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.