4

Anarchists With Bloody Hands

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts

versus

Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco

Thursday, April 15, 1920, dawned bright and windy in South Braintree, Massachusetts, a manufacturing town some twenty miles south of Boston. Shortly after nine that morning, Shelley A. Neal, the local American Express agent, waited at the New Haven railroad station for the delivery of a $15,776.51 payroll. The money was consigned to Slater & Morrill, Inc., one of South Braintree’s two shoe companies.

The cash arrived on the Boston train at about 9:10, and Neal took it to his office on the first floor of Hampton House, a four-story frame building on Railroad Avenue, a few feet from its intersection with Pearl Street, South Braintree’s main thoroughfare. Slater & Morrill occupied the top three floors of Hampton House, with its business office on the second floor. After he had sorted and counted the money, Neal left his office and walked down Railroad Avenue to the shoe company’s main entrance in the center of the rectangular building. As he locked his door, he saw that the hands on his office clock stood at exactly 9:30. He was a rapid walker and had almost arrived at the double-doored entrance before he noticed, with some apprehension, that a large, newly varnished black automobile with its motor running was parked alongside the curb.

When Neal passed the car, he saw that its driver, a light-haired man with an emaciated, jaundiced face, was watching him intently. As he entered Hampton House, he observed that the man got into the car and drove slowly up Railroad Avenue. Neal followed the vehicle with his eyes and thought that he could glimpse another man sitting in its rear seat. Although he later admitted that he had considered the driver’s conduct extremely suspicious, the agent did not report the incident to anyone at Slater & Morrill.

The company’s paymistress receipted for the money and began at once to fill the pay envelopes. When she had finished, the grey-colored packets were stacked in two large tin flats. Thursday was payday at the factory, and the boxes were scheduled to be picked up at three o’clock that afternoon by Frederick A. Parmenter, Slater & Morrill’s acting paymaster.

The car that had aroused Neal’s suspicions was apparently seen in other parts of South Braintree that morning. At 10:30, Harry E. Dolbeare, a piano repairman, was walking on Hancock Street when he noticed what he later described as “a carload of foreigners” in a large black sedan turning into Hancock Street from Holbrook Avenue. In the back of the car, he saw a man with “a very heavy mustache ... leaning forward as though he was talking to either the driver or the other person in front of the car.” In all, there were four men in the car who appeared to him to be “a tough looking bunch.”

A little after 11:30, Mrs. Lola R. Andrews, an unemployed practical nurse, arrived in South Braintree with Mrs. Julia Campbell, an elderly friend. Both women were seeking work and applied first at Slater & Morrill’s Factory No. 2, a four-story frame building which was located about an eighth of a mile east of Hampton House on Pearl Street. As the women entered the factory, Mrs. Andrews noticed a large black car parked in front of it. She saw a swarthy man, dressed in dark clothing, bending over the hood. In the back seat, she observed a thin, emaciated looking man with what she later depicted as “a light complexion.”

There were no jobs open at Slater & Morrill and, when Mrs. Andrews left the building some fifteen minutes later, she saw that the swarthy man was now lying on the ground with his head and shoulders under the front part of the vehicle. The sickly looking man, who had been sitting in the rear seat, was outside, leaning against the back of the car. Mrs. Andrews asked the man under the car if he could direct her to the Rice & Hutchins factory. At the sound of her voice, he got to his feet and pointed to the five-story brick building which was some 120 feet west of Factory No. 2.

Earlier that day, John M. Faulkner, a Cohasset pattern maker who was bound for the post hospital at the Watertown Arsenal to be treated for an infected hand, had boarded the 9:20 train to Boston. He was sitting in the second seat on the left hand side of the smoker. As the train came into East Weymouth, the passenger sitting on his right asked him if the stop was East Braintree. As Faulkner remembered it, “he said, ‘the man behind me wants to know if it is East Braintree.’” The pattern maker had then looked at the other man who was sitting in a single seat near the lavatory. “He looked like a foreigner, with a black mustache, and cheek bones.” The “foreigner” wore a felt hat and was dressed in “kind of old clothes.” Faulkner had watched him leave the train, carrying a leather bag, when the local pulled into East Braintree shortly after ten o’clock.

At 11:30, William S. Tracy, a real estate broker, had driven by South Braintree Square. He “saw two men standing with their back to the window of that [drug]store, the window nearest the corner of Pearl Street.” Some ten minutes later, he returned to the Square and noticed that the two strangers were still there. “The man nearest the drugstore was the shorter of the two and the other fellow ... the shorter man of the two, he stood erect, and their general appearance was that they were dressed respectably and looked as if they might have been waiting for a car.” What had attracted his attention to the men, whom he thought were Italians, was the fact that “no one was allowed to lean up against that building.”

Just after noon, one William J. Heron, a railroad detective, saw two strange men loitering near the station restroom. “One of them was about 5 feet 6 inches, weighed about 145 pounds, Italian. The other fellow was about 5 feet 11; I should say, weighed about 160. They were smoking cigarettes, one of them.” He had observed them closely because he considered it unusual for them to be there with no train due for some time, and “they acted kind of funny to me, nervous....” Heron had come to South Braintree to look for a lost boy whom he had found in the station and taken into the ticket office. When he emerged, a few minutes later, “the two men were gone.”

Shortly before three o’clock, Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli, a guard, arrived at the paymistress’ office on the second floor of Hampton House. They signed for the payroll and each man took one of the tin boxes containing the pay envelopes. Mark Carrigan, a shoe cutter, who worked on the third floor of Hampton House, watched the two men leave the building. They crossed Railroad Avenue, passed to the right of the New Haven station, talked briefly with James E. Bostock, a Slater & Morrill millwright, and then started up Pearl Street toward Factory No. 2.

A few minutes earlier, Bostock had noticed two foreign looking strangers—he later said he thought they were Italian fruit peddlers—leaning against a fence near a water tank on the north side of Pearl Street, but he did not mention them to Parmenter or Berardelli. His conversation with the paymaster and the guard was brief—he remembered only that Parmenter had ordered him to “go into the other factory and fix the pulley on the motor” and that he had answered that he couldn’t do the job that afternoon because he was “going to get this quarter past three car to Brockton.”

Albert Frantello, a former Slater & Morrill employee, also saw the two strangers who had attracted Bostock’s attention, and remembered that “the one that was nearest me had on a black cap, dark suit, dirty front on him, looked like a jersey, dark complexion and needed a shave, and he was a stocky build. The other fellow, he was light complexioned. He had on a cap; dark suit. He was about as tall as the other fellow, about the same height, only he was slimmer, kind of pale looking, and his hair was light. It was not as dark as the other fellow’s. I would say he was slimmer than the other fellow. He was not stocky build.” The first man had been wearing “a dark cap ... pulled down just like any ordinary fellow would have his cap on, just resting on his forehead.” The two men had been having an argument and Frantello overheard the stocky one berate his companion “in the American language.”

After his brief conversation with Parmenter and Berardelli, Bostock hurried on toward Hampton House. He had only gone a few steps when he was startled to hear a fusillade of shots behind him. He turned and saw the guard lying on the ground and a man standing over him with a smoking pistol in his hand. As he later testified, “... he stood over him. He shot, I should say, he shot at Berardelli probably four or five times. He stood guard over him.” Parmenter had dropped his box when he was hit by the first bullet and managed to run across Pearl Street, closely pursued by a second man who shot him in the back just as the pair reached an excavation for a new restaurant on the north side of the street.

According to Bostock, both bandits “was dressed in sort of dark clothes, with ... dark caps ... they appeared to be foreigners.” As for their physical appearance, “they was fellows of medium build ... smooth face, dark complected.” When one of the gunmen fired two shots at him, the millwright jumped behind the wooden fence where he had first noticed them just before meeting Parmenter and Berardelli. He had started to run back toward the railroad crossing when a black seven-passenger Buick drove slowly down the street, picked up the two gunmen and their loot, and then proceeded down Pearl Street toward the railroad crossing. The millwright ducked behind the water tank as the car shot by him. It was so close to him that “if I laid out at arm’s length I could have touched the spokes of the car as it passed me.” He saw four men inside, one of whom was firing at the excited crowd which was rapidly collecting around the bodies of the paymaster and the guard.

When the shooting started, Lewis L. Wade, a sole leather cutter who doubled in brass as an auto mechanic for Slater & Morrill, was filling Mr. Slater’s car with gasoline from a pump located in a little concrete shed in front of Factory No. 2. He saw Parmenter run across the street and disappear from view behind “a dirt truck.” A short, bareheaded man who “needed a shave” was standing over Berardelli, pumping bullets into the fallen guard. “And the next thing that I saw was a car come up Pearl Street, and stop—well, it didn’t exactly stop. I wouldn’t say for sure whether it stopped or not. And there was a man at the wheel ... he was a pale-faced man, a man, I should judge ... about probably 30 or 35. He looked to me like a man that had sickness or he was sick.”

As soon as the car had passed him, Wade ran into the factory office and called in the first alarm to the Braintree police. When he returned, he “went to where Berardelli lay and he was not dead then. He was breathing, and when he breathed the blood would come up and down on his face.” Across the street, the mechanic noticed that James E. McGlone, a teamster who was transporting stone from the restaurant excavation, was struggling to keep his frightened team from stampeding. McGlone later described the killers as “dark-skinned Italians” while Hans Behrsin, Mr. Slater’s chauffeur, who had been crouched behind the gasoline shed during the shooting, thought they had been “light complexioned boys.”

Mrs. Barbara Liscomb, who had been looking out on Pearl Street from a third-floor window squarely in the middle of the Rice & Hutchins building, said she saw “two men lying on the ground and one man, a short dark man, standing on the ground facing me with his head up, holding a revolver in his hands.” She was only at the window “about two seconds,” having collapsed when the man waved the gun at her, and she did not see the automobile traveling down Pearl Street. As she later put it, “I sort of fainted away.”

Mary E. Splaine, a Slater & Morrill bookkeeper, was working in her corner office on the second floor of Hampton House that afternoon. Just after three o’clock, she had watched Parmenter and Berardelli walk up Pearl Street toward Factory No. 2, and had returned to her desk when they passed out of her line of vision. When she heard the shots, which she first thought were automobile backfires, she returned to the windows which opened on Pearl Street. She saw a black automobile driving slowly in the direction of the railroad tracks. It crossed the tracks and, as it passed under her window, she saw one of its passengers leaning out of the car, a man she later described as “an active looking man.”

Miss Splaine did not see the actual shooting but twenty-two-year-old Lewis Pelser, a Rice & Hutchins employee, claimed that he did. He was working on the main floor of the factory building when he heard the first shots. He had rushed to the window, looked out and, as he put it, “I seen this fellow shoot this fellow. It was the last shot. He put four bullets into him.” The killer “had wavy hair pushed back, very strong hair, wiry hair, very dark.” Pelser also jotted down the license number of the car, noticing as he did so that the rear window of the vehicle had been removed and that a rifle or shotgun barrel protruded from this opening. Edgar C. Langlois, his foreman, had watched the shooting from the floor above Pelser. According to him, the murderers had been “stout ... thick-chested young men.”

Winifred H. Pierce, a Slater & Morrill shoemaker, had run to a window on the Pearl Street side of Hampton House as soon as the gunplay started. He saw two men in a black car, one of whom was climbing into the front seat from the rear. Lawrence D. Ferguson, a co-worker who was standing next to Pierce at the window, corroborated his story. But Daniel J. O’Neil, a South Braintree school boy, had a different version. According to him, the man in the car’s back seat had “walked along [its] running board and before the car had got over the other side of the crossing that man was sitting in the front seat.” The man he had seen “was a man [with] dark hair, cleanly shaven, broad shoulders light complexion.... He wore a blue suit and no hat ... of and his hair was thick but light and combed back straight over his head.”

As Parmenter and Berardelli walked up Pearl Street toward Factory No. 2, they had been followed by Roy E. Gould, a razor sharpening paste peddler, who hoped to sell his product to the Slater & Morrill employees after they were paid. He was running in order to get to the factory before the paymaster did, so that he could set up his display stand. Before he could catch up with the two men, the hold-up occurred. As the Buick passed within ten feet of him on its way toward the railroad crossing, one of the gunmen fired at him, the bullet piercing the pocket of his overcoat without injuring him. Gould gave his name to a Braintree policeman and indicated that he would be available for questioning if needed. His observations apparently failed to titillate the police and he was never questioned by them.

Frank J. Burke, an itinerant glassblower who had arrived in South Braintree at 2:30 that afternoon to give a demonstration of his art at a local school, claimed that the hold-up car had passed within ten feet of him after the shooting. When he first saw it, the sedan was moving slowly down Pearl Street toward the railroad crossing. He watched two men jump on the running board and climb into the back seat. As the car approached the crossing, one of these men crawled into the front seat next to the driver. Seconds later, Burke heard a gunshot in the car, and the man who had climbed over into the front seat pointed a revolver at him and shouted, “Get out of the way, you son of a bitch!” He saw “a dark man with a short cropped mustache” in the rear of the car.

Mark Carrigan watched the car drive over the Pearl Street crossing but it was going too fast for him to recognize anyone in it. One of its occupants, “had black hair and looked, possibly, like an Italian.” Louis De Beradinis, who owned a shoe repair shop at the corner of Railroad Avenue and Pearl Street, noticed a man with a gun standing on the vehicle’s running board. “This man pointed a revolver to my face” and had “a long face, and awful white, and light hair combed in the back. It was a thin fellow I saw.”

Carlos E. Goodridge, a Victrola salesman, who was whiling away a slow day in Magazu’s poolroom which was a block west of Hampton House on the north side of Pearl Street, rushed out when he heard the excitement. He saw the black sedan cross the New Haven tracks and watched, with idle curiosity, as it approached Magazu’s. Suddenly, he noticed that one of its occupants—“a dark complexioned fellow, with dark hair, a peculiar face that came down pointed”—was pointing a gun at him, and he jumped back into the poolroom and hid under one of the tables.

Michael Levangie, the gate tender at the Pearl Street crossing, had lowered his gates for an approaching train when the Buick came toward him. He was startled to see that one of the passengers in the car was pointing a revolver at his head. He was ordered by this man to raise his gates. He remembered that the person who shouted at him spoke with a decided foreign accent although it was Burke’s recollection that the man who had ordered him out of the way had used good English. As Levangie later testified, “I looked back at the train to see if I had a chance to let them go. I saw that there was a chance to let them go and I let them, and I put my gates back where they belonged.” He was able to describe only one of the vehicle’s occupants, the driver, who, he said, was “a dark complected man with cheek bones sticking out, black hair, heavy brown mustache, slouch hat and army coat.”

The Buick continued down Pearl Street and turned left on Hancock Street. As it crossed the New Haven tracks, it was seen by eight railroad workers, most of whom described the driver as “kind of light-complexioned” and the man sitting alongside of him on the front seat as “big and dark.” Shelley Neal saw it make the turn when he ran out of his office upon hearing the shots. As it passed the drug store on the corner of Pearl and Hancock, its passengers scattered rubber-headed tacks along the road. It took more than a week before South Braintree could count a day without at least one blowout on Hancock Street. Daniel Buckley, a railroad employee, was the last person in South Braintree to see the car as it headed out of town on South Street.

Several people remembered spotting it later that afternoon as it headed south through Randolph, Canton, Stoughton, Brockton and West Bridgewater. At four, sixteen-year-old Julie Kelliher, a student at Brockton’s Hancock School, saw a black sedan hurtling through that town at such a high rate of speed that she reported it to the police. It was next seen by Austin Reed, the gate tender at the Matfield Crossing just outside of West Bridgewater, at 4:15. Reed waved his warning sign at the oncoming automobile because a train was expected momentarily. One of the men in the car pointed his finger at the startled gate tender and snarled, “What to hell you hold us up for?” The man he saw was “a dark complected man, kind of hollow cheeks, with high cheek bones, had a stubby mustache. His hair was black.”

Meanwhile, back in South Braintree, the horror-struck bystanders, who had been scattered momentarily by some shots from the rear window of the disappearing Buick, regathered around the two wounded men. Berardelli was lying in the street with his head next to the curbing. He was almost dead. According to Jim Bostock, the first man to reach him, “he laid in a kind of crouched position and I helped lay him down and every time he breathed, blood flowed and was coming out of his mouth.” The two men were taken to the home of Horace A. Colbert, a railroad tower man who lived just east of the restaurant excavation, where Berardelli died. Parmenter lived until five o’clock the next morning.

Fred L. Loring, a Slater & Morrill shoe worker, noticed a cap with earlaps near Berardelli’s body, which he picked up and turned over to his superintendent. The next day, the latter gave the cap to Jeremiah F. Gallivan, Braintree’s police chief, who kept it under the seat of his car for ten days before delivering it to Brockton’s Captain John Scott. The only other evidence found at the scene were some empty cartridges which littered Pearl Street. Berardelli’s Harrington & Richardson revolver, which he had been carrying that day, was missing.

Two days later, the Buick was discovered by two horsemen in Bridgewater’s Manley Woods, some five miles west of the Matfield Crossing. Leading away from the abandoned vehicle were the tiretracks of a smaller car. Although the black sedan’s license tags had been removed, plates with the number which Louis Pelser had jotted down two days before had been pilfered from another car early in 1920. The Buick itself had been reported as stolen by its owner, a Dr. Francis J. Murphy, on November 23, 1919. The isinglass rear window was pushed out and there was a bullet hole in the car’s right rear interior. It was later identified by almost every eyewitness as similar to the one they had seen on the day of the robbery.

Bridgewater’s Police Chief Michael E. Stewart was convinced that the crime had been committed by a resident Italian who owned a car. Mike Boda, who boarded with a radical named Coacci in a shack near the Manley Woods, was interviewed by Stewart three days after the South Braintree murders. He told the police officer that his car, a small Overland, was stored in Simon Johnson’s garage in West Bridgewater. Stewart called on Johnson and told him to notify the police if anyone called for Boda’s car.

On the evening of May 5th, Nicola Sacco, a Stoughton shoe worker, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a Plymouth fish peddler, Boda, and a mutual friend named Ricardo Orciani, started out from the former’s house for West Bridgewater to pick up the Overland. Sacco and Vanzetti took the trolley while the other two men rode on Orciani’s motorcycle. When Boda and Orciani arrived at the garage, they found it locked. They then walked over to Johnson’s house where they were soon joined by Sacco and Vanzetti. Boda rang the bell and, when the garage owner’s wife opened the door, told her that he had come for the Overland. While the four men waited, Mrs. Johnson went over to a neighbor’s house and telephoned to Chief Stewart. Meanwhile her husband had convinced Boda that, since the Overland did not have 1920 plates, it would be better to leave it in the garage. Boda apparently took his advice and drove off on the motorcycle with Orciani.

Sacco and Vanzetti left the Johnson house and boarded the North Elm Street trolley for Brockton. When the car was passing through the Campello section of Brockton, it was boarded by a policeman who immediately arrested the two men. The officer found a .38-caliber Harrington & Richardson revolver (which was not Berardelli’s) and some shotgun shells in Vanzetti’s coat pocket. Sacco denied that he was carrying a gun and “a slight going over” did not reveal any weapon on his person. Later that evening, at the Brockton police station, “an automatic .32 Colt revolver” was found in his belt as well as thirty-two cartridges of various makes.

Four weeks later, Vanzetti was indicted for an attempted holdup that had taken place at Bridgewater on the morning of December 24, 1919, in which several “foreigners” had tried to hijack a truck containing the payroll of the White Shoe Company. According to eyewitnesses, two men had parked their automobile so that it blocked off Broad Street, the road leading to the shoe company. Guards in the payroll truck had fired at the holdup men who had retreated to their car and driven away. One of the thwarted bandits, who was armed with a shotgun, had discharged his weapon harmlessly at the guards before turning tail.

The trial of this indictment began at Plymouth on June 22, 1920, before Judge Webster Thayer and a jury of twelve men, one of whom was the foreman at the Plymouth Cordage Company from which Vanzetti had been discharged in 1916 for participating in a strike. The charges against the fish peddler were assault with intent to rob and assault with intent to murder. Sacco was not indicted because the records of the 3-K Shoe Factory in Stoughton indicated that he had been at work on the day of the crime.

Frederick G. Katzmann, the District Attorney of Suffolk and Plymouth Counties, took the position that the 1920 Buick which had been found in the Manley Woods on April 17th had also been used in the Bridgewater assault. He had three witnesses—the two guards who had been in the payroll truck and a shoe company employee—who identified Vanzetti as the man who had fired the shotgun. A Mrs. Georgina F. Brooks, who had been walking near the Bridgewater railroad station, said that she had seen Vanzetti driving an automobile in the vicinity just after the shooting. Maynard Freeman Shaw, a newsboy, swore that he had seen the defendant that morning running up Broad Street with a gun in his hand. He knew he “was a foreigner, I could tell by the way he ran.” Most of the witnesses described the bandits’ automobile as a “dark touring car.”

The prosecution rested on June 28th and Vanzetti’s attorneys, J. P. Vahey and J. M. Graham, put sixteen Italians on the stand to prove that the defendant had an alibi for the day of the crime. His landlady said that she had seen Vanzetti preparing his fish on the evening of December 23rd and that she had awakened him early the next morning. Other Plymouth residents swore that they had purchased eels from him during the day. John DiCarli bought some shortly after seven a.m. and Mrs. Terese Malaquci an hour later. Between nine and ten, Beltrando Brini, a thirteen-year-old boy who worked for Vanzetti, delivered some fish to Mrs. Adeladi Bonjionanni and to her neighbor, Mrs. Margaretta Fiochi. All told, some seven people testified that Vanzetti or young Brini had filled orders for them on the morning of the twenty-fourth. Upon the recommendation of his lawyers, who were afraid that his radical opinions and activities would be brought out, Vanzetti did not take the stand.

The jury retired at 10:50 on the morning of July 1st and returned a verdict of guilty on both assault charges a little more than five hours later. In the middle of August, Judge Thayer sentenced the defendant to twelve to fifteen years in prison. As the verdicts were announced, Vanzetti turned to his many friends in the courtroom and said, “Corragio.” Although a notice of appeal was duly filed with the Supreme Judicial Court, it was never perfected because of the subsequent murder conviction.

On September 11th, both Sacco and Vanzetti were indicted for the South Braintree murders by “beating and shooting ... against the peace of said Commonwealth.” However, it was not until May 31, 1921 that their joint trial began in Dedham, a Boston suburb, before the ubiquitous Judge Thayer. It took more than four days and seven hundred Norfolk County veniremen before George A. Gerard, the last juror, was sworn in at 1:35 a.m. on June 9th. Thayer appointed Walter R. Ripley, a stock-keeper and former Quincy police chief, as foreman and it was at last time for Katzmann to put in his case against the two immigrant defendants.

After Vanzetti’s conviction on the assault charges, the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, headed by Aldino Felicani, the editor of La Notizia, an Italian-language newspaper, retained Frederick H. Moore and William J. Callahan, for Sacco, and two brothers, Jeremiah J. and Thomas F. McAnarney, for Vanzetti. Moore, a member of the California Bar, was named chief counsel for both men despite strenuous pre-trial efforts by Mrs. Sacco to have him withdraw in favor of William G. Thompson, a Boston attorney. The Commonwealth was again represented by Mr. Katzmann who was aided by Assistant District Attorney Harold P. Williams.

After the physicians who had conducted the autopsies on the two murdered men had described their wounds and identified the bullets taken from their bodies, Shelley Neal told the jury about the black sedan he had seen in South Braintree on the day of the crime. He was positive that it was the same car that had been found in the Manley Woods two days later. But, outside of remembering that there had been a slender man with light hair standing next to the Buick when he had seen it parked in front of Hampton House on the morning of the holdup, he was unable to describe any of the vehicle’s occupants.

Neal wasn’t the only prosecution witness who couldn’t identify the defendants. Hans Behrsin, Mr. Slater’s chauffeur, had observed two “light complexioned fellows” sitting on the fence near Rice & Hutchins just before the shooting. But he was unable to describe them with any certainty because “they were all covered up.” After the murders, he had seen the Buick heading for the Pearl Street crossing. When it passed him, “the back curtains were drawn and flopping around back and forth, and I think there were about five of them in there ... and as that passed me by there was some one on the back there beckoning with a gun or shotgun.” Because he hadn’t gotten a good look at any of the men in the car, he couldn’t say that Sacco or Vanzetti had been riding in it.

Jim Bostock had been taken to see the defendants shortly after their arrest and asked whether they were the men he had seen on Pearl Street that afternoon. Like Behrsin, he “could not tell whether or not they was, no, sir.” Lewis Wade could not “say for sure” if Sacco was the man who had shot Berardelli. Even though he had told Katzmann at the Brockton Police Station that the defendant was the man he had seen, he now thought he had been “a little mite mistaken.” The reason he was no longer sure of his identification was that just before the trial he had seen a man in a barber shop who resembled the murderer.

Foreman Langlois, who had watched two “young men” firing at the guard and the paymaster, remembered only that they had been “short and dark complexioned, curly or wavy hair, about five feet, eight or nine inches, about 140 or 145 pounds.” He was sure that he could not identify either man if he saw them again. Mark Carrigan had seen the car race over the crossing but had not been able to recognize anyone in it because it had been going so fast. Louis DeBeradinis, the proprietor of a shoe repair shop at the corner of Railroad Avenue and Pearl Street, had been frightened by a man with “a long face ... and light hair” who had leaned out of the car and pointed a gun at him. Although, he thought that dark-haired Sacco looked like the man with the gun, he insisted that the latter had been “a light-haired man.”

But Katzmann was not wanting for more definite eyewitnesses. He had five who claimed to have seen Vanzetti near South Braintree on April 15th. John Faulkner said he had observed him, bushy mustache and all, on the Boston train that morning. But he was unable to remember anything about the man sitting to his immediate right who had asked him, supposedly at Vanzetti’s request, whether the next station was East Braintree. He admitted that he had seen a picture of the defendant in a newspaper before he was taken to the jail to identify him. The conductor on the train later testified that he, too, had seen such a man get off at East Braintree on several occasions long after April 15th, but he was certain that he was not Vanzetti.

Harry Dolbeare, the piano tuner, who swore that he had noticed Vanzetti among a group of “foreigners” sitting in the back of a car before noon on the day of the shootings, couldn’t identify any of the other men. Although gate tender Levangie was sure that Vanzetti was the “dark complected man” who had frightened him with a pistol at the Pearl Street crossing, he couldn’t remember whether Mr. McAnarney had visited him at his shanty barely two weeks before the trial started. Alexander G. Victorson, the railroad’s freight clerk, later testified that Levangie had said, minutes after the shooting, that he didn’t think he could identify the men he had seen in the car as it sped over the tracks.

An hour later, the gate tender told Henry McCarthy, a locomotive fireman, that he had “ducked in the shanty” when he saw the guns pointed at him. “I asked him if he knew them,” McCarthy said, “He said no, he did not. I asked him if he would know them again if he saw them. He said ‘No,’ he said all he could see was the gun and he ducked.” Shortly afterward, Levangie informed Timothy J. Collins, a Boston Globe reporter, that he had not seen anyone in the car, while, at 4:30, he told Slater & Morrill’s Edward Carter that its driver had been “a light-haired man.”

Austin T. Reed, the gate tender at the Matfield Crossing in West Bridgewater, identified Vanzetti as the man sitting next to the driver of a “five-passenger car” which had roared toward his intersection at 4:15. The automobile had screeched to a stop when Reed lowered his gates because of an approaching train. When the train had passed, the car crossed the tracks and pulled up alongside Reed’s shanty. Vanzetti, he said, had shouted, “What to hell did you hold us up for?” in “English that was unmistakable and clear.” The vehicle then drove off to the east, circled around, and finally recrossed the tracks, disappearing in the direction of West Bridgewater. Like Faulkner, Reed had gone voluntarily to Brockton and “asked to see the two defendants that were there.” He had listened to Vanzetti speak to an officer at the police station in “the same gruff tone that he used in speaking to me.”

Austin C. Cole was the conductor of the street car on which Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested. He was sure that they were the same two men he had seen on his car on either April 14th or 15th. According to him, they had boarded the trolley at Sunset Avenue, some two miles from West Bridgewater’s Elm Square. He particularly remembered Vanzetti because he had first thought that the latter was a friend of his named Tony. When the defense showed him a side view photograph of one Joseph Scavitto, a man who bore a striking resemblance to Vanzetti, the witness was unable to say that it was a picture of the man who had boarded his car because he had never seen his profile.

The prosecution had seven witnesses who identified Sacco. Lola Andrews insisted that he was the man she had seen working under the car near Slater & Morrill Factory No. 2. When Katzmann asked her to look around the courtroom, she pointed to the steel cage in which both defendants were seated and said, “That man there.” Sacco sprang to his feet and shouted, “I am the man? Do you mean me? Take a good look!” Yes, she was sure that the man who had just yelled at her was the same dark man who had told her how to get to Rice & Hutchins.

Mrs. Andrews claimed that she had picked out Sacco in the Dedham Jail in February. After she had been taken through the prison, she had accidentally seen the defendant in one of the cells. She couldn’t remember whether he had been alone or not but she had watched him for at least fifteen minutes. No one had told her to look into that particular room. “The room I was in,” she said, “was—I don’t know just how to explain it, but it had kind of an opening back here, like there was a room underneath that you could look from the room I am in down into this room underneath.”

When Mr. Moore showed her some snapshots and asked her whether she had looked at them before at his request, she stated that “I don’t recognize any of those photographs at all.” The next day, Mrs. Andrews collapsed on the stand when Mr. McAnarney tried to pin her down as to just what pictures she had seen. Later in the trial, Mrs. Campbell, who had accompanied Mrs. Andrews to South Braintree on April 15th, swore that the man under the car had “never looked up at all” and that neither she nor her friend had spoken to him.

But Mrs. Campbell wasn’t the only witness to contradict the practical nurse. George W. Fay, a Quincy policeman, said that she had told him in February that she had not seen any man’s face that day. She had also told Alfred N. LaBreque, the secretary of the Quincy Chamber of Commerce, the same thing. Harry Kurlansky, a tailor whose shop was near Mrs. Andrew’s house, remembered a conversation he had had with her when she returned from the Dedham Jail. “The Government took me down and want me to recognize those men,” she had complained to him, “and I don’t know a thing about them. I have never seen them and I can’t recognize them.” A former landlady, who readily admitted that she didn’t like her and “wouldn’t have her in my house again,” said that she had a “bad name” in the community.

Real estate broker Tracy, who had told the police that he had seen Sacco standing near a Pearl Street drugstore at noon on the day of the murders, had identified him in jail ten months later. However, he was not prepared now to say that he was “positively” the man. “To the best of my opinion he is the man,” he testified. While he was “quite sure” that he was right, he was willing to “suppose the best of people could make a mistake.”

Q. Then you feel you could not be mistaken in the identity of this man?

A. I said I would not positively say he was the man; but I wouldn’t positively say so.

William J. Heron, the railroad detective, claimed that he had seen Sacco handcuffed to a policeman near the Quincy Courthouse some six weeks after having observed him in the South Braintree station. He was “pretty sure” that the defendant was the same “nervous Italian” he had watched in the waiting room. He readily admitted that he had refused to talk to defense investigators when they came to see him before trial. His reluctance, he said, had been due to the fact that he didn’t want to become involved. Besides he didn’t think that his information would be helpful to the defense. McAnarney’s face purpled with anger.

Q. You took it on yourself to determine the fact that your evidence would hurt these defendants, didn’t you? Did you?

A. Yes, sir.

The man whom Lewis Pelser had seen shoot Berardelli had been wearing a “dark green pair of pants and an army shirt, tucked up.” He would not swear that Sacco was the gunman but insisted that “he is the dead image of the man I seen.” He had written down the Buick’s license number but he had not seen anyone in the car. “I was too anxious to get away,” he said, “I was kind of scared myself.”

When Moore took over, he asked the witness whether he had been interviewed by a Mr. Reid on March 26th. Yes, he had, but he hadn’t told him everything he knew because “I didn’t know him well enough.” He admitted that he had told the investigator that he hadn’t seen the murderer because he had ducked under his workbench when the shooting started. But he insisted that he “didn’t exactly lie to Mr. Reid.” In fact, he hadn’t even told the District Attorney what he had seen that day until he took the stand. Moore’s voice was heavy with disbelief.

Q. You never talked to a living soul and told them what you intended to say on the witness stand today, and told them the truth, until you got on the witness stand.

A. Yes, sir.

Later, William Brenner, Peter McCullum and Dominic Constantino, who had been working with Pelser on the first floor of the Rice & Hutchins factory, testified for the defense that they had not seen the latter at the window when the shooting took place. According to the three men, everyone on the first floor had ducked under his bench when the gunshots had shattered the air. Constantino was sure that Pelser had not stood up until after the murders had occurred. He remembered that Pelser had told him that he had not been able to see any of the killers.

Mary Splaine, the Slater & Morrill bookkeeper, who had picked Sacco out in the Brockton police station as the man she had seen leaning out of the Buick just after it roared across the Pearl Street crossing, identified him again. “He was a man,” she claimed, “that I should say was slightly taller than I am ... he was an active-looking man. I noted particularly the left hand was a good-sized hand, a hand that denoted strength.... He had a gray, what I thought was a shirt ... and the face was what we could call clear-cut, clean-cut face. The forehead was high. The hair was brushed back and it was between, I should think, two inches and two and one-half inches in length and had dark eyebrows, but the complexion was a white, peculiar white that looked greenish.” Evidently, years of poring over account books hadn’t interfered with the witness’ eyesight because this detailed observation had been the result of a three-second glance “from a distance of from 60 to 80 feet.”

When Moore reminded her that, at the preliminary examination at Quincy, she had said that she was not sure that Sacco was the man she had seen, Miss Splaine denied that she had ever made that statement. The next day, however, she indicated that perhaps she had indeed said that.

Q. Do you wish to change any part of your testimony that you made yesterday?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. What part of your testimony would you like to change at the present time?

A. That question and answer where you asked me if I possibly identified the man, and in Quincy I said I didn’t feel I would positively identify him. I said I didn’t say that yesterday, but on reflection that was the answer in Quincy.

In addition, she admitted that, after the shooting, she had identified a photograph which the police had shown her as the man she had observed leaning out of the car. She later learned that the man in the photograph had been in New York’s Sing Sing Prison on April 15th.

When Mr. McAnarney took over from Moore, he asked the witness whether she was sure that she had had enough time on the day of the murders to get a good look at the defendant. “Yes, sir, I think I did,” was her answer. The lawyer shook his head. Hadn’t she testified in Quincy that “I don’t think my opportunity afforded me the right to say he is the man.”? Yes, she had made that statement. But now, she was “positive he is the man, certain he is the man. I admit the possibility of an error, but I am certain I am not making a mistake.” McAnarney pressed her.

Q. What did you mean when you said you didn’t have sufficient opportunity to observe him?

A. Well, he was passing on the street.

Q. That is the only opportunity you had?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. You have had no other opportunity but that fleeting glance?

A. The remembrance of that.

She hadn’t seen Sacco since the Quincy hearing on May 26, 1920, but, even without “any further examination of him,” she had changed her mind and now believed that he was the man.

Frances J. Devlin, another Slater & Morrill bookkeeper, who worked in the same room with Miss Splaine, had seen a man in the back of the Buick fire into the crowd that had developed around Parmenter and Berardelli. “He was a dark man,” she recalled, “and his forehead, the hair seemed to grow away from the temples, and it was brown-black and he had clear features, rather clear features, and rather good looking, and he had a white complexion and a fairly thick-set man, I should say.” She had identified Sacco at the Brockton Police Station as looking “very much like the man that stood up in the back seat shooting.” She was far more definite when Katzmann asked her to look around the courtroom and “see if you see that man.” She pointed to the steel cage in which the two defendants were sitting and said, “The man on the inner side as you go out.”

Q. The man who is smiling?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. That man you know is Sacco?

A. Yes, sir.

No, there had never been any doubt in her mind “at any time” that the defendant was the man she had seen.

Yet, a year earlier she had testified in Quincy that she couldn’t say “positively” that Sacco was the gunman she had witnessed. But she had a ready answer for the seeming conflict in her testimony. “At the time there I had in my own mind that he was the man, but on account of the immensity of the crime and everything, I hated to say right out and out. I knew he was the man and still I didn’t want to say knowing as I knew it would be a deliberate lie, according to my own mind, but still I hated to say right out and out, so I just put it that way.” She had also sworn in Quincy that short, stocky Sacco was “a man who seemed as though he was a big man to me.”

Victrola salesman Carlos E. Goodridge was certain that Sacco was the man who had waved a gun at him when the black Buick raced by Magazu’s pool parlor on lower Pearl Street. He remembered the defendant as “a dark complexioned fellow with dark hair and he had ... a kind of peculiar face, that came down pointed.” When McAnarney tried to find out whether Goodridge wasn’t having his own problems with the law, Judge Thayer intervened. “You can’t attack any witness’ credibility,” he observed, “except by showing a record of conviction.” The jury was never to learn that the salesman had recently pleaded guilty to larceny and had been placed on probation.

Goodridge’s testimony conflicted sharply with that of Harry Arrogani, a South Braintree barber. Five or six days after the murders, Goodridge had told the barber that he had seen “a man in the car but if I have got to say who the man was, I can’t say.” Peter Magazu, the owner of the pool room, said that Goodridge had described the man who had pointed the gun at him as a “young man with light hair, light complexion.” Andrew Manganio, Goodridge’s sales manager, later testified that his pool-playing employee had refused to identify the defendants in jail because he had been so frightened by the gun that “he could not possibly remember the faces.”

Drs. George B. Magrath and Nathaniel S. Hunting had conducted the autopsies on the two murdered men. Four bullets were found in Berardelli’s body and two in Parmenter’s. As each bullet was removed, the physicians had scratched a Roman numeral in its base. The one which had caused Berardelli’s death, a .32-caliber Winchester, was marked No. III. At the trial, Captain William H. Proctor, the ballistics expert for the Massachusetts State Police, testified that all but the No. III shell had been fired through a Savage automatic pistol.

When Sacco was searched at the Brockton police station, a “.32 Colt automatic,” which was to become Katzmann’s Exhibit 28, was found in his belt. Proctor said that he had conducted tests on the fatal bullet and the defendant’s gun. As a result of his investigation, he was prepared to say that No. III was “consistent with being fired by that pistol.” As for the other five bullets, his opinion was that they had not been fired from Sacco’s Colt.

Captain Proctor’s opinion was shared by Charles Van Amburgh, an assistant in the ballistics department of the Remington Arms Company. He also had examined the fatal bullet and Sacco’s pistol.

Q. Have you formed an opinion ... as to whether or not No. III bullet was fired from that particular Colt automatic?

A. I have an opinion.

Q. And what is your opinion?

A. I am inclined to believe that it was fired, No. III bullet was fired, from this Colt automatic pistol.

He had reached this conclusion after comparing the No. III bullet with six test shots which he and Captain Proctor had fired into oiled sawdust at Lowell, Massachusetts. “My measurement of rifling marks on No. III bullet as compared with the width of the impressions which I have taken of No. III or of this particular barrel,” he explained, “together with the measurements of the width or dimension of rifling marks in bullets recovered ... in Lowell, inclines me to the belief.” In addition, he had observed marks on No. III which he thought were caused by pitting in the groove of Sacco’s Colt.

James E. Burns, an expert marksman who had been employed by the United States Cartridge Company for more than thirty years, contradicted the prosecution’s experts. He, too, had examined the fatal bullet, and he was convinced that it had not been fired from Sacco’s gun.

Q. ... on what do you base that opinion?

A. On the 11 bullets that I examined that were fired from the Sacco gun. It doesn’t compare with them at all.

The Colt’s barrel had shown “a clean-cut lead all the way through.” There wasn’t a particle of doubt in his mind that No. III had not been fired “from a gun that had a clean lead.”

J. Henry Fitzgerald, the director of the testing room at the Colt Firearms Company, agreed with Burns that No. III “was not fired from the pistol given to me as Exhibit 28.” He had examined three bullets which had been fired by Mr. Van Amburgh at Lowell and, “the land marks of the No. III bullet do not correspond, in my best judgment, to bullets I have seen fired from this pistol.” Like Burns, he had been unable to find any distinctive pittings in the groove of Sacco’s gun.

The cap which Fred L. Loring had found lying near Berardelli’s body had been turned over to Thomas F. Fraher, Slater & Morrill’s superintendent. Katzmann called George T. Kelley, Sacco’s foreman at the 3-K Shoe Factory, who testified that the defendant often wore a cap to work. “There were times that he wore a cap,” Kelley said, “There was other times he wore a hat.” As to the former, he could remember only that it had been “a dark cap ... of a salt and pepper design.” He was unable to recall whether the cap he had seen hanging on a nail near Sacco’s workbench had earlaps or not.

When the defense objected to the introduction of the cap on the ground that it had not been sufficiently identified as belonging to Sacco, Judge Thayer ordered Mr. Williams to ask Kelley whether “that cap ... is like the one that was worn by the defendant Sacco?” “In color only.” the witness replied.

THAYER: That is not responsive to the question. I wish you would answer it, if you can.

KELLEY: I can’t answer it when I don’t know right down in my heart that that is the cap.

THAYER: In its general appearance, is it the same?

KELLEY: Yes, sir.

Thayer promptly admitted the cap into evidence as the Commonwealth’s Exhibit 29.

After Sacco’s arrest, Lieutenant Daniel T. Guerin had visited his home and found another cap in the kitchen. Later in the trial, when Kelley was recalled as a witness for the defense, he was shown this second cap. He said that he thought that the cap the policeman had found looked more like the one he had seen the defendant wearing than did Exhibit 29. On cross-examination, Katzmann asked him if he hadn’t told the police when they interviewed him about the cap that “I have an opinion ... but I don’t want to get a bomb up my ass.” Kelley admitted that he “might have said it when they drove off, but not at the time when they showed me the cap.”

Q. Was that in reference to the cap?

A. Yes.

Later in the trial, when Katzmann cross-examined Sacco, he asked him to put Exhibit 29 on his head. According to the Boston Herald, “It stuck on the top of his head and he turned with a satisfied air to let the jury see.” He then explained to the District Attorney that the cap was “too tight” to fit properly.

Q. You are sure of that?

A. I am pretty sure. I can feel it.

He denied that the cap was his and his wife subsequently testified that her husband “never wore caps with anything around for his ears, never, because he never liked it and because, besides that, never, he never wore them because he don’t look good in them, positively.”

Mrs. Simon Johnson said that, after her husband had gone to bed on May 5th, Boda had knocked on her front door and asked her whether he could pick up his Overland car. When she awakened her husband, he had told her to go next door to Mrs. Bartlett’s and telephone the police. She had walked over to her neighbor’s house and called Chief Stewart. Although there was no street light near her home, the area had been illuminated by the headlight of a motorcycle which she noticed was parked in the street. Two strange men who were standing in the vicinity of the vehicle, seemed to follow her when she left to make her call. Ten minutes later, when she was walking back from Mrs. Bartlett’s, she saw the same men who appeared to be “walking along” with her. She was sure that Sacco was one of the men who had tailed her that night.

When she had testified in the earlier trial of Vanzetti at Plymouth, Mrs. Johnson had not been so confident of her identification of the men who had followed her. Then she had been certain that she “did not know who they were or whether they were the same men or not.” Now, she was prepared to say that “one of them” was the same man.

Q. ... do you want to say that you recognized Sacco before you went into the Bartlett house?

A. I would know him if I saw him again.

Q. I submit it is not an answer to the question.

THE COURT. Can you answer it, Mrs. Johnson, by Yes or No?

A. Yes.

Q. Then by that I assume that you mean you did recognize him before you went into the Bartlett house?

A. Before I did, yes.

The witness’ husband told a somewhat different story. At no time, had either of the strange men been illuminated by the beams of the motorcycle’s light. While he had not watched his wife walk over to the Bartlett’s, he had seen her on the return trip. At that time, he was sure that, with the exception of Boda, all the strangers were standing near the cycle. He had told Boda that he couldn’t have the car that night because “there were no 1920 number plates on it.” The latter had replied that “I will send somebody for it tomorrow,” but no one had ever called for the car.

Michael J. Connolly and Earl J. Vaughan, two Brockton policemen, had arrested the defendants on the North Elm Street trolley later that evening. Connolly was the first officer to board the car. “... I went down through the car,” he said, “and when I got opposite the seat I stopped and I asked them where they came from. They said, ‘We went down to see a friend of mine.’ I said, ‘Who is your friend?’ He said ‘A man by the —— they call him ‘Poppy.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I want you, you are under arrest.’”

According to Connolly, Vanzetti, who had been sitting on the seat nearest the window, put his hand in his hip pocket. The policeman had shouted, “Keep your hands out on your lap, or you will be sorry!” When the two defendants asked him why they were being arrested, he had told them that they were “suspicious characters.” Vaughan then boarded the car and Connolly ordered Vanzetti to stand up so that the latter could “fish” him. He himself gave Sacco “a slight going over ... did not go into his pockets.”

Q. Was anything found on either man at that time?

A. There was a revolver found on Vanzetti.

The two suspects were then transferred to a police car which was waiting alongside the tracks. Connolly “put Sacco and Vanzetti in the back seat ... and Officer Snow got in the back seat with them. I took the front seat with the driver, facing Sacco and Vanzetti.” During the trip to the Brockton station house, Connolly noticed that Sacco “reached his hand to put under his overcoat and I told him to keep his hands outside of his clothes and on his lap.” When he asked the defendant, “Have you got a gun there?,” the latter had replied, “No, I ain’t got no gun.” Merle A. Spear, the driver of the car, swore that he had heard this conversation and that Sacco had answered, “You need not be afraid of me.” Later that evening, a Colt revolver had been found in Sacco’s pocket.

Chief Stewart had arrived at the police station shortly after eleven o’clock that night. The two prisoners told him much the same story that they had related to Connolly. They insisted that they had gone to West Bridgewater to see a friend named Poppy but denied any knowledge of Boda or Orciani’s motorcycle. Sacco thought that they had left his house at 6:30 that day while Vanzetti was sure that they had started out three hours earlier. Sacco claimed that he had purchased his Colt in Hanover Street in Boston many months before his arrest.

On June 22nd, after fifty-nine witnesses had testified for the prosecution, Katzmann informed Judge Thayer that “We believe we have nothing further to offer ... the Commonwealth rests, if your Honor please.” Following Callahan’s opening statement, the defense promptly called Frank J. Burke, the glassblower who had watched the Buick race over the Pearl Street crossing after the murders. He had gotten a good look at its passengers and he was certain that neither defendant had been in the car. “I would say they were not,” he said. But on cross-examination, Katzmann succeeded in showing that the witness had such poor eyes that he had thought that Mr. Callahan’s Hudson in which he had been driven to the courthouse that very morning was a Buick.

Mrs. Barbara Liscomb, the Rice & Hutchins employee who had fainted when one of the gunmen pointed his pistol at her, “would always remember his face.” When she had been taken to the Brockton police station, she had been unable to identify either defendant.

Q. And you have looked at these men in the dock?

A. I have.

Q. Are either of the men in the dock the man you saw pointing the revolver at your window?

A. No, sir.

She was “positively sure” that she had never seen either Sacco or Vanzetti before.

Jennie Novelli, a nurse, who, some ten minutes before the shooting, had seen the Buick proceeding slowly up Pearl Street in the direction of the Rice & Hutchins plant, said the man who had been sitting next to the driver was not Sacco although she had previously told a detective that a photograph of the defendant “resembled” the man she had seen in the car. Albert Frantello insisted that the defendants were not the men he had noticed leaning against the Rice & Hutchins fence before the murders. None of the laborers at the restaurant excavation or the railroad employees who had been repairing tracks at the Pearl Street crossing could say that they had seen Sacco or Vanzetti in the vicinity of the crime. In all, some two dozen eyewitnesses testified that they had not seen either defendant in South Braintree on April 15, 1920.

Vanzetti was the first of the two defendants to take the stand. As far as the day of the murder was concerned, he insisted, in broken English, that he had not left Plymouth. In the morning, he had been “selling fish from a cart” on Castle and Cherry Streets. Some time during the morning, he had asked Joseph Rosen, a peddler, to accompany him to the home of Mrs. Alphonsine Brini so that she could look at a piece of cloth which Rosen wanted to sell to him. Vanzetti thought that this had taken place “near one o’clock, about half past eleven, something like that, half past twelve, about one o’clock.”

After he had sold all his fish, the defendant had visited Melvin Corl, a friend of his, who was painting his boat. He had had a long conversation with Corl—about an hour and a half—during which time he had also talked to a boat builder by the name of Frank Jesse. Then he had gone home, changed his clothes, and eaten his supper. He could not remember what he had done after finishing his dinner.

On May 5th, he had accompanied Boda to the Johnson home in order to pick up the latter’s car which was to be used in collecting radical literature from the homes of some of his friends “in five or six places, five or six towns.” The mysterious death in New York, on May 3rd, of Andrea Salsedo, a radical with whom he had been associated for many years, had convinced him that he should “get the books and literature to put at some place and hide not to find by the police or the state.” He had not told the police about his plans for that night “because in that time there, there was the deportation and the reaction was more vivid than now and more mad than now.”

He readily admitted that he had lied to Stewart when the police chief had questioned him after his arrest. “I was afraid,” he said, “he went into the house of the people that they named and found some literature or paper and arrested the men ... I was scared to give the names and addresses of my friends as I knew that almost all of them have some books and some newspapers in their house by which the authorities take a reason for arresting them and deport them.” His fears had been aggravated by the fact that Officers Connolly and Vaughan had refused to tell him why he was being taken into custody.

Q. What did they say what you were arrested for?

A. They say, ‘Oh, you know, you know why.’ And when I try to sleep in the cell, there is no blanket, only the wood. Then we called for the blanket, because it was rather cool. They say, ‘Never mind, you catch warm by and by, and tomorrow morning we put you in a line in the hall between the chairs and we shoot you.’

In fact, during the night, one of his jailers had spit in his face and threatened him with a revolver.

Vanzetti also conceded that he had lied to Katzmann when the District Attorney had questioned him about the price he had paid for his revolver, the number of times he had visited Boston overnight, and his acquaintance with Boda. Again he based his reluctance to tell the truth on his desire to shield his friends. “I intend to not mention the name and house of my friends” he explained.

Joseph Rosen testified that he had sold Vanzetti several pieces of cloth at noon on April 15th. Mrs. Brini remembered that she had seen the defendant selling fish that morning and that he and Rosen had come to her house to get her opinion as to the worth of some swatches of material. Her daughter, LeFavre, had also seen the fish peddler on both occasions. At noon, Angel T. Guidobone, a rug worker, had purchased some codfish from Vanzetti. Melvin Corl recalled that the defendant had visited him when he was painting his boat, and Frank Jesse stated that he had talked to Vanzetti about an automobile while they were watching Corl at work.

Sacco confirmed Vanzetti’s testimony that both men had told falsehoods because they were afraid that they had been arrested for their radical activities. Since the police had not informed them of the nature of the charges against them, he had been convinced that he and Vanzetti had been picked up because they had been working “for the movement for the working class, for the laboring class.” In fact, one of the first things Stewart had asked him was whether he was a Socialist.

Q. When he asked you what you were in Bridgewater for, did you give him a true reason for being there?

A. No, sir, because I was afraid to arrest us, they arrest somebody else of the people....

Like Vanzetti, he freely admitted that he was a Socialist who did not believe in war. After the United States entered the war in 1917, both he and his co-defendant had run away to Mexico to avoid the draft. Sacco had returned to Massachusetts several months later under an alias and had not resumed his real name until after the war ended. As he put it, “What right do we have to kill each other? I don’t believe in no war. I want to destroy those guns.” He loved his adopted country, but his hatred of war was greater than his devotion to an abstraction.

As far as April 15th was concerned, he maintained that he had spent the entire day in Boston. In the middle of March, he had received a letter informing him that his mother had died in Italy. He had decided to take his family back to the old country and had gone to Boston on the day of the murders to have his passport validated at the Italian Consulate. He had taken the 8:56 train from Stoughton and, after arriving at South Station, had walked to Hanover Street where he had met Angelo Monello, a Roxbury contractor. Then he had gone to Boni’s Restaurant for lunch with Felice Guadagni, the editor of an Italian journal. The two men were later joined by John D. Williams, a space salesman for several foreign-language newspapers, and Albert Bosco, a La Notizia editor.

Sacco had left Boni’s at 1:30 and gone to the consulate. He was told by some man there that the photograph he had brought was much too big to fit on a passport. Then he had dropped in at a nearby coffee house where he had again met Guadagni and Antonio Dentamore, a former newspaperman. At 3:20, after buying some groceries at a nearby store, he had paid a debt of fifteen dollars to a man named Affe. Then, he had caught the 4:12 train back to Stoughton, arriving home shortly after six o’clock.

Katzmann was remorseless in his cross-examination. Why hadn’t the defendant gone to the consulate in the morning and taken the noon train back to Stoughton? “Well, I think to pass all day when I been in Boston,” was the reply. Hadn’t he lied to George Kelley, his foreman, when he had told him “that there was such a crowd in there you could not get your passport and the place closed and you missed the noon train for that reason?” Yes, he had lied to Mr. Kelley. He also hadn’t told the truth at Brockton when he claimed that he had worked on the fifteenth. “I was not sure,” he explained, “There was not interest to me very close to find out the date I have been out.”

A bevy of witnesses paraded to the stand to buttress Sacco’s alibi. Dominick Ricci said that he had seen the shoemaker early on the morning of the fifteenth at the Stoughton railroad station. At eleven a.m., Angelo Monello had passed the time of day with him in East Boston. Guadagni, Williams and Bosco verified the lunch at Boni’s. According to an affidavit submitted by Guiseppe Andrower, the former passport officer at the Italian consulate, Sacco had come to his window at two p.m. and shown him a photograph which the official had said was too large for a passport. “April 15th, 1920, was a very quiet day,” he swore, “and since such a large photograph had never been before presented for use on a passport, I took it in and showed it to the Secretary of the Consulate. We laughed and talked over the incident.”

At 2:45, at Giordani’s coffee house, the defendant had complained to Dentamore that he would have to go to the expense of having another picture taken for his passport. Carlos M. Affe remembered that Sacco had dropped in at his grocery store between three and four o’clock to pay an outstanding bill of $15.50. Mrs. Sacco, who testified through an interpreter, knew that her husband had gone to Boston on the 15th because that was the day she had been visited by Henry Iacovelli, a friend from Milford. Mr. Iacovelli confirmed that he had indeed called at the Sacco home that day.

As for their guns, each defendant had an explanation. Vanzetti claimed that he had bought his for five dollars from a friend named Luigi Falzini in early 1920 because “it was a very bad time and I like to have a revolver for self defense.”

Q. What do you mean ‘It was a bad time?’

A. Bad time, I mean it was many crimes, many holdups, many robberies.

Sacco maintained that he had gotten into the habit of carrying a gun when he had worked as a night watchman at the 3-K Shoe Factory. On the day he was arrested, he and Vanzetti had planned “to go to shoot in the woods” but had not done so because “we started an argument and I forgot....”

On July 14th, after Judge Thayer had delivered his charge from a flower-bedecked bench, the jury retired. Some seven hours later, it filed back into the courtroom. When Clerk Worthington asked if it had reached a verdict, Foreman Walter R. Ripley announced that it had. He and his colleagues had found each defendant guilty of murder in the first degree. Thayer was happy to express the Commonwealth’s gratitude for “the service that you have rendered. You may now go to your homes, from which you have been absent for nearly seven weeks.” As the twelve men hurried to take his Honor’s welcome advice, Sacco shouted, “They kill an innocent man! They kill two innocent men!”

His prophecy was somewhat premature. On November 5th, a motion for a new trial on the ground that the verdict was against the weight of evidence was argued before Thayer. It was denied on the day before Christmas. As far as the judge was concerned, he would not “announce to the world that these twelve jurors violated the sanctity of their oaths, threw to the four winds of bias and prejudice their honor, judgment, reason and conscience, and thereby abused the solemn trust reposed in them by the law as well as the Court.” If any errors had been committed during the trial, no one would be happier than he if the Supreme Judicial Court corrected them. “But until that time comes,” he said, “so far as these motions are concerned, the verdicts of the jury must stand.”

Before Thayer’s decision, Jeremiah McAnarney had learned that, during the trial, Foreman Ripley had exhibited some .38-caliber cartridges to other members of the jury. Unfortunately, Ripley died before the lawyer could obtain a statement from him. However, two of his fellow jurors admitted that they had seen the bullets and, on the strength of this, the defense attorneys filed the first of six supplementary motions for a new trial. In their briefs, they argued that it was improper for the jurors to have considered any but legitimate exhibits.

To buttress their position that Ripley was hopelessly prejudiced against the defendants, their lawyers submitted an affidavit by William H. Daly, a good friend of the ex-foreman, who stated that he had run into him at a railroad station several days before the trial. When Daly had expressed some doubt as to whether Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty, Ripley had replied, “Damn them, they ought to hang them anyway.” The prosecution offered no evidence to contradict the Daly affidavit.

In early October of 1921, Frank J. Burke, the glassblower who had testified for the defense, ran into Roy E. Gould in Portland, Maine. The razor paste peddler had never been called as a witness despite the fact that he had given his name to the police. When the black Buick had driven by him, he had gotten a good look at its occupants. According to his sworn statement, which Moore used as the basis of his second supplementary motion, “the man that he saw at South Braintree on April 15, 1920, at or about the hour of three o’clock in the afternoon, riding in the bandit car, front seat, on the right-hand side of the driver, is not the man that he saw in the Dedham County Jail, and who was pointed out to him as Nicola Sacco.” As far as Vanzetti was concerned, he had seen photographs of the condemned man and “he in no sense resembles the man affiant saw at South Braintree on April 15th, 1920.”

On February 4, 1922, Lewis Pelser admitted in writing to Moore that he had perjured himself at the trial. His original statement to a defense investigator that he hadn’t seen anyone in the bandits’ car because he had been huddling under his workbench was, he now admitted, the true story. Pelser’s retraction was made part of the Gould motion. However, several days later, he wrote a letter to Katzmann in which he claimed that he had been drinking “pretty heavy” when Moore interviewed him. “He asked me one question and other,” he wrote, “and finally had my whole story contradicted what I had said at the Dedham Court.” He had decided to write to the District Attorney because he was “worried at the way they have framed me up and got me into trouble.”

Moore’s third motion was based on the fact that Carlos Goodridge, the Victrola salesman who had rushed out of Magazu’s poolroom just as the Buick drove by, had not used his right name at the trial. Furthermore, the lawyer alleged that Goodridge had twice been convicted of theft in New York and that, when he testified, he was a fugitive from a third indictment. In opposing Moore’s motion, Katzmann introduced an affidavit from the salesman, admitting most of the defense’s contentions, but insisting that his testimony had been accurate.

On September 11, 1922, Moore filed a fourth motion. Two days earlier, Lola Andrews had signed an affidavit in which she repudiated the testimony she had given at Dedham, claiming that she had been coerced by the District Attorney and the police. Now, she was prepared to state that “each and every part of her testimony ... wherein she identified the said Nicola Sacco as the person that she had seen on April 15, 1920, is false and untrue.” To the best of her knowledge, she had never seen the defendant until he was pointed out to her in the Dedham County Jail.

Four months later, Mrs. Andrews retracted this repudiation. She told Katzmann that Moore and his associates had threatened to prosecute her and her son if she did not sign a statement which indicated “that I had told a lie, that I did not at any time see Sacco at South Braintree.” She would never have signed the paper if her son hadn’t put his arm around her and said, “Mother, sign this paper and have an end to all this trouble, for you did not recognize these men, and you will be doing a terrible wrong if you send those men to the chair.” She now maintained that she had told the truth at Dedham.

In April of 1923, Albert H. Hamilton, a well-known criminologist, who had testified in more than 165 murder trials, examined all the exhibits in the case. He came to the conclusion that the fatal bullet had not been fired from Sacco’s gun. He was supported in his thesis by a member of the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In opposing this motion—the defense’s fifth—Katzmann submitted affidavits by several arms experts, disputing Hamilton’s claims.

As an adjunct to the Hamilton motion, William G. Thompson, who had come into the case in 1923, filed an affidavit by William H. Proctor. Captain Proctor, who had testified for the Commonwealth that Bullet III was “consistent with” having been fired from Sacco’s pistol, now explained that he had meant to say only that it was “fired from a Colt automatic pistol of .32-caliber.” He insisted that he had “repeatedly” told Katzmann that he could not swear that the “so-called mortal bullet ... passed through Sacco’s pistol.” “Had I been asked the direct question,” he stated, “whether I had found any affirmative evidence whatsoever that this ... bullet had passed through this particular Sacco’s pistol, I should have answered then, as I do now without hesitation, in the negative.”

After hearing argument on all these motions, Thayer denied each one on October 1, 1924. He did not feel that the “mere production” of Ripley’s cartridges in the jury room had in any way prejudiced the defendants and, besides, he was unwilling to “blacken the memory” of the dead juror. As far as Gould was concerned, he was convinced that the razor paste salesman must have been mistaken. He disposed of the Pelser retraction by blaming it on an excess of liquor. The motion attacking Goodridge’s veracity because of a previous criminal record was a “bold and cruel attempt to sandbag Goodridge by threatening actual arrest” which he could only attribute to Mr. Moore’s “over-enthusiastic interest in his client’s cause.” Lastly, Mrs. Andrews’ repudiation had been procured by duress, Hamilton’s opinion was unconvincing, and, if Captain Proctor had really believed that the fatal bullet did not come from Sacco’s gun, he had had ample opportunity at the trial to make himself clear.

After Judge Thayer’s decision, all of the defense attorneys except Thompson withdrew from the case. On May 12, 1926, the five-judge Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, in a sixty-page opinion, affirmed the trial judge’s denial of the various motions. Two weeks later, Thompson filed another application for a new trial, this time based on the admission by one Celestino F. Medeiros, a convicted murderer, who had sent a note to Sacco in jail in which he confessed that he had participated “in the South Braintree shoe company crime and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime.”

Although Medeiros would not name the men who had been associated with him in the Slater & Morrill holdup, he was willing to reveal every other aspect of the crime. He had met the four other members of the gang in a Providence saloon and they had driven to Randolph in a Hudson which they exchanged for a Buick in some woods outside of town. Then they proceeded to South Braintree, killed Parmenter and Berardelli, and drove back to the woods where they abandoned the Buick and raced back to Providence in the Hudson. Medeiros’ role during the holdup was to sit in the rear of the Buick with a gun and “help hold back the crowd in case they made a rush.”

Despite all of Thompson’s astuteness, Medeiros would not name any names. The most the lawyer could get from him was the fact that the gang had been composed of Italians who “had been engaged in robbing freight cars in Providence.” At the time of the South Braintree murders, a group of criminals known as the Morelli gang had been hijacking freight cars throughout New England. In fact, on April 15, 1920, several of its members were out on bail awaiting trial for stealing shoes which had been consigned by both Slater & Morrill and Rice & Hutchins. Medeiros’ descriptions of his confederates fitted the known members of the Morelli group.

Although Felix Frankfurter was convinced that Medeiros, who maintained that he had confessed because “I seen Sacco’s wife come up here with the kids and I felt sorry for the kids,” was telling the truth, Judge Thayer felt otherwise. As far as he was concerned, Medeiros was unworthy of belief because he was “a crook, a thief, a robber, a liar, a rum-runner, a ‘bouncer’ in a house of ill-fame, a smuggler, and a man who has been convicted and sentenced to death for ... murder.” If Medeiros was so eager to save two men whom he claimed were innocent, why didn’t he reveal the names of the other men who had supposedly participated in the Slater & Morrill caper? Furthermore, he felt that Medeiros’ haziness as to certain details of the crime clearly indicated that he had not been there.

On April 5, 1927, Thayer’s denial was affirmed by the appellate court. Four days later, the two defendants were brought before him for sentencing. After both men had made statements affirming their innocence, Thayer ordered that they “suffer the punishment of death by the passage of a current of electricity through your body within the week beginning on Sunday, the tenth day of July, in the year of our Lord, one thousand, nine hundred and twenty-seven.” As the judge was intoning the death sentence, Sacco interrupted to shout, “You know I am innocent. That is the same words I pronounced seven years ago. You condemn two innocent men.”

On May 3rd, Vanzetti wrote to Governor Alvan T. Fuller, on behalf of Sacco and himself, requesting clemency. Fuller’s response was to appoint an Advisory Committee composed of President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, President Samuel W. Stratton of M. I. T. and Probate Judge Robert Grant, to investigate the evidence against the condemned men. Because the three-week hearing didn’t begin until July 1st, the executions were postponed for one month. On July 27th, the committee’s members reported to the governor that they had “seen no evidence sufficient to make them believe that the trial was unfair.” One week later, Fuller stated that he had found “no sufficient justification for executive intervention.” “I believe with the jury,” he said, “that these men, Sacco and Vanzetti, were guilty and that they had a fair trial.”

Since the executions were scheduled for August 10th, a variety of petitions and motions were filed with everyone from Judge Thayer to Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, all without success. In order to give the defense time to appeal several of these denials to the Supreme Judicial Court, Fuller granted a reprieve until August 22nd. Two days earlier, petitions for certiorari were filed with the clerk of the United States Supreme Court but Justices Holmes, Brandeis, Stone and Taft refused to halt the executions. As Holmes put it, “I cannot say that I have a doubt and therefore I must deny the stay.”

At 12:19 on the morning of August 23, 1927, Sacco died in the electric chair at Charlestown State Prison. Seven minutes later, he was joined in death by his friend Vanzetti who wished “to forgive some people for what they are doing to me.” Perhaps the several thousand people who milled around the prison that torrid August night could take some small measure of comfort from Vanzetti’s remarks to a newspaper reporter on the seventh anniversary of the South Braintree shooting: “If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life, talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now, we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man, as now we do by an accident. Our words, our lives, our plans, nothing! The taking of our lives, lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler—all. That last moment belongs to us. That agony is our triumph.”