Investigations
The investigation conducted by the Bureau of Investigation stalled when none of the victims turned out to be the driver of the wagon. Though the horse was newly shod, investigators could not locate the stable responsible for the work. When the blacksmith was located in October, he could offer the police little information.
Investigators questioned a tennis champion Edwin Fischer who had sent warning post cards to friends, telling them to leave the area before September 16. He told police he had received the information "through the air." However, they found Fischer made a regular habit of issuing such warnings, and had him committed to Amityville Asylum, where he was diagnosed as insane but harmless.
The Bureau of Investigation and local police investigated the case for over three years without success. Occasional arrests garnered headlines but each time they failed to support indictments. Most of the investigation initially focused on anarchists and communists, including the Galleanist group, who authorities believed were involved in the 1919 bombings. During President Warren G. Harding's administration, officials evaluated the Soviets as possible masterminds of the Wall Street bombing and then the Communist Party USA. In 1944, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, successor to the BOI, investigated again. It concluded that its agents had explored many radical groups, "such as the Union of Russian Workers, the I.W.W., Communist, etc....and from the result of the investigations to date it would appear that none of the aforementioned organizations had any hand in the matter and that the explosion was the work of either Italian anarchists or Italian terrorists."
One Galleanist in particular, Mario Buda (1884–1963), an associate of Sacco and Vanzetti, and the owner of a car which led to the arrest of the latter for a separate robbery and murder, is alleged by some historians, including Paul Avrich, to be the man most likely to have planted the bomb. Avrich and other historians theorize that Buda acted in revenge for the arrest and indictment of his fellow Galleanists, Sacco and Vanzetti. Buda's involvement as the Wall Street bombmaker was confirmed by statements made by his nephew Frank Maffi and fellow anarchist Charles Poggi, who interviewed Buda in Savignano, Italy, in 1955. Buda (at that time known by the alias of Mike Boda) had eluded authorities at the time of the arrests of Sacco and Vanzetti, was experienced in the use of dynamite and other explosives, was known to use sash weights as shrapnel in his time bombs, and is believed to have constructed several of the largest package bombs for the Galleanists. These included a large black powder bomb that killed nine policemen in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1917. Buda was in New York City at the time of the bombing, but he was neither arrested nor questioned by police.
After leaving New York, Buda resumed the use of his real name in order to secure a passport from the Italian vice-consul, then promptly sailed for Naples. By November he was back in his native Italy, never to return to the United States. Other Galleanists still in the U.S. continued the bombing and assassination campaign for another twelve years, culminating in a 1932 bomb attack targeting Webster Thayer, the presiding judge in the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. Thayer, who survived the ensuing blast that destroyed his house and injured his wife and housekeeper, moved his residence to his club for the remainder of his life, where he was guarded 24 hours a day.
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