For the newspapers the case lost its novelty, and the accounts of the trial often slipped to an inside page. What blackened the front pages now was the scandal of Mishawum Manor, a roadhouse north of Boston where, at a booze party a few years before, Adolph Zukor and several other film executives had been framed with naked call girls and shaken down for a hundred thousand dollars. The affair had been arranged through the office of District Attorney Nathan Tufts of Middlesex County. Only now was it coming to light, with Tufts, an old Yankee, and District Attorney Joseph Pelletier, an Irishman with a French name, facing disbarment. * * * * * It is almost impossible for anyone to sit through a murder trial without taking sides emotionally. With respect to Sacco and Vanzetti the sides had for the most part been taken before the defendants ever appeared in court. In the eyes of the court officers, sheriffs, police, janitors, stenographers, and the rest the two Italians were guilty, otherwise they would not be sitting in the cage. The feeling pervaded Dedham, and Frank Sibley, the dean of the local reporters, covering the trial for the Boston _Globe_, did not like it. As the weeks passed there were other things Sibley did not like. He had not liked the squads of state troopers. He could not help but notice the antagonism between Moore and Thayer. Perhaps it was not so obvious to the jury, but as an old crime reporter he had been aware of it at once. Thanks to Moore’s objections, there was a succession of lawyers’ conferences at the bench with the jury sent from the room. Once when the stenographer went up to record what was being said in the buzzing cluster, Sibley heard Thayer snap, “Get the hell out of here! Who called you up here?” Sibley, who remembered that old Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw would not discuss a current case even with his own family, was shocked by Thayer’s fondness for talking about the case to newspapermen. Several times on his way to lunch at the Dedham Inn Sibley had heard Thayer announce explosively that the defendants’ counsel were damn fools. A gauntly impressive figure who wore a Windsor tie and a Latin Quarter hat and could be recognized on any Boston street a quarter-mile away, Sibley decided early that Sacco and Vanzetti were not getting a fair trial. * * * * *