Two Parallel Stories from 1927

On a clear summer day in 1927, Italy’s first international super-star athlete, Ottavio Bottecchia, was found lying unconscious on the side of the road, his skull and collarbone broken. He never woke up and died some days later. Leaning against a fence, the undamaged bike he used for training witnessed the assassination from a few paces away. Mussolini’s government’s official statement on the matter was that Bottecchia, the world’s greatest cyclist and Tour de France titleholder, must have been overwhelmed by the by the sun, swooned, then lost control on that straight and smooth road – his bike bucking him before parking itself.

          Bottecchia learned how to ride fast at the behest of exploding mortars while working as an unarmored bike messenger on the front lines of the First World War. His most famous act involved dragging a heavy machine gun behind his bike and up a mountain to a besieged artillery post. He won a bronze medal of valor for that, then returned to his wife, kids, and occupation as a bricklayer, impoverished and illiterate. While pondering the Italian government's answer to the yes/no question of whether the working poor deserved the rights accorded to all other humans, a fellow cyclist taught him to read with pamphlets on socialism. The leader of the athlete’s union gave him a racing bike, and soon he became a champion, using his perch on top of the winner’s podium to condemn Mussolini and his fascist goons.

           Bottecchia had authority: his skin looked as worn as his saddle, prematurely aged by a life of toil, and the hitch in his walk from one war wound or another spoke to his distanced but longstanding relationship with anguish. Off the bike Bottecchia stood a head above his peers, on it he passed his competition like fenceposts in a row. Even his rivals liked him. There are more films of Bottechia smoking cigars in the pace line than of him winning races. 

          Though he often traveled with a cadre of friends and protectors, he outpaced them on his bike where fascist thugs, waiting on blind corners, had a fleeting chance to silence him. He was known to switch his jersey mid-ride on races that strayed too close to the fascist-held territories.

           A year after Mussolini’s forces seized Rome, Bottecchia rode over to the friend who taught him how to read, and asked if he’d join him on a ride. But his friend couldn’t go out, he felt ill. He rode a little further and asked his old teammate, but he was too busy. Without witnesses, on the same stretch of road that saw the murder of his brother under the wheels of an anonymous motorist a couple months before, a conspiring mixture of either fate or, more likely, personalities arranged for the execution of Ottavio Bottecchia. The local government officials guaranteed his family a large insurance payout and the investigation was dropped.

            And we will never know who killed him.

***

On a summer day in 1927, two Italian immigrants – Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti – were killed by sudden cardiac arrest after having been strapped to live electric chairs in a Massachusetts state prison. Seven years of appeals prior, they were convicted of robbing the payroll transport of a shoe manufacturer and killing two of that company’s guards. Their deaths caused international and domestic outrage, as it was clear to many people with knowledge of the case that the trial was designed for an outcome.

Before Sacco and Vanzetti were apprehended, the officers tasked with solving the case learned from a passer-by that the assailants were probably Italians, and the worst kind too, as anybody could see by the long peel of tire left by their speeding vehicle. The investigators then went to a nearby auto mechanic and discerned that the car in the lift was Italian-owned. The width of the tires didn’t match those of the tracks at the crime, an inconsequential detail it turned out, because when Sacco and Vanzetti arrived to pick the car up, the officers had already decided to arrest them. In Sacco’s pocket they found a leaflet announcing Vanzetti as a speaker at an upcoming socialist rally, thus proving they were revolutionaries, possibly anarchists, probably Catholics. Around that time the actual vehicle used in the crime was found abandoned off the road near the shoe factory, presumably planted by the accused. With the murderers in jail, a motive assumed, and a spare murder vehicle found, the case went to trial.

When the prosecuting attorney asked Sacco if he loved America, Sacco said yes. When asked if he fought in the Great War, he said no. When asked why, Sacco said, in broken English that will be condensed here, that he came to this country because he believed it to be a republic, a place where all men were respected, where everybody had the right to a happy, healthy, verdant life. Wars are just a game for millionaires, and the working people, with the daily struggles imposed upon them by the elites, are seen in the best of times as tools, but usually as trash. Neither he nor Vanzetti wanted to contribute to their destruction.

Despite the ninety-nine witnesses who came to defend the accused, the honorable Judge Thayer (who was known to have little patience for Italians, revolutionaries, or the friends of either group) listened to the jury (all men of worth, selected from the local protestant fraternal orders) and pronounced Sacco and Vanzetti guilty. He stuck by that verdict through all the years of appeals, even after the state’s witnesses were discredited, even after the jury foreman admitted to prejudice, even after conflicting ballistics tests. Oh, yes, even after the notorious gangster Celestino Madieros admitted  to the robbery while standing trial for other crimes, Judge Thayer refused to recant.

Despite petitions, demonstrations, threats, and riots, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were sentenced to death.

And we know exactly who killed them.