The defense tried to get the information into the record that Dentamore and Sacco came from the same district in Italy. Judge Thayer excluded the references. Thwarted at each turn, Moore tried to explain that “through this witness the defense offers to prove that in the conversation that was had between the witness and Mr. Sacco it became known to the witness that Mr. Sacco and himself were both from the same section of Italy, that they were both mutual friends and acquaintances of Mr. Mucci,[13] and that the witness, after learning that Sacco was returning to Italy at an early date ... asked Mr. Sacco to convey to Mr. Mucci his good wishes and the fact that they had met one another in Boston.” At once the district attorney objected and his objection was sustained.
As Monday drifted into afternoon there was a feeling of the wheels running down, of impatience for the hour of decision. Everyone in the court sensed there would be no more surprises, no more climaxes. Half the reporters’ desks were empty. The Post sent its cartoonist over to the Middlesex courthouse to sketch the juicier proceedings in the Mishawum Manor scandal. The remaining witnesses, including the handful to be offered by the Commonwealth in rebuttal, were like odd bits of string, useful only for tying up loose ends. Speaking through an interpreter, Carlos Affe, a grocer whom some of the Italians jokingly called the mayor of East Boston, told of selling $15.67 worth of groceries to Sacco on March 20, 1920. On April 15 he had again seen Sacco, who had paid him $15.50. Affe had made a record of this in his account book and marked the date. That book he now produced.
Luigi Quintiliano appeared briefly to say that he had seen Vanzetti in New York on April 27 and 28 and had talked over the problem of getting rid of radical literature. The Spanish anarchist Frank Lopez refused to take an oath and affirmed instead that he had talked to Vanzetti both before and after his New York trip about getting incriminating literature out of their friends’ houses.
Then Rosina Sacco came forward, glancing at her husband with as much courage as she could muster. She stood there, a slight pathetic, determined figure, her red-gold hair softening her fine, slightly archaic features so that with her sprinkling of freckles she looked almost adolescent. Her story was simple. She told of her husband’s receiving the black-bordered envelope containing the news of his mother’s death one noon just after he had eaten. He had gone back to the factory, but after half an hour came home again. She remembered how on the day of his arrest she had been cleaning out a closet and found the shotgun shells. Vanzetti had picked them up and said he would sell them for fifty cents to a friend. Then, going through the bureau drawers, she had found a pistol and some more shells. These she placed on top of the bureau and asked her husband what he was going to do with them. That same day Orciani and Boda had come to supper. After supper her husband left with Vanzetti to catch the Brockton streetcar. Boda and Orciani started out later after fixing a tire on the motorcycle. When Vanzetti had said good-by to her, he had given her a message to take back to Italy. She did not learn of her husband’s arrest until twelve the next day when officers Connolly and Scott and two or three others arrived at the house. On April 15 a man from Milford named Iacovelli had come to see about taking over Sacco’s job and stayed a quarter of an hour.
Jerry McAnarney showed Rosina the caps that had been exhibited before. The gray cap, she thought, looked like her husband’s, like the cap the police had taken from her house on May 6. As for the dark one with the earflaps, her husband had never owned such a cap “because he never liked it ... he don’t look good in them positively.”
When Katzmann questioned her, she told him that even before the death of Sacco’s mother they had been planning to return to Italy. “That’s why we were saving our money, because we wanted to go across in the old country, but since the mother died, we hurried more because he was sorry about his mother died without seeing him.” Sabino’s letter telling of the mother’s death had arrived March 23 or 24. Thirteen or fourteen days later Sacco had gone in to the consulate with his photograph. Katzmann wanted to know how thirteen or fourteen days after March 24 could make the date April 15. “Well, you count up from the twenty-third or twenty-fourth of March,” she told him, “and going to the fifteenth, I says thirteen or fourteen days, and I don’t think it is much different, because it is over a year he is in prison, and I don’t remember everything.” Katzmann asked her nothing more. Sacco’s savings-bank book, introduced as evidence, showed that from December 9, 1918, he had deposited amounts from $30 to $270 for a total of about $1500.
The Milford shoe-worker Henry Iacovelli was the last defense witness. In April 1920 he received a letter from Michael Kelley telling him there was a job open in the Three-K factory. He had gone to Stoughton on April 15, first seen George Kelley, then gone to Sacco’s bungalow. Rosina told him that Sacco had gone to Boston, but this hearsay evidence Jerry McAnarney could not bring out in court. On this fading note the defense rested.
Among the residual rebuttal witnesses were Angelo Ricci, the foreman of the railroad gang near the crossing; a Mary Gaines, who knew Lola Andrews and Julia Campbell; Henry Hellyer, the Pinkerton agent; Chief Stewart; Lieutenant Guerin; and a belated identification witness by the name of Frank Hawley.
Ricci maintained that when the getaway car went over the tracks he did not see any of his gang at the crossing, but he admitted under cross-examination: “When you got to control twenty-four men, what to hell, one fly away. I could not tie them up with string and hold them all as one. If they went around, sneaked around the pile of dirt or something like that, I could not hold them.”
Mary Gaines of Quincy was brought in to show that “the statement Mrs. Andrews made about making inquiry of the man under the car is not of recent contrivance.” She had visited Julia Campbell and her sister and Lola Andrews in the Alhambra Block the week following the shooting. Lola had then told them “she seen this man underneath the automobile, and she taps this man on the shoulder, she asks him to please direct her to the Rice and Hutchins shoe shop, and he got up and directed her to it.”