Part 8
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?