FOOTNOTES:
[5] Like Sacco a native of Torremaggiore, Mucci had spent some time in America and had been one of the defending counsel in the Ettor-Giovannitti trial at Lawrence.
[6] Shields would end up a Communist. Minor, already one, visualized even that early the propaganda possibilities in Sacco and Vanzetti. He became a cartoonist for the Daily Worker and later its editor. By the time of the Bridgewater crime he had written a savage attack on anarchism in which he defended the recent suppression of the Russian anarchists by the Bolsheviks.
[7] Francis J. Squires was clerk of the district court in Dedham; Percy, a lawyer, was Fred Katzmann’s brother.
[8] Four years after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, Angelina DeFalco appeared in the Suffolk Superior Court in Boston, accused of the theft of fifteen hundred fifty dollars from Mrs. Giovanino Voce on the promise of bringing about the release of the latter’s brother, then serving a ten-year sentence in state prison. Found guilty of grand larceny, Mrs. DeFalco received a six-month jail sentence. She was still living in Dedham in 1961. When I telephoned her and mentioned the Sacco-Vanzetti case, she hung up. A few weeks before Francis Squires died in 1960, I found him unwilling to discuss the DeFalco incident.
CHAPTER NINE
THE TRIAL: I
Judge Thayer’s voice rasped as he looked down from the bench at the plump venireman from Brookline, the fourth in succession who had asked to be excused because he did not believe in capital punishment. “Do you set your opinion above the law?” the judge asked caustically. “Have you done anything to get the law changed? Have you seen your local representative about it?” The man did not know who his representative was.
From the look of the odd-lot prospective jurors who were passing through the courtroom on this first morning of the trial it seemed as if most of the able men of Norfolk County had managed to sneak their names off the jury list. The apologetic line filed by the bench—fogies long past the statutory age, invalids, men who had been deaf for years, whose wives were dying and who had certificates to prove it, who were just about to sail for Europe, and finally the objectionable objectors.
Of course there were the occasional better prospects, but every time a man came along who looked educated or respectable, as if he might be somebody, Moore seemed bound to challenge him. That was the way it struck Jerry McAnarney. If Jerry had been going on trial for murder he knew he would rather take his chances with a businessman than with some fellow who dug sewers. But not Fred Moore; he wanted the sewer-digger every time. There was a young fellow Jerry had spotted in the line, a good clean-cut college type; as soon as Moore found out he worked for Page & Company, that finished him. Then there was someone McAnarney recognized from the New England Trust Company, the sort of man any defense lawyer ought to get down on his knees to have on a jury. He told Moore so, but Moore would not have him.
For thirty years Jerry McAnarney had been going in and out of the Dedham courthouse, but he had never seen anything like this morning. State troopers in khaki, some mounted, were deployed all around the courthouse. Other troopers with motorcycles and sidecars swept up and down the High Street, the pop of their exhausts sounding like machine-gun fire. And inside there were police and deputies at the doors, parading up and down the corridors, on the stairs.
When Jerry and Tom arrived at the courthouse just before ten they found the front door locked. The side door was also locked. When they knocked, a guard looked through the glass and waved them off. Finally a court officer recognized them and let them in. Inside, a trooper patted them over for weapons. Then a flashy policeman stopped them at the foot of the stairs, and on the landing they were stopped again. The way the place was guarded, Jerry told his brother, it looked as if Sheriff Capen was getting ready to try the Kaiser.
Entering the courtroom, the brothers glimpsed the backs of the defendants in the waist-high prisoners’ cage. Rosina Sacco, with seven-month-old Ines in her arms, sat close behind her husband, the only ordinary spectator allowed in the courtroom that day. The others present were either reporters or deputies. Fred Katzmann, tanned and glowing from a long week end at golf, spotted the McAnarneys in the doorway and waved to them with casual friendliness. Moore was behind the bar talking with Judge Thayer. The judge’s face seemed frozen. Just before the McAnarneys went in, a deputy sheriff said under his breath: “Tom, I like to see you boys win your cases, but I hope to God you lose this case. These men are no good.”
At the opening Moore filed a motion for severance and a separate trial for Sacco on the grounds that his association with Vanzetti would be prejudiced because of the latter’s conviction for the Bridgewater crime. Similarly, the McAnarneys requested a separate trial for Vanzetti, since his defense was to be “separate and distinct.” Both motions were denied.
During the whole morning not a single juror was picked. By lunchtime it was obvious that the Yankee judge was taking a poor view of the Western lawyer. The McAnarneys could tell that merely by the way Thayer glared at Moore, the lines at each side of his mouth etching into his cheeks before he replied to one of Moore’s objections. Even Rosina Sacco, with her imperfect knowledge of English, sensed it. Moore kept on needling Thayer, objecting to each triviality, challenging each likely juror. The class-conscious Westerner demanded that prospective jurors be asked if they were opposed to organized labor, if they belonged to a union, or if they hired union help. These questions Judge Thayer disallowed. At the noon recess he remarked angrily and audibly as he left the courthouse that no long-haired radical from California was going to tell him how to run his court.
It was midafternoon before the first juror, Wallace Hersey, a real estate dealer from Weymouth, was picked. By the end of the afternoon only two more had been selected: John Ganley, a grocer, and a machinist, Frank Waugh. Each defendant was allowed forty-four challenges, and that day the defense used up twenty-one. Judge Thayer, exasperated by the delays, held an evening session until ten, when he had to leave to catch the last train back to Boston. It took ten hours and 175 veniremen to get the initial three jurymen.
There was, as there usually is in even the most ponderously sustained trial, an occasional lighter moment. At one point a plump sugar dealer from Braintree had the idea of getting himself excused by pretending he was deaf. The courtroom echoed with laughter as Judge Thayer pounced on him. Sacco laughed so hard that tears rolled down his cheeks. Then the courtroom settled down again, the hivelike humming broken only by the squeak of Sheriff Capen’s boots as he walked gingerly across the floor to the upright mace. Behind the judge’s dais the triple-cylindered pendulum of the marble-faced clock ticked away the formal minutes.
From time to time the sallow-faced defendants in the cage whispered to one another. Sacco had aged in the year of his arrest. His hair was thinning. That morning was the first time he and Vanzetti had seen each other in eight months. When they met before court opened, they had kissed each other gravely on the cheek.
The McAnarney brothers, seated inside the bar enclosure, saw the unhappy pattern of the morning repeated all through the afternoon and evening. It was clear by now to Jerry McAnarney that Moore, for all his reputation, was doing nobody any good, least of all the men in the cage. Jerry was as convinced as ever that the two men were innocent. He had even brought his wife to the jail after the Decoration Day parade to let her talk with Sacco and get her opinion, and she had felt the same way he did. But now, even before the jury had been picked, he had the feeling of the sands slipping from under his feet, of being beyond his depth. The Italians were never going to get a square deal with Moore running things. Jerry could hear Thayer’s edged voice: “Mr. Moore, that may be the way they practice law out West, but not in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!”
At the close of the evening session the brothers drove to John McAnarney’s house in Quincy and told him of what was blowing up between Moore and Judge Thayer. They wanted John to get rid of Moore and take charge. John thought it over, and then, even though it was midnight, telephoned William G. Thompson. Thompson was an old Yankee, a lawyer’s lawyer, a lecturer at the Harvard Law School, and whatever he said carried weight in Massachusetts.
In his Chestnut Hill home, Thompson listened to John McAnarney explain the difficulties his brothers were facing at the beginning of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. John begged him to come to Dedham in the morning, insisting that the lives of two men were at stake, and that in his opinion the men were innocent. Thompson agreed to look in.
As Thompson got off the train in Dedham and walked up from the station past the spent lilac hedges of the High Street, the brim of his Panama flopping with each step, the Phi Beta Kappa key and the Institute of 1770 charm jingling on his heavy watchchain, he looked the very model of a proper Boston lawyer. Even the loose way he held his pipe in his mouth reinforced his assurance. He found John McAnarney, much upset, waiting for him in front of the closed courthouse gates.
They went in through a side door. In the lower corridor the two lawyers found Moore arguing with Rosina Sacco in the center of a group of gesticulating Italians. Thompson could hear Rosina’s voice shrill to the edge of breaking, demanding of Moore by what right he represented her husband. She didn’t want him, she shouted, she didn’t believe in him. She wanted a good lawyer.
Rosina’s outburst was the culmination of months of bitterness. She had neither liked nor approved of Moore from the beginning. Her thrifty peasant nature was affronted by his manner of life, his Beacon Hill house and car with chauffeur—all paid for by poor Italians. Now she was telling him in effect: Get out! And he was refusing.
Thompson and John and Jerry McAnarney talked the matter over in one of the anterooms. “I want either you or John to replace Moore,” Jerry told Thompson. Thompson said it was too late. The next day at latest the jury would be empaneled. “You have got to make the best of it,” he told the brothers.
When Moore joined them in the anteroom, Jerry McAnarney offered to turn back his first payment of two thousand dollars and go on with the case for nothing if Moore would only retire. Moore refused to consider it. He had hired the McAnarneys as subordinates, not to give him orders. With their narrow conservatism, he considered them incapable of the larger view the case demanded.
During the rest of the morning Thompson sat with the McAnarneys watching the resumed parade of prospective jurors. A new lot of 160 veniremen had been brought in, but the selection was going no faster than it had the day before. Moore was again needling Judge Thayer. He could not seem to help it, even though he must have sensed the tensing of the atmosphere. It was a morning Thompson was to remember in all its immediacy years later. “Katzmann would say something,” he recalled to the Lowell Committee in 1927, “and Moore would object to it. He was jumping up all the time. He would make objection after objection. Judge Thayer would sit there and look at Moore with the fiercest expression on his face, moving his head a little. Moore would say ‘I object to that’ and Judge Thayer ... would sit back in his chair and say ‘Objection overruled.’ It wasn’t what he said, it was his manner of saying it. It looked perfectly straight on the record; he was too clever to do otherwise. I sat there for a while and I told John McAnarney ‘Your goose is cooked. You will never in this world get these men acquitted. The judge is going to convict these two men and see that nothing gets into the record; he is going to keep his records straight and you have no chance.’”
When John Dever, a Filene’s clothing salesman, received a post card ordering him to report at the Norfolk county courthouse for jury duty, he had expected he might serve on some civil case. Not until the Decoration Day week end did he learn that his summons might be for the South Braintree murder case. Of that case he had only a blurred recollection, something he had read in the papers the year before. It gave him a queer feeling to think he might find himself on a murder jury. His supervisor at Filene’s told him he was lucky—it would be like having time off, with Filene’s paying his salary.
Although Dever was twenty-seven, he could have passed for twenty-one. He had been a poor Irish-Catholic boy brought up on the wrong side of the tracks in the quarry city of Barre, Vermont. As he grew up he had played with many of the children of the Italian immigrant stoneworkers. Some of these workers had been anarchists, or at least radicals. Dever, though a pious adolescent, had had no particular feeling against the local anarchists in their clapboard hall. He was used to them.
At fifteen he had left Barre for Boston, where he first worked as a bellboy in the Parker House. He had volunteered for the Army in 1917 but had not been sent overseas. In 1919 he had gone to work at Filene’s. Unmarried, he lived in a brick rooming house on upper Beacon Street, Brookline.
Inconspicuous as this slight, fair-haired young man may have seemed when he was shepherded into the courtroom with the other veniremen, he was in one respect unique. In the course of the day he would be one of three accepted for the jury, and of the final twelve he alone would write about the trial. His memoirs, although fragmentary and redundant, remain the sole record of the case as seen from the jury box. As a result of the trial Dever became so interested in the judicial process that he enrolled in an evening course at the Suffolk Law School and eventually passed his bar examinations. During the last ten years of his life he prepared his Memoirs of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case and at his death in 1956 the manuscript had reached several thousand pages. Interspersed among the tedious legalities are telling casual incidents, still bright over the years: how the jurors were picked, where they slept, where and what they ate, what they did in their spare time, and how they felt about the case.
This was the first time Dever had ever been to Dedham. As he walked from the railroad station through the square he kept thinking what a pleasant town it was. Above the masking elms he could see a white dome with round windows in it like portholes. That, he supposed, was the courthouse. He wandered up and down several of the side streets before heading for the domed building.
Never before had he been inside a court, and the neoclassic building with its marble-tiled floors and marble stairs and marble-paneled walls awed him. With the other veniremen he was taken to the courthouse, where Judge Thayer first explained the procedure and then exhorted them to perform their disagreeable duties as patriotically as the American soldier boy in France.
“What, gentlemen, does the law seek to accomplish?” he concluded. “It seeks to select twelve jurors who will stand between these parties, the Commonwealth on the one hand and these defendants on the other, with an unyielding impartiality and absolute fairness and unflinching courage in order that truth and justice shall prevail, for, gentlemen, verdicts must rest upon truth and justice in order that the life, the liberties, and the properties of the people of the Commonwealth, including the defendants, shall be secure and protected.”
John Dever was impressed not only by the rhetoric but by the whole formalized proceedings. To him Judge Thayer seemed “a sincere, honest, absolutely fair and impartial man.” Dever was not called during the morning. At one o’clock he ate a sandwich and a piece of pie at Gilbert’s Lunch, a one-arm in the square. When he returned to the courthouse it was still too early for the afternoon session. He sat on the back grass plot with some of the other men. Dever said he hoped he would not be picked, because he might lose his two weeks’ vacation. “Don’t worry,” a man wearing a Red Men’s badge told him. “You’ll be challenged. You’re too young. Besides they don’t want any of you fellows on this jury.” He pointed to the ex-serviceman’s pin in Dever’s buttonhole. “They’ll show you right out the front door,” he concluded.
Afterward Dever could not remember much about the afternoon. One by one the names were called, one by one the veniremen disappeared. No jurymen had been picked during the morning and only two after lunch: Frank Marden, a mason from Weymouth; and a slightly deaf, slightly senile retired farmer with a handlebar mustache, Walter Ripley, who raised bulldogs and called himself a stockkeeper. For all his challenging, Moore did not spot the fact that Ripley had once been chief of the police and fire departments in Quincy. It was not until eight o’clock that Dever’s name was finally called. He was led into the courtroom. Thayer asked him a few questions and then announced, “The juror stands indifferent.”
I looked in front of me [Dever recalled] and saw a whole battery of attorneys, eight or nine in all, I should say. Before I had a chance to orient myself a man whom I was to know as District Attorney Katzmann stood on his feet and said “the Commonwealth accepts the juror.” Well, I thought to myself, the defense will now challenge me. I looked at the defense table and saw four attorneys looking at a very large book. They would look in the book, then look hard at me; and then whisper to each other. That went on for what seemed to be six or seven minutes. I began to feel I was on trial. I turned in the witness stand getting ready to leave, Judge Thayer glanced at me and said, “Stay right where you are, young man, we are waiting for these gentlemen,” and looked at the defense table. After about two more looks at me, Mr. Jeremiah McAnarney stood up and said, “If your Honor please, both defendants accept the juror.”
Dever was the sixth juror accepted. A few minutes later the court adjourned. The six jurors were taken to the ground floor room of the Court of Probate and Insolvency, where twelve iron cots from the county jail had been set up. There they were locked in for the night.
When Dever woke the next morning, he thought at first he was in a lecture hall. Then he remembered. He got up, washed, and fixed his hair with the brush and comb the sheriff had given each juror. He was not given a razor. At eight o’clock a deputy appeared and took them to breakfast.
Almost at the beginning of the morning session the seventh juror, Lewis McHardy, an elderly quiet-mannered mill worker from Milton, was selected. Seventeen more veniremen filed past the bench. Then the sheriff informed the judge that his list of five hundred was exhausted.
According to the General Laws of Massachusetts, if such a situation occurs in a murder case after seven jurors have been chosen, “the Court shall cause jurors to be returned from the bystanders or from the county at large to complete the panel.” Judge Thayer cited the statute and ordered Sheriff Capen to have two hundred more men present by ten the next morning. The sheriff was doubtful. “They will jump,” he remarked, “when they see me coming.” He was right. The news got round, and almost before the afternoon session closed, the streets of Dedham and the adjoining towns were deserted.
Capen spread his deputies that evening through Brookline, Needham, Dedham, Norwood, Millis, Medway, Stoughton, and Quincy. They struck at random, ringing doorbells when they saw lights in windows, sometimes summonsing luckless veniremen from their beds. They consulted assessors’ lists, voting lists, any list they could get their hands on. In Needham nine unsuspecting men were picked up coming out of a Masonic meeting. Deputy Allen Loring broke up a band concert at Hollis Field, Braintree. Norman Gardenier of Quincy was whisked away from his wedding supper. In spite of all this, Capen managed to seine in only 175 indignant additions. He hoped they would suffice. The defense still had twenty-nine challenges left.
Judge Thayer decided to remain in session until the jury was finally chosen, no matter what the hour. Not until after midnight was the selection finished. The five additional jurors were Harry King of Millis, a shoemaker; George Gerard, a Stoughton photographer; Alfred Atwood, a Norwood real estate dealer; Frank McNamara, a Stoughton farmer; and Seward Parker, a Quincy machinist. By the time Parker’s name was called the defense had used up all its challenges. Katzmann affably offered to challenge Parker if Moore had any objection to him, but Moore declined.
No sooner had the left-over veniremen been excused than Moore objected to the five new jurors of the completed panel on the grounds that none of them were bystanders, according to the meaning of the statute. In the clammy courtroom the attendants and deputies yawned and the district attorney fiddled with a blotter while Moore developed his lengthy quibble. Judge Thayer overruled Moore on every point. At 1:20 A.M. he ordered the jurymen brought in and sworn. “The jury is in bed,” a deputy sheriff told him.
Thayer’s voice rose two notes. “Who allowed them to go to bed? Bring them in!”
A few minutes later, bleary-eyed and bristly, the twelve trudged in to take their seats in the box. Several of them were collarless, their shirts open. Two wore felt slippers. Thayer gave them the conventional warning. He also advised them to get plenty of exercise. In conclusion he told them that they must “see to it that a trial is held according to American law and according to American justice and nothing must be done by anybody to mar or impair a fair, honest trial.” The jurors then took their oath and the court adjourned until Monday morning at ten o’clock.
The jurors slept late on Saturday, June 4, took a walk by the Charles River in the afternoon accompanied by a squad of deputies, and in the evening read the Boston papers. All references to the trial had been snipped out, and they made the unhappy discovery that most of the sports news had been on the back of what was cut.
The twelve soon formed their habit patterns. Dever found himself going to bed at nine and waking at five. He spent a lot of time reading old National Geographics. The older jurors usually played cards; Dever preferred listening to the Victrola. There were a lot of records that he liked: Van and Schenk, and the All-Star Trio; songs like “Dardenella,” “Whispering,” “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” After he had cranked the Victrola a few times, though, the card-players would begin to look over at him as if to say “Don’t you think you’ve played enough for tonight?” Then he would go back to the Geographics.
On their first Sunday they just sat around their made-over courtroom. Since they all had to stay together and could go only to one church, they decided not to go to any. They had breakfast at the Dedham Inn on Court Street beyond the Episcopal church and dinner at the Haven House just across the way; in the afternoon they went for a bus ride.
Monday was hot, a blue clear prelude to summer. The jury, after being polled in the courtroom, spent the rest of the day viewing the various locations connected with the South Braintree crime. A cavalcade of eight cars drove from place to place, carrying not only the jury but also the judge, the district attorney, and two carloads of newspaper reporters.
The jurors arrived at their first stop, South Braintree, just as the noon whistles were blowing, and at once the cars were surrounded by curious factory workers. Katzmann had to order a retreat to Braintree for lunch. When the cavalcade returned, the factory windows were filled with faces but Pearl Street itself was free. From the railroad crossing the procession followed the route of the bandit car along the side roads through Randolph and Stoughton and Brockton to West Bridgewater. The dust churned, covering the men in the cars, coating their faces like masks. The jurors were shown Simon Johnson’s house, the Elm Square Garage, the house where Coacci and Boda had lived, and then the Manley Woods. A motorcycle was parked beside the bridle path, and as the assorted jurors, lawyers, police, and newspapermen made their way to where the Buick had been found, they surprised the cyclist and his girl making love under a bush. Their last stop was the gate-tender’s shanty at the Matfield crossing. At the end of the day they had covered ninety-one miles, and Dever thought each of them had absorbed about a pint of dust. There was no place for the jurors to get a bath, either—he noted ruefully—after they got back to the courthouse.
Tuesday morning, June 7, when Assistant District Attorney Williams made the opening statement for the Commonwealth, set the pattern for the month to follow. Sacco and Vanzetti, handcuffed to each other and to a deputy, with three blue-uniformed policemen in front, three to the rear, and two on either side, were marched from the jail down Village Street past the cemetery, then up Court Street to the courthouse. A trooper, with a bandolier of a hundred rounds slung across his shoulder and a rifle in his saddle boot, rode sternly ahead of them, while a second mounted trooper followed as a rear guard. At the midday recess the prisoners were marched back to the jail. This martial procession took place four times a day.
Once in the courtroom the defendants were placed in the cage and their handcuffs removed. Then followed a pause of some minutes until the diminutive judge in his built-up heels strode through the door, his black silk gown billowing behind him. At his appearance Clerk Worthington rapped with his gavel and gave the peremptory command “Court!” Everyone stood up. For the first time the public was allowed in the courtroom. Among the spectators were Mrs. Glendower Evans, representing the New League for Democratic Control; Cerise Carman Jack, the wife of a Harvard professor, representing the New England Civil Liberties Committee; and Lois Rantoul of the Federated Churches of Greater Boston, a relative of Harvard’s President Lowell. Felicani was present, as were most of the members of the Defense Committee and the Italian consul, the aloof pince-nezed Marquis Ferrante di Ruffano, on instructions from his government.
In informal preliminary discussions the prosecution and the defense had come to an agreement not to bring up the subject of radicalism during the trial. Katzmann had also offered to agree “that no particular bullet came from any particular gun” and refrain with the defense from trying to prove one way or the other whether the murder bullets had been fired from Sacco’s automatic or Vanzetti’s revolver. Moore had refused, exclaiming melodramatically that he was being asked to turn his sword into a shield, and insisting on being free to have the bullets and guns examined by experts. Officially Moore, assisted by William Callahan—the lawyer engaged for Sacco and Vanzetti in the Brockton police court—represented Sacco, and officially the McAnarney brothers represented Vanzetti, but this was merely a maneuver to give both Jerry McAnarney and Moore the right to argue before the jury and to cross-examine. In reality Moore was as completely in charge as if he had been captain of a ship.
The contention of the Commonwealth, Assistant District Attorney Williams said in his explanatory statement,
is that this crime was committed by five men; that use was made of this stolen Buick car which after its theft from Dr. Murphy of Natick had been kept in the curtained shed of the Coacci house in West Bridgewater; that on the morning of the murder it was taken from the Coacci house and was driven to South Braintree; that they picked up Vanzetti at the East Braintree station; that the men who guided and drove that car were very familiar with the localities of West Bridgewater and the roads leading to and from that section; that they went down to the railroad crossing after the shooting, and made that hairpin turn to throw their pursuers off the scent ... that they proceeded by those back roads, Oak Street and Chestnut Street, until they got to the old turnpike, which, though a rough road, furnished a direct means of access to the West Bridgewater locality; and they tore down there and either started to take Vanzetti over to Plymouth and for that reason went over the Matfield crossing or went over there with the idea of perhaps disposing of something in the Matfield River ... found it inadvisable to do that which they intended to do, came back over the Matfield crossing and subsequently abandoned their car in the region adjacent to the Coacci house.
Williams claimed he would later show that Mike Boda was seen driving a Buick touring car during the winter of 1920. Reminding the Jurymen of Puffer’s Place, the house they had seen the day before, he gave an unsubstantiated account of the police visiting the shed and finding traces of a hole recently dug in the dirt floor as well as tire marks to the left of the boards on which Boda had kept his Overland.
Although Judge Thayer later excluded references to the shed, and although no evidence was brought forward connecting Coacci, Boda, or Orciani with the South Braintree crime, Williams in his opening nevertheless managed to link them with it by innuendo.
The first witness to take the stand was Boston photographer John Farley, who had photographed the various buildings, places, and objects covered in the case and whose pictures were now offered to the jury as exhibits. Moore objected to the angles at which several of the pictures had been taken and there followed an inconclusive wrangle with the prosecution, to the visible annoyance of Judge Thayer.
During the noon recess, while Sacco and Vanzetti were marched back to the jail for their meal, Judge Thayer walked down the street to the Dedham Inn. Whenever he was in Dedham he took his midday meal there, as did the newspapermen and most of those connected with the courthouse. Returning from the inn, Thayer could not conceal his scorn at the sight of the coatless Moore taking a nap on the grass plot in front of the courthouse. Moore was always doing things like that, offending the New England sense of decorum without even realizing he had offended. Once in court on a hot afternoon he took off his shoes and stepped before the bench to make an exception in his stocking feet. Jerry McAnarney, watching Judge Thayer’s bottled-up indignation as it approached the uncorking point, was fearful as well as dismayed. “For God’s sake,” he warned Moore, “keep your coat and vest on in the courtroom, can’t you?”
Ripley, the dodderer with the tobacco-stained mustache, had been appointed foreman of the jury, possibly because at sixty-nine he was the oldest of the twelve. When on that first day he returned to the courtroom from lunch, he paused with self-conscious rectitude and—to the embarrassment of the others—saluted the American flag that stood beside the jury box.
The photographer was followed by Edward Hayward, the surveyor who had made the large-scale map of the South Braintree scene that hung to the right of the flag. Then the medical testimony began, the reiterative technicalities that the law requires to prove the indisputable fact that a man is dead. Indifferently the jury followed the course of the bullets through the bodies, listened to Dr. Hunting, who had operated on the dying Parmenter; Dr. Jones, who had picked up the bullet shaken out of Parmenter’s jacket; Dr. Frazer, who had examined Berardelli’s body in the front room of the Colbert house. The medical evidence was summed up and concluded by Dr. Magrath, whose boast was that he had performed more autopsies and attended more symphony concerts than any other medical examiner in New England. His toupee, the most obviously artificial in Massachusetts, was equally familiar to Symphony Hall, city morgues, and the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Magrath was a character. There was an iron quality about him that did not brook contradiction. Even Moore had no questions to ask him.
Such preliminaries took up the first week. Meanwhile Judge Thayer, irritated enough by the sight of the squint-eyed California lawyer bobbing up in front of him, found a more pervasive irritant in the printed broadsides of the Defense Committee denouncing the unfairness of the trial even before it started. “I am here to see the defendants get a fair trial,” he announced from the bench. And one day he asked a group of reporters at the Dedham Inn if they had ever seen a case in which so many leaflets had been spread around saying that people could not get a fair trial in the State of Massachusetts. As he went out onto the porch his face was flushed and his voice rose. “You wait till I give my charge to the jury,” he told the reporters, shaking his fist. “I’ll show ’em!” Even the monarchist Ferrante, whose chief regret was that Sacco and Vanzetti had not become American citizens so that he could have washed his hands of them, sensed within the first few days that Thayer was sure they were guilty.
Not until Wednesday morning, June 8, did the South Braintree express agent, the Commonwealth’s first important witness, take the stand. Considerably embellishing the story he had told in the Quincy court the year before, Shelley Neal again described his payroll delivery, the pale man in the doorway of the Hampton House, his brief view of the car that he was again to see jolting over the railroad crossing after the holdup. But Neal did not attempt to identify Sacco or Vanzetti as anyone he had seen that day. Margaret Mahoney, the paymistress, followed Neal; she told of making up the payroll boxes and handing them over to Parmenter and Berardelli just before three o’clock.
Mark Carrigan, the shoe-cutter, was next. From his window on the third floor of the Hampton House he had watched the paymaster and the guard go down the street; then he had heard the shots and seen the car cross the tracks with the gunman crouched in the front seat. But from that glimpse Carrigan had not been able to identify the defendants in the Brockton police station and he was not now able to identify them in the courtroom.
So far the trial was going in the routine manner that Katzmann had planned. These early witnesses were not expected to identify anyone. They were there merely to set the scene. Something more, however, was expected of Jimmy Bostock, the repairman, who had talked with Parmenter and Berardelli at the crossing, had seen the two men fall, and afterward had held the dying guard in his arms. The getaway car with the Italian-looking man who was leaning out shouting had passed so close to Bostock on Pearl Street that he could have reached out and touched it. Nevertheless, when asked in the Brockton station if he could tell whether Sacco and Vanzetti were the bandits he had answered, “No sir, I could not tell whether or not they was, no sir.” On the stand Bostock testified that Berardelli usually carried a 38-caliber revolver. He had seen it several times, the last time the Saturday before the murder. He had joked with Berardelli about it and asked him if he carried it to shoot rats. The mention of the revolver seemed irrelevant—especially as nobody had seen it on April 15—and Moore objected. Judge Thayer held a conference at the bench. There Assistant District Attorney Williams revealed for the first time the Commonwealth’s contention that the revolver found on Vanzetti had been taken from Berardelli’s body by the man who shot him.
When Lewis Wade was taken by Katzmann to the Brockton station he had pointed out Sacco as the wavy-haired man he had seen standing over Berardelli. At the preliminary hearing in the Quincy court three weeks later he was not quite as certain. “I don’t want to make a mistake,” he had said, looking at Sacco. “This is too damn serious, but he looks like the man.” Since then Katzmann had given Wade a pep talk and was now counting on him for a positive identification. Williams, leading the witness along, became stutteringly disconcerted when Wade balked, maintaining that although Sacco looked to him somewhat like the man who did the shooting, he “had a doubt.” Several weeks ago, Wade explained, he had seen a man in Damato’s barbershop who looked just like the man who had shot Berardelli. Since that time he had decided that Sacco was not the man. Williams managed to recover his composure, but though he did his forensic best, he could get no further in persuading the intractable Wade.
As Wade left the stand one of the police officers at the door called him a piker and another muttered: “We’re not through with you yet.” It was a remark borne out a few weeks later when Wade was dismissed from his job at Slater & Morrill. He had it coming to him. That was the way people felt in South Braintree.
John Dever, in the first row of the jury box, glancing from time to time at the defendants in the cage, was so far not impressed by the Commonwealth’s case. Sometimes he felt frightened at having to decide whether two men should live or die. Sacco and Vanzetti, he thought,
did not look like criminals. Sacco appeared to be an alert, bright, and rather clean-cut young fellow. Every time I looked at Vanzetti he seemed to be thinking with an impassive look on his face or listening intently to whatever was taking place at the time.... My sympathies were with the men on trial and I was hoping that the evidence would not be sufficient to establish their guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The reasonable doubt became more shadowy after the spinsterish Hampton House bookkeepers, Mary Splaine and Frances Devlin, appeared. Both pointed to Sacco as the man they had seen leaning out of the murder car. Mary Splaine told how, after they had heard the shots, she and Frances Devlin had gone first to the front window, then to the one looking out on Pearl Street, just in time to catch the car as it careered across the railroad tracks. From sixty feet away she had watched the bareheaded bandit for the three seconds the car took to pass. “He had a gray, what I thought was a shirt—had a grayish, like navy color, and the face was what we would call clear-cut, clean-cut face ... a little narrow, just a little narrow. The forehead was high. The hair was brushed back and it was between, I should think, two inches and two and one-half inches in length and had dark eyebrows, but the complexion was white, peculiar white that looked greenish.” She had particularly noticed his left hand resting on the back of the front seat. It was “a good-sized hand that denoted strength.”
Dever thought Mary Splaine seemed honest, but he did not see how anyone could have remembered all those details from such a distant glimpse, and he decided that she must have refreshed her memory on her visits to the Brockton police station. At the Quincy hearing the year before, when her memory was greener, Mary Splaine had not been so certain of her identification. There she had said of Sacco: “I am almost sure I saw him at Braintree, but I saw him at the Brockton police station afterward.” When Moore, with the Quincy transcript in his hand, pressed her about her negative answers then, she belligerently denied making them but was finally forced to admit that she had said: “I don’t think my opportunity afforded me the right to say he is the man.” This she now qualified by saying that her observation of him for several hours in the Quincy court had convinced her that Sacco was the man in the car. “I am positive, certain he is the man,” she concluded, her voice ringing and determined. “I admit the possibility of an error, but I am certain I am not making a mistake.” As she said this Sacco thrust his head forward, smiling at her with fixed bitterness.
Frances Devlin’s story was almost the same as her friend’s, although not so detailed. She had seen the car spurt over the hill with a man leaning out firing at the crowd. She described him as “a dark man, and his forehead, the hair seemed to be grown away from the temple, and it was blown back and he had clear features, and rather good looking, and he had a white complexion and a fairly thickset man, I should say.” Sacco was that man. She was positive. Like Mary Splaine, in the Quincy court she had been less positive. There, the most she had said of Sacco was: “He looks very much like the man that stood up in the back seat shooting.”
McGlone, the young teamster who had caught the staggering Parmenter, was another disappointing witness for the Commonwealth. A ferret-faced, stubborn man, he said that the two bandits he had seen were Italians, but that was all he would say about them. Assistant District Attorney Williams could not bring him to say that Sacco and Vanzetti were the gunmen, any more than Moore could bring him to say that they were not. “Well,” McGlone kept on telling them, “I did not get a good look at them to see what they did look like.”
Edgar Langlois, the Rice & Hutchins foreman who had looked down from the second-floor window at the two gunmen below him, described them in court as short and dark-complexioned, full-chested, clean-shaven, with curly or wavy hair. He had not been able to identify either Sacco or Vanzetti at Brockton as the men he had seen from the window, nor was he now willing to identify them in court.
The only witness of the actual shooting to make any such identification was the young Jewish shoe-cutter Louis Pelser, who had been working on the first floor of Rice & Hutchins. After hearing shots outside, he said, he had opened the middle window and looked out at a bareheaded man with a gun, only seven feet away, shooting at Berardelli. “I seen this fellow shoot this fellow,” he told the court. “It was the last shot. He put four bullets in him.” The gunman had “wavy-hair—pushed back ... dark complexion,” and was wearing dark green pants and an army shirt. He had then seen the gunman climb into the car. Pelser pointed to Sacco as the man. Katzmann twice asked him, over Moore’s objections, if he had any question in his mind but that Sacco was the man. Pelser hesitated. In the heat of the day, in his blue serge suit, he was an abject sight. John Dever thought he “looked and acted like a man who was doing something he didn’t want or like to do.” Looking at Sacco, pressed by the district attorney, Pelser reluctantly came out with it: “I wouldn’t say he is the man, but he is the dead image of the man I seen.” He added that he had thrown open the factory window and watched there from the time the gunman shot Berardelli until the car disappeared up Pearl Street.
The day that Pelser testified, June 10, was the hottest of the year. Outside the sun was molten and inside the air had become so humid that the walls and marble floor were beaded. Judge Thayer allowed the jurors to take off their coats, and finally ordered the sheriff to bring them fans.
Moore, beginning his cross-examination, was like a cat with a not overly nimble mouse. Pelser sweated so that the drops fell. Some months earlier, when interviewed by Robert Reid, a white-bearded Boston constable who had become a defense investigator, Pelser had denied seeing any of the shooting. “They were shooting while I was at the window,” he had told Reid, “and I got under the bench, and that is all I seen of them.” Now he claimed that he had lied to Reid because he did not want to be called as a witness. Moore, driving him into a corner, made him admit that he had, after all, ducked under the bench. He also admitted that he had avoided going to the Brockton station with the other witnesses by telling the police he had not seen enough to identify anyone. However, Moore could not shake Pelser’s insistence that he had seen the gunman and the getaway car—and it was a fact that Pelser was the only person in South Braintree who had written down the car’s license number.
William Brenner, Peter McCullum, and Dominic Constantino, all of whom worked at the front benches with Pelser, were brought in as defense witnesses to contradict Pelser’s story, but their effect was lessened by the tidy mechanics of legal procedure that postpones the appearance of rebuttal witnesses until the prosecution has finished its case. So it was not until two weeks later, when the details of Pelser’s testimony were overlaid by that of a score of other witnesses, that Brenner took the stand. He too, after he had heard shots, looked through the partially opened center window and saw a man “sinking—sinking.” Pelser had not been near the window. After McCullum had raised the sash he had slammed it down again and yelled “Duck!” and they had all got down behind the benches. Under cross-examination Brenner admitted he really did not know where Pelser was when he himself was looking through the window.
McCullum, following Brenner, was not sure where Pelser was either, but Constantino was certain that when the shooting started Pelser was “right down under the bench.” Afterward Pelser had told them: “I did not see any of the men but I got the number of the car.” Constantino admitted he had not given any thought to where Pelser was until he had read the latter’s testimony in the newspaper two weeks before. Then he had gone to the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee and volunteered his information. At first he maintained that Pelser was at his workbench three windows down when McCullum had thrown up the sash, but Katzmann finally forced him to admit that he really did not know where Pelser was or whether he might have opened another window.
The appearance of Hans Behrsin, the Slater chauffeur, was unsatisfactory to the prosecution. All he could say was that the two men he had seen sitting on the Rice & Hutchins fence as he drove past in the Marmon “seemed to be pretty well light-complexioned fellows.” He had not noticed their features, and the district attorney did not even bother to ask him to identify the defendants.
It was generally agreed by the newspapermen covering the trial that Lola Andrews was the prosecution’s star witness, since she was the only one who had actually talked with any of the gunmen. She was an unpredictable woman. When Moore and two assistants had gone to Quincy on January 14 with a stenographer to interview her as a prospective defense witness, he found her calm and pleasant. According to the stenographer’s record she told Moore that she could not identify the two men she had seen near the car in front of the Rice & Hutchins factory. When she was shown pictures of Sacco and Vanzetti, she said they were not the men. Although she did not mention it to Moore on January 14, she later claimed that two evenings before, a dark one-eyed man in a sailor’s reefer had appeared at her door, spoken incomprehensibly about the South Braintree crime, and then, when she refused to listen to him, followed her into the hall toilet and assaulted her.
The evening before Lola appeared in court, Jerry McAnarney had gone to see her in Quincy, and she had told him that she could not and would not identify Sacco or Vanzetti as the men she had seen near the automobile in front of Slater & Morrill. Moore had even considered using her as one of his own witnesses and was surprised when she took the stand for the Commonwealth. She wore a stiff-crowned hat with a flat brim that shadowed her face. It was a coarse apprehensive face which, though faded, still managed to preserve a physical appeal.
Again she told her story of walking down Pearl Street to the Slater & Morrill factory, of seeing the pale man and the dark man by the touring car, of asking directions from the dark man on the way back. “He told me—he asked me,” she said, looking at the defendants in the cage, “which factory I wanted, the Slater? I said ‘No, sir, the Rice and Hutchins.’ He said to go in the driveway and told me which door to go in, it would lead me to the factory office.”
Williams then asked her dramatically if she had seen the man since. She replied that she had seen him in the courtroom. It was the climax to which the assistant district attorney had been building. “Do you see him in the courtroom now?” he asked. She paused, raised a bare, fleshy forearm, and pointed to Sacco.
“I think I do. Yes, sir. That man, there.” Sacco jumped to his feet in the cage, his eyes flashing. “I am the man?” he demanded in his thick accent. “Do you mean me? Take a good look!”
Moore in his cross-examination went back at once to the January evening when he had shown her a selection of photographs including one of Sacco holding a derby in his hand. According to the stenographer’s record she had said that the man with the derby was not the one she had talked with in South Braintree. Now, on the stand, she denied that she had said any such thing, claiming on the contrary that she had then identified the man in Moore’s picture as the man who had got up from under the car.
Though Moore could not shake her story he brought out that in February Stewart and Brouillard had taken her to the Dedham jail. There she had looked through a grating at a cell tier on a lower level. For about ten minutes she had watched a dark muscular man pacing up and down, the man—she finally decided—whom she had talked with in front of the factory on the day of the murder. That man, she was told, was Nicola Sacco.
At one o’clock Judge Thayer suspended the session for the week end. Lola Andrews’ cross-examination would continue Monday and into Tuesday. Moore was determined to drive her to the wall. But in his determination he overlooked the one question that should have occurred to any trained legal mind. Lola Andrews had been given detailed directions to Rice & Hutchins by a man who spoke English easily. Sacco’s command of English was so slight that he would not have been capable of such fluent talk. His heavy accent was at times almost incomprehensible. Yet Moore in his two days of hammering at Lola Andrews never once brought up the question of the speech and accent of the man who had directed her.
Judge Thayer’s weekend instructions to the jury seem, at least from the record, judicious and temperate. “Drop this case now,” he told them, “to be taken up Monday morning at ten o’clock. Don’t discuss this case among yourselves. You haven’t heard all the evidence; you haven’t heard any of the evidence of the defense. You haven’t heard the argument; you haven’t heard the charge. Just keep your minds open, absolutely open, fair and impartial, so that when you finally cross the threshold of the jury room for your final determination of this case your mind will be as impartial and as open as it is humanly possible for any man’s mind to be.”
The trial was now beginning to look like a long one, and most of the jurors were concerned about getting back to their families. They talked about asking the judge to hold longer sessions. Dever was worried that Filene’s might cancel his summer vacation after he had been away so long. Saturday morning he had just opened a Geographic when Sheriff Capen stuck his head in the door and asked if anyone wanted to take a bath. At first they thought it was his idea of a joke, but the sheriff marched them up to the jail and there in the basement they found twelve bathtubs all set up and waiting. For over an hour they soaked and splashed and tossed cakes of soap back and forth. Dever could see a rim of dirt forming all along the edge of his tub. The water felt great. So did the clean clothes his sister had sent him.
Monday morning brought Lola Andrews back to the stand. Moore repeatedly tried to force the witness into admitting that she had spoken to the pale sickly man, not the squat dark one. Over and over he asked about the location of the car, the position of the two men, the distance from the factory. Katzmann objected to the repetitions. So did Judge Thayer. “I thought we had been all through this before,” the judge exclaimed caustically. Moore explained that he was trying to show that “much of the testimony of the witness ... is one of rather hopeless confusion.” Katzmann objected and Thayer turned on Moore. “That is an unfair criticism of any witness,” he told the Westerner. “Kindly refrain from taking up a subject that has already been exhausted.”
Moore’s tactics were apparently to wear the witness down. All morning he kept hammering at her, going back again and again to what she had told him in January, making her retrace each step along Pearl Street on the morning of the crime. He could not, however, change her identification of Sacco.
Much of the testimony was irrelevant. Moore wanted to know how long the witness and Julia Campbell had worked at Rice & Hutchins, what they did there, and whether they had worked on men’s or women’s shoes. He became visibly embarrassed when the subject of Julia Campbell’s present address in Maine came up and Lola Andrews said he had asked her how she herself would like a little vacation down there. When she had told Moore she was afraid she would lose her job, he had promised her a job in Maine “as good or better.” Katzmann and Williams, sitting at the side of the enclosure, grinned at Moore’s efforts to defend himself.
At the beginning of the afternoon session Jerry McAnarney took over the questioning, leading back to the matter of the photographs that Mrs. Andrews had or had not identified for Moore in January. Then there was a conference between Thayer and the lawyers as to how far the defense might go into the witness’ past history. On overhearing this, she complained that she felt faint. A few seconds later she fell forward. Katzmann and Williams caught her as she slumped. She did not take the stand again until the following morning.
In the anteroom she told the district attorney that she had fainted because she had suddenly seen in the courtroom the man who had assaulted her. During the short recess it was whispered in the corridors that one of the spectators had been caught with a revolver. Unlike most courtroom rumors, it happened to be true. The man had a permit and was released, but on the morning following Lola Andrews’ fainting fit those who arrived early found the courthouse gates closed and guarded. Only five minutes before the session were they opened, and then each entering spectator was patted. There was another flurry when the police thought they had discovered a man in possession of three small bombs. They turned out to be hard-boiled eggs that he had brought for his lunch.
When John Dever thought of Lola Andrews being overborne in Quincy by Moore, with a stenographer taking down every word she said, he felt sorry for her. Moore’s harsh cross-examination backfired, causing Dever and the other jurymen to feel sympathetic enough to believe her.
Although Lola’s testimony dragged on for another day, little more was added. There was an involved and lengthy discussion as to whether the photograph she had identified for Moore had been of Sacco—as she now maintained—or of an unidentified mustached man in a straw hat holding a cigar. Indirectly Williams brought up the matter of the one-eyed stranger who had assaulted her. The assistant district attorney claimed that she had been in a frightened state of mind at the time of her interview with Moore and could not be held to what she had said. Although the jury was sympathetic, the newspapermen were less so. One of the Hearst reporters nicknamed her “Fainting Lola.”
Moore was sensitive enough to a jury’s mood to realize the impression her identification had made. To help repair the damage he brought in five refuting witnesses. Alfred LaBrecque, a young Quincy reporter, had gone to Lola Andrews’ room shortly after the assault, and she had told him that she could not say if the man who forced her into the toilet resembled the man at South Braintree because she had not seen the face of the man in South Braintree. George Fay, a Quincy policeman, testified that Lola had told him much the same thing. Harry Kurlansky, a tailor, who had known Lola for eight years, told of her passing his shop in February and his saying “‘You look kind of tired.’ She says ‘Yes.’ She says ‘They’re bothering the life out of me.’ I says, ‘What?’ She says, ‘I just came from jail.’ I says, ‘What have you done in jail?’ She says, ‘The Government took me down and want me to recognize those men,’ she says, ‘and I don’t know a thing about them. I have never seen them and I can’t recognize them’.”
Judge Thayer looked down sourly at the little Polish Jew. “Mr. Witness,” he rasped, “I would like to ask one question. Did you attempt to find out who this person was who represented the Government who was trying to get her to take and state that which was false?” Kurlansky, already bewildered by the courtroom atmosphere, was almost speechless at the thought of turning himself into a private detective. “Well,” he said, “it didn’t come into my mind. I wasn’t sure, you know. It didn’t——” Only later, with Jerry McAnarney to encourage him, was he finally able to say that he didn’t see why he should bother about it.
Moore sprang a surprise on Katzmann when he produced the aged but peppery Julia Campbell, whom he had brought down from Maine. Mrs. Campbell addressed Katzmann as “dear man,” and when he tried to confuse her with a litany of dates, she sent a titter round the courtroom by exclaiming “Oh, chestnuts!” She swore that Lola Andrews had never spoken to the man under the car but to the man standing by it. As for the two defendants in the cage, she did not think she “ever saw them men in the world.”
Lena Allen, who ran a lodging house in Quincy, was the last refuting witness. She said that Lola Andrews had roomed at her house until the other roomers had threatened to leave if she didn’t get rid of her. Lola Andrews had a bad reputation and was untruthful, according to Lena Allen—who admitted she disliked her.
Five witnesses identified Vanzetti in one way or another, but only one of them, Mike Levangie, the Pearl Street gate-tender, placed him at the scene of the murders. Almost all the other witnesses had described the driver of the getaway car as pale, fair, sickly. Levangie, at the inquest two days after the crime, had asserted the man was dark, with a dark brown mustache. Now he pointed to Vanzetti in the cage as the man, the only man he had seen.
Katzmann in his summing-up admitted that the driver of the car was indisputably a pale blond man, but he explained that Levangie’s identification was still valid as he must have glimpsed Vanzetti leaning over from the back seat and in the excitement thought he was the driver.
Although Levangie was the only witness to place Vanzetti in the Buick, two others placed him in South Braintree on that day. Harry Dolbeare, the piano tuner, had been summoned to Dedham as a prospective juror. While waiting in the courtroom he had seen the defendants being led by. Suddenly he had recalled the carload of tough tickets he had seen on Hancock Street the morning of the South Braintree crime. The man with the mustache, handcuffed to the sheriff, looked just like one of those men in the back seat. Having gone to the district attorney’s office with his story, he now found himself appearing as a witness. Dolbeare had no particular recollection of the other four men in the car except for the general impression of their toughness, but the middle man in the back seat was Vanzetti. “I had the same view of him in the courtroom as I had in the car, a profile view,” he told the court. He had “not a particle of doubt” about Vanzetti being the man.
John Faulkner, another surprise witness, picked out Vanzetti as a man who had ridden with him in the smoking car of the train from Plymouth to Boston on the morning of April 15. Faulkner, a patternmaker at the Watertown Arsenal, was an unhesitating witness. Each day he was accustomed to take the train from Cohasset and he always rode in the smoking car. On the morning of the fifteenth as the train was pulling into East Weymouth a man across the aisle had said someone in back wanted to know if the stop was East Braintree. Faulkner turned and saw a foreign-looking man sitting in the single seat next to the toilet. He had a black mustache, high cheekbones, and was wearing old clothes. At Weymouth Heights the man again leaned forward and asked if the stop was East Braintree. When the train stopped at East Braintree the man had picked up an old leather Boston bag and got off. “That is the man,” Faulkner said, identifying Vanzetti. He was sure. However, when asked by Moore if he could remember the man across the aisle who had first spoken to him, Faulkner had no recollection of him at all. He remembered the date because it was the time when he had been injured and had gone in on the late train to the hospital. The next day he read about the murders and wondered if the foreigner he had seen had had anything to do with them.
In refutation Moore brought in Henry McNaught, the conductor of the train, who said that no cash fares had been collected that day from Plymouth to Braintree. The station agents of Plymouth, North Plymouth, and Kingston testified in addition that no tickets had been sold from their stations to the Braintrees. However, Katzmann made them admit that they did not know if any such tickets had been sold the day before or how many might have been sold to Quincy or Boston. Edward Brooks, the ticket agent at East Braintree, recalled that about the time of the murders and several times since he had seen a tall dark man carrying a black bag get off the morning train and walk from the station toward Quincy Avenue. He had seen the man perhaps half a dozen times. Vanzetti was not the man.
The other two who identified Vanzetti were Austin Cole, the streetcar conductor, and Austin Reed, the gate-tender at the Matfield crossing. Cole told the same story he had told at the Plymouth trial. The two men who boarded his car at Sunset Avenue on May 5 and had been taken off by the police in Brockton had also got on at the same stop the night of April 14 or 15. Sacco and Vanzetti were the men. Reed, a man in his early twenties, told of the car that had swirled up to his crossing just as the train was coming and how he had gone out into the road with the stop sign in his hand. A man with a “stubbed” mustache and high cheekbones had leaned out of the car and asked loudly what the hell he was holding him up for. When Reed read of the South Braintree holdup the next day he had been sure those men were the bandits, and after he heard of the arrests on May 5 he had gone of his own accord to the Brockton police station to have a look at the suspects. The man with the mustache, Vanzetti, was the same man who had shouted at him from the car. He was sure of it in Brockton, he was sure of it now. There was no doubt in his mind.
Jerry McAnarney cross-examined Reed at random, asking what he was doing before the car appeared, how often the trains ran, where he now worked, how much dust was on the faces of the men in the car, what sort of hats they were wearing. Then Moore took over and at the last came close to the vital question when he asked if the man had spoken “in a loud bold voice.” Reed admitted that he had and that the quality of the English was “unmistakable and clear.” But Moore did not pursue the matter. As with Faulkner’s and Lola Andrews’ testimony, Moore overlooked the matter of the defendants’ accents. His jibes at Reed’s youth and at his going on his own to the police station aroused John Dever’s sympathy for the witness.
The weather continued oppressive; the motionless air bore down damply on the marble wainscotting. The routine of the court so enveloped the jurymen, the spectators, and even the lawyers and the sheriff’s men, that the outside world became unreal. Though the enlarged map of South Braintree still hung on the wall to the right of the jury box, there seemed no organic connection between the act of violence that had taken place there fifteen months before and this decorous legal game with its inherited rules.
For the newspapers the case lost its novelty, and the accounts of the trial often slipped to an inside page. What blackened the front pages now was the scandal of Mishawum Manor, a roadhouse north of Boston where, at a booze party a few years before, Adolph Zukor and several other film executives had been framed with naked call girls and shaken down for a hundred thousand dollars. The affair had been arranged through the office of District Attorney Nathan Tufts of Middlesex County. Only now was it coming to light, with Tufts, an old Yankee, and District Attorney Joseph Pelletier, an Irishman with a French name, facing disbarment.
It is almost impossible for anyone to sit through a murder trial without taking sides emotionally. With respect to Sacco and Vanzetti the sides had for the most part been taken before the defendants ever appeared in court. In the eyes of the court officers, sheriffs, police, janitors, stenographers, and the rest the two Italians were guilty, otherwise they would not be sitting in the cage. The feeling pervaded Dedham, and Frank Sibley, the dean of the local reporters, covering the trial for the Boston Globe, did not like it.
As the weeks passed there were other things Sibley did not like. He had not liked the squads of state troopers. He could not help but notice the antagonism between Moore and Thayer. Perhaps it was not so obvious to the jury, but as an old crime reporter he had been aware of it at once. Thanks to Moore’s objections, there was a succession of lawyers’ conferences at the bench with the jury sent from the room. Once when the stenographer went up to record what was being said in the buzzing cluster, Sibley heard Thayer snap, “Get the hell out of here! Who called you up here?”
Sibley, who remembered that old Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw would not discuss a current case even with his own family, was shocked by Thayer’s fondness for talking about the case to newspapermen. Several times on his way to lunch at the Dedham Inn Sibley had heard Thayer announce explosively that the defendants’ counsel were damn fools.
A gauntly impressive figure who wore a Windsor tie and a Latin Quarter hat and could be recognized on any Boston street a quarter-mile away, Sibley decided early that Sacco and Vanzetti were not getting a fair trial.
The last three witnesses to identify Sacco were William Tracey, the owner of the Tracey Building, the railroad detective William Heron, and Carlos Goodridge, who had heard the shooting as he was playing pool with Peter Magazu. Of the two men Tracey had noticed standing by the drugstore on the morning of the murders, one, he felt, was Sacco. “While I wouldn’t be positive, I would say to the best of my recollection that was the man,” was the most Katzmann could get out of him. When he was cross-examined he maintained that he felt quite sure he was right, but “would not positively say Sacco was the man.”
Heron recalled the two Dagos he had seen in the South Braintree station the morning he had collared the McNamara kid. He remembered them particularly because they were smoking under the no smoking sign. There was no question in his mind but that Sacco was one of the men he had seen.
Goodridge, a middle-aged man of uneasy appearance, picked out the bandit who had leaned from the car and pointed a gun at him. He was “the gentleman on the right in the cage”—Sacco.
“Are you not,” Jerry McAnarney asked Goodridge “a defendant in a criminal case in this court?” Goodridge denied it, and Judge Thayer broke off the line of questioning by reminding McAnarney that a man’s record as a defendant could not be brought up unless he had been convicted. There was another conference at the bench, with the jury sent out. Jerry McAnarney handed Judge Thayer a document from the clerk’s office showing that on the same day Sacco and Vanzetti were arraigned Goodridge had pleaded guilty to stealing money from his employer and a week later had been placed on probation. Thayer ruled against the jury being allowed to hear this because the case had been filed. John Dever sensed that something was wrong about Goodridge, even if McAnarney could not bring out the details.
Goodridge was contradicted by four defense witnesses who, unhappily for the defense, also contradicted each other. Harry Arrogni, a barber in Damato’s shop, said that when Goodridge had had his hair cut a few days after the holdup, he had told of seeing the man in the car, adding, “if I have got to say who that man was I can’t say.” Katzmann forced Arrogni to admit that this was the only customer’s conversation he could remember from a period of fourteen months. Damato himself claimed that Goodridge had said he was inside the poolroom and did not see any of the men in the automobile.
Just before the shooting Peter Magazu had left his poolroom to wait on a customer in the shoe shop on the other side of the partition. After the car had swung by he asked Goodridge if he had seen anything. Goodridge told him, “‘I seen the men, they pointed with a gun.’ I says, ‘How do the men look like?’ He says, ‘Young man with light hair, light complexion and wore an army shirt. This job wasn’t pulled off by any foreign people.’”
Andrew Manganaro, Goodridge’s disgruntled employer, related that Goodridge had told him he “saw this automobile going by and as he did one of the men pointed a gun at him and he run in. When he saw the gun he was so scared he run right in from where he was. He could not possibly remember faces.” As for Goodridge’s reputation for veracity, Manganaro announced with emphatic satisfaction that it was bad.
After the identifications there followed a string of residual witnesses to establish at length for the bored jury facts that were for the most part apparent at a glance. Charles Fuller and Max Wind told of finding the Buick in the Manley Woods, whereupon Moore engaged in a lengthy dispute with Judge Thayer as to whether or not the Buick should be admitted as evidence. Francis Murphy, the owner, testified that the car was his. Warren Ellis identified his stolen license plates. There was more interest in the story of William Hill, the police officer who had driven the Buick to Brockton. He had spent fifteen or twenty minutes looking the car over in the police garage and found it undamaged, yet the next morning he had noticed a bullet hole in the right rear door.
Assistant District Attorney Williams, putting Napoleon Ensher on the stand, announced that the Commonwealth would “show that this man Boda ... was seen driving a car of the type which is of interest to us in this case; that he was associated with one Orciani, that he was associated with Sacco, and we shall ask the jury ... to draw the inference that the car which Boda was then driving was the car concerned in this murder, and we shall tie up the car and Boda, by evidence of other association between these four men, Sacco, Vanzetti, Orciani and Boda.”
Unfortunately for this theory, there was no link for Williams to connect the murder car with the one Ensher claimed to have seen Boda driving. The assistant district attorney admitted that all he could hope to show was that it was the same kind of car; he could not, however, “place the four men together at any time in this particular Buick car.” For lack of such a connection, Judge Thayer excluded Ensher’s testimony.
Officers Vaughn and Connolly again told their tale of arresting the two Italians, Connolly elaborating on the story he had told at the Plymouth trial. Vanzetti had so far controlled his feelings, but as Connolly told of Vanzetti’s reaching for his revolver the Italian jumped up in the cage and shouted “You are a liar!” The deputies forced him down, his eyes sparkling with anger, as Connolly continued.
Following Connolly, Parmenter’s widow gave brief, pathetic, and largely inconsequent testimony. Fred Loring told of picking up the cap near Berardelli’s body. George Kelley, Sacco’s neighbor, refused to identify the cap as Sacco’s. The most Williams could get him to say was that the cap was similar in color to the cap Sacco wore and that at the Three-K factory Sacco hung his cap on a nail each morning. Williams asked whether he knew of anything happening to the cap because it was hung on a nail. Kelley said he did not. Then Williams asked what he noticed about the condition of the cap lining he was examining on the stand. “Torn,” Kelley replied. As he went on, he did his best to put in a good word for Sacco. His feeling of friendship was obvious. However, he was obliged to admit that Sacco had not worked during the Christmas week of 1919—an admission later corroborated by his sister Margaret, the Three-K paymistress.
Mrs. Glendower Evans had become such an assiduous note-taker that the sheriff finally provided a small table for her. Even from behind the table she managed to display a vast assurance and a well-bred disapproval of the proceedings. Judge Thayer took for granted the enmity of radicals and of anarchists (arnuchists, he pronounced it) but he expected something different from these Boston women of old families who seemed to form a phalanx at the trial and who, he felt, were people of his own class. One day, as the court adjourned, he asked Mrs. Rantoul to step into his chambers. She found him alone, waiting in his black robe. At once he asked her how she thought the trial was going. “I told him,” she said later in an affidavit, “that I had not yet heard sufficient evidence to convince me that the defendants were guilty. He expressed dissatisfaction both by words, gestures, tone of voice, and manner. He said that after hearing both arguments and his charge I would certainly feel differently.”
The Commonwealth rested its case on the first day of summer.
CHAPTER TEN
THE TRIAL: II
Of the four bullets taken from Berardelli’s body, plus the one removed from Parmenter in the Quincy hospital and the one found in his jacket, five had been fired from a 32-caliber pistol or pistols. The type was determined by measuring the lands (ridges) and the grooves impressed on the bullets by their passage through the barrel. In addition, the rifling had a right-hand twist that also left its mark.
The sixth bullet—the mortal one that Dr. Magrath had cut from Berardelli and marked with three needle scratches—had been fired from a 32-caliber automatic with a left-hand twist. Only the Colt among American automatics had such a twist. The question that four experts debated for several days was simply whether or not this bullet had been fired from the Colt found on Sacco.
For the jury, the experts’ testimony was the most tedious part of the trial—“a wilderness of lands and grooves,” as the Boston Post put it. Through the long sticky days the jurymen fidgeted, fanning themselves as the voices droned on.
Captain Proctor of the State Police led off for the prosecution. From the time he had arrived at South Braintree the night of the murders until Katzmann appointed Chief Stewart, he had been in charge of the investigation. At the very beginning he felt that the holdup with its careful timing was a professional job, and after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti he told Katzmann that Stewart had got hold of the wrong men. He still felt so. It was not, however, about his theories but as a ballistics expert that the white-haired Proctor now testified. Only three days before taking the stand he and his colleague Charles Van Amburgh and the defense expert James Burns had fired fourteen test bullets through Sacco’s automatic into a box of oiled sawdust. The recovered bullets were compared with the mortal Bullet III. That bullet had a milled groove around it (known as a cannelure) that had been discontinued in more recent Winchester bullets of the same caliber. Burns was unable to obtain any of the older Winchesters corresponding to Bullet III, so used U.S. bullets as most closely resembling the obsolete type.[9]
To John Dever, Proctor seemed a reluctant witness. The captain first explained that he was accustomed to testing 38- and 32-caliber revolvers by pushing bullets through the barrel manually. When in his demonstration he showed himself unable to strip the Sacco pistol, Dever was not impressed. Proctor then told the jury that the five right-twist bullets had come from a Savage automatic. When the assistant district attorney asked him if he was sure, he replied: “I can be as certain of that as I can of anything.” However, when Williams asked his opinion as to whether Bullet III had been fired from Sacco’s Colt, Proctor phrased his answer in a much more measured manner. “My opinion is,” he told Williams, “that it is consistent with being fired by that pistol.” In the casual moment the ambiguity of the answer escaped Moore. Thomas McAnarney spotted it at once and nudged his brother, but wise in the ways of the police, he feared a trap. If he should now ask Proctor what he meant by consistent, Proctor might reply that he meant that the bullet had gone through the gun—and this would be so much the worse for the defendants. Thomas therefore said nothing.
As for the four shells Bostock had picked up from the gravel walk, Proctor explained that Shell W—with the identifying Winchester W on it—had been fired in one pistol, the other three in another. He compared the indentation made by the firing pin on Shell W with the indentations on the test shells fired in Sacco’s pistol. The marks on both, he said, were consistent—again he used the word—with their being fired in the same weapon.
The Commonwealth’s second expert was Charles Van Amburgh of the Remington Union Metallic Cartridge Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Before going to Remington, he had spent nine years at the Springfield Arsenal, and then periods at the Westinghouse and Colt Firearms companies. His evidence was a corroboration of Proctor’s. He, too, had compared Bullet III with those recovered from the sawdust. By measuring the lands, he had determined that the bullet had been fired from a 32-caliber Colt. As to whether he thought it had been fired from Sacco’s Colt, he replied circumspectly, “I am inclined to believe that it was fired, Number III bullet was fired, from this Colt automatic pistol.” He went on to say that there was a rough rust track at the bottom of the pistol barrel, and that corresponding marks could be traced on the bullet. Under cross-examination he admitted that it was common for Colts to rust at that particular place. Like Proctor, he thought that the other five bullets had come from a Savage and had been fired from the same weapon.
Burns, the first of the defense’s experts to testify, had spent thirty years as a ballistics engineer with the U.S. Cartridge Company. He agreed that Bullet III could have been fired from a Colt but felt that it could also have been fired from a Bayard, a foreign make. Whatever pistol it had come from, the rifling had been fouled and corroded. The other bullets, he testified, could have been fired from a Savage, a Steyr, or a Walther. Burns produced six of the eight bullets he had fired from Sacco’s Colt—the other two, he explained, he had lost. He pointed out that the lands and grooves were regular and clean. To the question whether Bullet III had been fired from Sacco’s pistol his answer was: “In my opinion, no. It doesn’t compare at all.”
J. Henry Fitzgerald, the second defense expert, backed him up. Fitzgerald had been twenty-eight years in the weapon business and was now in charge of the testing room at the Colt Patent Firearms Company. “Number III bullet was not fired from the Sacco pistol,” he told the court. “I can see no pitting or marks on bullet Number III that would correspond with a bullet coming from this gun.”
With these paired contradictions the bullet testimony ended.
Berardelli had owned a 38-caliber Harrison & Richardson revolver. After his death it could not be found. It was Katzmann’s contention, underlined in his summing-up, that the revolver found on Vanzetti the night of his arrest had been lifted by Sacco from the dying detective.
In Dedham Vanzetti was to tell a different story about his revolver than he had told at the Brockton police station. When he took the stand he admitted he had lied before, claiming that he had wanted to protect the friends from whom he had bought the gun. His first story—that he had bought it five years before his arrest for eighteen dollars was false; he had really owned it only two or three months, and he had bought it from Luigi Falzini, an East Boston marble cutter, who in turn had bought it not long before from Ricardo Orciani. Instead of paying eighteen dollars for it, Vanzetti had paid five; he had never fired it; the bullets now in the revolver were there when he bought it. The reason he had bought it was to protect himself, for often when he went to buy fish he carried eighty or a hundred dollars in his pocket, and it was “a bad time, it was many crimes, many holdups, many robberies.” He did not remember telling Katzmann in Brockton that he had bought a box of cartridges or that he had shot off all but six on the beach at Plymouth. If he had said this, it was not so.
Falzini took the stand after Vanzetti and recognized the revolver as his because of rust spots and a deep scratch behind the trigger guard that he had noticed when he bought it. In the time he owned it, he had never fired it or taken it apart.
For his next corroborating witness Moore brought Rexford Slater from Dexter, Maine. Before settling in Maine, Slater had worked in the same Norwood foundry as Orciani. He had bought a Harrington & Richardson revolver from his mother-in-law, a Mrs. Mogridge, who happened to bring it with her when she came from Maine on a visit. He had fired it several times, once killing a cat, and in 1919 had sold it to Orciani. He recognized it on the stand by the way the nickel plating had worn off the end of the barrel and over the cylinder. The holster—picked up by the police in searching Vanzetti’s room—he also recognized from the brass knob on it, a tear in the back, and a small side-strap.
Slater was at first an argumentative witness. When Katzmann asked if another revolver of the same kind fired under the same conditions might not show the same wear, he denied that any conditions could ever be the same. As Katzmann kept pressing him, Slater’s confidence began to wilt. The district attorney asked him if he was not just guessing, if he was sure that Vanzetti’s revolver was the one that had belonged to him. “I am sure the same scars as on the gun I sold, and exactly the same,” Slater answered in syntactical confusion. Katzmann persisted. “I did not ask you that. Are you sure that is the same gun?” Slater delayed his answer so long that Judge Thayer finally rapped out: “Answer the question!”
“I am not,” he admitted.
Eldridge Atwater, Slater’s brother-in-law, took the stand to say that eight years before he had often borrowed his father-in-law’s Harrington & Richardson to shoot at bottles and cans. After Mogridge’s death, his widow had taken the revolver with her when she went to Norwood to visit her daughter and that was the last Atwater had ever seen of it. He could not quite bring himself to say that the revolver exhibited in court was the same one he had fired seventy-five or a hundred times in Maine. The closest he would come to it was to say that “as far as those two markings, that is the revolver Mr. Mogridge had eight years ago.” He had never paid any attention to the revolver’s serial number.
The missing link in the ownership chain was Orciani. Some months before the trial he had given up his foundry job to become Moore’s chauffeur. The fact that he was never called as a witness was not missed by the jurors. Katzmann in his summing-up made the most of it. “Why didn’t you bring Orciani into this courtroom?” he demanded rhetorically. “He has been within the control of this defense. He has been outside the courtroom, and he is not produced. What is the reason?”
While there was no one in South Braintree who could say with certainty that Berardelli had his revolver with him on the day of his death, his widow testified that he generally carried it. Margaret Mahoney and the other girls in the Slater & Morrill office had seen the revolver at various times, and he had even showed it to Jimmy Bostock the Saturday before the robbery. Bostock knew that it was nickel-plated and that the guard carried it in his hip pocket, but what kind it was he did not know. No one had seen the bandits take anything from Berardelli’s body. Lewis Wade saw the guard reach for his hip pocket as he was falling, and Peter McCullum saw one of the bandits holding a “white” revolver in his left hand.
Sarah Berardelli, a sad, illiterate Jewish woman, told what she knew of her husband’s revolver. It was like Vanzetti’s. Three weeks before the murder her husband had taken it to Boston to be repaired—it had a “spring broke.” Sarah had accompanied her husband and they had gone to a store on Washington Street which—with prompting from the district attorney—she remembered: the Iver Johnson Company. Berardelli had been given a claim check. This he turned over to Parmenter, who then let him take another gun that looked just like the first. Whether anyone had picked up the gun at Iver Johnson’s, whether it had come back into her husband’s possession, Sarah Berardelli did not know.
Lincoln Wadsworth, the clerk in charge of repairs at Iver Johnson’s, said that according to his records he had received a 38 Harrington & Richardson, the property of Alex Berardelli, on March 20, 1920, to which he had given the repair number 94765. George Fitzemeyer, the gunsmith on the fifth floor, testified that he had been given a revolver with that repair number sometime between the nineteenth and the twenty-second of March. He had repaired it and marked it “H. & R., revolver 32, new hammer, half an hour.” Since he repaired twenty-five or thirty revolvers a day, he could not be sure of the caliber of this particular one. On inspecting Vanzetti’s revolver he said that it had a new hammer. “The firing pin,” he said, “does not show of ever being struck.” Williams, conducting the questioning, neglected to ask him whether the Vanzetti revolver was the one he had repaired.
Fitzemeyer’s testimony about the hammer contradicted that of the defense ballistics experts, Burns and Fitzgerald. Burns stated that to the best of his knowledge the hammer was no newer than the rest of the weapon, but admitted that the revolver “bore little indication of being fired much.” Fitzgerald maintained that “the hammer in this revolver has every indication of being as old and used as much as any other part of the pistol.” Thinking it over, John Dever felt that Fitzemeyer, with thirty years’ experience taking revolvers apart, ought to know what he was talking about.
According to James Jones, the manager of the Iver Johnson firearms department, the gun with repair number 94765 must have been delivered because it was no longer in the store. When a repaired gun was not called for in a reasonable time the firm’s policy was to lock it away until after stocktaking time in January. If still unclaimed, it was then sold. Iver Johnson kept a record of every sale. There was no record of Berardelli’s revolver being sold. Unfortunately, records of delivery were not made, and there seemed to be no written record that this revolver had been delivered.
If the serial number of the missing revolver had been recorded when it was left for repair, it could have been determined at once whether or not Berardelli’s was the one found on Vanzetti—but at this point, as at so many in the case, the direct proof turned as elusive as a will-o’-the-wisp.
To Ripley, the jury foreman, Vanzetti’s revolver looked just like the Harrington & Richardson he himself owned. The last time he had used it—to fire some blanks at the Quincy firemen’s muster—he had found three bullets in the cylinder. These he had extracted, putting them in the vest of the suit he had worn to court. At the next recess, when he was downstairs in the dormitory, he searched his vest pockets and found the bullets still there. He later showed them to Hersey and McNamara, and Dever also had a glimpse of them.
While Ripley was downstairs examining his bullets, Thomas McAnarney in the upstairs corridor happened to run into Captain Proctor and the Commissioner of Public Safety, Colonel Alfred Foote, and they chatted together before court resumed. McAnarney never forgot Proctor’s parting remark to the commissioner: “These are not the right men. Oh, no, you haven’t got the right men.”
On Wednesday, June 22, the short opening statement for the defense was made by William Callahan, who, although he had been dropped as Vanzetti’s counsel in the Plymouth trial, still remained associated with Sacco’s defense. Whatever his capacities, he kept the confidence of both defendants to the end. Moore wanted him, as a local lawyer, to present the case, and this was one of the few times he emerged from his background role. Callahan first reminded the jurors that the defendants were presumed innocent. Then he promised that the defense would show what Vanzetti was doing on April 15 and would prove that Sacco was in Boston getting a passport. In addition, the defense would offer witnesses to show that the men in the South Braintree bandit car were not Sacco and Vanzetti.
Moore intended to swamp the prosecution with witnesses. After a protracted exposition by Charles Breed, a civil engineer who had made maps and photographs of the Pearl Street area for the defense, Moore produced Edward Carter, a cutter at the lower Slater & Morrill factory. As the first shots were fired Carter had looked out a window and up the street to what, until he saw a man drop, he thought was a bunch of boys fooling. From his distance of eighty yards and with the sun in his eyes the men had been indistinct. He was unable to say whether or not the defendants were the men he had seen.
Frank Burke remembered the man in the front seat who had thrust a pistol in his face as the Buick passed the cobbler’s shop. That man was “very dark complected and needed a shave very badly.” Burke also noticed a man with a “short cropped mustache” in the back seat. But when Callahan asked him if the defendants were the men he had seen ten feet away in the car, the most he could get Burke to say was: “I would say they were not.” John Dever was not favorably impressed. Burke seemed to him to be “altogether too anxious at times to volunteer information and at other times evasive and vacillating.”
Katzmann wanted to know how Burke knew the car was a Buick. Because, Burke said, it was like the car belonging to lawyer Callahan in which he had ridden to court this morning. His powers of observation were at a discount when it turned out that Callahan’s car was a Hudson.
Albert Frantello, who had run into Parmenter and Berardelli as they left the Hampton House, recalled that on his way up from the lower factory he had met two men leaning against the Rice & Hutchins pipe fence. He particularly remembered the dark one in a dark cap who needed a shave, for he had passed so close he could have touched him. The other man had a lighter complexion. They were talking to each other in “the American language,” and he was sure that neither of them was either of the men in the cage.
As part of his cross-examination Katzmann led Frantello to the jury box, asked him to observe two jurors, then turn away and describe them. Although both jurors were clean-shaven, Frantello described one of them as having a mustache as well as a nonexistent watchchain. Immediately after the murders he had told Brouillard that the dark man by the fence was “a regular wop”; now he denied that the man was an Italian. Whether or not he had told Brouillard that he did not know the language the men were speaking he could not recall, but whatever he might have said then, he now insisted that they were speaking “American.”
Wilfred Pierce and Lawrence Ferguson, shoe-cutters who had been working with Mark Carrigan on the third floor of the Hampton House, were no more satisfactory witnesses for the defense than Carrigan had been for the prosecution. Both had heard the shots and looked out the window as the touring car crossed the tracks. Both had seen a dark man climb from the rear seat to the front. Pierce saw him fire a shot. When asked if the man was either of the defendants, he would say no more than “I don’t think it was, but I am not positive.” Ferguson was equally uncertain: “It may or it may not have been. I don’t know positively.” The most that their testimony seemed to show—and this by contrast—was the extraordinary vision and tenacious memory of Frances Devlin and Mary Splaine.
Through the last of June the hot spell was unrelenting. To speed up the trial Judge Thayer agreed to extend the session from 9 A.M. until 6 P.M., but he rejected the jurors’ suggestion for evening sessions. The days followed each other torpidly. Sacco and Vanzetti sat upright in the cage, occasionally whispering to one another; the jurymen sat fanning themselves. The succession of witnesses accelerated and the spectators thinned out. Mrs. Evans, the “angel for the radicals” as the Post called her, continued to write voluminously at her desk. Her hats changed frequently, her attitude did not.
With June fading, Moore found the defense again in the familiar position of running short of money. The fifty thousand dollars collected over the past year was gone, used up in investigations and fees and a hundred other unavoidable expenses. Judge Thayer offered to allow the defense to proceed in forma pauperis with some of their costs home by the Commonwealth, but this humiliation Moore refused to accept. On June 29 with the defense lacking funds even to pay witnesses, Mrs. Evans produced $1500 to tide them over for the week. At the end of the week she added to this all her available income, $2950, plus $600 contributed by her friends. Mrs. Cerise Jack handed over $100.
The sixteen-man crew that had been digging the excavation across the street from Rice & Hutchins and that Mrs. Nichols saw cut and run when the shooting started could scarcely be considered the most reliable of witnesses, but Moore with his weight-of-numbers tactics how brought in five of them, of whom only one could speak English.
William Foley, the driver of a dump truck, had just left the excavation with a load when the shots rang out and the Buick swayed up Pearl Street. Foley, headed in the other direction, saw only the driver clearly and his description of him was unique: “eyeglasses, short mustache, soft hat, high cheekbones, sallow complexion.” He also had a glimpse of another man in a cap sitting in the rear seat. At this point he could not recall the men’s faces, but they were not the men in the cage. Katzmann, weaving back to Boda, asked Foley several times if the driver was not wearing a velour hat. Foley remembered it as a soft hat, but was positive it was not velour. He admitted that he could not tell whether or not the man in the back seat was one of the defendants.
Emilio Falcone, who had been shoveling dirt into Foley’s truck just before the shooting, testified through the court interpreter, Joseph Ross, who also acted as Judge Thayer’s chauffeur. Falcone thought that he had been forty or fifty feet away from the shooting, near enough at least so that he heard Parmenter groan as he dropped. The man who shot him was “kind of pale, light, pale.” Another man had picked up the money-box. Under Callahan’s rather fussy questioning as to whether the two men in the cage resembled the men in the car, Falcone said they did not. Callahan’s reiterations, doubly tedious through translation, made Falcone lose his temper. “Well, for God’s sake,” he replied, “why do you ask me again?”
Three Spaniards who had been working next to Falcone testified through an interpreter of their own. Pedro Iscorla, on his way to get a drink of water, had seen a “high, thin, slim, light fellow” shoot Parmenter and a dark man shoot Berardelli. These men were not the defendants. Henry Cerro had seen a light gunman who resembled neither of the defendants. Like Iscorla, Sibriano Guidierris had seen a light man and a little dark man with a dark cap. Each shot a different man. Neither gunman resembled the men in the cage.
Moore now brought in eight of the railroad workers who had seen the Buick pass. They had all noticed the meager light-complexioned driver and four of them had seen the dark man next to him. All were positive that the defendants had not been in the car. Nicola Gatti, one of the workers, had known Sacco in Milford eight years earlier—the only witness of the crime who had previously known either of the defendants. In spite of the remonstrances of the foreman, he had pushed ahead of the others when he heard the shots until as the Buick passed he was standing just behind the gate-tender. He had been that close, and he had seen three men distinctly: the pale driver, the dark man beside him, and a man in the back who was firing a gun. Sacco was none of these men—nor was Vanzetti.
One of the track workers, Joseph Cellucci, testified in English. He had recently joined the Navy and appeared on the stand in uniform. As soon as he had heard the shots he had thrown down his shovel. Ricci, the foreman, had tried to stop him, but he had ducked away and was only about five feet from the Buick as it passed. A dark bristly man half-kneeling between the front and back seats had leveled a revolver and fired at him, the shot winging so close to his ear that he was deaf for three days. Cellucci had only a glimpse of the driver but it was enough to convince him that neither of the prisoners had been in the getaway car.
Barbara Liscomb, who had looked directly down at the bareheaded gunman, was considered the star witness for the defense. The contorted face of the dark man with the pistol who stared up at her as she stood at a second-floor window of Rice & Hutchins, had made an imprint in her mind she could never forget. “I would always remember that face,” she told the court. She was “positively sure” it was not the face of Sacco or Vanzetti.
Jenny Novelli described the man she had seen in the car who looked so much like her friend as having “dark hair and a dark complexion, like a man that has to shave every day.” Neither prisoner was that man. Just after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti, Hellyer, the Pinkerton operative, had shown Mrs. Novelli a photograph of Sacco and she said it greatly resembled the man next to the driver. She now denied ever making such a tentative identification. Sacco was not the man.
Hellyer himself would take the stand almost at the end of the trial and testify that when he interviewed Mrs. Novelli on April 17, 1920, she had described the man beside the driver as “twenty-seven years, five feet seven inches tall, slim build, black hair, black eyes, dark complexion, thin features, wide mouth, smooth-shaven, but appeared to be a man who could grow a heavy beard from the dark stubble on his face.” Hellyer’s Pinkerton report, which was not produced in evidence, recorded a markedly different description of the man: “27 years, 5 feet eight inches, medium build, light brown hair, fair complexion and smooth shaven, wore a cap but cannot recollect what else he wore.”
Mrs. Novelli was followed by minor witnesses whose fleeting glimpses, although not enough to establish much about the other passengers in the Buick, at least corroborated the now-undisputed fact that the driver was a pale, fair man. Elmer Chase, who had been loading his truck in front of the Co-operative Society as the Buick passed, had looked down at the driver and the bareheaded man next to him. He was positive that neither of the men he saw that day were the men in the cage. Walter Desmond, the tobacco salesman who had met and passed the Buick on his way from Randolph, had seen the pale-faced driver but scarcely noticed the man next to him. All he could say in court was that the driver was not one of the defendants. Wilson Dorr, working in the sandpit with John Lloyd on the Stoughton Post Road, had seen four “light complected,” men in the Buick as it passed within twenty-five feet of him. All had looked directly at him. None of them resembled Sacco or Vanzetti.
It was to be Vanzetti’s claim that he had spent April 15 in North Plymouth going his usual rounds with his pushcart. Before he himself took the stand to make this claim, the defense introduced witnesses to corroborate it. The first was Joseph Rosen, a thirty-three-year-old cloth peddler from Dorchester.
On the fifteenth Rosen arrived in Plymouth at ten minutes to eight. After eating breakfast at Ventura’s Restaurant on Court Street, he had taken the streetcar to North Plymouth, carrying a valise of men’s suiting and some swatches. He met Vanzetti near Cherry Street and showed him a piece of blue serge that was enough for a suit. He offered it cheap because it had a couple of small holes in it. Vanzetti wanted to let Alfonsina Brini see the cloth. Together Rosen and Vanzetti walked several blocks to Cherry Court, where the Brinis had recently moved. Alfonsina knew cloth because she had once worked in a woolen mill. She felt the material and said it was a good buy. Vanzetti paid Rosen $12.25, then gave him another fifty cents when he complained he was losing money. It must have been about twelve o’clock when they left the Brinis’, for as they came out the whistles were blowing and people were hurrying home from the Cordage for lunch.
That afternoon Rosen had gone back to the center of Plymouth, peddled more cloth, stopped in again at Ventura’s, and finally left on the last train at 6:10. He had got off at Whitman, about halfway between Plymouth and Braintree, and spent the night in a dollar room at Littlefield’s Rooming House. The next day he had continued to peddle his goods in Whitman.
Katzmann spent an afternoon cross-examining Rosen, using the old legal trick known as taking the witness over the hurdles. Where, the district attorney asked Rosen, had he been on May 15, 1920; June 15, 1920; April 15, 1921; May 15, 1921, June 15, 1921?
Rosen could not say, but he maintained he had particular reasons for remembering April 15, 1920. In the morning his wife had paid his delinquent 1918 poll tax and when he returned home next day she had given him the dated and receipted bill he now produced in court. Also, the evening of the fifteenth “it was all boiling” in Whitman about the South Braintree murders. Lillian Shuler, who ran Littlefield’s Rooming House, later corroborated Rosen by producing a record of having rented him a room the night of the fifteenth.
When Vanzetti’s picture was published in the papers after his arrest and Rosen saw it and the words “fish peddler,” it reminded him of the day he sold the piece of blue cloth to the Italian in North Plymouth. He went to ask Alfonsina Brini about the matter the next time he happened to be in Plymouth, and it was through her that he came into the case.
Alfonsina herself again appeared to testify for her old friend. Katzman had agreed not to refer to the Plymouth trial in return for the defense’s renouncing any evidence as to the peaceful and law-abiding reputation of the defendants. Regardless, in his summing-up he called Alfonsina “a stock, convenient and ready witness as well as friend who ... in another case when another date was alleged, testified to the whereabouts of this same Vanzetti on that other date there involved.”
Alfonsina told much the same story that Rosen had told of the two men coming in to show her the damaged cloth. She recalled the date as the fifteenth because she had been ailing at the time and Dr. Shurtleff had come from Plymouth to see her on the fourteenth and sixteenth. In between those visits the Cordage nurse had called.
Gertrude Matthews, a nurse at the Plymouth Cordage Company, said she had visited Alfonsina between the fifteenth and the twenty-fifth but could not recall the exact dates. LeFavre Brini, Alfonsina’s daughter, told of Vanzetti’s coming to their house at about ten o’clock the morning of the fifteenth with some fish which he had left in the sink. He had come back about noon with a peddler and she saw him hand a length of cloth to her mother. She recalled the date because her mother had been in the hospital and it was just a week after she had had to quit her own job at the Gorton-Pew Fisheries to care for her.
Angelo Guidobone, a rug-weaver who lived in Suosso’s Lane, told through an interpreter of buying some codfish from Vanzetti during the lunch hour. He remembered it was Thursday the fifteenth because on the nineteenth he had had his appendix removed. When Katzmann asked him if he could not have bought his fish on the thirteenth or the fourteenth, Guidobone said that he bought fish fresh on Thursday to eat on Friday. “Do you think I keep fish in the house for a week?” he asked the district attorney indignantly.
Melvin Corl, a Plymouth fisherman from whom Vanzetti some times bought his supplies, recalled April 15 as the day he had been painting his boat at Jesse’s Boatyard. About two o’clock Vanzetti had come down to the water’s edge and stopped to talk with him, saying that the fish business was so bad he was thinking of looking for another job. Corl remembered the date because he had planned to put his boat in the water the next day; however, he had not managed to finish it until two days later—the seventeenth, his wife’s birthday. On that same day, the seventeenth, he had towed a boat belonging to Joseph Morey from Duxbury to Plymouth.
Frank Jesse, the boatyard owner, remembered seeing Corl painting his boat and Vanzetti standing talking to him, but he could not recall the date. Joseph Morey testified that Corl had towed his boat on the seventeenth; he remembered the date because it was two days before Patriot’s Day. Under cross-examination he admitted that he and Mrs. Corl had talked it over and finally decided that the seventeenth must have been the date. Katzmann finally edged him into admitting that neither he nor Corl was completely sure.
John Dever was not sure either. Corl at first had seemed convincing, but Dever now felt that if these people could not be certain about a date, they could not be certain about anything.
For several days Jerry McAnarney had noticed among the courtroom spectators a man with a high forehead, long nose, and drooping mustache so combined that he could have served as Vanzetti’s double. He turned out to be an unemployed Italian named Joseph Scavitto who had known Sacco slightly, and who, having nothing else to do, was spending his days at the trial. Jerry sent him, with a borrowed hat that intensified his resemblance to Vanzetti, to have some photographs made. If witnesses like Austin Cole could be persuaded to identify Scavitto from a photograph as the man they had seen, it might do much to establish Vanzetti’s alibi.
Nothing came of the idea, but Scavitto’s appearance in court resulted in a comic interlude. Asked on the stand what his business was, he replied that he was in the mosaic business. Asked where his place of business was, he answered: “I ain’t got no business.” From the flat pages of the record it is hard to determine just why his appearance and his explanation caused so much amusement, but according to the Herald, when he told of picking up someone else’s hat “the court filled with laughter.”
It would have been logical for Vanzetti to have followed his alibi witnesses to the stand. However, they had concluded on Friday, July 1, and with the Fourth coming on Monday, Moore did not want to have Vanzetti’s testimony interrupted by the holiday week end. In his place several witnesses were introduced to account for Sacco’s whereabouts on the day of the murders.
The first, John Williams, a mild-looking advertising agent, said that he had met Sacco in Boston on April 15 between 1:15 and 1:30 at Boni’s Restaurant in North Square. He had gone into Boni’s for lunch and had seen an acquaintance, Professor Guadagni, sitting at a table with a stranger whom he introduced as Nick Sacco. Guadagni had finished his meal and was smoking a cigar. As the three talked together, Sacco said he planned to go back to Italy and was going to get his passport that afternoon.
Williams, who sold advertising space in several foreign-language newspapers, including La Notizia, was well known in Boston. It was not so well known that he was a left-wing socialist and had been an associate of Trotsky and Bukharin in New York in 1917. Every Thursday he made the rounds of the small North End factories soliciting help-wanted ads for the Saturday editions. On April 15, according to his advertising book, he had taken an order from the Washington Knitting Mills. Later in the afternoon he had gone uptown to see his doctor, Howard Gibbs, who was treating him for asthma.
After the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti, Felicani asked Williams if he remembered seeing Professor Guadagni and Sacco at Boni’s. Williams said he did. Felicani then asked him if he realized this was the date of the South Braintree crime. Williams had not thought of it, but checking back in his advertising book to the Washington Knitting Mills order, he found it was so. Felicani and Williams felt that this fixed Sacco in Boston instead of in South Braintree. As Williams explained it in court: “The fact that I secured this order and the fact that I met this young man down there, and the fact that he was said to be going for his passport; all of those things brought a sequence of events back to me, and I recalled the incident very easily.”
Under Katzmann’s cross-examination Williams could not remember the dates of other visits to his doctor, or any advertisements he had taken on April 14, or any other occasions when he had met Guadagni. However, Dr. Gibbs testified that although he treated Williams regularly, he had seen him only once in April and that was on the fifteenth.
Albert Bosco, one of the editors of La Notizia, was another witness who claimed to have seen Sacco in the restaurant. Bosco was already at Boni’s with a man named Reffi when Guadagni came in with Sacco and introduced him as “the man that is going to Italy.” Then Guadagni talked about the banquet that the Franciscan Fathers of North Bennett Street were giving at their priory that same day in honor of James T. Williams, Jr., editor of the Boston Transcript, whom the Italian government had just made a Commandante in recognition of his war work. The next day Bosco published an account of the banquet in La Notizia—and also ran a story about the South Braintree killings. When Guadagni spoke to him after the arrests about his meeting with Sacco, Bosco went to the newspaper files and found that the banquet they had discussed in Boni’s restaurant had been held on April 15.
Another witness, a contractor named Angelo Monello, had known Sacco for several months before his arrest. On April 15, just before noon, they had run into each other on Hanover Street. Monello had the date fixed in his mind because on Sunday the eighteenth he had tickets for Madame X, playing at the Tremont Theatre with the great Italian artist Mimi Aguglia. Both he and Sacco were amateur actors and belonged to dramatic clubs, and they had talked about the play. Katzmann at once took Monello over the hurdles, asking if he had talked with anyone about the play on April 16, 17, 13, 12, 19, 21, 28. All Monello could say was that he did not remember.
Michael Kelley and his son Leon appeared willingly as witnesses for Sacco, but because of the agreement of counsel they were not allowed—as they had intended—to testify as to his character. Katzmann hovered over any such mention with an instant objection. Michael Kelley managed to say, however, that he trusted Sacco with the keys to the Three-K factory and that every night the place had been in his hands. Early in the spring Sacco had shown Michael Kelley a black-bordered letter saying that his mother had died. The letter, from Sacco’s father, begging him to come home, was then translated to the jury.
District Attorney Williams now read a deposition by Giuseppe Adrower, made in Rome. In April 1920, Adrower was a clerk in the Italian consulate in Boston. Sacco, he deposed, had appeared early in April about a passport and had been told to come back with two photographs. On April 15 he had returned with an oversize family photograph. Adrower remembered the date because it was “a very quiet day in the Royal Italian Consulate and since such a large photograph had never before been presented for use on a passport I took it in and showed it to the Secretary of the Consulate. We laughed and talked over the incident. I remember observing the date in the office of the Secretary on a large pad calendar while we were discussing the photograph. The hour was around two or a quarter after two, as I remember about a half an hour later I locked the door of the office for the day.” When Professor Guadagni came to the consulate the week after the arrests to ask about the incident, Adrower could not remember Sacco, but after Guadagni showed him the oversize photograph he remembered both it and the date and had no doubt about either.
The written cross-interrogatory contained the by-now-familiar Katzmann hurdles. Adrower had stated that between a hundred fifty and two hundred people a day came to the consulate to inquire about passports. He was asked to give the name of each person he talked with on April 17, 19, 21, 24, 29, and May 2, 3, and 4. He could not remember their names. He was then asked to describe every person with whom he talked on those days. “I cannot describe them in detail,” he admitted. In the defense’s redirect interrogatory, Adrower stated that although many people appeared at the consulate with family group photographs, none had ever brought in such a large one as Sacco produced.
Friday’s last new witness was Dominic Ricci, a carpenter living in a boarding house in South Stoughton, not far from Sacco’s bungalow. He had known Sacco several years. The morning of April 15, he said, he had seen Sacco on the Stoughton railroad platform at about half-past seven and Sacco had told him he was going to Boston to get a passport. Next day, seeing Sacco in the Three-K factory at eight o’clock, Ricci had talked with him about the newspaper accounts of the South Braintree murders.
Katzmann, with deceiving gentleness, asked Ricci if he had worked on the eighteenth. Ricci said he had. Katzmann asked him about the twenty-fifth, May 2, May 9, 16, 23, 30, and June 6, consulting a pocket diary each time he asked. A titter spread through the courtroom as the realization came that each of these dates was a Sunday. The realization did not come as quickly to the embarrassed Ricci. Katzmann continued leading him on a trail of Sundays through the rest of the year, finally closing his diary with mock weariness and smiling ironically at the bewildered Italian. “I have got to the end of my calendar. You worked every Sunday, didn’t you, from then on? That is all.”
George Kelley now reappeared briefly to say that on April 16 he had got to the factory at seven in the morning and Sacco had already been working there three-quarters of an hour.
Friday evening about ten o’clock, long after the courthouse gate had been bolted and the jury locked in for the night, John Drummond, the courthouse janitor, heard a noise in the library and found Jerry McAnarney lying collapsed on the center table. One of the deputy sheriffs drove him back to Quincy. Actually, Jerry was malingering to give Moore an extra day he claimed he needed for tracking down a new witness. Next morning Thomas McAnarney told Judge Thayer that his brother was under a doctor’s care and asked for a postponement. Thayer adjourned the court until Tuesday, July 5.
The prospect of the long week end dismayed the jurors, most of whom had hoped to be back with their families by the Fourth. However, they felt somewhat more cheerful after Judge Thayer told the sheriff to see that they were taken on an outing over the holiday. When John Dever heard that after a month of sitting still they were going to the beach, he felt the way he used to when the circus came to town.
The rest of Saturday the jurors spent as usual—playing cards, talking, reading the cut-up remains of the newspapers, and going out to meals. Sunday afternoon they went on their usual ride, this time through Wellesley and the Newtons.
Monday morning, after breakfast at the Dedham Inn, they went by bus to the wooden-turreted Cliff House at North Scituate. There they sat in rocking chairs on the wide veranda, looking out over the sea and enjoying the breeze until their shore dinner was ready. Dever long remembered that meal—clams and lobsters and more lobsters. George Gerard, the Stoughton photographer, had a Graflex with him. He had been born in Paris, and the others kidded him at the table, telling him it was too bad he couldn’t go down on the beach and take French pictures of the girls. During the afternoon Sheriff Capen produced a fishpole for each man and they sat on the rocks in the sun, joking and fishing.
It was almost dark by the time they got back to the courthouse. Dever felt contented even though his face and arms were red and the skin tingled on the back of his neck. As he went up the courthouse steps he noticed fireflies zigzagging about.