The members of the committee were inclined to pay the money. Not so
Moore. Suspecting that the defense might be charged with trying to
bribe public officials, he—over Felicani’s protest—had Cicchetti and
Mrs. DeFalco arrested. Cicchetti was released but Mrs. DeFalco was
held on the technical charge of attempting to solicit law business,
not being an attorney. As no money had changed hands this was all she
could be charged with.
On the stand in the Boston municipal court she gave a rambling
account of how Cicchetti, a brother-in-law of her brother, had asked
her if she could help him see his friend Sacco. He had also asked
if she and her brother would go to Boston with him to see Felicani
about getting a Norfolk County lawyer to defend Sacco and Vanzetti.
She admitted that she had had talks with members of the Defense
Committee. One morning she had met Guadagni, who introduced himself
as Mr. Giovannitti of New York. He had told her the committee had a
lawyer, Moore, whom they were paying three hundred dollars a week
although he was not doing much. When Felicani had asked her what
lawyer she would recommend she had named Squires, whom she knew
because her husband was his gardener. She had arranged a meeting for
them with Squires at her home, but Felicani and Guadagni had never
showed up.
District Attorney Katzmann then took the stand to deny that he knew
Mrs. DeFalco. He had never even heard of her until her arrest. Percy
Katzmann said he had known her for about seven years and had employed
her as an interpreter in his Italian cases. Mrs. DeFalco had asked
him several times if he would take on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and
though he first told her he would not, out of friendship for her he
had agreed to meet Felicani and Guadagni at her house.
Inspector Flaherty, who had arrested Mrs. DeFalco, testified she
had said then she would “fix those anarchists.” She was found not
guilty. Judge Murray called her conduct “imprudent, unwise, but not
criminal.”[8]
Whatever Mrs. DeFalco had been up to, the episode and the standing of
the men involved gave the Greater Boston community its first inkling
of the enlarged dimensions of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Moore’s
propaganda efforts were getting not only action but reaction.
Even before Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, their names were in
the files of the Department of Justice. After the Plymouth trial the
Boston office began to take a more active interest in them. Agents
were assigned to attend the various Sacco-Vanzetti defense meetings.
One of them, Harold Zorian, even managed to become a collector for
the Defense Committee, although, as he admitted afterward, he kept
most of the money for himself.
William J. West, the agent in charge of the Boston office’s Radical
Division, furnished memoranda regularly to District Attorney Katzmann
about Sacco and Vanzetti’s anarchist activities. As Fred Weyand, one
of the Department’s Boston agents explained it:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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