“Yes, sir,” Vanzetti told him. “I am that man, not the man you want me, but I am that man.”
When Vanzetti had first been questioned in Brockton he could not recall anything specific that he had been doing on April 15. Katzmann now wanted to know how he could recall so much of that day fifteen months later. It was, Vanzetti told him, because in Brockton he had no idea he was going to be charged with murder. But “three or four weeks after my arrest I understand enough to see that I have to be very careful to save my life and my liberty and I have to remember.”
Thinking back, he was able to reconstruct most of the day by checking with what he had been doing on the following Monday, Patriot’s Day, and on other days. As for the night of his arrest, he had planned to go on to Plymouth with Boda in the Overland. Sacco and Orciani were to go back to Stoughton, and he had not expected to see Sacco again. When asked again about the literature they planned to collect, he said there must have been four or five hundred pounds of it, and that he had been told by his friends in New York to get rid of it. In a brief re-examination Vanzetti said again that when he was arrested he had thought it was because of political matters since he was asked “if I am a Socialist, if I am an I.W.W., if I am a Communist, if I am a Radical, if I am a Blackhand.”
Through a day and a half the district attorney flashed questions at Vanzetti so fast that his acquired English collapsed. Still, he managed to keep his calm manner. Such self-control would be beyond Sacco’s capacities. For a year now he had fretted in the Dedham jail, and a month’s submission to the routine of the courtroom had brought him close to the point of explosion—as the experienced Katzmann well realized.
After Vanzetti was released from the stand, Simon Johnson returned to answer a few questions about Boda’s Overland. This ended the morning session. At the beginning of the afternoon session, at a word from Moore, Sacco with one quick backward look at his wife stepped to the stand.
In spite of his jail pallor and his thinning hair, Sacco still kept an appearance of youth. Although born only three years after Vanzetti, he seemed a generation younger. He was dressed in a neat dark suit, a white shirt, and a black string tie. The Post reporter found his appearance “frank and open.” He seemed glad finally to be able to tell his story.
With Moore guiding him, he gave the matter-of-fact details of his childhood in Torremaggiore, then told of his early longing to go to America. “I was crazy to come to this country,” he explained, “because I was liked a free country, call a free country.” It was a fateful remark.
After Sacco’s arrival in America there were the years of odd jobs before he learned a trade, there was his marriage, and finally there was the black-edged letter from his father that made him decide to go back to Italy. Only in passing did Sacco mention that he had left the United States in June 1917 and returned sometime in August. All this was just a preliminary to the history of April 15, 1920. That day, according to his account, he left Stoughton on the 8:56 A.M. train for Boston to go to the Italian consulate and apply for a foglio di via, a one-way passport to Italy. He arrived at the South Station and walked from there along Atlantic Avenue to the North End. On Prince Street he bought a copy of La Notizia and spent some time reading it. Then he walked down Hanover Street, turned the corner, and ran into his friend Angelo Monello. Together they walked to Washington Street; Sacco continued alone, looking in the store windows and pricing the new suits and straw hats. The morning was getting on, and he thought he might as well have lunch and see about his passport afterward.
As he was going in to Boni’s Restaurant he met Professor Guadagni, and they sat down at a table together. Albert Bosco was already there, and later Mr. Williams, the advertising man, joined them. Sacco stayed about an hour and afterward went uptown to the consulate on Berkeley Street. Arriving there at two, he said to the clerk, “I like to get a passport for my whole family. He asked me—he said, ‘You bring picture?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ so I gave it to him, see a big picture. He says, ‘Well, I am sorry. This picture is too big.’ ‘Well,’ I says, ‘can you cut and make him small?’ he said, ‘the picture we cannot use, because it goes too big.’ I says, ‘Can you cut?’ He says, ‘No, no use, because got to make a photograph just for the purpose for the passport, small very small.’”
After a quarter of an hour at the consulate he went back to the North End, dropped in at a café for a cup of coffee, and met Professor Guadagni again with a Professor Dentamore. Then he went over to a store on the other side of North Square to buy some groceries. Some time in the afternoon he met a man named Afa—that was the way he thought the name was spelled—and paid him fifteen dollars he owed him. A little after four he took the train for Stoughton and arrived there about six. On the way home he stopped off at the drugstore and bought some elixir for a physic.