Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday March 2, 1921 Salsedo Dead in New York City; Sacco and Vanzetti in Danger in Massachusetts
From the New York Liberator of March 1921:
One Dead-Two in Danger
By Robert Minor
-by Art Shields -cover design by Robert Minor
OUT of a window high in an office building in Park Row, a man’s body took the long drop to the street below. Early morning newspaper distributors and a policeman smoothed back the black hair on the head that rolled loosely. There were the fine forehead of olive skin, the black eyes and aquiline nose of an Italian.
The body had fallen from a window that gaped open in the half-dark of dawn, fourteen stories above. Investigation of the fourteenth floor showed that this was a window of a secret prison kept by the agents of the United States Department of Justice.
Do you remember “Palmer’s Revolution?” It was dated for May 1st, 1920. The Italian workman’s plunge to death on May 3rd from Palmer’s secret prison was its only casualty.
The secret jail, hidden away in an office building in the heart of the business district, was the headquarters for “Palmer’s Revolution.” In that resort, away from the restraints of regular prisons, Palmer’s agents handled “reds.” Andrea Salsedo was one of the working men that was being handled there. There was another man in the prison, Roberto Elia, a friend of the dead man. Elia had seen that Salsedo’s head and face were a mass of bruises. Salsedo had been taken out each day three times, he said, to be questioned and to be beaten so as to make him give the answers that were wanted. Elia said that he heard Salsedo’s screams while he was being tortured, and saw the agents examine Salsedo’s eyes and finger nails to learn whether the beating was going so far as to endanger life. When Elia went to sleep at night, the agents pointed to the open window, saying: “Don’t forget this is the fourteenth floor.”
In the morning Elia was told that Salsedo had “jumped out of the window.” The newspaper men and city policemen and strangers came, asking questions. The pile of shapeless flesh in the pool of blood below the window of the secret prison was embarrassing to Palmer and to Flynn of the Secret Service. Even the capitalist press stirred a little with the tang of the mystery. Did the man jump and kill himself, or was he thrown from the window? Was he thrown out alive? Or was a dead body dropped from the window to conceal the manner in which death had taken place?
The newspapers were shut off at last. The body was quickly buried without any coroner’s inquest. Roberto Elia was the only one who knew anything-except Palmer’s men. He was quickly deported to Italy, where he disappeared from sight. Then the Italian population of various American industrial districts began to make trouble. Agitators began to make protest meetings.
The two most capable of the agitators were Bartelomeo Vanzetti and Nicolo Sacco. Palmer’s agents found that Vanzetti came to New York even before the death of Salsedo, and they shadowed him back to his home in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and further on to Brockton. At Brockton Vanzetti and Sacco were arranging to stir the Italian population to protest in mass meeting. The Department of Justice had the local police arrest Sacco and Vanzetti, with the handbills advertising their meeting in their pockets. In every detective bureau a couple of dozen miscellaneous pistols are kept for the purpose of “finding” them on the persons of anyone that the police want to hold. The police held Sacco and Vanzetti in that manner, and questioned them as “reds.”
But the grumbling was getting louder against Palmer’s monstrous ways. “Red raids” were not the road to the presidency. The two Italians could not well be held and tortured as “reds.”
The police, who had been holding the two men for Palmer, were evidently given permission to use Sacco and Vanzetti for their own purposes. The police needed prisoners. The “crime wave” had already struck the Boston district, and struck it hard. There had been many hold-ups there, just as there had been in New York and in every other district, and the Massachusetts small-town police had been unsuccessful in catching the criminals. They needed Sacco and Vanzetti badly. They could use Vanzetti especially well, for Vanzetti had led in a cordage works strike in 1915, and had stirred up the Italians to give money to the Lawrence strikers and the Mesaba Range strikers.
The factory superintendents brought a plenty of witnesses. Vanzetti was charged with a hold-up in Bridgewater that had occurred on the preceding Christmas Eve, and he and Sacco together were charged with another hold-up and the murder of two men in South Braintree, which occurred on April 15th. $25,000 was offered for any testimony that would convict Sacco and Vanzetti of robbery and murder, and the witnesses came in herds. It was the favorite case of the Massachusetts small-town police. A boy had testified that he had seen a man run “like a foreigner” from the scene of a crime, and a woman had seen a couple of men talking “like Italians” across the street. Nobody identified the prisoners positively. The prisoners were forced to pose in melodramatic style as though using firearms. Still the witnesses were not sure of identifying them. But that didn’t matter. Vanzetti was tried for the Christmas Eve hold-up. He had an alibi that nobody would believe, because the witnesses were “Dagoes.” Twenty of them testified that Vanzetti had been selling eels in Plymouth, twenty miles away, on the morning and at the hour of the hold-up. Who would believe a “Dago”? A “Dago” selling eels on Christmas Eve! Nobody took the trouble to notice that it is a universal custom of Italians to eat eels on Christmas Eve. Vanzetti was convicted.
The jury was in doubt about it for a while, but while deliberating they got hold of some shotgun shells that were “found” in the pocket of Vanzetti by the detectives, and in the jury room they opened these shells, finding that buckshot was contained in them. They admit now that they convicted Vanzetti on the fact that they found buck-shot in their private examination of these shotgun shells-which evidence was not even known by the defense.
After the jurymen had been dismissed, one of them confided in the judge, showed one of the buck shot which he had kept as a souvenir. The judge listened to this account of the jury’s secret reason for conviction, cautioned the juryman to be silent about it, and then sentenced Vanzetti to fifteen years in the penitentiary. Now that the one man is convicted it will be “easier to convict the two of them of the murder of April 15.”Just as Billing’s fraudulent conviction was used as a preliminary to help in the conviction of Mooney!
In a few weeks Sacco and Vanzetti will go to trial for robbery and murder. The frauds of the trial forerun the event. A woman who offered to peddle an acquittal to the defendants for $50,000 has been freed by the court, and an attempt has even been made to deport Frank R. Lopez, who was a witness of the affair. The two Italian workmen must be electrocuted because the police have to get somebody for the crime wave, and Mitchell Palmer wants to get rid of those who raise questions about the torture and murder of Andrea Salsedo. Just as we suspected that poor Andrea Salsedo was tortured to death-perhaps the third degree was carried one step too far and the body thrown out of the window to conceal the murder-so we know the motive for strangling Sacco and Vanzetti.
We are not children. We know that Sacco and Vanzetti are labor agitators; we know that without being identified positively by any witnesses, and in spite of a thorough alibi they are likely to be electrocuted. We know that their electrocution will be very convenient to the human hounds of the Massachusetts industrial district and of Palmer’s secret police. That is enough. In these days when the whole rotten structure of the Mooney-Billings frame-up is tumbling about the heads of the official criminals who made it-let us decree that there shall be no more labor frame-ups! Let us raise money and send it to the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. The address is the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, 7 East 15th Street, New York.
[Emphasis photograph and and paragraph break added.]
———-
“Are They Doomed” by Art Shields -cover design by Robert Minor
———-
