In weighing the testimony against Vanzetti, it should be borne in mind
that the prosecution admitted it had no evidence that Vanzetti took any
part in the shooting. He was never given a preliminary examination on
the South Braintree crime and did not know on what ground he would be
linked with that crime until he heard it at the trial.
The prosecution sought to connect him with the murder by producing one
witness—solitary, uncorroborated and conceded by the prosecution to be
“mistaken” in one part of his observations—who claimed fourteen months
after the event, to “identify” Vanzetti as among the bandits; two
detached witnesses who claimed to have seen him on the morning of the
crime in or near Braintree; one other who claims to have seen him in the
bandit-car some miles distant after the crime; one witness who claimed
to have seen him in a trolley car in another town on the evening before
or following the crime, and by an attempt to show that a revolver found
in Vanzetti’s possession belonged to Berardelli, one of the men
murdered, but this fizzled completely.
The defense countered by introducing impeaching evidence of all the
so-called “identifications” and by bringing strong alibi witnesses.
Of the score of witnesses for both sides who described some portion of
the murder scene, 35 claimed to have gotten a sufficiently good view to
describe the face of one or more of the bandits. The only one of these
who identified Vanzetti was Michael Levangie, gate tender for the N. Y.,
N. H. & H. railroad at South Braintree. This man was in his shanty on
the west side of the tracks when the shooting occurred. He had lowered
the gates for an oncoming train; then he saw an automobile coming from
the east.
In that car sitting beside the driver, Levangie said, a man waved a
revolver at him, motioning him to raise the gates, and the car sped
across. The man with the pistol snapped the trigger at the gateman as
the automobile passed. Levangie declared the driver was dark
complexioned, with black hair, heavy brown moustache, cheek-bones
sticking out, slouch hat, army coat. He identified the driver as
Vanzetti.
The District Attorney in his closing argument admitted that Vanzetti
could not have been at the wheel, as the testimony was overwhelming that
the driver was a light, consumptive looking man. The defense brought
four witnesses who absolutely impeached Levangie’s assertions in toto:
Henry McCarthy, fireman on the New Haven, talked with Levangie a few
minutes after the shooting. Levangie told him he didn’t get a look at
the bandits, and was so scared he ran for cover. McCarthy volunteered to
testify for the defense after reading Levangie’s assertions in the
newspapers.
Edward Carter, shoe-worker for Slater and Morrill, testified that
Levangie told him at 4:15 P. M. that day, the driver was
light-complexioned.
Alexander Victorson, a freight clerk at South Braintree, heard Levangie
say immediately after the shooting, “it would be hard to identify those
men.”
John L. Sullivan, gate tender who takes shifts with Levangie, was told
by Levangie, about two weeks before the trial that he had been
interviewed by J. J. McAnarney, counsel for the defense, and that he had
told him he was unable to identify anyone. Under cross-examination,
Levangie first acknowledged that he remembered this interview. Later he
declared, “I don’t remember anything about it,” and denied having ever
told anyone that he was unable to identify the bandits. Asked if he had
ever described the driver as a “light-complexioned, Swedish or Norwegian
type of person,” he answered, “No, sir.”
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.
While the jury was being drawn, Harry Dolbeare, piano tuner from South
Braintree, was excused from service after a whispered conversation with
the judge. Summoned later as a prosecution witness, he testified that he
asked to be excused because he recognized Vanzetti in court as a man he
saw in South Braintree on April 15, _fourteen months before he
testified_.
Dolbeare asserted that on that uneventful morning he saw an automobile
moving along the street with five men in it, and he noticed particularly
the middle man of the three in the rear seat. This man was leaning
forward talking with somebody in the front. Dolbeare got only a profile
view of him against the background of the black curtain.
“What was it about them that attracted your attention?” asked Attorney
McAnarney.
“The appearance of the whole five attracted me. They were strangers to
me, and appeared to be foreigners.”
“What else?”
“Well, that carload was a tough-looking bunch.”
Dolbeare agreed that he had seen many cars containing three, five or
seven foreigners coming from the Fore River shipyards.
“Give me some description of the men on the front seat,” said McAnarney.
“I wouldn’t like to be on record, for my impression isn’t firm enough.
The men on the front seat impressed me hardly any.”
He thought they wore old clothes, but he didn’t know whether they wore
overalls and jumpers, nor whether they were clean or grimy.
“Give me some description of the other men on the back seat,” demanded
McAnarney.
But Dolbeare couldn’t give a single detail except that they were a
“tough-looking bunch.” All the excitement attendant upon the murders in
Braintree that day didn’t impel him to inform the authorities that he
had seen a tough-looking bunch in an automobile, nor did he go to
Brockton police station with the big delegation which went from
Braintree after Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested. Even the photographs
of Vanzetti published broadcast then did not move him to any action.
At 4:15 P. M. on the crime-date, Austin T. Reed, gate tender at the
Matfield Crossing, some miles distant from South Braintree put the gates
down for a passing train and brought a big touring car to a stand. “A
dark complexioned man” with “kind of hollow cheeks, high cheek
bones—stubbed moustache” wearing a slouch hat, called out in “clear and
unmistakable” English, “What in hell are you holding us up for?”
Three weeks later, when Sacco and Vanzetti had been arrested and many
persons were being taken to the Brockton jail to look them over, Reed
went to Brockton, “looked for an Italian,” as he testified under
cross-examination, an Italian with a moustache, and Vanzetti filled the
bill. He recognized not only the appearance, but the voice, which
speaking in the jail in a conversational tone and in Italian, recalled
to the witness “that same gruff voice” in which the Italian had hollered
at him from the automobile. This witness was certain of his
“identification,” although Vanzetti’s moustache is the opposite of
“stubbed” and his accent is noticeably foreign.
It is to be noted that Reed placed the moustached man with whom he
“identified” Vanzetti, on the front seat beside the driver, the location
in which almost every other witness had placed the bandit with whom it
was sought to identify Sacco.
One other witness, Austin C. Cole, conductor on the trolley car into
Brockton on which Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested on the evening of May
5th following the crime, testified that these same men had ridden on his
car at the same hour on either April 14th or 15th. If this testimony is
accepted as to the 14th, it discredits Faulkner’s testimony as to the
passenger on the train from Cohasset the following morning. And if it is
accepted as to the 15th, then it claims that two red-handed murderers,
one of whom had been in the limelight before scores of spectators, left
their high power automobile to board a trolley several hours later in a
town not far from the scene of their crime.
Under cross-examination Cole admitted that when the two men boarded the
car in April he thought at first the larger man was “Tony the
Portuguese,” whom he had known in Campello for a dozen years.
Defense Counsel McAnarney showed Cole a profile photograph of a man with
a large dark moustache.
Q. Do you recognize that picture?
A. It looks like Vanzetti. (Cole, of course was sitting where he could
see Vanzetti plainly as he answered.)
Q. That is a picture of Vanzetti?
A. That is what I would call it.
Q. And not a picture of your friend Tony? A. No.
At this juncture a man was brought into the courtroom.
Q. Do you know this man? A. I have met him, yes.
Q. Who is he? A. Tony.
McAnarney showed the picture to Cole again.
Q. Is that a picture of Vanzetti?
A. It looks like it.
But actually it was a photograph of another Italian, wholly unlike
Vanzetti except that he has a big moustache.
The foregoing is the whole case against Vanzetti in the way of
identification.
It was the theory of the government that the Harrison & Richardson
revolver which Vanzetti carried when arrested had been taken from
Berardelli’s dead body by the bandit who shot him. No one had seen this
done. Prosecutor Katzmann based the theory on evidence that Berardelli
was known to have carried a revolver (whether of similar make is
unknown), which had been seen in Berardelli’s possession and handled by
a prosecution witness, James F. Bostock, the Saturday previous to the
shooting, and that no weapon was found on Berardelli after his death.
Three weeks before the murders, however, Berardelli took his revolver to
the Iver Johnson Company in Boston for repairs, according to testimony
given by his widow, Mrs. Sarah Berardelli. She accompanied him on the
trip. The gun had a broken spring.
Berardelli had obtained the revolver originally from his superior,
Parmenter, and he gave the repair check to Parmenter so that the latter
could take the gun out after it was repaired, the widow stated. “I don’t
know whether the revolver ever came back.... Mr. Parmenter let him have
another revolver, with a black handle like the first.”
Mrs. Berardelli did not identify the Vanzetti revolver as her husband’s.
Lincoln Wadsworth, in charge of gun repairing at the Iver Johnson
Company, testified that the company’s records show that Berardelli
brought in a 38-calibre Harrington and Richardson revolver for repairs
on March 20. But Geo. Fitzmeyer, gunsmith for that firm, testified that
a revolver on Repair Job No. 94765 was a 32-calibre gun. The company’s
records, according to the testimony of James H. Jones, manager of the
firearms department, do not show whether the revolver repaired on Job
No. 94765 was ever delivered.
When Fitzmeyer was testifying, he was asked to examine the Vanzetti
pistol, and he declared that a new hammer had recently been put into
that gun. But he found no indications that any new spring had lately
been put into it.
Of important, almost conclusive, bearing upon the state theory is the
testimony of Mrs. Aldeah Florence, the friend with whom Mrs. Berardelli
made her home after her husband’s death. She testified that the day
following the funeral, while in conversation with the widow she had
lamented “Oh, dear, if he had taken my advice and taken the revolver out
of the shop, maybe he wouldn’t be in the same condition he is today.”
The government might have called Mrs. Berardelli to the witness stand to
contradict this evidence had it believed it to be untrue, but did not do
so. If Mrs. Florence’s testimony stands, and the government did not
challenge it, then the rest of the voluminous testimony relative to the
pistol is irrelevant.
Vanzetti’s gun was traced from owner to owner until no doubt remained as
to its identity.
If the evidence against Vanzetti was slight, there was nevertheless the
fact, never referred to, but in everybody’s mind, which cannot fail to
have been counted as evidence, that upon his arrest he had been at first
charged, not with complicity in the South Braintree crime, but as
principal in the attempted holdup at Bridgewater.
Under the forms of legal procedure, there was no chance to put in the
plea that the earlier trial for the Bridgewater crime was believed by
those who had studied the transcript of evidence to have been an almost
grotesque travesty of justice. The Bridgewater crime stalked behind and
overshadowed all the evidence introduced against Vanzetti at Dedham.
The failure on the part of Judge Webster Thayer to separate the two
trials made it inevitable that this shadow (and no amount of
instructions could remove it) also covered Sacco.
Bartolomeo Vanzetti declared on the witness stand that he was in
Plymouth, 35 miles from South Braintree all day on April 15. He gave
names of persons to whom he sold fish; told of buying a piece of suiting
from Joseph Rosen, a woolen peddler; and of talking with Melvin Corl, a
fisherman, while Corl was painting a boat by the sea.
Vanzetti’s alibi was supported by eleven undiscredited witnesses.
Mrs. Alphonsine Brini testified that Vanzetti brought fish to her home
in Cherry Court, Plymouth, about 10 a. m. April 15. He came back about
noon with Rosen, and asked her to examine and pass upon the quality of
cloth he had bought for a suit. Mrs. Brini fixed the date by the fact
that she had been home a week from the hospital, and that her husband
telephoned that day to Dr. Shurtleff for a nurse.
Miss Lefevre Brini, 15, stated that Vanzetti delivered fish at the Brini
home about 10 o’clock on April 15. She had remained home from work that
day to care for her mother, who was ill.
Miss Gertrude Mathews, nurse in medical department of Plymouth Cordage
Company, recalled telephone conversation with Dr. Shurtleff regarding
the matter of attending Mrs. Brini. Was at Brini home to attend her from
April 15 to April 20, inclusive.
Mrs. Ella Urquhart, another nurse at the cordage plant, recalled the
same message from Dr. Shurtleff.
Joseph Rosen, woolen peddler, testified that he met Vanzetti in Suosso’s
Lane, Plymouth, shortly before noon on April 15. Vanzetti was pushing
his fish-cart. They were acquainted. Rosen had sold him cloth before.
Sold him a piece of suiting now with a hole in it, “at a bargain”; went
with Vanzetti to Brini home to show goods to Mrs. Brini.
Several other persons in Plymouth bought cloth from him that day, Rosen
averred. Rosen was actually one of the strongest witnesses in Vanzetti’s
defense. The prosecution never attempted to disprove his story of his
presence in Plymouth on the day of the crime. If that story had not been
true, it would have been easy for the commonwealth to have discredited
Rosen by producing the various persons to whom he said he made sales.
One of these was the wife of the police chief of Plymouth.
But the prosecution did not produce any of these persons as witnesses,
and Rosen’s story stands unshaken in every detail.
That evening Rosen went by train to Whitman, a small town near Brockton.
There he read in the Brockton papers about the payroll murders at South
Braintree, and he heard many people there talking about the crime. He
stayed that night at a small hotel in Whitman. Next day he returned to
Boston. Three weeks later he read of the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Remembering Vanzetti well, he fixed the date by his memory that when he
had reached Whitman, all the town was talking about the South Braintree
murders.
He also fixed that date as April 15 with reference to a receipt for
taxes, paid by his wife on that date, and about which he had spoken to
her before leaving home. The receipt was produced in court.
Miss Lillian Schuler, waitress in hotel at Whitman, testified that she
rented a room to a man on the night of April 15. Register simply shows
that a man occupied the room, and gives no name.
Melvin Corl, Plymouth fisherman, testified that he was painting a boat
on the afternoon of April 15. Vanzetti came down to the shore and talked
with him for an hour. Corl fixed the date by reference to his wife’s
birthday which fell on April 17th, on which date he launched the boat
and made a trip to Duxbury to tow a boat back, for which he received
$5.00.
Angelo Giadobone of Plymouth bought fish of Vanzetti on April 15.
Remembered date with relation to April 19, when he was operated on for
appendicitis. Giadobone said he still owed Vanzetti for the fish.
Antonio Carbone of Plymouth attested that he sold fish to Vanzetti on
April 15.