Facing the chair

by John Dos Passos

Levangie was a loose-jointed fellow, with a shifty eye and a look of cunning in his face. He appeared wholly unabashed at the contradictions brought out during his cross-examination. Rather he had the manner of regarding the whole proceedings as a joke. It would be difficult to imagine a witness less entitled to carry weight. Yet his “identification” was the sole evidence of Vanzetti’s presence at the murder scene.

The other identification witnesses of Vanzetti referred to times and places other than those of the crime. They were Faulkner, Dolbeare, Reed, and by a stretch of liberality also Cole.

John W. Faulkner averred that he left Cohasset on the 9:23 a. m. train on April 15. At three stations he was asked by a man across the aisle if this was East Braintree. The inquirer said that a man behind him wanted to know. Faulkner identified Vanzetti as the man in back. This man alighted at East Braintree.

The improbability that any man on his way to commit murder should attract attention to himself and to the point at which he was to meet his companions in crime, is heightened if applied to Vanzetti who is a man of superior intelligence and who had made frequent journeys on that railroad line.

The morning after the murder, when the news of the crime was published, it occurred to Faulkner that perhaps the Italian on the train might be mixed up with the affair. Then came the arrest and the publication of Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s pictures. But Faulkner, with the episode fresh in his mind, did nothing. Two months later he was taken to make an identification. At Dedham he testified positively, “He is the man,” indicating Vanzetti in the cage opposite to him.

At one point defense counsel McAnarney suddenly requested a certain man in the audience to step forward, a dark man with a big moustache like Vanzetti’s, and Faulkner was asked:

“Isn’t this the man you saw on the train?”

“I don’t know. He might be.”

But the dark man bore little resemblance to Vanzetti, except for the big moustache. His name, Joseph Scavitto.

In contradiction of Faulkner’s claim, the defense put on the stand the conductor of the train, who certified that no ticket had been collected from Plymouth to East Braintree or to Braintree on that day, and that no cash fare had been paid; and it put on the stand the ticket agents of Plymouth, of Seaside, first station out of Plymouth, and Kingston, the second station out of Plymouth, all of whom testified that no ticket had been sold to either of the above points.