the winds.
Nothing beats a good thing like too much of it.

"How?" asked Mary, whose mouth was swollen
with Szechuan spicy beef and fried rice.

Joe shook his head like a big bass fighting a hook.
The headshake meant that he didn't know, couldn't talk, or both. We
were thinking of an airtight way to nail Joseph Carlton Critchfield
to the wall, even though he was ninety-two years old.

"His grandson's the active one now," said
Brian. "Maybe he's the one we're really after. One thing: we're
not going to get anything firm on him because of that letter. It's
damning; it'll wreck his rep . . . but it won't put him away."

"We got to get him for killin' Johnny,"
said Sam.

"
I've got a nasty hunch," said Brian,
"based on a lot of experience, that if we don't make it tight on
the first pass, he'll slip through the net. He's got too many
connections."

"You're dead right," Joe said, rolling up a
pancake filled with mu shu pork: He fed the tube into his mouth; it
disappeared like a branch into a tree shredder. "I suggest
entrapment."

"Isn't that illegal?" I said.

"Yep. I suggest it anyway. Just for openers. All
Critchfield now knows are two things. One: nobody's found the
incriminating photographs. He therefore has good reason to suspect
they'll never be found . . . at least in his lifetime. Two: the
thugs— all three of them— who could testify against him are
dead, and nobody's come knocking on his door. He thinks he's in the
clear. He's finally breathing easy. He's ready."