As to his other lies, Sacco had lied when he denied knowing Orciani. He had lied about the time he worked in South Braintree because he was afraid if the police found out he had been working there under the name of Mosmacotelli he would be punished as a slacker and they would find the radical literature in his house. He had lied when he said he had known Vanzetti only a year and a half because he did not want to tell about their going to Mexico. He had known Boda for three years; he had lied when he said he never had heard of him; Boda was a radical and he wanted to protect him. He had had no intention of looking up Pappi that night. That was another lie. As for the day of the crime, he had said in the Brockton station he worked all that day because he really thought he had. Katzmann forced him to admit that he had lied to George Kelley, his friend, in telling him he would be gone only half a day. Next morning he had invented a story for Kelley that there was such a crowd in the consulate that he could not get his passport in the morning and so missed the noon train.
Katzmann questioned Sacco minutely about the evening of May 5. Then after a short recess the district attorney appeared with two caps. Sacco objected that the first, a gray one, was too soiled to be his, but then admitted it belonged to him. The hole or tear in the lining he could not account for, although Katzmann pressed him to agree that it came from the nail in the factory wall on which he used to hang it each morning. The second cap, the dark one found next to Berardelli’s body, Sacco denied was his.
Mrs. Evans enlivened the courtroom Friday and caused some confusion among the courtroom attendants by appearing with binoculars. Thursday, July 7, was Judge Thayer’s sixty-fourth birthday, and he had been sent a bouquet of rambler roses. They now stood in a vase on the great oak desk, nodding cheerfully in the breeze from the electric fan.
When Sacco, his face heavy with fatigue, resumed the stand he asked for an interpreter and Joseph Ross was assigned to him. Katzmann began to hammer at why Sacco had said he was working at the factory the day before he had admittedly read in the paper about the South Braintree murders. Sacco tried to explain that at the time he had not given the date much though. The district attorney insisted. “Why did you tell me a falsehood that on Thursday, the day before you read the account in the paper, you worked all day?”
“Well, I did not remember for certain,” Sacco told him. “I said that I had been out two or three days.” There were two other days, Sacco admitted, that he had gone to the consulate, although he could not even now remember just what days they were. But they were half-days; April 15 was the only whole day he had spent in Boston.
As the cross-examination continued, a dispute arose as to the accuracy of Ross’ interpreting. Sacco accused him of translating inaccurately. Felix Forte, a young, bilingual lawyer brought in by the defense, debated with Ross as to the translation of quanto; Ross had translated it as before whereas Forte held that it meant when. As the argument boiled up, Judge Thayer sent the jury from the room. An arbiter called by Thayer, A. Minini, tried to reconcile his colleagues. A flurry of English and Italian followed. Vanzetti, in the cage, sprang to his feet to object to Ross.[12]
After the jurors had again taken their seats, Sacco denied that in Brockton he had said he was away from the factory at the beginning of April and that this was the only time he was away for a whole day.
The district attorney turned abruptly from the debate on days: “Did you shave this morning?” When Sacco said yes, he continued, “Have you shaved every day since this trial opened?” Scarcely waiting for the affirmative answer, the district attorney announced: “That is all, sir.”
It was Moore’s task in the re-examination that followed to patch up the damage done. He brought out that although Sacco might have admitted in Brockton that there was one whole day in April he had not worked, he had given Katzmann no definite date. He had lied to Michael Kelley about being delayed at the consulate because he was ashamed to admit that the reason he had broken his word about getting back in the afternoon was that he had spent the time talking to his friends. The letter that he had received from his father, after Sabino’s earlier letter announcing the mother’s death, was shown as corroborative evidence to the jury.
Once more Sacco went over the night in the Brockton police station, still maintaining that he thought he had been arrested because he was a radical and a slacker. The first thing Stewart had asked him was whether he was “an anarchist, communist, or socialist.” Again the dispute welled up about Ross’ integrity. As the morning session reached its end Jerry McAnarney asked that the jury be retired. He then presented another motion for a severance, asking for a separate trial for Vanzetti on the grounds of Sacco’s outburst: