Chapter NINE: The Trial: I (2)

Monday morning brought Lola Andrews back to the stand. Moore repeatedly tried to force the witness into admitting that she had spoken to the pale sickly man, not the squat dark one. Over and over he asked about the location of the car, the position of the two men, the distance from the factory. Katzmann objected to the repetitions. So did Judge Thayer. “I thought we had been all through this before,” the judge exclaimed caustically. Moore explained that he was trying to show that “much of the testimony of the witness ... is one of rather hopeless confusion.” Katzmann objected and Thayer turned on Moore. “That is an unfair criticism of any witness,” he told the Westerner. “Kindly refrain from taking up a subject that has already been exhausted.”

Moore’s tactics were apparently to wear the witness down. All morning he kept hammering at her, going back again and again to what she had told him in January, making her retrace each step along Pearl Street on the morning of the crime. He could not, however, change her identification of Sacco.

Much of the testimony was irrelevant. Moore wanted to know how long the witness and Julia Campbell had worked at Rice & Hutchins, what they did there, and whether they had worked on men’s or women’s shoes. He became visibly embarrassed when the subject of Julia Campbell’s present address in Maine came up and Lola Andrews said he had asked her how she herself would like a little vacation down there. When she had told Moore she was afraid she would lose her job, he had promised her a job in Maine “as good or better.” Katzmann and Williams, sitting at the side of the enclosure, grinned at Moore’s efforts to defend himself.

At the beginning of the afternoon session Jerry McAnarney took over the questioning, leading back to the matter of the photographs that Mrs. Andrews had or had not identified for Moore in January. Then there was a conference between Thayer and the lawyers as to how far the defense might go into the witness’ past history. On overhearing this, she complained that she felt faint. A few seconds later she fell forward. Katzmann and Williams caught her as she slumped. She did not take the stand again until the following morning.

In the anteroom she told the district attorney that she had fainted because she had suddenly seen in the courtroom the man who had assaulted her. During the short recess it was whispered in the corridors that one of the spectators had been caught with a revolver. Unlike most courtroom rumors, it happened to be true. The man had a permit and was released, but on the morning following Lola Andrews’ fainting fit those who arrived early found the courthouse gates closed and guarded. Only five minutes before the session were they opened, and then each entering spectator was patted. There was another flurry when the police thought they had discovered a man in possession of three small bombs. They turned out to be hard-boiled eggs that he had brought for his lunch.

When John Dever thought of Lola Andrews being overborne in Quincy by Moore, with a stenographer taking down every word she said, he felt sorry for her. Moore’s harsh cross-examination backfired, causing Dever and the other jurymen to feel sympathetic enough to believe her.

Although Lola’s testimony dragged on for another day, little more was added. There was an involved and lengthy discussion as to whether the photograph she had identified for Moore had been of Sacco—as she now maintained—or of an unidentified mustached man in a straw hat holding a cigar. Indirectly Williams brought up the matter of the one-eyed stranger who had assaulted her. The assistant district attorney claimed that she had been in a frightened state of mind at the time of her interview with Moore and could not be held to what she had said. Although the jury was sympathetic, the newspapermen were less so. One of the Hearst reporters nicknamed her “Fainting Lola.”

Moore was sensitive enough to a jury’s mood to realize the impression her identification had made. To help repair the damage he brought in five refuting witnesses. Alfred LaBrecque, a young Quincy reporter, had gone to Lola Andrews’ room shortly after the assault, and she had told him that she could not say if the man who forced her into the toilet resembled the man at South Braintree because she had not seen the face of the man in South Braintree. George Fay, a Quincy policeman, testified that Lola had told him much the same thing. Harry Kurlansky, a tailor, who had known Lola for eight years, told of her passing his shop in February and his saying “‘You look kind of tired.’ She says ‘Yes.’ She says ‘They’re bothering the life out of me.’ I says, ‘What?’ She says, ‘I just came from jail.’ I says, ‘What have you done in jail?’ She says, ‘The Government took me down and want me to recognize those men,’ she says, ‘and I don’t know a thing about them. I have never seen them and I can’t recognize them’.”

Judge Thayer looked down sourly at the little Polish Jew. “Mr. Witness,” he rasped, “I would like to ask one question. Did you attempt to find out who this person was who represented the Government who was trying to get her to take and state that which was false?” Kurlansky, already bewildered by the courtroom atmosphere, was almost speechless at the thought of turning himself into a private detective. “Well,” he said, “it didn’t come into my mind. I wasn’t sure, you know. It didn’t——” Only later, with Jerry McAnarney to encourage him, was he finally able to say that he didn’t see why he should bother about it.

Moore sprang a surprise on Katzmann when he produced the aged but peppery Julia Campbell, whom he had brought down from Maine. Mrs. Campbell addressed Katzmann as “dear man,” and when he tried to confuse her with a litany of dates, she sent a titter round the courtroom by exclaiming “Oh, chestnuts!” She swore that Lola Andrews had never spoken to the man under the car but to the man standing by it. As for the two defendants in the cage, she did not think she “ever saw them men in the world.”

Lena Allen, who ran a lodging house in Quincy, was the last refuting witness. She said that Lola Andrews had roomed at her house until the other roomers had threatened to leave if she didn’t get rid of her. Lola Andrews had a bad reputation and was untruthful, according to Lena Allen—who admitted she disliked her.

* * * * *

Five witnesses identified Vanzetti in one way or another, but only one of them, Mike Levangie, the Pearl Street gate-tender, placed him at the scene of the murders. Almost all the other witnesses had described the driver of the getaway car as pale, fair, sickly. Levangie, at the inquest two days after the crime, had asserted the man was dark, with a dark brown mustache. Now he pointed to Vanzetti in the cage as the man, the only man he had seen.

Katzmann in his summing-up admitted that the driver of the car was indisputably a pale blond man, but he explained that Levangie’s identification was still valid as he must have glimpsed Vanzetti leaning over from the back seat and in the excitement thought he was the driver.

Although Levangie was the only witness to place Vanzetti in the Buick, two others placed him in South Braintree on that day. Harry Dolbeare, the piano tuner, had been summoned to Dedham as a prospective juror. While waiting in the courtroom he had seen the defendants being led by. Suddenly he had recalled the carload of tough tickets he had seen on Hancock Street the morning of the South Braintree crime. The man with the mustache, handcuffed to the sheriff, looked just like one of those men in the back seat. Having gone to the district attorney’s office with his story, he now found himself appearing as a witness. Dolbeare had no particular recollection of the other four men in the car except for the general impression of their toughness, but the middle man in the back seat was Vanzetti. “I had the same view of him in the courtroom as I had in the car, a profile view,” he told the court. He had “not a particle of doubt” about Vanzetti being the man.

John Faulkner, another surprise witness, picked out Vanzetti as a man who had ridden with him in the smoking car of the train from Plymouth to Boston on the morning of April 15. Faulkner, a patternmaker at the Watertown Arsenal, was an unhesitating witness. Each day he was accustomed to take the train from Cohasset and he always rode in the smoking car. On the morning of the fifteenth as the train was pulling into East Weymouth a man across the aisle had said someone in back wanted to know if the stop was East Braintree. Faulkner turned and saw a foreign-looking man sitting in the single seat next to the toilet. He had a black mustache, high cheekbones, and was wearing old clothes. At Weymouth Heights the man again leaned forward and asked if the stop was East Braintree. When the train stopped at East Braintree the man had picked up an old leather Boston bag and got off. “That is the man,” Faulkner said, identifying Vanzetti. He was sure. However, when asked by Moore if he could remember the man across the aisle who had first spoken to him, Faulkner had no recollection of him at all. He remembered the date because it was the time when he had been injured and had gone in on the late train to the hospital. The next day he read about the murders and wondered if the foreigner he had seen had had anything to do with them.

In refutation Moore brought in Henry McNaught, the conductor of the train, who said that no cash fares had been collected that day from Plymouth to Braintree. The station agents of Plymouth, North Plymouth, and Kingston testified in addition that no tickets had been sold from their stations to the Braintrees. However, Katzmann made them admit that they did not know if any such tickets had been sold the day before or how many might have been sold to Quincy or Boston. Edward Brooks, the ticket agent at East Braintree, recalled that about the time of the murders and several times since he had seen a tall dark man carrying a black bag get off the morning train and walk from the station toward Quincy Avenue. He had seen the man perhaps half a dozen times. Vanzetti was not the man.

The other two who identified Vanzetti were Austin Cole, the streetcar conductor, and Austin Reed, the gate-tender at the Matfield crossing. Cole told the same story he had told at the Plymouth trial. The two men who boarded his car at Sunset Avenue on May 5 and had been taken off by the police in Brockton had also got on at the same stop the night of April 14 or 15. Sacco and Vanzetti were the men. Reed, a man in his early twenties, told of the car that had swirled up to his crossing just as the train was coming and how he had gone out into the road with the stop sign in his hand. A man with a “stubbed” mustache and high cheekbones had leaned out of the car and asked loudly what the hell he was holding him up for. When Reed read of the South Braintree holdup the next day he had been sure those men were the bandits, and after he heard of the arrests on May 5 he had gone of his own accord to the Brockton police station to have a look at the suspects. The man with the mustache, Vanzetti, was the same man who had shouted at him from the car. He was sure of it in Brockton, he was sure of it now. There was no doubt in his mind.

Jerry McAnarney cross-examined Reed at random, asking what he was doing before the car appeared, how often the trains ran, where he now worked, how much dust was on the faces of the men in the car, what sort of hats they were wearing. Then Moore took over and at the last came close to the vital question when he asked if the man had spoken “in a loud bold voice.” Reed admitted that he had and that the quality of the English was “unmistakable and clear.” But Moore did not pursue the matter. As with Faulkner’s and Lola Andrews’ testimony, Moore overlooked the matter of the defendants’ accents. His jibes at Reed’s youth and at his going on his own to the police station aroused John Dever’s sympathy for the witness.

The weather continued oppressive; the motionless air bore down damply on the marble wainscotting. The routine of the court so enveloped the jurymen, the spectators, and even the lawyers and the sheriff’s men, that the outside world became unreal. Though the enlarged map of South Braintree still hung on the wall to the right of the jury box, there seemed no organic connection between the act of violence that had taken place there fifteen months before and this decorous legal game with its inherited rules.

For the newspapers the case lost its novelty, and the accounts of the trial often slipped to an inside page. What blackened the front pages now was the scandal of Mishawum Manor, a roadhouse north of Boston where, at a booze party a few years before, Adolph Zukor and several other film executives had been framed with naked call girls and shaken down for a hundred thousand dollars. The affair had been arranged through the office of District Attorney Nathan Tufts of Middlesex County. Only now was it coming to light, with Tufts, an old Yankee, and District Attorney Joseph Pelletier, an Irishman with a French name, facing disbarment.

* * * * *

It is almost impossible for anyone to sit through a murder trial without taking sides emotionally. With respect to Sacco and Vanzetti the sides had for the most part been taken before the defendants ever appeared in court. In the eyes of the court officers, sheriffs, police, janitors, stenographers, and the rest the two Italians were guilty, otherwise they would not be sitting in the cage. The feeling pervaded Dedham, and Frank Sibley, the dean of the local reporters, covering the trial for the Boston _Globe_, did not like it.

As the weeks passed there were other things Sibley did not like. He had not liked the squads of state troopers. He could not help but notice the antagonism between Moore and Thayer. Perhaps it was not so obvious to the jury, but as an old crime reporter he had been aware of it at once. Thanks to Moore’s objections, there was a succession of lawyers’ conferences at the bench with the jury sent from the room. Once when the stenographer went up to record what was being said in the buzzing cluster, Sibley heard Thayer snap, “Get the hell out of here! Who called you up here?”

Sibley, who remembered that old Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw would not discuss a current case even with his own family, was shocked by Thayer’s fondness for talking about the case to newspapermen. Several times on his way to lunch at the Dedham Inn Sibley had heard Thayer announce explosively that the defendants’ counsel were damn fools.

A gauntly impressive figure who wore a Windsor tie and a Latin Quarter hat and could be recognized on any Boston street a quarter-mile away, Sibley decided early that Sacco and Vanzetti were not getting a fair trial.

* * * * *

The last three witnesses to identify Sacco were William Tracey, the owner of the Tracey Building, the railroad detective William Heron, and Carlos Goodridge, who had heard the shooting as he was playing pool with Peter Magazu. Of the two men Tracey had noticed standing by the drugstore on the morning of the murders, one, he felt, was Sacco. “While I wouldn’t be positive, I would say to the best of my recollection that was the man,” was the most Katzmann could get out of him. When he was cross-examined he maintained that he felt quite sure he was right, but “would not positively say Sacco was the man.”

Heron recalled the two Dagos he had seen in the South Braintree station the morning he had collared the McNamara kid. He remembered them particularly because they were smoking under the no smoking sign. There was no question in his mind but that Sacco was one of the men he had seen.

Goodridge, a middle-aged man of uneasy appearance, picked out the bandit who had leaned from the car and pointed a gun at him. He was “the gentleman on the right in the cage”—Sacco.

“Are you not,” Jerry McAnarney asked Goodridge “a defendant in a criminal case in this court?” Goodridge denied it, and Judge Thayer broke off the line of questioning by reminding McAnarney that a man’s record as a defendant could not be brought up unless he had been convicted. There was another conference at the bench, with the jury sent out. Jerry McAnarney handed Judge Thayer a document from the clerk’s office showing that on the same day Sacco and Vanzetti were arraigned Goodridge had pleaded guilty to stealing money from his employer and a week later had been placed on probation. Thayer ruled against the jury being allowed to hear this because the case had been filed. John Dever sensed that something was wrong about Goodridge, even if McAnarney could not bring out the details.

Goodridge was contradicted by four defense witnesses who, unhappily for the defense, also contradicted each other. Harry Arrogni, a barber in Damato’s shop, said that when Goodridge had had his hair cut a few days after the holdup, he had told of seeing the man in the car, adding, “if I have got to say who that man was I can’t say.” Katzmann forced Arrogni to admit that this was the only customer’s conversation he could remember from a period of fourteen months. Damato himself claimed that Goodridge had said he was inside the poolroom and did not see any of the men in the automobile.

Just before the shooting Peter Magazu had left his poolroom to wait on a customer in the shoe shop on the other side of the partition. After the car had swung by he asked Goodridge if he had seen anything. Goodridge told him, “‘I seen the men, they pointed with a gun.’ I says, ‘How do the men look like?’ He says, ‘Young man with light hair, light complexion and wore an army shirt. This job wasn’t pulled off by any foreign people.’”

Andrew Manganaro, Goodridge’s disgruntled employer, related that Goodridge had told him he “saw this automobile going by and as he did one of the men pointed a gun at him and he run in. When he saw the gun he was so scared he run right in from where he was. He could not possibly remember faces.” As for Goodridge’s reputation for veracity, Manganaro announced with emphatic satisfaction that it was bad.

After the identifications there followed a string of residual witnesses to establish at length for the bored jury facts that were for the most part apparent at a glance. Charles Fuller and Max Wind told of finding the Buick in the Manley Woods, whereupon Moore engaged in a lengthy dispute with Judge Thayer as to whether or not the Buick should be admitted as evidence. Francis Murphy, the owner, testified that the car was his. Warren Ellis identified his stolen license plates. There was more interest in the story of William Hill, the police officer who had driven the Buick to Brockton. He had spent fifteen or twenty minutes looking the car over in the police garage and found it undamaged, yet the next morning he had noticed a bullet hole in the right rear door.

Assistant District Attorney Williams, putting Napoleon Ensher on the stand, announced that the Commonwealth would “show that this man Boda ... was seen driving a car of the type which is of interest to us in this case; that he was associated with one Orciani, that he was associated with Sacco, and we shall ask the jury ... to draw the inference that the car which Boda was then driving was the car concerned in this murder, and we shall tie up the car and Boda, by evidence of other association between these four men, Sacco, Vanzetti, Orciani and Boda.”

Unfortunately for this theory, there was no link for Williams to connect the murder car with the one Ensher claimed to have seen Boda driving. The assistant district attorney admitted that all he could hope to show was that it was the same kind of car; he could not, however, “place the four men together at any time in this particular Buick car.” For lack of such a connection, Judge Thayer excluded Ensher’s testimony.

Officers Vaughn and Connolly again told their tale of arresting the two Italians, Connolly elaborating on the story he had told at the Plymouth trial. Vanzetti had so far controlled his feelings, but as Connolly told of Vanzetti’s reaching for his revolver the Italian jumped up in the cage and shouted “You are a liar!” The deputies forced him down, his eyes sparkling with anger, as Connolly continued.

Following Connolly, Parmenter’s widow gave brief, pathetic, and largely inconsequent testimony. Fred Loring told of picking up the cap near Berardelli’s body. George Kelley, Sacco’s neighbor, refused to identify the cap as Sacco’s. The most Williams could get him to say was that the cap was similar in color to the cap Sacco wore and that at the Three-K factory Sacco hung his cap on a nail each morning. Williams asked whether he knew of anything happening to the cap because it was hung on a nail. Kelley said he did not. Then Williams asked what he noticed about the condition of the cap lining he was examining on the stand. “Torn,” Kelley replied. As he went on, he did his best to put in a good word for Sacco. His feeling of friendship was obvious. However, he was obliged to admit that Sacco had not worked during the Christmas week of 1919—an admission later corroborated by his sister Margaret, the Three-K paymistress.

Mrs. Glendower Evans had become such an assiduous note-taker that the sheriff finally provided a small table for her. Even from behind the table she managed to display a vast assurance and a well-bred disapproval of the proceedings. Judge Thayer took for granted the enmity of radicals and of anarchists (_arnuchists_, he pronounced it) but he expected something different from these Boston women of old families who seemed to form a phalanx at the trial and who, he felt, were people of his own class. One day, as the court adjourned, he asked Mrs. Rantoul to step into his chambers. She found him alone, waiting in his black robe. At once he asked her how she thought the trial was going. “I told him,” she said later in an affidavit, “that I had not yet heard sufficient evidence to convince me that the defendants were guilty. He expressed dissatisfaction both by words, gestures, tone of voice, and manner. He said that after hearing both arguments and his charge I would certainly feel differently.”

The Commonwealth rested its case on the first day of summer.