Danny nodded.

“I know he’s like blood to you,” Luther said.

Danny held up a hand. He closed his eyes and rocked slightly in place.

“He killed that boy? For nothing?”

“For nothing but being black and alive.”

Danny opened his eyes. “Whatever we do from this point on…? You understand.”

Luther nodded. “Dies with us.”

Connor’s first big federal case involved an ironworker named Massimo Pardi. Pardi had stood up at a meeting of the Roslindale Ironworkers Union, Local 12, and proclaimed that the safety conditions at Bay State Iron & Smelting had better improve immediately or the company “might find itself smelted right to the ground.” He’d been loudly cheered before four other men—Brian Sullivan, Robert Minton, Duka Skinner, and Luis Ferriere—had lifted him onto their shoulders and walked him around the room. It was that action and those men who sealed Pardi’s fate: 1 + 4 = syndicalism. Plain and simple.

Connor filed deportation orders against Massimo Pardi in district court and argued his case before the judge on the grounds that Pardi had violated the Espionage and Sedition Act under the antisyndicalist laws of the Commonwealth and therefore should be deported back to Calabria where a local magistrate could decide if any further punishment were necessary.

Even Connor was surprised when the judge agreed.

Not the next time, though. Certainly not the time after that.

What Connor finally realized—and what he hoped would hold him in good stead as long as he practiced law—was that the best arguments were those shorn of emotion or inflammatory rhetoric. Stick with the rule of law, eschew polemic, let precedent speak for you, and leave opposing counsel to choose whether to fight the soundness of those laws on appeal. It was quite the revelation. While opposing counsel thundered and raged and shook their fists in front of increasingly exasperated judges, Connor calmly pointed out the logical strictures of justice. And he could see in the eyes of the judges that they didn’t like it, they didn’t want to agree. Their seepy hearts held for the defendants, but their intellects knew truth when they saw it.

The Massimo Pardi case was to become, in hindsight, emblematic. The ironworker with the big mouth was sentenced to a year in jail (three months time served), and deportation orders were filed immediately. If his physical eviction from the country were to occur before he finished his sentence, the United States would graciously commute the remainder of it once he reached international waters. Otherwise, he did the full nine months. Connor, of course, felt some sympathy for the man. Pardi seemed, in the aggregate, an inoffensive sort, a hard worker who’d been engaged to be married in the fall. Hardly a threat to these shores. But what he represented—the very first stop on the road to terrorism—was quite offensive. Mitchell Palmer and the United States had decided the message needed to be sent to the world—we will no longer live in fear of you; you will live in fear of us. And that message was to be sent calmly, implacably, and constantly.