In the Bronx

By a margin no wider than desirable, the U. S. last week escaped a replica (with variations) of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. In the Bronx (outlying borough of New York City) a jury acquitted one Calogero Greco and one Donate Carillo of the murders of one Joseph Carisi and one Nicholas Amoroso last Memorial Day. The Messrs. Carisi and Amoroso, members of the Fascist League of America, had been on their way to join Fascist comrades in a parade. The Messrs. Greco and Carillo, hot antiFascists, were alleged to have set upon them at the foot of an elevated railway staircase and jabbed them, stabbed them, shot them to death.

The incident might have been confined to a few babbling Italian quarters, but for the alertness of liberty-loving Lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays and other advocates of the Sacco-Vanzetti brief in Massachusetts' recent spectacle.

Lawyer Hays and colleagues sniffed collusion between Tammany Hall and Fascist Italy. A defense fund was raised. Witnesses were guarded and supported. Pre-trial statements by the defense promised demonstrations on a scale that would dwarf the Sacco-Vanzetti spectacle if it were proved, as the defense said convictions would prove, that the Fascist League of America had enlisted pressure from the political overlords of the biggest city in the U. S.

But such demonstrations were averted. The Greco-Carillo defense committee enlisted the services of Lawyer Clarence Darrow of Chicago. Last week, in the tawdry Bronx courtroom, Lawyer Darrow, one of the most dangerous lions of the U. S. bar, exercised the expressive seams in his face, hunched his expressively hulking shoulders, intoned his expressive drawl, until he convinced 12 jurors who had no interest in the political passions of "little Italy" that Italian political passions were the motives underlying the prosecution; that the prosecution's case rested solely upon identification of a rear-view of one of the alleged murderers, the identifier being a Fascist organizer who hated the very benches the defendants sat on. The jurors acquitted the Messrs. Greco and Carillo after eight hours' deliberation.