The Best American Crime Reporting 2007
Guest Editor: Linda Fairstein

The crimes:

“The Loved Ones” by Tom Junod: were the operators of a New Orleans nursing home that didn’t evacuate before Hurricane Katrina struck guilty of negligence? Or did they care too much?

“The Inside Job” by Neil Swidey: the owner of a construction and landscaping business hires an accountant from a temp agency who proceeds to embezzle millions from him, largely without him even being aware of it.

“The Talented Dr. Krist” by Steve Fennessy: the perpetrator of a ghastly kidnapping does his time and even becomes a doctor, but can’t help getting into trouble.

“The Case of the Killer Priest” by Sean Flynn: a priest in Toledo is charged with having killed a nun a quarter-century earlier.

“Double Blind” by Matthew Teague: British efforts to infiltrate the IRA are so successful the double agents don’t even know whose side everyone is on.

“The School” by C. J. Chivers: an account of the Beslan school massacre in North Ossetia, as experienced by various survivors.

“A Kiss Before Dying” by Pamela Colloff: a high school football player in Texas kills his ex-girlfriend by shooting her in the head with a shotgun and throwing her body in a stock pond, apparently all in accordance with her wishes. He is acquitted at trial.

“The Devil in David Berkowitz” by Steve Fishman: the Son of Sam killer finds God in prison, or so he says.

“The Man Who Loves Books Too Much” by Allison Hoover Bartlett: a swindler steals rare books from second-hand bookshops across the U.S. He’s caught, but remains largely unrepentant.

“Dirty Old Women” by Ariel Levy: female teachers have affairs with underage male students.

“Who Killed Ellen Andross?” by Dan P. Lee: a pair of high-profile medical examiners face off in the murder trial of a husband accused of killing his wife.

“Fatal Connection” by David Bernstein: a Chicago escort is murdered not by one of her clients but by her financial adviser.

“Last Seen on September 10” by Mark Fass: a woman living in Lower Manhattan goes missing the day before the attack on the World Trade Center. Her family think she died in the bombing but others have their doubts.

“My Roommate, the Diamond Thief” by Brian Boucher: a man rents out the bedroom in his one-bedroom apartment to a mysterious fellow who turns out to be a jewel thief on the run.

“The Monster of Florence” by Douglas Preston: an American writer living for a while in Florence befriends an Italian journalist and they start looking into the case of a serial killer who terrorized the area years earlier. This gets them both into trouble with the authorities.

The book:

Like all the entries I’ve read in this (now sadly defunct) series, it’s great. I didn’t think there was a bad story. Levy didn’t do much with her quick look at teachers-in-heat, and Boucher’s piece is also a bit light, but they’re also the two shortest stories and still manage to be interesting and fun.

On the other end of the scale, C. J. Chivers on the Beslan school massacre is the longest piece and still feels as though it needed more room. It really should have been a book, complete with photos and maps, as it’s basically a collage of first-person accounts (or “a museum of words,” as Chivers puts it) and isn’t always easy to follow. Meanwhile, the fact that at least two of the stories included here – the ones by Bartlett and Preston – were later turned into successful books gives you some idea of the quality of the material.

I don’t go into such an anthology expecting much in the way of continuity in terms of the subject matter, so I was surprised to find a strong recurring theme. Perhaps guest editor Linda Fairstein had a predilection for a particular kind of crime story. However it came about, a lot of the stories deal with a betrayal by individuals in a position of trust.

We begin with the operators of a nursing home who put their residents at risk as a hurricane bears down on New Orleans. Next up an accountant embezzles funds from her employer. Then we have a bad doctor and a killer priest. Also we’ll have teachers having sex with their students and a financial advisor who steals money from his client before killing her. And finally the Italian police in “The Monster of Florence” demonstrate not so much ignorance and corruption (though there was probably some of that) as provide evidence that they’re not the kind of people you’d want to put in a position of authority.

A lot of this is a sort of sub-set of a message that a lot of true crime writing carries: that you can’t trust anyone. Put another way, “if delusion is our enemy, it equally may be said that trust is no friend of clear-thinking” (this is from the Introduction by the series editors). Or, as Duncan says of the treacherous thane of Cawdor:

There’s no art
To find the mind’s construction in the face.
He was a gentleman on whom I built
An absolute trust.

Indeed there is no art, as Duncan is about to find out by putting his trust in Macbeth. He’s learned nothing. That said, we learn from books as much as example and experience, which is one of the things that I think gives true crime real value. If not an art, there’s a skill to reading people that we can always get better at. It begins with realizing that there’s no one deserving of “an absolute trust.”

Noted in passing:

In my notes on Kathryn Casey’s She Wanted It All I talked about some of the stupid ways that not-very-bright criminals find to blow their ill-gotten money. I thought of that again reading about Angela Platt bilking her boss for millions and then spending it on not just a new house, a big-screem TV, and time-shares in Florida and the Bahamas but also “the kind of bizarre crap you’d expect to find if you could journey through Christopher Walken’s brain”:

A hot rod fashioned into a green monster with teeth the size of fence pickets. A 1931 Plymouth with the faces of Bonnie and Clyde and lots of bullet holes painted on it, bearing the Rhode Island license plate UMISED. Collections of rare guns and wretched movies. Talking trees inspired by The Wizard of Oz.

OK, I’m not sure what this has to do with Christopher Walken, and I have a small collection of wretched movies myself, but this sounds pretty bad. And there was more! Platt also had a life-sized statue of Al Capone wearing a white suit and chomping on a cigar. For her brother’s wedding she hired the entire Riverdance touring troupe (at a cost of over a quarter million dollars) and Burt Bacharach (nearly $400,000) to perform. Given that her boss hardly even noticed the money she was siphoning off to pay for all this, I really had to laugh.

I’d forgotten how David Berkowitz had been caught. A woman had seen his car being ticketed on the night of one of the killings and reported it. When police investigated they turned up a lot of suspicious information relating to Berkowitz, and when they tracked down the car (Berkowitz hadn’t changed his plates) they found he’d left a gun lying unconcealed in the back seat.

It’s interesting how these routine traffic violations have played a role in catching famous bad guys. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was caught because an officer noticed that his car had false plates. Timothy McVeigh was only stopped while leaving Oklahoma City because he hadn’t attached plates to the vehicle he was driving. It’s the little things that trip you up.

Takeaways:

While not everyone is a potential killer, it’s a safe bet that nobody is exactly what they seem to be. In any event, you should always question people in positions of trust and authority unless you know they’ve earned it. They rarely have.

True Crime Files

Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism
By Jeffrey Toobin

The crime:

On April 19, 1995 (the second anniversary of the end of the Waco siege) Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. There were 168 dead, including 19 children. McVeigh was quickly apprehended and after being found guilty executed by lethal injection. His associate Terry Nichols, who helped him build the bomb, is serving a life sentence.

The book:

Homegrown is the opposite of a timely book, coming out nearly thirty years after the events it describes and the extensive media coverage it attracted. Ten years ago I reviewed a book on the subject – Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed – and Why It Still Matters by Andrew Gumbel and Roger G. Charles – that took a very critical look at the investigation and the question of whether McVeigh and Nichols were working alone. Jeffrey Toobin doesn’t mention Oklahoma City and I don’t know if he even read it, but he takes the opposing side, praising the efforts of law enforcement and arguing that there were no shadowy connections between McVeigh and various right-wing militia movements.

Which is not to say he doesn’t see McVeigh as part of the same tide of extremism that was swelling in America at the time and that later crested in the Capitol riots of January 6, 2021. The connection to the Capitol riots, and “the rise of right-wing extremism” more generally in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing is the main point Toobin wants to drive home. This he does repeatedly. Flipping to the index I found January 6 referenced over 30 times. It usually sounds like this:

The right-wing extremists of the 1990s employed the same kind of violent imagery that their successors would use more than twenty-five years later. Before Oklahoma City, [Rush] Limbaugh spoke of how close the nation was to “the second violent American revolution,” just as Donald Trump told his armed supporters on the Ellipse on January 6 to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” On both occasions, actual violence followed broadcast incitement. Clinton believed that this kind of language had real-life consequences, but that wasn’t the kind of conclusion that could be tested in a court of law. In contrast [Merrick] Garland and others in the Justice Department refused to tie the bombing case to contemporary politics, believing that such analyses could only confuse a straightforward criminal trial. Thanks to the reticence of Garland and his colleagues, as well as the tunnel vision of the journalists covering the case, the impression lingered that McVeigh was an aberration, a lone and lonely figure who represented only himself and his sad-sack co-defendant. This notion, as history would show, was mistaken.

Or:

The events of January 6, 2021 saw the full flowering of McVeigh’s legacy in contemporary politics. McVeigh was obsessed with gun rights; he saw the bombing as akin to the revolutionary struggle of the Founding Fathes; and he believed that violence was justified to achieve his goals. So did the rioters on January 6.

And so on. From their embrace of violence, performative rage (“the fight – was the end in itself”), fetishization of the Second Amendment, invocation of the spirit of ’76, and inspiration drawn from The Turner Diaries (elevated into a kind of sacred text), a clear line runs from McVeigh to today’s right-wing militias. What has mainly changed is the way the Internet and social media now allow for greater mobilization of the “army” that McVeigh could only dream of. McVeigh read books and listened to the radio and shortwave. He wrote letters to the editors of local newspapers and to his representatives in congress. He met up with kindred spirits in the flesh at gun shows. What he “lacked was something that hadn’t been invented.” “The digital radicalization of McVeigh’s descendants,” Toobin notes, “was much faster and more efficient.” “More than any other reason, the internet accounts for the difference between McVeigh’s lonely crusade and the thousands who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

I’m in broad agreement with this point of view, as it’s part of a larger question that historians and pundits have been discussing ever since the rise of Trump: to what extent did Trump and his MAGA movement mark a significant break with traditional Republican values, and to what extent was he the culmination of the American right’s long slide into violent insanity? Toobin clearly comes down on the side of continuity, and I think he makes a strong case. There were some places, however, where I thought he pressed too hard. At one point, for example, he tries to rope McVeigh in with “incel” culture:

McVeigh came of age before the term “incel” – involuntary celibate – came into wide use. Like the incels of a later day, McVeigh was unable to attract the sexual interest of women and responded with rage toward them.

This appears to be mistaken just on the basis of Toobin’s own reporting. For starters, I wasn’t sure what rage he was referring to, aside from McVeigh’s anger at his mother. But more to the point, McVeigh himself claimed to his lawyers that he’d had eight sexual partners, “three of them the wives of friends” (including the wife of Terry Nichols). A serial cuckolder isn’t an incel, and I wouldn’t have thought having eight partners by one’s early 30s was considered batting at such a low average as to be described as “unable to attract the sexual interest of women.”

Even without knowing anything of McVeigh’s sexual history, my own knee-jerk reaction against calling him an incel had to do with his height. Are there many tall incels? According to dating data, height is a primary (if not the primary) sexual selector, and McVeigh at 6’3” would be considered pretty much ideal in this regard. In comparison, famous killer incels Elliot Rodger and Alex Minassian were both 5’9,” which isn’t short but didn’t make them irresistible.

I’ve noted this dangerous predilection women have for tall men before in these notes, and the point here is that just by being 6’3” McVeigh seems to have had no problem attracting at least some women, despite having no job, living out of his car, and only possessing average looks combined with a rebarbative personality. But he also seems to not have been that interested in women anyway, or bothered seeking them out, which sort of kills your chances. In any event, it’s interesting that he took exception to a New York Times story that considered him to be “asexual” because he did his own dishes – a judgment that shows how facile such analyses can be.

Calling McVeigh an incel though isn’t just another way to tie his case in with more recent cultural trends but is part of the usual pattern, at least among not very good writers, of painting a villain as black as possible every chance you get. McVeigh was an evil man, but having said that, what purpose is served by calling him an incel, or a coward? Here is Toobin trying to explain “the real reason” why McVeigh didn’t shoot Charlie Hanger, the officer who arrested him:

In Iraq, McVeigh could fire a projectile from a Bradley and still strike a target far off in the distance. In Oklahoma City, he could put in his earplugs and set off a bomb that targeted faceless federal employees he would never see. But McVeigh never had the guts to kill a man face-to-face.

This struck me as a really cheap shot, and stupid. Because why does it take guts to kill someone face-to-face? I would have thought that this was just the mark of a psychopath. Would killing Hanger have made McVeigh more of a man?

I guess this is a minor point though, when placed in context. Overall I thought Toobin did a good job here retelling the story, though I was surprised given the amount of material he had to mine (courtesy of McVeigh’s lawyer rather dubiously donating all of his material on the case to a library in Texas) how little here is actually new. But did we not know all about McVeigh before this? What was there to find out? Toobin seems mainly intent on putting to rest ideas that McVeigh had help from anyone other than Nichols and Michael Fortier. This seems pretty convincing, though I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the “clutter” that the prosecution didn’t want to bring into their case might have also included other individuals or even groups who were to some degree in the know.

I also wasn’t as impressed as Toobin by the efforts of law enforcement and the prosecutors. They did their job. But the fact is this was as open-and-shut a case as you could imagine. Toobin frankly calls McVeigh’s defence to be “hopeless.” It’s also true that McVeigh was apprehended by accident, after being pulled over for failing to attach a licence plate to his car (much the same way Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, would be caught). Nichols, for his part, would basically turn himself in. Then, after McVeigh was in custody he pretty much gave himself up and wanted to sound a call to arms/become a martyr to his cause. The fantastic sums his lawyers were provided to defend him seems mostly to have been wasted on what were basically just expensive vacations.

The most disturbing thing in the book though is the conclusion Toobin draws: that what was once extreme has become mainstream. The so-called Overton window has shifted. To take just one example:

The McVeigh prosecutors put the “civil war” issue in front of the jury to show how extreme and exotic the defendant’s views were. But a quarter century later, McVeigh’s view was close to the conservative movement norm. This view – about the possibility of civil war – became mainstream as the passions underlying the January 6 insurrection roiled conservatives during the Biden presidency. According to an Economist/YouGov poll in the summer of 2022, 43 percent of Americans believe it’s at least somewhat “likely” that “there will be a U.S. civil war within the next decade.” More than half of Republicans feel that way, and 21 percent of “strong Republicans” believe a civil war is “very likely.” McVeigh’s extremism had spread to much of the contemporary Republican Party.

First you imagine these things happening. Then you calculate their possibility. Then you start talking about them as inevitable. And then they happen.

Noted in passing:

There’s long been a theory about how the American West has traditionally acted as a kind of safety valve for the discontents of “civilized” modern life. I don’t know if McVeigh was aware of this, but on some level he clearly was tapping into it in his understanding of the kind of American past he wanted to return to: “I want a country that operates like it did 150 years ago – no income taxes, no property taxes, no oppressive police, free land in the West.” The frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner is still in play, at least in some minds.

I’ve written before about the strange way that some cases strike the fancy of the public and stick in the public consciousness more than others. At around the same time as the Oklahoma City bombing trial was going on (in Denver) there were the O. J. Simpson civil trial and the JonBenét Ramsey murder, and it’s hard to say if the bombing will last longer in memory than either of those. That may sound callous and even cruel, but as Toobin points out at one point it may have been technically inaccurate to say, as many media figures and even the FBI did at the time, that the bombing was “the deadliest act of homegrown terrorism in U.S. history.”

It was not; indeed, the bombing was not even the deadliest terror attack in Oklahoma history. In June 1921, a white mob in Tulsa conducted a pogrom and killed about three hundred Black residents of the city’s Greenwood neighborhood. In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, the Tulsa race massacre was scarcely mentioned.

Actually, before there was a spate of interest thrown up by a book and documentary recently, I think the Tulsa race riots had been almost completely forgotten. Similarly, the Bath, Michigan school bombing of 1929, which killed 44 people (38 of them students) is an event that very few people know anything about today. Or take this list that Toobin provides in talking about the 1994 bill before Congress to ban assault weapons:

Assault weapons – that is, short-stock semiautomatics, with magazines for multiple rounds – had figured in several recent mass murders at the time. In 1989, a teacher and thirty-four children were shot by an intruder in an elementary school in Stockton, California, in 1991, a gunman killed twenty-three people at a Luby’s restaurant in Killeen, Texas; eight people were killed in a San Francisco law firm in July 1993. (Notably, as the roll call of mass shootings continued in subsequent decades, these horrors have been largely forgotten.)

Guilty as charged. I pulled a blank on all of these, though the Luby’s shooting did ring a distant bell.

It really is impossible to say what historical events, or cultural artefacts, are going to stay with us. Here, for example, is a bit Toobin takes from the summation of McVeigh’s lawyer, Stephen Jones:

Forty years ago this very month, there was a major literary event in this country. James Gould Cozzens’ great novel, By Love Possessed, was published. And for people of my generation and my mother and father’s generation, and I’m sure some but not all of you, that novel remains with us today, though its author has long since been forgotten. The book was an instantaneous best seller. It stayed at the top of the New York Times best seller list for over a year. It was a Reader’s Digest condensed book. It won for the author not only the Howell prize but a cover story on Time magazine. And eventually as you might expect, it was made into a movie and then translated into some 14 or 15 languages throughout the world.”

Again, and perhaps with even greater embarrassment, I have to plead guilty. I couldn’t remember ever having heard of By Love Possessed, book or movie, before this, or for that matter of the Howell Prize (technically the William Dean Howells Medal, which Toobin also must not have known anything about). I know I must have at least read Dwight Macdonald’s review, but there’s no memory of any of it now. The author, I can testify, has indeed “long since been forgotten.” This is just the way cultural memory works. Or doesn’t work.

Takeaways:

There’s nothing new about violent right-wing extremism in America. What has changed is how mainstream it has become. A lot of that is probably due to the Internet and social media, as people bring the poison into their homes and their phones, but it’s also due to the rot now spreading down from the top. All of which makes me think that it’s probably impossible now to root out.

True Crime Files

American Demon: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper
By Daniel Stashower

The crime:

Between 1935 and 1938 at least twelve people are believed to have been the victims of an unidentified serial killer in Cleveland, Ohio. The bodies were found in a dismembered state, mostly in the area of a shantytown known as Kingsbury Run. Eliot Ness, Cleveland’s Public Safety Director at the time, was in charge of the investigation.

The book:

I’m surprised that the case of the Cleveland Torso Killer, or Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, isn’t better known. But it’s an interesting question – one I’ve addressed before and will again – as to why some crimes grab hold of the public imagination and have more staying power in the culture than others. As an unsolved series of murders with the highest possible gore quotient – “those two qualities guaranteed to compel enduring fascination,” in the words of James Jessen Badal – you’d think it would have attracted greater attention than it has. As it is, American Demon takes its place on my shelf alongside Badal’s In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland’s Torso Murders and the comic adaptation Torso by Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyko, but that’s all I have and I don’t think there’s a whole lot else out there.

Maybe, in part, it’s the absence of good information. As Badal reports (and his book remains the authoritative account), the original case files have vanished and it’s not clear they’d add much anyway. The victims mostly were, and to this day remain, unknown, and the couple we can name we can’t say very much about. Nor is the killer easily pigeonholed. He (assuming it was a he, which seems to me a pretty safe bet) killed men and women, making the sexual nature of the crimes, if there was one, hard to figure. Usually unsolved crimes give us a little more to go on. Here, even the leading suspect – a disturbed ex-doctor named Francis (Frank) Sweeney – seems only the most likely candidate in a thin field.

That said, there was a lot of forensic evidence, from the actual body parts to their distinctive wrappings. I don’t think it’s just the so-called “CSI effect” that makes me think such murders would be easy to solve today. The police at the time were hard working, but before the invention of the term “serial killer” no one seemed sure how to proceed, or what they were looking for. “Is there someone in Cuyahoga county a madman whose god is the guillotine?” a Cleveland newspaper asked. “What fantastic chemistry of the civilized mind converted him into a human butcher?” As Stashower points out, “This was a question that the Cleveland police of 1936 were ill-equipped to answer.” You can tell just from the way the questions were put, the sort of language used (“fantastic chemistry” of the mind), that they had a problem. And when Ness’s external help came in the form of “the first policeman in America with a PhD,” who also happened to be one of the people credited with inventing the pseudoscientific “lie detector” machine, then you get some idea of the lack of professional expertise available.

Still, you would have expected the police to come up with something more. As it is, they couldn’t even identify the “tattooed man” – whose tattoos were far from generic. Nor was forensics up to the job. One coroner mistook a classroom skeleton for a victim of the Butcher, while a couple of others might have missed the fact that the body of one of the later victims had been embalmed. These were not little mistakes.

This general lack of fitness for duty went right to the top. Ness himself had no experience in chasing after killers, and what’s more didn’t see it as his job. “The director of public safety [Ness’s actual title] wasn’t expected to hunt murderers any more than he was expected to put out house fires or rescue cats stranded in trees.” Instead, he saw his mission as busting vice networks and cleaning up police corruption while modernizing the force. And in that he had some success. He apparently wanted nothing to do with the murder investigation and only finally got involved when the job was thrust upon him. That’s not a likely recipe for success.

Did his failure to apprehend the killer contribute to his subsequent breakdown? Or was the golden boy of Untouchables fame just another example of celebrity burnout? Given that this book is as much about him as it is about the Butcher’s killing spree you get enough information to make up your own mind. Whether you actually want this much Ness material mixed in is another question, as I felt it didn’t add much to the story. Ness had an interesting life story, but as this isn’t a biography a lot of it feels out of place and doesn’t add much.

As a final note I have to call out the supporting apparatus. There are no maps provided (and they would have been useful), and only a poor selection of photographs. There actually are a lot of good photos relating to the torso killings available, many of them reproduced in Badal’s book. They aren’t included here, and instead what we get are mainly pictures of Ness, some of them looking like publicity shots. Plus photos of all of Ness’s wives. These were unnecessary, and the way the photo section is tucked away at the back is another thing I didn’t care for.

It’s a good read, but I wouldn’t call it either the best book out there on the Cleveland killings, or the best book available on Ness. As an introduction to these subjects though it doesn’t hurt.

Noted in passing:

Soon after the killings stopped and Ness’s life started to circle the drain he was involved in a car accident in which he was intoxicated. He left the scene and might have got away (he hadn’t identified himself to the other driver) but for the fact that someone had taken note of his distinctive license plate: EN-3.

I think it was about thirty years ago that a thoroughly disreputable person (not a friend) told me to never get vanity license plates. When another person I was with asked him why not he simply replied “Too easy to identify.” So I guess he had a point.

Takeaways:

In the 1930s having six small tattoos about your body was enough to make you a “tattooed man,” and most likely a sailor or ex-con. Today it just means you’re a guy with some ink.

True Crime Files

Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind
By Bruce Watson

The crime:

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were a pair of Italian immigrants accused of killing two men in the commission of an armed robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts. Despite a weak case against them they were convicted at trial, in part because of prejudice due to their being immigrants and anarchists but also because of poor representation by a grandstanding defence lawyer at trial. They were sentenced to death in 1921, and after years of appeals (but no retrial) and a global outcry were finally sent to the electric chair in 1927.

The book:

The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti actually wasn’t that big a deal initially, and nowhere near “trial of the century” billing. But it became an enormous cause célèbre, attracting media attention around the world. As I understand it this book is the fullest treatment of a case that had enormous political significance at the time and that has become something of a legend in the annals of criminal justice.

It was also a very complicated case, and I don’t think Bruce Watson explains it all that well. To be sure, this is a fair-minded and exhaustive account, but I got confused trying to follow things like the ballistics evidence and the varying eyewitness reports. Though in fairness they seemed to confuse the jury too. The witnesses in particular were all over the map with their testimony, not just because eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable but because some people will do anything for attention, to feel important, or just to be listened to. It has always been thus.

Watson doesn’t argue a side but I think he lines up with what is the general consensus, which is that Sacco and Vanzetti were railroaded. So how did things go so wrong?

Albert Einstein remarked, with specific respect to this case, that “even the most perfectly planned democratic institutions are no better than the people whose instruments they are.” As we’ve seen in our own time, the guardrails can’t be expected to hold if there’s something rotten in the culture. And it seems there’s always something rotten in the culture. Watson speculates on the social and political psychology of the jazz era in ways that really strike home today.

In Watson’s analysis the 1920s were a time of “culture war,” driven by cults of celebrity, newness, and consumerism. “But of all the decade’s casualties,” Watson writes, “the least lamented was the death of compassion.” In such a time the defence lawyers “would never rally the American masses to their cause.”

An amusement park is a poor place to gather marchers. Radicals had been shouting for decades – about the McNamaras, Tom Mooney, the “capitalist” war, and now Sacco and Vanzetti – and what good had their carping done? Labor unions were shrinking, the war had whipped patriotism to an all-time high, and the flu’s staggering toll suggested how unforgiving this world could be. In the midst of frivolity, the idea of risking one’s reputation for two down-and-out anarchists seemed quaint. . . . Had they been condemned during a sober decade, they might have tapped a collective sense of justice. Yet Sacco and Vanzetti were men of their times, and their times were too hurried to care about immigrants, radicals, or so-called frame-ups. Besides, hadn’t the papers said they were guilty?

Reading this I had to wonder what decade in America’s history Watson would count as “sober.” Certainly in the years since compassion hasn’t had much of a rebound, and I don’t think there’s any evidence of a growing “collective sense of justice” in our own time. Perhaps among the so-called “greatest generation,” those who survived the Depression and the Second World War, there might have been the requisite sobriety for the guardrails to have held. But I can’t think of any other time I would have bet on it.

Noted in passing:

Watson mentions the discomfort of the (all-male) jury, who had to swelter sequestered through a miserably hot trial and who had not been able to bathe in more than two weeks before being taken to the basement of a local jail to wash up. I’m sure they were in need of a good bath, but it’s also true that it’s only in our present day and age, with the convenience of modern baths and showers, that daily bathing has come to be seen as a requirement. It was typical of working men just a generation older than me to only properly bathe once a week. This was usually on a Sunday. They did, however, wash their hands and face more frequently than people do today.

Takeaways:

One of the worst things that can happen to anyone is to become the target of a police investigation. The dreaded “tunnel vision” locks in and the whole point of the investigation becomes to prove, even frame, your guilt, to the exclusion of any other function. Even worse is when the judicial process has run its course and found you guilty. From that point on the establishment (police, judiciary, media), backed by all the resources of the state, will go to any length to defend itself, doing anything to “protect the verdict” and their own reputations. Even if you can overturn the verdict and gain your freedom, it’s unlikely you’ll get any admission from the authorities that they did anything wrong or made any mistake, since apologies only lead to liability. The case of Ron Williamson, as described in John Grisham’s The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, is a good true-crime example. That of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, mentioned here as precursors to the Sacco and Vanzetti hysteria, is another. Of course the classic historical instance was the Dreyfus case, which also illustrated how public opinion can join establishment forces and ally itself against the innocent.

This was the terrible situation Sacco and Vanzetti found themselves in. While there was a groundswell of sympathy and support for them nationwide and globally, this only made local media dig in more strongly against them.

To “Cold Roast Boston,” Sacco and Vanzetti were more than symbols; they were the line between the venerated Victorian age and the chaotic twentieth century. If a Massachusetts judge and jury could be overruled by a worldwide radical uprising for “these two murderers,” then the old Commonwealth and all its institutions would be fair game for modern mayhem. “No two lives,” one lawyer told a civic club, “are of greater import than the stability of our courts.” In the prideful state there were few dissenters, very few. . . . Touring New England, the populist editor William Allen White sensed only “bitterness and hate” toward the demonized men. Before visiting Massachusetts, White wrote [Massachusetts Governor] Fuller, “I had no idea that one could let their passions so completely sweep their judgment into fears and hatreds, so deeply confuse their sanity. I now know why the witches were persecuted and hanged by upright and godly people.”

This is a takeaway that I’ve expanded on because of its importance. Even proving your innocence, a near impossible task, won’t always be enough. The “stability” of the system will always take precedence, even at the cost of innocent lives. There is no worse trap to be snared in than the law.

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