Facing the chair

“But Vanzetti had a criminal record,” they tell you, “he was serving a jail sentence when he was brought up for trial with Sacco.”

This is the story of Vanzetti’s criminal record.

In 1914 Vanzetti had a job loading rope coils on freightcars with the outside gang of the Plymouth Cordage. The Plymouth Cordage is the largest in the world, and virtually owns Plymouth and the surrounding towns where colonies of Italians and Portuguese worked (at that time for a maximum of nine dollars a week) tending the spinning machines that transform hemp shipped up from Yucatan into rope and binder twine. On January 17, 1916, there was a big walkout, the first in the history of the Cordage. Vanzetti was one of the organizers of the strike. After the plant had been shut down for a month in the busiest season, the company conceded a raise. Since then wages have risen to round twenty five a week. Vanzetti was always in the front, picketing, making speeches. He was the only employee who did not get his job back when the strike was settled.

At the time of the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti there was a general impression that the gunmen in a Buick car who attempted to hold up a paytruck of the L. Q. White company in Bridgewater on the morning of day before Christmas 1919, were Italians and the same as those who had made off with the South Braintree payroll.

It was impossible to implicate Sacco in that affair as he had been working that day. Vanzetti was his own boss, so he could not give himself a certificate of employment. He was taken over to Plymouth and brought to trial under Judge Thayer in June, Mr. Katzmann prosecuting the case for the state. It is very probable that the man hired to defend Vanzetti deliberately gave away his client’s case. In any event he showed criminal negligence in neglecting to file a bill of exceptions and in refusing to allow Vanzetti to take the stand in his own defence.

This is what Vanzetti himself says about it in a letter to some friends in Mexico:

“As for Mr. Vahey, he had asked me very little concerning my defence, and, from after the preliminary hearing to the end of the trial, he did not put to me a single new question about the case. On the contrary, he began to promise me the electric chair. ‘They will put you with Sacco’, and ... at this point he used to cease to speak, to begin to whistle, tracing upward spiral motions with his right hand, its index finger straight up. This is the sole Herculean fatigue accomplished by Mr. Vahey in my defence, while smoking big cigars bought him by the poor Italian people. But Mr. Vahey’s words proved that he knew before the Plymouth trial that I would be indicted for the Braintree robbery and slaying * * * To suppose that Mr. Vahey and his agent Govoni might have been induced to such conduct by their conviction of my guilt, would be as wrong as it is unjust. There had been nothing in the case to justify, not even to excuse, such a doubt. I have always protested my innocence; the Italian population and some Americans of Plymouth had run in a mass to prove it. The preliminary hearing had proved the impossibility and inconsistency of the charge against me as the record shows. The truth is that both the prosecution and the defence counsel had realized that without the latter’s betrayal the frameup in the making would have been an utter failure; hence the betrayal.”

The Bridgewater holdup had occurred at 7.35 A. M. It was an armed attack on three occupants of the L. Q. White Shoe Company’s paytruck. This truck had obtained the weekly allotment of money for White’s, said to be $33,000, at a bank in the public square, and was on its way to the shoe factory.

Its route lay northward on Broad Street, along which a trolley track runs. One block north of the public square, Hale Street, a narrow lane, cuts into Broad Street from the east, and ends there. One block farther north there are railroad tracks and a depot, the latter being set back considerably from Broad Street to the east, so that it cannot be seen from the crime-zone.

As the paytruck approached Hale Street, two men on foot began firing at the three on board—a paymaster, a special officer, and a chauffeur. The fire was returned. One bandit had a revolver, and the other a shotgun. Later Vanzetti was declared to be the shotgun man. The truck escaped around a trolleycar.

No one was injured, nor were any bullet marks afterwards found. The bandits jumped into an automobile which waited with engine running in Hale street, and fled.

At that hour Vanzetti was actually 28 miles away—in Plymouth, where he was well known as a fishseller. December 24th stands out always on the Italian calendar. Among the Catholics it is a fast day, and fish is the logical food. But the feasting spirit of the Christmas-tide is in the air, and the fish of ordinary days is not rich enough, so the Italians eat eels.

Vanzetti had taken orders in advance from numerous families for eels. On the evening of December 23rd, he arranged with thirteen-year-old Bertrando Brini to have him help in the delivery of the eels. Next morning the two went through the streets together making those deliveries. They were seen by many people. That day stood out in Bertrando’s memory because it was then he earned his Christmas money.

Eighteen reputable witnesses vouched for Vanzetti’s whereabouts on that day. Nine of those had been at home when he brought the eels, and talked with him. John Di Carlo, proprietor of a shoe store, testified that Vanzetti came to his store while he was cleaning up that morning—between 7:15 and 7:40 A. M. Every hour of Vanzetti’s time that Christmas Eve was accounted for.

Those who swore that they purchased eels from him included Mrs. Mary Fortini, Mrs. Rosa Forni, Rosa Balboni, Teresa Malaguice, Adelaide Bongiovanni, Marquetta Fiochi, Emma Bosari, Enrico Bastoni, a baker, and Vincent J. Longhi.

All these are persons of good repute. Their testimony was straightforward and certain. The prosecution made no serious attempt to disprove it.

Prosecutor Katzmann, who says this is solely a criminal case, asked Di Carlo during cross-examination:

“Have you ever discussed government theories over there between you?” and “Have you discussed the question of the poor man and the rich man between you?” (Trial record, Page 47).

And when Michael Sassi, cordage worker, was testifying for Vanzetti, the prosecutor asked: “Have you heard anything of his political speeches to fellow workers at the Cordage?”

Witnesses for the prosecution were few and inconsistent; several altered their testimony, consciously or unconsciously, to fit the prosecution’s needs.

Frank W. Harding, better known as “Slip,” originally described the shotgun bandit as “smooth-shaven,” according to the Boston Globe of December 24, 1919. But in the official transcript of the preliminary hearing of Vanzetti on May 10, he uses five lines to describe the “overgrown Charlie Chaplin” moustache of the same man. This description was given after he had seen Vanzetti.

Similar alteration of testimony was made by Benjamin J. Bowles, one of the men on the paytruck. Bowles is a special officer for the White Shoe Company and member of Chief Stewart’s police force in Bridgewater. At the preliminary hearing Bowles swore the shotgun man’s moustache was “short and croppy.” But presently it became known that Policemen Schilling and Gault, of Plymouth, together with the Chief of Police there and various prominent persons, would testify for the defense that Vanzetti’s moustache had been full and flowing for years. So in the trial Bowles declared that the shotgun man’s moustache was “bushy.”

Bowles’ “pretty positive” identification, thrice repeated at the preliminary hearing (Page 32, preliminary record), became “positive” in the trial. (Page 25, trial record.)

Although refusing to make a positive identification for the commonwealth, Paymaster Alfred E. Cox reversed his general testimony at the trial and gave a description which would fit the defendant. In the Brockton police court on May 10, Cox declared several times that the shotgun man, in contrast to the other bandit, was “short and of slight build” (Page 11, preliminary record), the “short” fellow of the attacking party.

This was bad for the commonwealth’s case. But it didn’t stand. Bowles followed Cox with a “five feet eight inches” description which fitted Vanzetti better, and said that the shotgun man was the taller of the two. Then, when the case went to trial, Bowles was called first and Cox carefully patterned his description after him and let the bandit grow taller. When Bowles again said “five feet eight inches” Cox repeated “five feet eight inches.”

Bowles gave a description of the shotgun man’s hair, eyes, face and clothes of minute completeness. Such fullness of detail six months after he had seen a man for only a few chaotic seconds seems incredible. Bowles described graphically how he helped operate the motor truck after Earl Graves, the driver, collapsed from fright with the first bullet, and how they steered around a trolley car directly ahead of them.

And most marvelous of all—at the very time when he was doing this, he was engaged in a pistol duel with another bandit from the one he was describing. This other bandit, he said, was fully eight feet away from the shotgun man. All this is in the preliminary trial record.

At the trial however the defense attorneys challenged Bowles on the latter point and he promptly changed his testimony, saying now that his second shot was fired at the shotgun man. But he had just said that he was from 25 to 50 yards away when he fired the second shot.

Mrs. Georgina Brooks is an elderly woman who appears to have supernatural powers. Buildings become transparent when they stand in her way. She declared she saw “fire and smoke from a gun” while she stood in a window of the railway station, 75 feet back from Broad Street and 300 feet from Hale Street where the events took place.

But there is a two-story frame house half-way along Broad Street which completely shuts off an observer in that window from any view of the crime-area!

Mrs. Brooks makes no secret of being able to see only the vague silhouette of objects before her with one of her eyes, and she has been taking treatment for the other. But on the way to the railroad station with a small child before the shooting, she took observations afterwards useful to the prosecution. She was walking north on the west side of Broad Street, she said, when she noticed an automobile drawn up in Hale street, east of the eastern sidewalk line on Broad Street. The rear of the car was toward her.

For some unexplained reason she became interested in that car, although its appearance was not unusual. She led the child across Broad Street and into Hale Street, and went out of her way to pass around the front end of the automobile. In it, she said, were four men. Three of these she took no notice of; but she scrutinized the fourth—a man with a dark face, moustache and dark soft hat, who “seemed like some kind of a foreigner.”

She looked twice at this man, who in return looked at her “severely”; and she continued to turn and look at him as she and the child proceeded to the railroad station. That man, she declared, to quote from the trial record, “That man, I should judge, was the defendant.”

Paymaster Cox testified at the preliminary hearing, as did Mrs. Brooks, that Vanzetti had worn a hat. But this detail given by Cox was carefully suppressed by the prosecution during the trial. Chief Stewart exhibited in court a cap, which he claimed to have taken from Vanzetti’s home; then he produced a witness, Richard Grant Casey, who said he thought he saw this cap on the shotgun man’s head on December 24.

Maynard Freeman Shaw, 14-year-old high school prodigy, stood behind a tree and saw the shotgun man running 145 feet away. He was one of those who “identified” Vanzetti. He admitted he never had more than a fleeting glimpse of the bandit’s face.

“I could tell he was a foreigner by the way he ran,” young Shaw testified at the trial.

“What sort of a foreigner?” asked the defense.

“Either Italian or Russian.”

“Does an Italian or a Russian run differently from a Swede or a Norwegian?”

“Yes.”

“What is the difference?”

“Unsteady.”

Courtroom spectators were impressed by the heroic recital of “Slip” Harding. He described modestly his own coolness under fire; how he stood in the open during the gun-play in the Bridgewater attack. Some onlookers assert that Harding was behind a tree, but he testified that he took down the number of the bandits’ automobile as it sped away. Then he gave the memorandum to Police Chief Stewart, he said, and failed to keep a copy of it.

When Stewart went on the witness stand he stated that he had mislaid that important memorandum. After spending a whole day searching for the automobile number, he had to confess that he had lost it. Later, however, he gave “from memory” a number which he asserted was that of the bandit-car. That was six months after the crime. The number Stewart gave was that of a car stolen from Francis Murphy, a Natick shoe manufacturer, in November, 1919.

Two days after the South Braintree holdup, an abandoned Buick automobile, identified as Murphy’s, was found several miles away. The prosecution contended that it was used in both crimes.

Vanzetti was connected with that car by the thinnest threads. Remember the three shotgun shells found in his pocket many days after the second holdup. The prosecutors tried to introduce as evidence a fourth shotgun shell, alleged to have been found alongside the automobile. Judge Thayer would not admit its introduction.

Whether that shell actually was found beside the car may be questioned, in the light of a news story in the Boston Globe of April 19. That story told of State Detective Scott and Police Chief Jeremiah Gallivan of Braintree beating the bush for the missing $15,000 payroll.

(A curious thing about the South Braintree crime is that no trace of the stolen money, or of the black boxes that were said to have contained it, has been found. Stewart had an idea it was in Coacci’s trunk. It was not there. The only mention of any money that could possibly have come from that source was the two thousand dollars Madeiros went South with late in 1920. Being questioned by Mr. Thompson he refused to say where it came from, but it is to be inferred that it was part of the South Braintree loot.)

“Their search was fruitless,” according to the Globe, “except for finding of an empty RIFLE shell.”

Failing to get the fourth shotgun shell into evidence, the commonwealth tried another way to link Vanzetti with the Buick car.

It proceeded to build its case upon the shoulders of two missing men—a shaky scaffolding, but one which served the prosecution’s purposes.

It put on the stand Mrs. Simon Johnson, wife of a garage keeper, who at the request of the police, telephoned them when Michael Boda called on the night of May 5 for his own automobile—an Overland—which was stored in the Johnson garage.

She asserted that Sacco and two other Italians were with Boda that night, and was quite certain about it, although her husband testified that Mrs. Johnson was in the light when she observed the four men, and that the visitors were in the shadow. Johnson knew Boda well, and he took an oath that Boda had owned and driven an Overland car, but never to his knowledge had driven a Buick.

Finally, however, the prosecution summoned Napoleon Ensher, a milkman, who said he didn’t know Boda by name, but that he knew who was meant, and that he had once seen Boda driving a Buick—maybe four weeks ago, maybe eight weeks ago. There was no showing that Ensher had any knowledge of different makes of automobiles, nor any explanation of how he happened to notice what kind of a car was being driven by a man whose name he didn’t know—a man who simply passed one day a long time ago, passed “waving his head.” Other makes of automobiles might easily be confused with a Buick by a person unfamiliar with their differences.

On this extremely flimsy evidence, in the face of an alibi that would certainly have been accepted had the defense witnesses been Americans instead of Italians, Vanzetti was convicted of attempted highway robbery and given the enormous sentence of from twelve to fifteen years. The indictment carried two counts: attempt to murder and attempt to rob. Judge Thayer instructed the jury to disregard the first count, but, such was the feeling against the defendant that they brought in a verdict of Guilty on both counts. Sentence however was only passed on the latter. In his charge to the jury Judge Thayer had said that the crime was “cognate with the defendant’s ideals” as a radical.

SACCO AND VANZETTI

But what sort of a trap was it into which Sacco and Vanzetti stepped the evening of May 5th?

Their arrest seems to go back to the fact that in the famous January raids Police Chief Stewart of Bridgewater helped Department of Justice agents rout four Lithuanians out of their beds and drag them off to Deer Island. That seems to have started him on a career of red-baiting.

Later, at the request of the Department of Justice, he arrested and engineered the deportation of a certain Coacci, a member of the vaguely outlined group, readers of Galleani’s paper, to which Sacco and Vanzetti belonged. Coacci was deported from Ellis Island on April 18, leaving behind a wife who was about to have a baby. Chief Stewart was worrying about the series of holdups, committed it was thought by Italians, which were earning the police considerable adverse criticism in the community. Something had to be done. It was not until Coacci had been shipped off that Stewart got the idea that perhaps he might be implicated in the Bridgewater and South Braintree crimes. It turned out that Coacci had worked in the L. Q. White shoe factory some time before the Bridgewater attempt. Stewart hatched the theory that perhaps the little house where Coacci lived was the bandit headquarters. Boda was a salesman and drove a car. Stewart found him and questioned him. Boda’s car was being repaired at Johnson’s garage a little down the road. Then Stewart found out from Johnson that the car had been brought in for repairs some time near the date of the South Braintree murders. He told him to phone for the police if anyone came to take Boda’s car away.

So Stewart, the small town cop, found himself in charge of the case. Captain Proctor, head of the state police, stepped out after warning him that he thought the trap had snapped on the wrong birds. The theory elaborated by him and by Katzmann was that the five men who committed the South Braintree crime (years later identified by Madeiros as members of the Morelli gang of Providence) were Boda, Orciani and Coacci, and after their arrest, Sacco and Vanzetti thrown in to make up the exact total. Coacci was escaping with the swag. Federal agents had his trunk seized and brought back when he landed in Italy, but nothing of a suspicious nature was found in it. Orciani was found to have been at work on the day of the crime. Boda disappeared. All of which proved conclusively that Sacco and Vanzetti were the criminals.

No one who remembers the winter of 1919–20 can deny that even the mildest radicals, whether citizens or aliens, were looked upon every man jack of them as criminals and bombers by the police and good people generally all over the Union. In conversation the phrase “He ought to be in jail” followed after the word Red as naturally as a tail follows a dog. The news of the death of Salsedo had thrown the few remaining Italian radicals round Boston into a panic. That night Sacco and Vanzetti were trying to hide incriminating literature and at the same time to call a protest meeting in Brockton on May 9th. When they met Boda and Orciani outside the home of the garage-keeper Johnson in West Bridgewater that night of the fifth, they were already pretty much alarmed. When Johnson began to make excuses to them about Boda’s car, saying that they could not take it out as it did not have the proper license plate, they must have felt pretty uneasy. Actually Mrs. Johnson was telephoning the police. Boda’s car was a small Overland, that would have been hard to match with the Buick that was being looked for in connection with the South Braintree crime, but the $2,000 reward offered by the shoe factory was worth taking a chance for. Probably the very fact of four wops wanting to go riding in a car was suspicious to the Johnsons. Anyway the four men got nervous. Boda and Orciani rode off on Orciani’s motorcycle, and Sacco and Vanzetti got aboard a street car. Crossing into Brockton they were arrested. The police thought they were arresting Boda.

We’re going to be deported, thought Sacco and Vanzetti, and naturally did their best not to implicate their friends and comrades.

The fact that they were armed was a piece of horrible bad luck. If it hadn’t been for the revolvers and shotgun shells found on them they would probably have been released as was Orciani whom the police picked up a couple of days later. But why were they armed, everybody asks. Vanzetti had bought the gun to protect his earnings as a fishpeddler. It was a time of many holdups. Sacco was accustomed to carry a gun as night watchman at the Three K’s Factory. A great many people of all classes get a feeling of strength and manhood out of toting a gun. Put yourself in their place. Haven’t there been times when you who are reading this would have been pretty embarrassed to explain your actions if suddenly arrested and bullied and crossquestioned by a lot of bulls in a station house? Add to that the chance connection of revolvers, shells, the draft of an anarchist leaflet. Many a man has died in the Chair on flimsier evidence than that. That’s always the answer of the man in the street when you press him about this case. Many a good guy’s been electrocuted on less than that.

It’s time that you realized fully, you who are reading this, man or woman, laborer or whitecollar worker, that if Sacco and Vanzetti die in the Chair as the result of a frameup based on an unlucky accident, your chance of life will be that much slimmer, if you ever come to be arrested as a result of a similar unlucky chain of circumstances. Justice can’t be embalmed in the dome of a courthouse. It’s got to be worked for, fought for daily by those who want it for themselves and for their neighbors.

A great many men and women do realize it. That’s why Sacco and Vanzetti are alive today.

So it was that it was as a convicted highway robber that Vanzetti was tried for murder with Sacco. If it hadn’t been for that fact it would have been much harder to convict the two men at Dedham.

By one of those agreements of counsel that seem so ghastly to a layman, the defense contracted not to produce character witnesses for Vanzetti, if the prosecution abstained from bringing up the previous conviction. It was a skeleton in the closet, never mentioned, but on everyone’s mind all through the trial.