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173 10 Infernal Machine A lthough the decision on appeal seemed to most observers the end of the story—the last event that newspapers would bother to cover, for example—that decision was not the end for the eleven Italians or for the lawyers and trial judge. The events leading to the trial, the trial itself, and the appeal all would continue to shape and define their lives and reputations. The appeal is not the end of the story either, for anyone interested in its most famous direct participant: Clarence Darrow. A state grand jury investigation, uncovered almost a century after the Italians’ appeal and nearly seventy-five years after Darrow’s death, raises new questions about the character and methods of the man who remains America’s iconic trial lawyer. Maddeningly, the investigation also fails to yield wholly convincing answers to those questions. The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision seemed to promise freedom for eight men and a woman, and indeed, it prompted immediate action. Just a day after the court’s decision, prison officials loaded the nine Italians whose convictions were overturned on a train back to Milwaukee. After arriving that afternoon, the nine were to stay only briefly in the sheriff ’s custody until it was clear where they would go next.1 Perhaps freedom was just a day or two away. Nothing would be that simple, though. Freedom would prove elusive. The Chicago office of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Immigration Service moved just as quickly as the state prison. By the time the train arrived in Milwaukee, the Immigration Service had arrest warrants awaiting all nine on charges that they were deportable as alien anarchists who believed in the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. They went from state to federal custody in the blink of an eye. A Milwaukee journalist, Robert Tanzilo, has traced the fates of some of the nine. Four certainly were deported immediately after their release from prison.2 Others escaped the Immigration Service’s net, but only for a time. Maria Nardini still remained in Chicago in September 1920, when she corresponded 174 Infernal Machine with the Wisconsin Board of Control about the fate of her brother, Vincenzo.3 There was one essential point of restoration for Maria: she and little Areno at last were reunited. Areno was an orphan at the state’s hands no more.4 But mother and son, too, eventually were deported.5 Sooner or later, the remaining few returned involuntarily to the land they had left for America’s opportunities.6 Back in Italy, Bianchi and Lilli remained under the eye of Italian authorities. They lived quietly, Lilli as a tailor and Bianchi as a baker. Even so, the Italian police watched Lilli on and off until 1931 and Bianchi until 1940.7 In the United States, despite Zabel’s ominous suggestion the day of the state supreme court’s opinion, the state never did seek to retry Denurra or Testolin. Referring to the supreme court’s rejection of the conspiracy theory, Zabel opined after time that a retrial would have been “an idle ceremony.”8 That was revealing. Without the opportunity to offer wide-ranging evidence of the statements and acts of others and with his proof against Denurra and Testolin limited to what they alone had done and said, Zabel saw little chance of conviction. If to convict them he had to prove that these two had committed crimes themselves, as opposed to proving that others had acted badly in ways that should count against the two on trial, Zabel decided that he would lose. There was a second reason not to retry the two. Zabel certainly was canny enough to see it. A retrial of these two relatively minor players in the Bay View pageant inevitably would have drawn attention to the police station bombing. That bombing had generated most of the energy that propelled the first prosecution. But renewed attention would have been embarrassing, for the investigation into the bombing had stalled completely in the nearly year and a half since the bomb meant for Giuliani’s church had reduced much of the central police station to rubble. Neither local nor federal authorities were any closer to an arrest than they had been the morning after the bomb exploded. A retrial of two minor players only could have reminded the public that the greater outrage—one that Zabel and the newspapers had linked so aggressively to these eleven...

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