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.’”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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