The last witness of the week was Felice Guadagni, the comrade who
had been first to visit Sacco and Vanzetti at the Brockton police
station. He confirmed Sacco’s April 15 alibi, telling how the two of
them had met by chance on the steps of Boni’s Restaurant at 11:30
A.M. Sacco, he said, was wearing a derby and a dark suit. They
had gone in together and were later joined by Bosco and Williams.
Guadagni had come out of Boni’s with Sacco at 1:30. He had then gone
back to his office at the _Gazzetta del Massachusetts_ and Sacco had
gone uptown to the consulate. About three in the afternoon he had
seen Sacco again in Joe Giordano’s café. Guadagni recalled the date
of his meeting with Sacco as the fifteenth because on that day he had
been invited to a banquet given by the Franciscan Fathers of North
Bennett Street in honor of Mr. Williams, the _Transcript_ editor, who
had just been made a _Commandante_.
Four or five days after Sacco’s arrest Guadagni had gone to the
consulate with Rosina, taking along a photograph of Sacco. There
they had talked with the acting consul and the vice-consul and the
clerk Adrower, but by the archaic rule of law—so frustrating to
laymen—Guadagni was not allowed to repeat what had been said.
Under cross-examination he admitted that he had seen Sacco in Boston
on several other days, always wearing the derby and the dark suit.
He could not, however, recall any specific dates. When Sacco came
into Giordano’s Café, Guadagni was already there talking about the
banquet. He had not attended it, but since it was the only banquet to
which he had ever been invited, he could not help but remember it.
The invitation had come the week before—he could not fix the date.
Court adjourned just before one o’clock and the jurors were left
alone in the marble courthouse to face another Saturday afternoon and
Sunday. They were almost certain, however, that this would be the
last weekend they would be kept in Dedham.
Judge Thayer spent his weekends in Worcester. There, at the familiar
golf club, he could join a foursome and forget the incidents and
frustrations of the past week. In the clubhouse after the game, in
the protecting company of his friends, he found a cathartic relief in
saying just what he really thought about those Bolsheviki who were
trying to intimidate him. Nobody, he told his friend Loring Coes,
could intimidate Web Thayer. A bunch of parlor radicals were trying
to get those Italian bastards off and trying to bring pressure on
the bench. He would show them, he told Coes, his face darkening with
accumulated anger. He would see them hanged, and he would also like
to hang a few dozen of the radicals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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