FOOTNOTES:
[2] According to his teacher, no one in Milford ever believed Sacco was guilty of murder. After his arrest the Italian community ran benefits to raise money for his defense. It also contributed to his funeral expenses.
[3] The most sensational of the anarchist criminal groups in this century was the Bonnot Gang of Paris. In December 1911, the members attacked two bank messengers on the street, shot one, grabbed their bags, and made off in a waiting car in what was apparently the world’s first motorized holdup.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE PLYMOUTH TRIAL
The first of the East Boston comrades to visit the Brockton police station was Professor Felice Guadagni, a graduate of the Institute of Naples and editor of the Gazzetta del Massachusetts. He was proud of being an educated man and in spite of his anarchism liked to call himself and have others call him Professor. He found that his two friends did not seem to understand the reason for their arrest. Vanzetti told him with a shrug that even if they were going to be deported now, they would at least go to Italy at Uncle Sam’s expense. The point of Katzmann’s opaque questioning was suddenly clear when Guadagni explained that they were being held, not because they were anarchists, not for running away to Mexico during the war, but because they were accused of murder.
When the news of Vanzetti’s predicament reached Plymouth, Vincenzo Brini gathered his friends together to decide what to do. Like most aliens they felt confused when faced with governmental authority. Whenever such difficulties came up in North Plymouth—troubles with police or courts or town officials—the Italian community turned to Doviglio Govoni. Govoni, the Plymouth court interpreter, was also the local fixer. He knew English, he knew the judges and the district attorney and the sheriff, he knew the routine of the town hall and the heads of the various departments, most of whom he called by their first names. Whether it was a tax abatement, a couple of boys caught robbing a fruit store, a matter of filing first papers, or getting a runaway son out of the Navy, Govoni was the man to go to.
After Govoni had listened to Brini and the others, he told them straight off that they must get rid of their lawyer, Callahan. What they needed was a good smart lawyer, like Judge John Vahey of the district court. Not only did Vahey know his way around Plymouth, but his brother was a big Boston attorney who might come in handy in case things didn’t turn out right.
Vanzetti’s friends agreed. They and Govoni went down to the Brockton station the following evening with a declaration of discharge. They explained to Vanzetti that they would do everything they could for him, but that they needed a lawyer they had confidence in. Vanzetti, though he had come to like Callahan, signed the declaration.
Meanwhile Sacco’s comrades had engaged a Boston lawyer, James Graham. An Irish Catholic, Graham had built up a large practice in the Italian North End, where he was noted for his ability to get on with politicians and to get his clients off. The latters’ guilt or innocence did not concern him. He assumed that most of the Italians who came to him in trouble were troublemakers.
Harding’s positive identification of Vanzetti as the Bridgewater shotgun bandit had been enough to convince Chief Stewart, and on May 11 he filed a complaint in the Brockton police court charging that Vanzetti “being armed with a dangerous weapon did assault Alfred E. Cox with intent to rob him.” That same afternoon, to Stewart’s disgust, Orciani had to be released, since his time card showed that he had been at work in Norwood on the date of both crimes.
The preliminary hearing on the Bridgewater charge against Vanzetti was held in the Brockton police court before Judge Herbert Thorndike on May 18, 1920.[4] Graves, the truck driver, who had thought the bandit car a Hudson, had died in the interim, but Cox the paymaster, Bowles the guard, and Slip Harding appeared as witnesses for the Commonwealth. The three still described the man with the shotgun as having a cropped mustache but picked out the droop-mustached Vanzetti as the man. Bowles and Cox, who had been vague when they first saw Vanzetti in the police station, had by this time become much more positive. “I think he looks enough like the man to be the man,” Cox told the court, although under cross-examination he admitted that he was still not completely sure. Bowles was sure. “That is the man who had the shotgun that morning,” he said.
Harding remained as certain about Vanzetti as he had been at the station, but the car he had originally described as a Hudson Six had now firmly become a Buick. In addition to the three repeaters the Commonwealth had a new witness, a Mrs. Georgina Brooks, who a few minutes before the Bridgewater attempt had been walking down Broad Street with her five-year-old son. She had crossed just in front of the bandit car and had noticed the four men inside. The driver had followed her with his eyes as she passed. Now she picked Vanzetti as the man she had seen behind the wheel of the car. “I am positive,” she said.
Vahey having not bothered to produce any defense witnesses, Judge Thorndike held Vanzetti for action by the grand jury, and on June 11 two indictments were found against him: for assault with intent to rob, and assault with intent to murder. At the conclusion of the May preliminary hearing Assistant District Attorney Kane told the court that he had witnesses who would positively identify Vanzetti in connection with the South Braintree murders. On learning this, Judge Thorndike refused to admit Vanzetti to bail and remanded him to the Plymouth county jail. His trial was scheduled for June 22.
In the intervening weeks Vanzetti continued to insist that he had spent December 24, the day of the Bridgewater attempt, delivering eels to his customers in North Plymouth. Among Catholics the day before Christmas is a fast day, and among Italians it ends in a feast that always includes eels. Even the poorest or the most free-thinking of Italian families manages to have eels on that traditional day. Brini rounded up several dozen witnesses to testify that they had bought eels from Vanzetti or seen him with his pushcart the day before Christmas.
Sacco’s lawyer, Graham, became associated with Vahey in Vanzetti’s defense. Six years afterward, while in Charlestown State Prison, Vanzetti wrote a pamphlet, “Background of the Plymouth Trial,” denouncing both his Plymouth lawyers. One of his chief complaints was that Vahey had refused to allow him to testify in his own behalf. Vanzetti wrote that when they discussed the matter,
He asked me how I would explain from the stand the meaning of Socialism, or Communism, or Bolshevism, if I was requested by the district attorney to do so. At such a query, I would begin an explanation on those subjects, and Mr. Vahey would cut it off at its very beginning.
“Hush, if you will tell such things to the ignorant, conservative jurors, they will send you to State prison right away.”
Graham set down his version thirty years later. According to it he and Vahey went to the Plymouth jail one evening and spent hours discussing whether or not Vanzetti should take the stand. Graham said he told Vanzetti that when a defendant failed to testify in Massachusetts he was usually found guilty.
Vanzetti [Graham wrote] was carefully advised as to the evidence that had gone in as to what inference the Jury might draw if he failed to take the stand despite what the Judge would tell them in his charge, and as to what information might be elicited from him if he did take the stand. “But you,” Vahey told him, “are the one who has got to make the decision as to whether you will testify or not.”
Sacco had been moved to the Dedham jail and Vahey, at Vanzetti’s request, went there to discuss the matter with him. When he returned, Vanzetti, according to Graham, said in substance: “I don’t think I can improve upon the alibi which has been established. I had better not take the stand.”
Vanzetti was sure afterward that he had been betrayed, and attacked Vahey in the bitter language of his pamphlet. Part of his bitterness was undoubtedly caused by the fact that in 1924 Vahey became Katzmann’s law partner.
May passed into June. Except among the Italians of North Plymouth and the small anarchist circle in East Boston, Vanzetti’s forthcoming trial caused little interest. There was a flurry in June when the Boston Sunday Advertiser reported—it later turned out to be a newspaperman’s hoax—that a letter, signed the “Red X Society,” had been found near Plymouth Rock demanding Vanzetti’s release “or take the consequences.” But for most people the trial was just a routine affair coming at the end of the spring criminal session. The newspapers and public were much more interested in the trial of Jennie Zimmerman in Springfield, accused of murdering her cousin and lover, Dr. Henry Zimmerman.
Although Chief Stewart had received a setback with Orciani’s release, he still stuck to his theory that the deported Coacci and the missing Boda had been mixed up in both crimes. Boda, he was convinced, was the man who had appeared at Hassam’s garage in Needham looking for license plates. But Boda had successfully vanished. Actually, during all the time the police were looking for him, he was living quietly with friends in East Boston. In August he moved on to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he stayed for two months, then went to Providence where—under his old name of Buda—he received a passport from the Italian vice-consul and returned to Italy. Several attempts were made later to induce him to come back to Massachusetts and testify for Sacco and Vanzetti, but each time he refused, maintaining that his life would be in danger.
When Stewart went to North Plymouth and searched Vanzetti’s room at 35 Cherry Street, he discovered nothing except odds and ends of clothing. He took away a black coat, a shirt, a sweater, and a brown cloth cap. An earlier search of Sacco’s bungalow in Stoughton had produced a gray cap and a rifle, along with a few books and a few anarchist pamphlets that Rosina had neglected to burn. In Joseph Ventola’s garage in Hyde Park the police turned up a box that had belonged to Coacci. It contained forty dollars’ worth of shoe material stolen from Slater & Morrill. Of the missing South Braintree payroll there was no trace anywhere.
Vanzetti’s trial began in the second-floor courtroom of the brick-pilastered Plymouth courthouse on Tuesday, June 22, with the selection of the jury. This ran off quickly. There were no challenges by either side, even though one of the jurymen, Arthur Nickerson, a foreman at the Cordage, might well have been challenged by the defense. Vahey and Graham were opposed by District Attorney Katzmann and Assistant District Attorney Kane. Judge Webster Thayer presided.
At the opening of the trial Judge Thayer was within two weeks of being sixty-three, although the leathery texture of his face made him seem a decade older. He was about five feet two inches tall, with the edgy vanity of many short men, and a voice that easily turned petulant. On the bench he looked the part of a judge. He had a high forehead, a sudden little hawk nose bridged by pince-nez, thin gray hair and mustache, dark-circled eyes, and a narrow Yankee line of mouth. Governor Samuel McCall, a fellow graduate of Dartmouth, had appointed him to the bench in 1917.
Thayer was born in Blackstone, Massachusetts, twenty-five miles south of Worcester, the son of the local slaughterer and provisions dealer. After going through the local public schools and Worcester Academy, he entered Dartmouth with the class of 1880. Known there as Bobby, he was more noted as an athlete than a scholar. While a sophomore he organized the first college baseball nine and was its captain for three years. Once he was suspended for a half-year as the result of a rowdy prank, but he returned to graduate with his class. His undergraduate pictures show a fair-haired young man with a sprouting mustache, a quizzical expression, and eyes so deep-set that they seem almost hooded.
On graduation he briefly considered going in for big-league baseball, but instead returned to Worcester, where for two years he read law on his own. He was admitted to the bar in 1882. For the next thirty-five years he remained in that small city, rising higher in its restricted social world than might have been expected of a butcher’s son. He married early and well. He became an Odd Fellow, chairman of the Worcester Athletic Association, and a member of the Dartmouth Alumni Council. Indicative of his popularity, he was elected a Democratic alderman in Republican Worcester, the youngest alderman the city ever had. Later he conformed more strictly to his social group and became a Republican. His greatest regret, for which his appointment as Superior Court Justice was only partial solace, was that he had not been young enough to join the Army in 1917.
Webster Thayer—the Anglo-Saxon coupling had a bell-like resonance in which were blended the Mayflower tradition and that of the young federal republic. Yet there was a hollowness to the ring, as the butcher’s son well knew. Thayer, even as a justice of the Superior Court, was haunted by an inner sense of doubt that made him seek the approbation of other men, constantly, uncritically. In his three years on the bench he appeared a run-of-the-mill justice, causing no particular attention adversely or otherwise. The court attendants noted his irascibility, and his vanity came out in a fondness for buttonholing lawyers in the corridor to tell them about the charge he had just written. As an old-line Yankee, he had no great sympathy with foreigners, but no one had ever questioned his fairness.
Other than Vanzetti’s Italian neighbors and a couple of cub reporters from the Boston papers, there were scarcely any spectators at the trial. The routine was the same each morning. Vanzetti was brought in handcuffed and taken to the prisoner’s box in the center of the room, where his handcuffs were unfastened. Then Vahey and Graham conferred with him, and the set melancholy face with the drooping mustache would take on a momentary animation. Katzmann and Kane always nodded affably to the defense lawyers as they came in. Then there was a wait of several minutes until Judge Thayer appeared, consciously delaying the daily drama of his entry, sweeping over the threshold in his black robe, inwardly satisfied that the room was standing for his presence and would remain standing until he took his seat. The crier intoned: “Hear ye, hear ye. All persons having anything to do before the Honorable Justices of the Superior Court now sitting at Plymouth within and for the County of Plymouth, draw near, give your attendance and you shall be heard. God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!”
With his intoning, the ritual of the court took over. The actuality of the outside world, the muted summer noises of the town entering with the sea air through the open oval-topped windows, became less real than this legal world where all action had been reduced to verbalizations. Symbolic in more than one sense was the statue of Justice in a niche of the courthouse, holding up her gilded scales and covered by a protective layer of chicken-wire.
During none of the trial sessions was there discussion of Vanzetti’s political beliefs. The prosecution’s case was merely an elaboration of the preliminary hearing. The district attorney relied chiefly on the primary identification witnesses—Bowles, Cox, Harding, and Mrs. Brooks—reinforcing them with corroborative evidence that would in itself have been insufficient even to indict. Bowles still maintained that Vanzetti was the man with the shotgun, but the mustache he had earlier described as close-cropped now became merely trimmed. Cox denied that he had said, on seeing Vanzetti in Brockton, “I think there is doubt.” Even now, though he had become much more certain, he was not wholly sure of his identification, and the best that Katzmann could get out of him was “I am not positive but I feel certain he is the man.”
All three men had been shown the car found in the Manley Woods. Harding, disregarding his first statement about a Hudson, again described the Bridgewater car as a seven-passenger Buick. The “croppy” mustache of the bandit that he “did not get much of a look at” was now “a heavy dark mustache that had been trimmed.” On December 24 he had described the shotgun bandit to a Pinkerton investigator as “slim, five feet ten inches, wore a long black overcoat and a derby hat.” Now he described him: “Long coat, no hat, high forehead, hair was short, dark complected man, I should say, high cheekbones, rather hard, broad face and the head, perhaps, more a round head, bullet shaped.”
Mrs. Brooks repeated her story of crossing in front of the parked car and looking through the windshield at the driver. She had picked Vanzetti out of a lineup of four men in the Brockton police station as that driver. Facing him in the courtroom, she was still certain he had been the driver. After she had entered the railway station, she testified she heard shots and, looking out the window, saw the flashes from two gun barrels as the L. Q. White truck lurched down Broad Street. In cross-examining her Vahey questioned whether it was possible (as indeed it was not) to have an unimpeded view of the street from the station, and whether in fact she had seen the shooting at all. Mrs. Brooks became confused and hesitant, but Vahey did not press the point. Neither did he bring out the fact that Vanzetti did not know how to drive.
The only other witness to identify Vanzetti in court was Maynard Shaw, a schoolboy who had been delivering papers at the time of the attempt. From one hundred fifty feet away on Broad Street he had seen a dark-mustached man with a shotgun get out of a touring car on the corner and fire at the payroll truck. “He is the one I saw,” the boy said, pointing at Vanzetti. He added that even at a distance he knew the man was a foreigner “by the way he ran.” Vahey made much of this remark, asking Shaw whether Italians and Russians ran differently from Swedes or Norwegians and how anybody could tell the difference. Shaw had not paid much attention to the bandits’ car, thinking it a Hudson or a Buick. Later, though he did not explain why, he concluded it was a Buick.
The other witnesses were routine. John King of Grove Street had been in his upstairs bedroom when he heard the car roar by. Looking out, he noted it was a seven-passenger Buick. Dr. Murphy once more told of picking up the spent shotgun shell. Simon and Ruth Johnson appeared and told their stories, and George Hassam, the Needham garage owner, told his. Officer Connolly told of arresting Vanzetti. Chief Stewart submitted a transcript of his interview with the defendant. Most of it was excluded because of its references to political beliefs.
Captain William Proctor of the State Police, testifying as a ballistics expert, claimed that the 12-gauge Winchester shell Dr. Murphy had found in the gutter and the Winchester shells found in Vanzetti’s pocket were identical, except that one was empty and the others loaded. Vahey objected that the shell in the gutter might have been dropped there by any passing hunter and that there was no connection between it and the shells found on Vanzetti four months later. Judge Thayer overruled Vahey and admitted the shells as evidence for the jury to pass on.
Sacco’s name was mentioned only once during the trial, when Austin Cole, the streetcar conductor, testified that he had seen Sacco and Vanzetti on the Brockton car not only the night of their arrest but also on the fourteenth or fifteenth of April, when the two men had got on at the same Sunset Avenue stop at the same time and had got off at Brockton. On that first night, according to Cole, Sacco had paid the fares with a quarter and a nickel. “I changed the quarter,” Cole continued, “and I said to him ‘To Brockton?’ He says ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘It will be thirty cents.’ ‘I know it,’ he says and he handed me a nickel and the other hand was thrust into the pocket, and he asked for two transfers. When I was talking with him he smiled and I noticed the gold tooth on Sacco.”
Vahey wanted to know how the conductor could remember a particular day of no special significance among many days he could not remember at all. Cole maintained that he had worked Wednesday and Thursday, the fourteenth and fifteenth, and not again until the following Tuesday. He remembered those dates particularly because he associated them with Patriot’s Day, the nineteenth.
Katzmann’s efforts to link Boda with the holdup attempt were fumbling. One witness, Napoleon Ensher, who lived a quarter of a mile from Puffer’s Place, said that early in the spring he had seen Boda drive past in a Buick and that Boda had waved to him. At the Dedham trial a year later Ensher’s evidence was ruled out as unsubstantiated. Another witness, Richard Casey, had watched the bandit car stop near his house at the corner of Broad and Main Streets. He described the driver as a man with a short mustache and prominent nose, wearing either a velour or a black soft hat. All that Casey could remember of the man next to the driver was that he wore a brown cap. When Stewart showed him half a dozen caps, Casey picked out the one that the chief had taken from Vanzetti’s room.
District Attorney Katzmann took three and a half days to present his case. On Monday, June 28, just before the noon recess, he announced that the Commonwealth rested.
The defense lawyers did not search Bridgewater for refuting witnesses. Their strategy was to rely on Vanzetti’s alibi as established by his North Plymouth neighbors. Judge Thayer charged the jury that if they could conclude Vanzetti was in Plymouth on the morning of December 24, the case was ended. In addition the defense had collected several witnesses to testify that during all the years Vanzetti had lived in Plymouth he had never worn anything but his present shaggy mustache.
Awed and uneasy, the Italian witnesses marshaled by Vahey sat together in the back of the courtroom talking in whispers and waiting for their names to be called. Except for those who were American-born, they spoke through the interpreter, Govoni. First to take the stand was Vittorio Papa, the elusive Poppy Vanzetti had claimed he was trying to visit the night of his arrest. Papa merely said that he had been friendly with Vanzetti in Plymouth and that when he moved to East Bridgewater he had asked his friend to come and visit him. He had not given Vanzetti his address there.
Papa was followed by Mary Fortini, Vanzetti’s landlady, who told how on that day before Christmas she had gone upstairs and called her lodger at a quarter past six. A few minutes later he had come down in his stocking feet, wearing overalls and a green sweater. She had warmed some milk for his breakfast. After drinking it, he had put on his boots and gone out.
A day or two before, a barrel of eels had come down from Boston for him by express, and she happened to be at home when it arrived. Vanzetti had spent the evening of the twenty-third in the kitchen cleaning and weighing them, wrapping them in newspapers, and ticketing them for delivery next day. After he left the house the morning of the twenty-fourth, he came back again about eight o’clock with a boy who was helping him, and the two of them had loaded the pushcart and a wheelbarrow with the packages of eels.
Carlo Balboni, a night fireman at the Cordage, said he had left the plant at six in the morning and gone directly to the Fortinis’ to pick up the eels he had ordered the day before. Vanzetti was still in bed when he got there and Mrs. Fortini had gone upstairs to wake him. John DiCarlo, a shoemaker on Court Street, said that on December 24 he had opened his shop as usual at 7:15 and was just starting to sweep the place out when Vanzetti came in with a package of eels. DiCarlo could even remember that they weighed a pound and a half. Rosa Balboni of South Cherry Street said that Vanzetti had delivered the eels she had ordered in the afternoon, but she had also seen him early that morning as she was going to the baker’s. Enrico Bastoni, the Cherry Street baker, told the court that Vanzetti had come to his shop the day before Christmas just before eight o’clock to see if he could rent a horse and truck for the day. But that day Bastoni needed them himself. It was a little before eight when Vanzetti arrived, for just afterward Bastoni heard the second Cordage whistle blow. Terese Malaguti, also of Cherry Street, said that she had bought eels from Vanzetti the same morning and that he had come about seven o’clock, when the first whistle blew. Adeladi Bongiovanni remembered that she had bought three pounds of eels at forty cents a pound. The boy brought them to the door and she had offered him two dollars, but as he had no change she had gone out in the street and paid Vanzetti herself. Just as the boy arrived she had been cooking polenta, and while she was out chatting with Vanzetti the polenta caught fire. Her next-door neighbors, Margherita Fiochi and Emma Borsari, told how they had also bought eels from Vanzetti that morning, as did a high school student, Esther Christophori, living in Suosso’s Lane, and young Vincent Longhi of 42 Cherry Street, both of whom testified in English.
In dealing with this solid block of testimony Katzmann tried to discredit it generally. He asked the witnesses how they could recall the details of one particular day among all the other days of the year. Might not Vanzetti as easily have delivered his eels on the twenty-third as the twenty-fourth? His landlady, for example, although she said she had called him at quarter past six the day before Christmas, could not recall what time he got up the day after Christmas, or New Year’s Day or Washington’s Birthday or any other specific day.
The most important witness for Vanzetti was thirteen-year-old Beltrando Brini. The defense claimed he had been Vanzetti’s helper on his morning round delivering the eels. Nicknamed Dolly, he was an intelligent, nervous boy, small for his age, looking rather helpless in his Norfolk knickerbocker suit and high boots. On the night of December 23, he told the court, two men had brought a half a pig to his house in Suosso’s Lane. His father had ordered the pig for Christmas. That same night Vanzetti had stopped in to ask if the boy would help him deliver eels next day. Dolly promised he would. On that damp and muddy morning before Christmas he met Vanzetti first in front of Maxwell’s Drugstore. Near the drugstore Dolly’s father had run into him, taken one look at his boots, and told him to go home and get his rubbers. At first the boy could not find them. By the time he had located them under the stairs and hurried back to Vanzetti’s house in Cherry Street it was eight o’clock, for as he trotted along he could hear the Cordage whistle blowing.
Vanzetti was putting his packages of eels in his pushcart and an extra wheelbarrow when Dolly arrived. He told the boy he had wanted to hire a horse and cart but could not find one. The two of them started out with wheelbarrow and pushcart, making their deliveries to the regular customers up and down Cherry Street, Cherry Place, Cherry Court, and finally down to Court Street. Dolly had worked from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon, when Vanzetti paid him off.
On Christmas Eve, Vanzetti dropped in at the Brinis’. When he left he noticed the children’s stockings hanging by the mantel and put two half-dollars in each one. On Christmas Day Vanzetti stopped in again, and Dolly thanked him for the half-dollars and showed him his Christmas presents.
Katzmann began his cross-examination with deceptive gentleness, calling the boy “son” and asking if he would like to testify sitting down. As he continued, his voice hardened and he began to box the boy in with questions. How many times had he told his story? How many times had he gone over it with his parents? With Mr. Vahey? Had he learned it just like a piece at school? Who corrected him when he left something out? The district attorney stalked him through all the details of the morning: the houses where the boy had left packages, the weight of the basket he carried, the time he started and the time he finished his deliveries. Had he finished at one-fifteen, or was it one-twenty? The boy squirmed and looked pleadingly at Judge Thayer, but there was no relief coming from that stiff-robed parchment-faced figure. Young Brini had to admit that he had repeated his story a number of times to his parents and others, and that when he repeated it and omitted anything his father would correct him.
Beltrando’s parents, Vincenzo and Alfonsina, both testified. Vincenzo told of meeting his boy in the lane on the morning of December 24 and sending him back for his rubbers. He also mentioned the side of pig that had arrived the night before, when Vanzetti dropped in for a visit. Vanzetti’s mustache was untrimmed then, just the same that night as it was now. Alfonsina corroborated her husband. In a lengthy cross-examination Katzmann tried to force her into admitting that she had coached her son in his story, but the most she would say was that she had listened to him tell it a number of times.
John Vernazano, the Court Street barber who had shaved Vanzetti and cut his hair for the last five or six years, now took the stand to say that he had never trimmed Vanzetti’s mustache, that it had always been just as it was today. He received unexpected confirmation from two non-Italian members of the Plymouth police force. Officer John Gault said that he knew Vanzetti and had seen him three or four times a week for several years. Gault had never noticed any change or alteration in the Italian’s mustache, but under Katzmann’s cross-examination he admitted that he had not paid any particular attention to it. Officer Joseph Schilling had seen Vanzetti off and on several times a week in the months before his arrest, and his mustache had always looked the same. It might not have been the same, Schilling admitted, but he had never noticed any difference.
Cross-examining Vernazano, Katzmann asked him if he knew William Douglass, the proprietor of the Samoset House, and if the man had a mustache. The barber said he knew Douglass by sight and that he had a small light mustache. Katzmann then produced the clean-shaven Douglass on the stand to say that he had never had a mustache.
On this inconclusive note the defense ended its case on Monday morning, July 1. Judge Thayer, in a short, conventional charge to the jury, instructed them that no inference should be drawn against the defense witnesses because they were Italians. However, in spite of the judge’s words, the Italians’ embarrassment as they spoke through their interpreter undoubtedly made the Anglo-Saxon jury feel that—in Vanzetti’s later words—“all the wops stick together.” If the headmaster of the Plymouth High School or the wife of the local Congregational minister had testified to buying fish from Vanzetti on the morning of December 24, that would have been as good as a directed verdict. But these swarthy aliens were suspect.
The jury retired at 10:15. Henry Burgess, the foreman, was curious about what was inside the shotgun shells and just before lunch he opened two of them. They were loaded, not with birdshot, but buckshot. Simon Sullivan and several of the other jurors took a few of the pellets as souvenirs.
After the lunch recess the jury resumed deliberation. At 4:18 it brought in its verdict, finding Vanzetti guilty of assault with intent to rob and guilty on three counts of assault with intent to murder. As the foreman pronounced the word “guilty,” a protesting wail broke out from the thickset peasant women in the back of the courtroom. Vanzetti remained calm. “Coraggio!” he called out to them as he was led away.
The echo of Vanzetti’s voice subsided into the dusty calm of legal decorum. Vanzetti’s friends moved toward the exits, looking back now and then at the men filing out of the jury box. Judge Thayer, after Vahey and Graham had stepped forward to consult with him, extended the time for filing exceptions to August 18 and set bail at twenty-five thousand dollars.
Several days later Juror Sullivan happened to run into Judge Thayer in a Brockton store and mention that he and a couple of others had taken away some of the buckshot. Judge Thayer ordered him to see that all of it was at once returned to the district attorney. The chastened Sullivan brought the pellets back, and Katzmann warned him not to say anything more about the matter.
On August 16 Vahey filed a bill of exceptions in which he requested that the shotgun-shell evidence and the testimony of Simon and Ruth Johnson be excluded. The exceptions were not allowed, and Vahey did not carry the matter further. On that same morning, in the almost-deserted courtroom, Vanzetti appeared for sentencing. He stood in the dock, an alien, slightly bent figure, flanked by his guards, with high forehead and high cheekbones and flowing mustache. The heat of the day had not yet set in, and the oval windows were open. If the prisoner had glanced to his left he could have looked down Brewster Street to the blue line of Plymouth Harbor. Instead, he stared ahead at Judge Thayer sitting on the dais beneath the Plymouth seal, and the judge stared back from the mask of his withered face.
Then Judge Thayer began to pronounce sentence in his precise dessicated voice, the phrases falling like a curtain: “The Court having considered the offense whereof the said Bartolomeo Vanzetti is convict does order and adjudge that the said Bartolomeo Vanzetti suffer imprisonment for a term of not less than twelve years nor more than fifteen years, one day thereof solitary imprisonment and the residue of said term confinement to hard labor, in and within the limits of our State Prison situate in Boston in our County of Suffolk.”