A few days after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti their typesetter friend Aldino Felicani organized a defense committee among the East Boston anarchists. The seventeen members were skilled workers—one was a building contractor—but they were men detached from American life, distrustful of outsiders. The freeing of their comrades from the ominous charge hanging over them was, they felt, their affair. Their first pamphlet, published in Italian, appealed to “Men of Good Will.” _Two of our active good friends and comrades ... have become involved in one of those tragic, dark legal plots in which innocence has all the semblance of guilt, and honesty has the hypocritical mask put on by the subtlest of rogues.... In a country where subversive ideas are persecuted with Inquisitorial fury, anarchists are beyond the pale.... We are convinced that an attempt is being made, through the persons of Sacco and Vanzetti, to strike at all subversive elements and their libertarian ideas. A sentence ... would serve, in the hands of our enemies, to show that lovers of liberty are common criminals and that their ideas are not entitled to any of the civil freedoms.... We face a severe, a terrible test._ Energetically the committee raised a defense fund from the nickels and dimes and quarters of their countrymen in the crowded streets of the North End and East Boston. It was the committee that hired Graham as counsel, counting on his American skill to mediate between the two Italians and the complexities of Massachusetts justice. For the committee, the result of the Plymouth trial was a disaster. In New York, Carlo Tresca and his fellow anarchists were appalled by the verdict. Tresca sent Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, with whom he had been living since he met her in a 1912 May Day parade, to talk matters over with Felicani. “Gurley,” the founder and secretary of the Workers’ Defense Union, was bound for Boston in any case, to see what could be done for the aliens imprisoned on Deer Island as a result of the Palmer raids. With Mrs. Marion Emerson, secretary of a workers’ defense organization in Boston, she made her way through the twisting streets of the North End to the offices of _La Notizia_, and there, under the shadow of the Old North Church spire, they talked with the tall, indignant Felicani, who at that time could speak only through an interpreter. So it was that Gurley and Mrs. Emerson on a July afternoon in 1920 were the first non-Italian sympathizers to hear the story of Sacco and Vanzetti. Later Felicani took them to see the other now thoroughly worried members of the committee, who asked them to try to arrange English-speaking protest meetings and to help find a lawyer who would understand the defendants’ radical viewpoint.