Later in the day several dozen witnesses were brought from South Braintree and Bridgewater to see if they could identify the prisoners as participants in either of the holdups. In the small Brockton police station there was no attempt to have the two Italians mixed with other suspects in a lineup. They were merely led into the emergency room by themselves where they stood docilely until ordered to kneel, put on and take off their hats, raise their arms, and assume the crouching position of a man firing a pistol. The various witnesses walked around them slowly observing them from every angle.

Mary Splaine, Frances Devlin, Minnie Kennedy, Louise Hayes, Mark Carrigan, Albert Frantello, Frank Burke, Hans Behrsin, Louis DeBeradinis, Jimmy Bostock, Mike Levangie, and Lewis Wade were among those who came from South Braintree. Minnie, Louise, Carrigan, Burke, and Bostock could not identify either man. Frantello was certain that they were not the ones he had seen on April 15. Wade thought Sacco resembled the man he saw shooting Berardelli.

Frances Devlin and Mary Splaine studied the two men separately several times. Sacco was again ordered to raise his arm as if holding a pistol. The two women finally decided that he might possibly have been the man they saw leaning out of the car and shooting, but they were certain they had never seen Vanzetti before. Of all the South Braintree witnesses only Levangie, the gate-tender, picked Vanzetti as the driver of the getaway car. Jenny Novelli, coming to the station with a later group of witnesses, said that Sacco resembled the man she had seen in the bandit car, but she could not be positive about him.

The shotgun bandit in the Bridgewater holdup had been described by Constable Bowles as having a close-cropped mustache, and Slip Harding had so described him to a detective the afternoon of the crime, adding “I did not get much of a look at his face, but I think he was a Pole.” Nevertheless, he no sooner caught sight of the droop-mustached Vanzetti in the Brockton station than he pointed to him with great positiveness as the man with the shotgun. Cox, on the other hand, was inclined to think Vanzetti was not the man. Bowles thought that he might have been.

While these identifications were being made, Chief Stewart and Assistant District Attorney William Kane took the handcuffed but still unperturbed Orciani on an identification marathon from Brockton to Needham to Braintree to Bridgewater. Faced with Sacco and Vanzetti, Orciani smilingly declared that he had never seen them before in his life. In Needham George Hassam said Orciani was not the man who had tried to borrow his dealer’s plates in December. When Orciani was displayed in the Braintree town hall, three witnesses identified him as one of the April 15 gunmen. In Bridgewater Harding was positive that Orciani had been one of the gunmen in the December 24 holdup.

Back in Brockton, Orciani was taken to court and charged with exceeding the speed limit on his motorcycle and not having a taillight, the only things the police could pin on him for the moment. Like Sacco and Vanzetti, he was held without bail. Although state and local police combed their districts for Boda they could find no trace of him.

The headlines of the Boston Evening Globe of May 6 announced that Governor Calvin Coolidge had vetoed the 2.75 Beer Bill. Tucked away on page six were several short paragraphs about “Bert Vanzetti, 32, of Plymouth, and Mike Sacco, 34, of South Stoughton ... arraigned this morning in the Brockton Police Court charged with carrying concealed weapons.” The last paragraph mentioned that an unnamed witness was almost sure that one of the men under arrest had driven the getaway car the day of the South Braintree murders.

These few lines were the first notice in print of what would in the next seven years become the Sacco-Vanzetti case.

CHAPTER SIX
THE MEN AND THE TIMES

An introspective man, the sensitivity of his features concealed by prominent cheekbones and the drooping thatch of his ferocious mustache, Vanzetti was well known in North Plymouth’s Italian settlement. Unmarried, he boarded with the Fortini family in a house halfway up Cherry Lane. Daily he sold fish to the Italian and Portuguese families, pushing his cart with its clanking brass scales and load of haddock, cod, halibut, and swordfish along Cherry Lane and Cherry Court and Standish Avenue. The fish for his regular customers he carefully wrapped in newspapers, marking the packages with the name and price.