FOOTNOTES:
[14] Katzmann’s successor. Katzmann was retained as special assistant in the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE CONFESSIONS
It is not unusual for a notable murder case to have several confessions as a by-product. Where these are false, they are either the notoriety-seeking of a psychopathic misfit or the effort of some criminal to obtain a pardon for a crime he has committed in order to stand trial for one he has not. In the latter case he can plan, once safely pardoned, to repudiate his confession.
Such was, no doubt, the motive of Augusto Pasquale, under life imprisonment in New York for kidnaping, when in May 1922 he confessed to being one of the South Braintree gunmen. According to his story he had met two strangers in a Bowery saloon who asked him if he wanted to pull a job with them in a factory in South Braintree. He agreed, and they went from New York to Boston by train to pick up a car. Pasquale did not know the make of car nor did he seem to be familiar with the geography of South Braintree. He said that he and the others held up an auto with the payroll in it. When the paymaster and guard drew their guns, they shot them, took over the auto, drove a quarter of a mile, then hopped a train to New York. His story was so obviously concocted that the police did not even pretend to take it seriously.[15]
The confession of Frank “the Winker” Silva to being a member of the gang that staged the Bridgewater holdup was a matter of more substance. Silva did not make his confession until Sacco and Vanzetti were dead—and then only after he was paid for it—but Moore had been aware of some of its details as early as 1922.
Jack Callahan, an ex-bank burglar turned journalist, who still kept his underworld contacts, was the go-between who persuaded Silva to sell his story to the Outlook and Independent, where it appeared in 1928.
Silva, at the time of the Bridgewater holdup, was thirty-five years old. He had come to Boston from Italy at the age of ten, and still spoke English with an accent, although his close-set face with its clipped mustache looked more American than Italian. Sensual, indolent, usually down on his luck, as readily a pimp as a mugger, Silva was the petty-criminal type not uncommon in the North End, where the brown, wrinkled-faced old women would draw their shawls tighter in contempt as he passed.
When the police seemed too active Silva would take a job, but never for long. In 1916, he told Callahan, he had worked briefly in the L. Q. White factory in Bridgewater, but soon returned to Hanover Street. His favorite hangout there was Jimmy “Big Chief” Mede’s shoeshine parlor and cigar stand, where a few of the boys were always talking about easy money, figuring things out. Jimmy was a dark-eyed, heavy-browed Sicilian who asked questions and let others do the answering.
According to Silva, he had told Jimmy it would be easy enough to go down to Bridgewater the day before Christmas and snatch the payroll. He figured it would amount to twenty or thirty thousand dollars.
Several times in the autumn of 1917, Silva said, he and Mede and Joe Sammarco, a nineteen-year-old Italian corner boy known as Joe Nap because he had come from Naples, went to Bridgewater to look over the factory, the bank, and the connecting streets. Then on November 14, 1917, Mede and some of his boys were caught after robbing the paymaster of the American Net & Twine Company in Cambridge, and the Big Chief found himself doing a seven-to-ten-year rap in Charlestown.
Silva, left to himself, joined the Army. After his discharge in 1919 he returned to the North End and ran into Joe Sammarco. They were both broke. Silva remembered the L. Q. White payroll, waiting there in Bridgewater like a Christmas turkey. The job would need two more to pull it off. Sammarco said he knew just the two. Next day he appeared with “Doggy” Bruno, a chunky fellow with a short mustache like Silva’s, and “Guinea” Oates, who owned a touring car.
Silva told Callahan that the four of them had driven to Bridgewater several times to check the roads. They had walked around the town, shot a little pool in the parlor under the post office, and taken a long look at the Bridgewater Trust Company, where the White truck picked up the payroll. Because Christmas would fall on Thursday, they knew the delivery would be made on Wednesday.
Monday of Christmas week, Silva told Callahan, Guinea had driven them to Needham and at a garage near the police station Silva asked a man about license plates. When the man walked away for a moment, he spotted an old car that had dealer’s plates tied on with string. He untied them, tucked them under his coat, and cleared out to meet the others. From Needham they drove to Bridgewater for another rehearsal.
On Tuesday they made their final dry run. Wednesday morning they arrived in Bridgewater at about half past six and parked on Hale Street, not far from a lunch stand. Silva said, “Boys, let’s go down and have something to eat because this is liable to be our last meal.”
He and Doggy finished eating ahead of the others and walked up to the square opposite the bank to watch for the truck. Suddenly Silva noticed that it had slipped in from the side street and was parked in front of the bank.
They returned to the car and Doggy got in, leaving Silva outside as look-out man. Guinea Oates was at the wheel. At Silva’s signal, he was to back the car into the street and block the truck.
Silva called out “Let’s go” and Guinea shoved the car into Broad Street while the other two piled out. What they had not counted on was a trolley car coming down the street right behind the truck. They shouted at the men in the truck, now almost on top of them, and Doggy leveled his shotgun, but, as Silva told it:
When we said, “stick ’em up,” instead of the driver sticking up his hands, and the rest of them they kept on going, and all of a sudden shots were fired from both sides. Most of us were behind some trees or posts, a few feet from Hale Street. I seen this man that was sitting on the side seat, I don’t know who it was, but it was a big man. He got up from his seat and grabbed the driver’s wheel and while he was grabbing the driver’s wheel, the street car comes down and cuts us off from seeing the truck. All of a sudden I heard a noise. We heard some glass breaking. We couldn’t see the payroll car any more. We all got on our car and we shot straight through Hale Street into Plymouth Street.... No cars followed us.
They stopped near a cemetery to change license plates, and Doggy threw the stolen ones into a pond. Back in the North End Silva and Bruno shaved off their mustaches. “I was broke and desperate,” Silva told Callahan. “There was some Jew from New York that was hanging around Boston and I got acquainted with him. He was way worst off than I was.” The man, a down-and-outer named Jacob Luban, was full of plausible talk about easy money in New York. Calling himself Paul Martini, Silva set out with him. His easy money turned out to be nothing more than working the combinations of post-office boxes and stealing letters that might contain money. In this paltry venture Silva and Luban were joined by another floater, Adolph Witner. Hanging around New York post-office lobbies, they were soon noticed and arrested. Witner turned state’s evidence. Luban and Silva received terms in the United States penitentiary in Atlanta.
Doggy Bruno and Guinea Oates vanished. Only Joe Sammarco stayed on in Boston. Three weeks after the Bridgewater failure a policeman was killed during a dance-hall brawl in City Square, Charlestown. Sammarco was convicted for this crime in 1920 and sent to Charlestown State Prison for life. There he found himself with Big Chief Mede.
In August, 1920, Vanzetti was taken to Charlestown. Mede, with an eye to parole, was conducting a weekly English class for those who did not know the language, and Vanzetti became one of his students. Mede never forgot him. Forty years later he was still scornful of the idea that anyone could ever have considered the bookish Vanzetti capable of committing a holdup.
By the end of 1921 Moore’s investigators had picked up rumors connecting Mede and Silva with the Bridgewater affair, and in January, February, and March, 1922, Moore visited Mede in Charlestown. The Big Chief would neither deny nor affirm anything, but intimated that if he was given help in getting a parole, plus certain other favors, he would disclose a lot. Moore wrote to Governor Channing Cox, explaining Mede’s situation and asking for assurance that no statement Mede made would hurt his chances for parole. Cox replied that inasmuch as Mede was not going to be paroled anyhow, he should feel perfectly free to tell what he knew. The Big Chief did not think much of the governor’s answer and refused to talk.
Mede’s counsel was James Vahey, the brother of Vanzetti’s Plymouth lawyer. As soon as Vahey heard that Moore had been seeing his client, he paid a visit to the Charlestown prison and asked Mede point-blank just what he had said to Moore. When Mede denied that he had told Moore anything, Vahey—according to Mede’s sworn statement in 1928—warned him: “Don’t you dare say anything in regard to the Sacco-Vanzetti case. You know, my brother defended Vanzetti, and you will only be putting my brother in Dutch.”
Mede agreed to say nothing, but shortly afterward he broke with Vahey and on receiving the guarantee of an unrevealed sum of money from Moore told a story of the Bridgewater holdup similar to that later told by Silva. Mede had got together with Sammarco and said the latter would corroborate him, but although Moore talked with Sammarco several times, he could get no admissions out of him.
Meanwhile, Adolph Witner, who had been let off with a token sentence for helping to convict Silva and Luban, found himself extradited to Boston on charges of forgery and mail robbery. Moore ran into him at police headquarters, overwhelmed by his new troubles. He told Moore that he could open up the Sacco-Vanzetti case if Moore, in turn, would help him. Somehow the adroit Moore arranged to get the charges against Witner dropped, and late in April the two men, accompanied by an ex-convict named John Jocomo, then working as an investigator for the Defense Committee, headed for Atlanta to interview Luban and Silva.
Luban, envious of Witner’s freedom, decided to turn a little state’s evidence on his own and proceeded to write a long, garbled account of these interviews to William J. Burns, the Director of the Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice. Burns sent an agent to Atlanta to interview Luban and Silva. Receiving a report of the interview, Lawrence Letherman of the Boston Bureau sent a copy to the attorney general of Massachusetts. A few days later one of the attorney general’s assistants, Albert Hurwitz, arrived in Atlanta to take affidavits from the two men.
Luban told Hurwitz that on April 18 he had been called to the warden’s office to find Silva and an outsider whom Silva introduced as John Jocomo already there. Jocomo said he had come down from Boston to investigate the Bridgewater holdup “committed by Sacco and Vanzetti.” Although he knew that Silva really had had nothing to do with it, Jocomo said he was in Atlanta for two reasons—first because he was being paid; second, to cover himself and his brother, who had deposited some of the money taken in the South Braintree holdup.
The next day Luban and Silva were brought to the office again; this time Moore was there with Jocomo, who asked if they would like to talk to Witner. Moore had Witner brought in. Witner confronted his two former pals as if he were doing them a favor.
During my conversation [Luban explained to Hurwitz] I was interrupted by Moore who said to me, “There is no use talking, Martini [Silva] don’t know the first thing about Bridgewater or about Braintree, but is willing to help along and take the blame providing Mr. Moore will keep the promise that he made him.” I forgot to state that when Mr. Moore came to Atlanta he told me he was in Washington, that he seen William J. Burns and Attorney General Dougherty, and that they told him they would be glad if this case would be disposed of in any way at all, as long as Sacco and Vanzetti go free. He also told me he had a conversation with Attorney General Allen of Massachusetts, a man I never heard of or never seen in my life before and that Mr. Allen told him that if he can find a way how to free Sacco and Vanzetti, “we don’t care whether legitimate or unlegitimate” that he, Mr. Allen, would help him in any shape or form.... He says ... Mr. Allen wants to dispose of this case in the worst way, and he don’t care how it is disposed of as long as these two men are free, because the Governor and everybody else is sick and tired of it.
The promises made to me were these, first that Mr. Moore will use his influence to get Martini and myself out of prison, and second that Witner would go to New York and confess to his part of the perjury which would show my innocence automatically. Third, that we would receive $5,000 apiece before Martini takes the stand, $5,000 apiece after he goes off the stand; fourth, that Martini will get a good lawyer who will instruct him while Martini is on the stand testifying, this lawyer will instruct him to refuse to answer questions on the grounds of incriminating and degrading himself, that will create an impression with the judge that he did not want to commit himself, but it is true that he is the one and not Sacco who committed the holdup in Bridgewater, and he believes on these grounds Sacco and Vanzetti will get a new trial. Later on Martini will be able to defend himself by telling the truth and showing that really while this murder and attempted murder was committed Martini was in New York.
When Hurwitz asked Luban what Moore wanted Martini-Silva to do, Luban replied: “He wanted Martini to confess that he together with another man named Joe Napp and Jas Meade committed the attempted robbery at Bridgewater. He said these two men were willing to take the blame for it, and was also willing to testify that Martini was along with them, providing Martini will consent to it, not otherwise.”
Witner, according to Luban, said that he was working as an investigator for Moore and being paid fifty dollars a week and expenses by the Amalgamated Garment Workers’ Union. He suggested that Silva also should admit that he and two other convicts now dead committed the Braintree murders. Later it would be easy to prove that he was in New York on both days.
He also stated they had two witnesses [Luban continued], one by the name of Louis Pelser has already been fixed up to change his testimony so it will be in favor of the defendants.
He said they had another witness by the name of Roy Gould who previously did not testify, but will testify now and will identify Martini, but should they want to prosecute Martini for murder Gould will retract his original testimony against Martini.
One of the man’s witnesses, a certain woman whose name I don’t remember, has already changed her testimony. From Mr. Moore’s statement to me I first understood she first testified in favor of the prosecution, and now she is ready to testify for the defense, that the prosecuting attorney had coached her and induced her when she identified Sacco, but she will switch over to Martini if necessary, because they look so much alike, and Witner told me in Jewish that it cost a good many thousand dollars to get the woman to change her testimony, and they are ready to spend a good many thousand more.
Luban gave a complicated account of Witner’s going to Moore’s office and seeing a picture he recognized as Silva’s only to have Moore tell him it was Sacco’s.
Then Moore thought for a minute that maybe Martini is the one who committed the crime in Bridgewater and Braintree and they mistook Sacco for Martini. Witner in his heart knew that Martini had nothing to do with it, because Martini was with Witner together in New York at the time these robberies and murders were committed.
Luban’s rambling affidavit was of course as suspect as his character. Sacco was never accused of participating in the Bridgewater attempt, although Luban seems to have got it into his head that he was the leader. Nor did Sacco in the least resemble Silva. Luban called Sacco and Vanzetti good union men, but the two had never belonged to a trade-union and as anarchists were opposed to them. Nor, of course, was there ever any indication that Massachusetts officials were interested in finding a way to free Sacco and Vanzetti.
Witner, safe behind the shield of language, undoubtedly told Luban some story about Silva in Yiddish, and it is apparent from Luban’s confused accounts of Pelser, Gould, and Lola Andrews that he had heard something about the witnesses. Moore made no further attempts to get in touch with Luban.
Silva, too, made an affidavit for Hurwitz in which he admitted he had known Jocomo for sixteen years and claimed that the latter’s brother Joe, who lived in Mattapan, “had come in possession of $12,000 of the money that was stolen at Braintree holdup, and an investigation was started to find from where he got that money.”
He stated that he told Moore he had nothing to do with either the Bridgewater or the Braintree holdups and knew nothing about them since on both dates he was living in a house belonging to Luban on West 46th Street in New York. It was on Luban’s advice that he had agreed to play along with Moore and pretend he had taken part in the Bridgewater business. Moore, Witner, and Jocomo had coached him on the dates of the holdups, and Moore had promised to show him maps of Bridgewater and Braintree.
Nothing more was to be heard from Silva until after Sacco and Vanzetti were dead. As soon as Mede was let out of Charlestown in 1923, Moore tried to persuade him to make a statement about the Bridgewater attempt. Mede, with the shadow of Charlestown still large behind him, refused, but agreed for a salary to go to New York and see what he could find out about the Braintree affair from the underworld there. A few weeks later Moore’s investigator Tommy Doyle had a talk with him in the Hotel McAlpin, and Mede agreed again that he had planned the Bridgewater job and that Sammarco and Silva had miscarried it.
Doyle made notes of this conversation. They remained among Moore’s papers until Thompson dug them out in the desperate spring days of 1927 and decided to ask Mede for an affidavit. Mede was then a boxing promoter in Massachusetts, doing a little bootlegging on the side. He still hesitated to say anything, for fear that his athletic license might be revoked, but finally agreed to tell what he knew to Governor Fuller if the governor would promise not to pass the information on to the State Police or take away his license. Six weeks before the executions the Big Chief, accompanied by Tommy Doyle, told the disbelieving governor his story of the Bridgewater holdup; of how he had planned it originally with Silva and later learned the outcome from Sammarco at State Prison. At the end of the interview Fuller called in Captain Blye of the State Police and told Mede to repeat his story. Mede refused.
As August arrived, with the execution date set for the tenth, a Hanover Street lawyer of clouded reputation, Joseph Santosuosso, urged Mede to make one more attempt to save the two men’s lives. Mede finally agreed to make a sworn statement about the Bridgewater affair to the State Police. With Santosuosso he went to Captain Blye’s office. Blye now refused to listen to him. And Mede’s earlier apprehensions turned out to be only too well justified, for his license was revoked soon after he talked with Fuller.
There were other echoes from Moore’s visit to Atlanta. On November 1, 1923, an envelope arrived in Boston addressed “The Sacco-Vanzetti Case.” It was delivered to the Boston Bar Association and turned over to Moore. Inside was a to-whom-it-may-concern letter from Emil Moller, a Dane awaiting deportation in a Washington, D.C., jail. “I have information about the Sacco-Vanzetti Case,” Moller wrote. Through his friendship with Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana, Moore managed to get Moller’s deportation postponed, and sent Carpenter, his investigator, to talk with him.
A petty criminal, Moller had made the tactical mistake of breaking into a house within the District of Columbia, thus making a minor crime a federal offense that sent him to the penitentiary in Atlanta. There he had shared a cell with one Joe Morelli, the leader of a Providence, Rhode Island, gang who was serving twelve years for robbing interstate shipments from freight cars. Moller had a typewriter in his cell and used to write letters and appeals for Morelli as well as for two other acquaintances, Luban and Silva.
Sometimes in the long evenings after the lights were out Morelli would tell Moller of the things he had done “that would make your hair stand on end.” Once, according to Moller, he boasted that his gang had pulled off the South Braintree robbery. Morelli told about it in detail: how the gang had started out before sunrise from a Providence saloon, how they had driven up Pearl Street in a stolen Buick, how afterward as they were changing cars in the woods they had almost been caught when the wheels of the second car got stuck in the mud. Looking for an alibi in case any of this ever came to light, Morelli asked Moller to swear that during April 1920 he had been living at the American Lodging House in East Side New York—a place run by Luban’s wife—and that on the night of the fifteenth he had been playing poker with Morelli, Silva, and Luban. Moller had pretended to go along.
Telling this story to Carpenter and later to Moore, Moller was the first to mention the name—Morelli—that would run like a dark thread through the fabric of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Moore considered that much of what Moller had to say was hearsay. Not for another two years would his story receive any corroboration, and by that time Moore would no longer be connected with the case, and Moller himself would have been deported.
On November 18, 1925, Edward Miller, a trusty in the Dedham jail, stopped at Sacco’s cell, handed him a magazine, and told him to look inside it. A few minutes later Miller passed Sacco’s cell again and found him leaning against the wall trembling, a slip of paper in his hands, his eyes full of tears. “What is this?” he asked, his voice barely under control.
“Can’t you read English?” Miller returned.
The note read:
I hear by confess to being in the south Braintree shoe company crime and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime.
Celestino Madeiros
The writer was a sallow, stoop-shouldered twenty-three-year-old Portuguese who had shot and killed the cashier of a Wrentham bank during a gang holdup in November 1924. He was being kept in the Dedham jail while his conviction for murder was appealed. Several times Madeiros had sidled up to Sacco in the washroom and said under his breath: “Nick, I know who did the South Braintree job.” Once he had sent Sacco a crude map of Oak Street in Randolph, with a house marked “Thomas” and the scrawled notation that Sacco should look up this Thomas.
Sacco had thrown the paper away, deciding that Madeiros was cracked or else another spy, like that Carbone they had put next to him four years ago. But this note in the magazine seemed to be another matter.
Sacco sent it to Thompson, who came at once to the jail to talk with Madeiros. The three men talked together in the reception room for an hour, Madeiros answering Thompson’s questions while the lawyer made notes on the back of an envelope. The Portuguese was quite willing to tell about what he claimed was his part in the South Braintree holdup, but he said he would not identify any of his companions. Sacco, sitting beside him, shaking with excitement, kept interjecting: “For Jesus’s sake, tell the truth!”
Madeiros’ story was that on April 15, 1920, he was picked up at 4 A.M. at Zack’s Hotel in Providence, Rhode Island, by four Italians who arrived in a five-passenger Hudson touring car. They drove to some woods near Oak Street in Randolph, Massachusetts, where they found another Italian waiting with a Buick. Changing cars, they drove to South Boston, where they stopped at a saloon in Andrews Square. Then, after returning to Providence, they headed for South Braintree, where they arrived about noon. They killed a few more hours in a speakeasy a few miles from the shoe factories and then, just before three, left for South Braintree.
During the holdup Madeiros said he sat in the back seat “scared to death” with a Colt .38, which he did not use, in his hand. The payroll money, he said, had been in a large black bag.
“These four men,” he told Thompson, “persuaded me to go with them two or three nights before when I was talking with them in a saloon in Providence. They talked like professionals. They said they had done lots of jobs of this kind. They had been engaged in robbing freight cars in Providence. Two were young men from twenty to twenty-five-years old, one was about forty, the other thirty-five. All wore caps. I was then eighteen years old. I do not remember whether they were shaved or not. Two of them did the shooting—the oldest one and another. They were left on the street. The arrangement was that they should meet me in a Providence saloon the next night to divide the money. I went there but they did not come.
“They had been stealing silk, shoes, cotton from freight cars and sending it to New York. Two of them lived on North Main Street, in lodging houses. I had known them three or four months. The old man was named Mike. Another was called Williams or Bill. I don’t remember what the others were called.”
Madeiros said that he knew their last names but he refused to give them. After Thompson had his notes typed up into an affidavit, Madeiros signed it without hesitation. A year and a half later he elaborated on this story when he was examined jointly by Thompson and an assistant district attorney, Dudley Ranney. In this dual examination Madeiros said that one of the men in the South Braintree murder car was not Italian but “Polish or Finland.” He still claimed that the payroll money had been in a black bag that had been tossed in the back of the car and a blanket thrown over it. As to how South Braintree had looked on that spring afternoon, he could not remember. He had been drinking and, huddled half-drunk in the back seat with shots echoing round him, he noticed no landmarks. However, he remembered that just before they got to the Stoughton turnpike they came to a fork in the road and stopped at a house where there was a woman in the yard. They asked her how to get on the Providence road. From the back seat Madeiros could not see her. At the Randolph Woods hideout they had changed back to the Hudson, and the Italian who had been waiting there had driven away alone in the Buick. They drove very fast in the Hudson through Randolph, where they were seen by a boy named Thomas who lived on Oak Street. Madeiros became acquainted with the boy four years later when he went to live on the same street. Thomas told him then that he had seen the South Braintree car go whizzing by.
There were parallels between the Wrentham and South Braintree holdups, as Thompson soon learned, that made it seem as if the Wrentham gang had used the earlier holdup as a model. Two stolen cars had again been used at Wrentham, a Buick and then a Hudson. The rear window of the getaway car had been removed and the bandits had carried a shotgun in the rear seat to discourage pursuit.
Madeiros was captured a few days after the Wrentham crime, and shortly afterward two of his associates were picked up—Jimmy Croft, usually known as Weeks, and Alfred Bedard, the driver of the car. The fourth bandit, Harry Goldenberg, got away.
Bedard, on arraignment, was represented by Katzmann—now in a law partnership with John Vahey—while Madeiros’ counsel was the same Francis Squires who had been involved with Angelina DeFalco in the bribery trial.
Katzmann went to District Attorney Winfield Wilbar, who had succeeded Harold Williams, to see if he could make a deal. Bedard had been waiting in the car when the holdup killing took place, and Katzmann argued that his client should be allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter. Wilbar refused. “Second degree murder or go to bat” was his ultimatum.
Bedard and Weeks pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received life sentences. Madeiros, who had done the actual shooting, always maintained that Detective Lieutenant Joseph Ferrari of the State Police had promised him a second-degree murder sentence if he confessed. Left alone to stand trial for his life, he felt double-crossed.
His trial began on May 11, 1925, before Judge Henry Lummus, a waddling three-hundred-pounder with a black Van Dyke beard. Scarcely more than a formality, it lasted only a few days. The car used in the holdup, a conspicuous blue Hudson speedster, was traced to Bedard in Providence. Madeiros himself had been picked up in Providence at Zack’s Hotel, where he was found in bed with two other Portuguese floaters, Mingo and Pacheco. Under his pillow was the gun he had used at Wrentham. The most that Squires could do for his doomed client was to question his sanity. It took the jury less than an hour to decide that Madeiros was sane and to bring in a verdict of guilty. There the case would have ended with a short walk to the electric chair except for a crotchet of Judge Lummus’. The bulky judge had long wondered why it was considered necessary at the outset of any criminal trial to instruct the jury that a defendant was presumed to be innocent. Deliberately he omitted the banal phrase, and because he did so Squires appealed the verdict. It was while this appeal was pending that Madeiros had written his note to Sacco.
The question was soon raised as to whether Madeiros had done this because, in his version, “I seen Sacco’s wife come up here with the kids and I felt sorry for the kids,” or whether he thought that the confession might be of help to him in his second trial. He already knew that the Defense Committee had spent a quarter of a million dollars defending Sacco and Vanzetti. According to Oliver Curtis, the deputy jail master, Miller, the trusty, had come to him one afternoon to ask if Madeiros might borrow a pamphlet from Sacco containing the committee’s financial report. Thirty or forty minutes later Miller returned it to Curtis with a scrawled note:
I hear by confess to being in the shoe company crime at south Braintree on April 15 1920 and that Sacco and Vanzetti was not there
Celestino F. Madeiros
Curtis kept the note but did nothing about it. After waiting three days Madeiros sent the second note to Sacco. The Portuguese did not deny he had read the financial report but claimed he had read it after he had written the two notes, not before.
A liar, thief, murderer, Madeiros was a man whose uncorroborated word would be worth nothing. His sister and friends testified that he had the mind of a child of ten, and like his parents was subject to epileptic fits. Even before he had quit school at age fifteen he had been arrested a dozen times. In Providence, Rhode Island, in January 1920, he emerged resplendent in the blue-gray uniform of a lieutenant in the American Rescue League and proceeded to solicit money. The League existed mostly in the imagination of one Arthur Tatro, who wore more elaborate insignia on his Salvation-Army style uniform and called himself captain. He and Madeiros bivouacked in the four-story, bathless, threadbare Zack’s Hotel—its ground floor conveniently a saloon—Tatro sharing a room with Madeiros’ sister Mary, who was given the rank of second lieutenant for her services, while Madeiros bedded in with a young red-headed girl, the sole private of their little army. For some months they drummed the streets in Fox Point—the Portuguese section of Providence—and in neighboring Fall River, Taunton, and New Bedford. On May 1 Tatro’s private army was outflanked by the police and arrested for fraud and impersonation. Madeiros was picked up at his rescue work in New Bedford’s Bristol House, a combination cabaret and brothel. While he was out on bail the Providence police caught him breaking into a shop on May 25.
In July, beginning his term in the House of Correction, he apparently had no money. Yet five months later he left Providence with twenty-eight hundred dollars of unknown origin in his pocket. Not until 1923 did he return. Then for a time he set himself up as a contractor and built several garages, none of which made him a profit. However, with a little hijacking on the side he managed to keep himself in funds. In March 1924, he went to work for Barney Monterios, a Cape Verde Island Brava, who ran the Bluebird Inn at Seekonk, about four miles from Providence.
Conveniently just over the Massachusetts line, this rural haven combined the features of a roadhouse, dance hall, and speakeasy, in which Providence gangsters could relax undisturbed by thoughts of the police. Upstairs there were always a few girls available. Barney ran the place with the help of a brass-blonde companion, Mae Boice, who was sometimes thought to be his wife.
Madeiros helped build a dining annex at the end of the dance floor, drove Mae around on errands, acted as bouncer in the evenings when the boys got a little too steamed, and spent much of his spare time upstairs with a new girl, Tessie, a plum-smooth little Italian. He had two revolvers with him, a .38 and a .45, and sometimes as he lay on the bed he used to scare Tessie by shooting the flies off the ceiling. Once when he was in the yard amusing himself by shooting at trees, he picked off Mae’s cat as it passed with its three kittens. Mae was furious, although she later forgave him and with time developed a certain affection for him.
One July evening, Bibber Barone, a trigger man associated with the Morelli gang of Providence, pulled up in front of the inn with a Cadillac full of his pals and announced loudly that he had come for Tessie. Madeiros went out on the porch with his revolver and Bibber stood on the grass, his hand in his pocket, staring at him. Mae Boice and Jimmy Weeks, who often used to drop in at the Bluebird, watched them through the open window. Weeks heard Madeiros tell Bibber “that he and his gang had double-crossed him once on the job, and that he might forgive them for that, but if they took the girl he would bump them all, and that it would be sure death.” Bibber wilted back to the Cadillac.
By autumn Madeiros had grown tired of Tessie’s olive plumpness and more attentive to the blonde Mae. Once he flashed a roll of thirty hundred-dollar bills in Mae’s face and tried to persuade her to run off with him. This was too much for Barney, who fired his carpenter-bouncer at the point of a revolver. Some time after Madeiros had left the inn he drove back with Weeks and picked a gunfight with Barney in the front yard. Madeiros hit nothing except the house, but as he and Weeks drove off Barney managed to shoot out the taillight of their car.
Although the Madeiros confession was signed and ready in November 1925, Thompson did not make it public while his death-sentence appeal was pending, since both he and the district attorney felt that if it became known that Madeiros had admitted to a second murder the fact would damage him in any new trial. Then, too, Thompson was optimistic about the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s pending decision on the defense’s appeal from Judge Thayer’s denial of the supplementary motions—he had argued the appeal before Chief Justice Arthur Rugg in the Pemberton Square Court House through three bleak January days. Four months later, on May 12, 1926, the court ruled against the defense on all points.
Madeiros had better, if brief, luck. His conviction was reversed by the Supreme Court in March 1926, thus demonstrating to Judge Lummus and other whimsically inclined judges that the formula must not be tampered with. Madeiros went on trial again in May. During most of the proceedings he slumped in his chair with his feet on the rail and his eyes shut as if he were asleep. The jury took less than two hours to find him guilty.
On the second day of the Madeiros trial, Thompson drove down to Oak Street in Randolph to locate the house Madeiros had marked on his crude map and see if there was any trace of the boy called Thomas. He found the house more easily than he had expected. It was occupied by a Thomas Driver, who regretfully admitted knowing both Weeks and Madeiros. Weeks, in fact, had been arrested in the house, and the publicity that followed had caused the Drivers much humiliation.
For six months before the Wrentham holdup, Weeks with his wife and children had lived in a shack on Cedar Street a half-mile down the road. A friendly neighbor, he used to run small errands for the Drivers in his Ford, often gave a lift to young Tom, then in high school, and even promised to teach the boy how to drive.
Driver scarcely knew Madeiros in the brief time that the latter lived with Weeks, but shortly before their arrest he had begun to wonder if the pair might not be bootleggers. He could not say whether his son had seen the holdup car on the day of the South Braintree murders.
The boy himself was away at sea, working for the United Fruit Company. Thompson saw him later when he returned from his voyage. Young Driver told him that he had not personally seen the car go past but that his mother had, and that after she had read about the crime in the paper she thought the men must have been the South Braintree bandits.[16]
Thompson, faced with increasing demands on his time, found the added complications of the Madeiros confession too much for him. He needed an energetic young lawyer to devote all his time to investigating Madeiros’ story. In search of one he turned to Dean Roscoe Pound of the Harvard Law School. Pound mentioned Herbert Ehrmann, then in his thirties, a lawyer who had come to Boston from Louisville, Kentucky, via Harvard College and the Law School. Four years before, Pound and Felix Frankfurter had edited a survey, Criminal Justice in Cleveland, and Ehrmann had contributed a chapter on the city’s courts. It seemed to Pound that Ehrmann, with his Cleveland experience in investigating civic scandals, would be just the man to track down the intricacies of Madeiros and the Providence gang.
At the outset Ehrmann did not have the conviction he came to share later so burningly with Thompson that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. When, on May 22, 1926, two days after Madeiros had been found guilty for the second time, he set out for Seekonk and Providence, he did not expect much.
The Bluebird Inn, on the shabby outskirts of Seekonk, had been closed by the police. It looked a traditional New England farmhouse gone to seed. A few chickens were wandering about the dusty front yard, and at the side an open kitchen door sagged on its hinges. Going up to the door, Ehrmann found a wrinkled Brava woman in a red bandana sitting just inside, plucking a fowl. She said she was Barney Monterios’ mother. When Ehrmann asked about her son, she slipped into the next room and returned with Mae Boice, who told him curtly that her husband was not at home. Ehrmann got nowhere with her until he mentioned that he had just talked with Madeiros. At the name the hard face beneath the brass hair softened and the voice was full of concern as she asked about the surly Portuguese. Did Ehrmann think it fair to execute a man who was not really sane? As she talked she led him out of the kitchen, across the dance floor, and past the piano to the dining alcove. He told her of Madeiros’ confession. At first she said it could not be true because on April 15, 1920, he had been in Mexico, but after thinking it over she agreed that he had not left New England until the following January. Mae remembered that he had said he had twenty-eight hundred dollars with him. Ehrmann knew that when Madeiros was arrested in June 1920 he had no money at all. Yet six months later and just out of the house of correction he had acquired a sum, it struck Ehrmann at once, equal to just about a fifth of the South Braintree payroll. That was all the Boston lawyer found out at the Bluebird Inn. Nevertheless, he felt he was on the track of something tangible.
Turning south from the inn, he drove to the dingy Providence police headquarters on Fountain Street. What he now needed to know was whether there had been, as Madeiros said, a local gang of Italians engaged in robbing freight cars.
Ehrmann put his questions to Chief Inspector Henry Connors. The answers were more of a corroboration than he would have dared hope. Yes, there had been a gang in Providence robbing freight cars who had finally been arrested on October 18, 1919. They were American-born Italians, known as the Morell or Morelli gang from the five brothers who formed its nucleus. Joe, Fred, and Pasquale Morelli had been tried in May 1920, but during April they had been out on bail. Connors had no tangible reason for suspecting that the Morellis had been in on the South Braintree holdup, but he suggested that Ehrmann see Captain Ralph Pieraccini of the New Bedford police, who might know something of the doings of Frank and Mike Morelli in that city, and John Richards, who had been a United States marshal at the time the Morellis went on trial.
On the way back to Boston Ehrmann reflected on the South Braintree robbery. It was apparent to him that someone must have scouted the factories in advance and learned all about the day and time of the payroll deliveries.[17] If he could now find some connection between the Morellis and South Braintree, that would show too much coincidence for Madeiros to have invented his story.
Three days later, Ehrmann drove the fifty miles down to Providence again with his wife Sarah. While he interviewed the Morellis’ former defense lawyer, Daniel Geary, she spent the afternoon looking up the indictments of the Morellis in the clerk’s office of the United States District Court. Geary reminded Ehrmann that he could not ethically disclose confidential communications from his clients, nor would he in any way implicate the Morellis in the South Braintree murders, but he would be glad to help in collecting any information that had been made public during their trial.
The Morellis had been systematic in their freight-yard robberies, confining their thefts to shoes and textiles which they disposed of through fences in New York. Ehrmann wanted to know how the gang received information on the shipments of merchandise. Geary thought that they sent spotters to adjacent industrial towns to watch shipments being loaded and get the numbers of the cars. Joe Morelli had taken a railroad detective, Robert Karnes, who had been gathering evidence against the gang, to various towns in Massachusetts and shown him where the shipments were spotted. Probably this was a maneuver of Joe’s to divert suspicion from himself, for the individualistic Joe did not follow the gangster’s code of loyalty.
Ehrmann asked whether Karnes had mentioned any specific places, and Geary recalled his having said something about Rice & Hutchins. The name had no particular significance for him until Ehrmann exclaimed: “That’s in South Braintree where the murders occurred.”
Geary whistled. “That brings it home, doesn’t it!” he said.
Geary could not find the portion of the trial record containing the detective’s testimony—although the court stenographer remembered the reference—and later when he signed an affidavit he referred less specifically to “Taunton, Attleboro and other places in Massachusetts.” In the battle of affidavits that followed, Assistant District Attorney Ranney got Karnes to deny that he had ever gone or said he had gone with Joe Morelli to South Braintree. He did not deny, however, having gone with Joe to towns in that general vicinity.
When, after the interview with Geary, Ehrmann met his wife in the lobby of the Providence-Biltmore he found her as full of information and as excited about it as he was about what he had discovered. She had learned in the clerks’ office that the first four counts of the Morelli indictment covered the theft of 611 pairs of ladies’ shoes from Rice & Hutchins, while the eighth count was for 78 pairs of men’s shoes from Slater & Morrill. For Ehrmann that was proof enough. There must have been a spotter for the Morellis in South Braintree who had studied the two factories and noted when the payroll arrived and how it was delivered. He was certain that when he told this to his Harvard classmate, Dudley Ranney, the district attorney’s office would want to investigate the whole matter of the Morellis and probably arrange a new trial. But when Ehrmann telephoned the next day, Ranney was not at all interested in the discovery and his voice had an edge to it as he told Ehrmann so.[18]
While Ehrmann was in Providence on Tuesday, May 25, Thompson was interviewing Jimmy Weeks in Charlestown. He had talked with him five days before, but Weeks had then said no more than that Madeiros’ confession was true. Thompson asked Deputy Warden Hoggsett to try to persuade him to make a statement, and several days later he learned that Weeks was willing to talk.
Weeks, a deceptively mild-mannered man, gave Thompson much the same information about the Morellis that Ehrmann was to bring back from Providence. He had been familiar with that large and notorious family when the brothers were living near Eagle Park, Providence. Once he had helped Joe steal a load of whisky out of a warehouse on Smith Hill, but Joe had claimed that the whisky was vinegar and refused to pay him off. It was true, Weeks said, that the Morellis worked on tips. They always had plenty of money and they liked to flash it at the races and at ball games.
Weeks said he had known Madeiros for six years. A short while before the Wrentham holdup, the two of them had talked over their plans in a barroom in Andrews Square, South Boston, Madeiros remarking that it was strange he should be in the very same bar he had been in four years before on the way to South Braintree. The men concerned in that job, whom Madeiros in his first confession had called Mike and Bill, he had called by their real names in talking to Weeks. They were, according to Weeks, the Morellis of Providence. Madeiros had often talked about the South Braintree crime. The four who had been with him there were Joe, Mike, Bill, and Butsy Morelli.
In the Wrentham job Madeiros had used a Hudson as a getaway car. He told Weeks he had enough of Buicks after South Braintree, where they had used a Buick and switched to a Hudson afterward. Joe Morelli, he said, had double-crossed him on his cut of the payroll.
As soon as Weeks had signed the statement, Thompson drove to the Dedham jail to see Madeiros. Sheriff Capen telephoned Assistant District Attorney William Kelley to ask permission for the interview. Then Thompson himself took the telephone and explained to Kelley that he hoped to clear up the Sacco-Vanzetti case in a few days and that he wanted to question Madeiros about the confession that Weeks had just made to the South Braintree holdup.
Kelley gave his permission, then left at once for Charlestown with State Detective Michael Fleming, who knew Weeks, and Lieutenant Henry Plett of the State Police to act as a stenographer. They met Weeks in the rotunda and moved to a small side room where they sat around a table.
“Jimmy, did you make a full confession in regard to the holdup in South Braintree?” Fleming asked him with professional sternness.
“Jesus, no,” Weeks answered fearfully. “I didn’t make any confession like that.”
Fleming said he heard otherwise. “Well, I did not!” the other insisted. The detective warned him that he would be very foolish to try to help someone else out of a scrape by making statements like that. Kelley then asked Weeks what he had told Thompson.
Weeks said that Madeiros had told him in 1924 “that Sacco was not in the stick-up at South Braintree.” Madeiros admitted that he himself had been in on the South Braintree job but never went into details or said how much of the money he received.
Fleming at this point turned paternally reproachful: “Now all the time we used to ride up to see you here you told us nothing about this. If a man is innocent I want to get him out of it. Joe and I are the first fellows you should have told. You don’t know whether you believe Madeiros?”
Weeks did not know. He had seen Bibber Barone at the Bluebird Inn, he said, and he knew Frank Morelli, and he remembered Joe Morelli’s name as well as the others in his gang: “Joe, Butsy, Patsy and a fellow called Gyp the Blood.”
With further questioning Weeks grew confused, talking in the same sentence about the shooting in South Braintree and the gunfight with Barney Monterios at the Bluebird Inn, speaking also of an unidentified holdup where Madeiros had been double-crossed and that “he told me many times that it was the one that Sacco was in on.”
Kelley left Weeks to his confusion, warning him he was at liberty to talk all he wanted but if “anyone comes here to see you and wants information, you have to look out for yourself. If they write out what you say and want you to sign papers, you yourself have to decide what you want to do.”
With the salvo of Weeks’ counterconfession, accompanied by a triple volley of sworn statements from Kelley, Fleming, and Plett, there began the battle of the affidavits. Relations between Assistant District Attorney Ranney—now in charge of the post-trial developments in the Sacco-Vanzetti case—and the defense lawyers remained alertly decorous. Any asperity was after all tempered by the fact that they were all Harvard men as well as lawyers in the same city.
As soon as Ehrmann or Thompson produced an affidavit, Ranney felt obligated to come up with a counteraffidavit. Thompson suggested to Attorney General Jay Benton that all important witnesses connected with Madeiros should be interviewed jointly by representatives of the defense and the Commonwealth in order that the case “not degenerate into a contest of affidavits in which each party’s trying to offset the affidavits of the other party, or to contradict affidavits already obtained.” District Attorney Wilbar would not agree to any such combined operation, and the battle was on. During June and July eighty-seven affidavits were filed—in addition to forty-six miscellaneous statements, depositions, and letters—the engagement reaching the ultimate point where affidavits were being filed about affidavits.
During the afternoon of May 25 Thompson returned to Weeks with a typewritten affidavit based on the notes he had made of their morning conversation. Weeks signed it without saying anything of the assistant district attorney’s noontime visit. The next day Thompson assembled the affidavits he and Ehrmann had ready and filed a motion with the clerk at Dedham for a new trial based on Madeiros’ statement. Not until two days later did he learn of Weeks’ maunderings. He went at once to Charlestown.
Weeks, shuffling into the rotunda in his prison denims, quivered when he saw Thompson’s set face. Thompson asked about his conversation with Fleming and Kelley. Weeks said that they threatened him about what might happen to him if he signed an affidavit for Thompson. Kelley had taken out a package of Camels and given him one, asking him if anything had been offered him to make a statement in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Weeks told Thompson he had replied, “No, Mr. Kelley, you have just offered me this cigarette, and not so much as this cigarette had been offered to me by anyone concerned in the Sacco-Vanzetti case.”[19]
He had admitted to Kelley that Madeiros told him and a since-murdered gangster named Steve Benkosky about taking part in the South Braintree holdup. For Thompson he now added several new details. Joe Morelli before his arrest had owned a Cole touring car and had given him rides in it several times. There was a second Mike, called Mike the Rug, in the Morelli gang; his real name was Cameron O’Connor. Weeks knew him as well as he knew Gyp the Blood, Fred Morelli, and Bibber Barone. They would sometimes come to the Bluebird Inn in an open Cadillac. Weeks claimed that some of his conversation with Kelley and Fleming had not been taken down by the stenographer. Both men had warned him about talking too much if he ever hoped to have his sentence commuted, adding that Madeiros was only eighteen at the time of the South Braintree affair and they knew he had nothing to do with it.
When Assistant District Attorney Ranney read the copy of the Madeiros confession that Thompson sent him, he arranged to have the Portuguese examined as to his sanity. Madeiros, sullen and challenging, stuck to his statement about having taken part in the South Braintree crime. He had admitted being in on it “because it was true,” although he had “done no shooting.” Beyond this he would say little. Whatever the doctors who examined him may have thought of his story, they at least concluded that he was sane.
While the battle of affidavits grew warmer in Boston, Ehrmann was making daily shuttle runs across the placid countryside to Providence and New Bedford. He had become convinced that the Morelli gang alone was at the bottom of the South Braintree crime, and each trip he made seemed to him to make this more certain.
The same day that Thompson was having his second session with Jimmy Weeks, Ehrmann questioned the New Bedford police captain, Ralph Pieraccini. The captain listened quietly to the lawyer’s request for information about Mike Morelli, but came to life when Madeiros’ confession was mentioned. “We’d better have Jake in,” he said.
Jake turned out to be Sergeant Ellsworth Jacobs, who in 1920 had been a department inspector. When he heard Ehrmann’s request he slipped out and came back with his 1920 notebook which he opened to the entry: “R.I. 154E, Buick touring car, Mike Morell.” This, he explained, meant that a few day before April 15, 1920, he had seen Morelli driving what looked to be a new Buick touring car. Knowing Mike, he suspected the car was stolen and wrote down the license number. On the afternoon of April 15 he caught a glimpse of the same car sometime between five and five-thirty. The license plate was the same, R.I. 154E.
On the afternoon of April 12 he saw a Cole Eight touring car with the license plate R.I. 154E parked in front of Joe Fiore’s restaurant at the comer of Kempton and Purchase streets. “The whole thing looked fishy,” Jacobs told Ehrmann, “so I went into the restaurant to inquire, although I was not on duty at the time. At a table inside I saw four men who looked like Italians, one of whom was Frank Morell. The men at the table were extremely nervous when they saw me come in. I can’t say just what it was, but they acted apprehensive of something. One of the Italians whom I remember distinctly was a short heavy-set man with a wide, square face, high cheekbones, smooth shaven and dark brown hair. I can never forget that man’s face. As I approached the group, this man made a movement with his hand towards his pocket and I thought he was going to draw a gun. As I was unarmed at the time I was badly scared, but tried not to show it. Fortunately, Frank spoke up and relieved the situation somewhat.
“‘What’s the matter, Jake?’ he said quickly. ‘What do you want with me? Why are you picking on me all the time?’
“‘Look here, Frank,’ I said, ‘there’s a Cole car downstairs with a number-plate that I’ve seen on your Buick car that Mike’s been driving. How did that happen?’” At that the bunch eased up somewhat.
“‘Oh,’ said Frank, ‘that’s a dealer’s plate. You see, I’m in the automobile business and we just transfer plates from one car to another.’
“At that time I had no way of contradicting Frank, so I left the restaurant and talked the matter over later with Ralph Pieraccini. At the time of the South Braintree murders and payroll robbery he and I had suspected the Morells, especially on account of Mike and the Buick car so that the actions of that bunch at Fiore’s made us more suspicious. Shortly after that, however, Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested and as I had no definite evidence, I dropped the matter. I never saw Frank again since approximately that time, but Mike hung around New Bedford for possibly a year afterwards.”
Ehrmann fitted another piece to his puzzle when he visited John Richards, now adjutant general of Rhode Island. Richards, a big-boned solid man with slate-colored eyes and a yellow mustache, had been in his youth a soldier of fortune, and even as a middle-aged United States marshal he had not lost his taste for excitement. Several times he had shot it out with the Morelli gang in the shadows of the Providence freight yards.
Listening to Ehrmann, Richards became instantly sympathetic to this young, dark-eyed lawyer, so different from him in temperament and physique and racial background. Ehrmann showed him Weeks’ affidavit and Richards agreed that the composition of the gang was as Weeks had made out: Joe, the oldest and the leader; Pasquale or Patsy; Frank; Fred or Butsy; Bibber Barone; Gyp the Blood. They had owned a Cole touring car and also a Reo truck. In a later affidavit Richards admitted that, like Weeks, he had confused Fred Morelli with Frank and that it was the latter who had been nicknamed Butsy. Richards recalled two other gang members, Paulo Rosso and Tony Mancini. There had also been a pair of young hijackers who were handy with cars: a light-complexioned man named Raymond McDevitt and another known as Steve the Pole. Both had since been killed in gunfights.
From the stories of Weeks and Sergeant Jacobs and Richards, and from the various court, police, and jail records, from his pokings about in Providence and New Bedford, Ehrmann now began to assemble a hypothetical cast of characters for the South Braintree affair. Madeiros had admitted to Ranney that he had shaped his story to Thompson to shield a gang. For Ehrmann, Madeiros’ Mike was an obvious transplant. The leader, “the oldest of the Italians,” must, in Ehrmann’s opinion, have been Joe, a gangster capable of just such careful planning as had gone into the South Braintree holdup. Butsy, the most dangerous of the brothers, was another who seemed to qualify for South Braintree. When Gyp the Blood showed signs of informing, Butsy in open court had threatened to kill him. The milder-mannered Mike was, as Sergeant Jacobs had noted, merely a car thief to whom would probably have fallen the job of guarding the second car in the woods. Madeiros crouched in the rear fitted the assistant district attorney’s trial reference to the “man we cannot describe in the back seat.” As for the gunman called Bill who, Madeiros said, had got out of the car with the leader to do the actual shooting, Ehrmann thought at first he might have been Bibber Barone, until it turned out that Bibber had provided himself with the perfect alibi of being already in jail. Gyp the Blood, though out of jail, was not the shooting type. Richards had mentioned two other members of the gang, Paulo Rosso and Tony Mancini, but soon advised Ehrmann later to eliminate Rosso. That left Mancini, and the more Ehrmann learned about him the more he seemed to fill the bill.
Mancini, besides being Joe Morelli’s close friend, was a nerveless killer. In February 1921, in New York City, he had shot down Alberto Alterio on Broome Street, almost across the street from police headquarters. When the police captured him they found in his pocket a Star 7.65-millimeter automatic—a type of gun that takes American 32-caliber cartridges. James Burns, Moore’s ballistics expert, had testified at Dedham that five of the South Braintree bullets could have been fired from a Steyr, and one of the few things that Dr. Hamilton had been able to demonstrate to Van Amburgh’s satisfaction was that three of the shells Bostock had picked up from the gravel bore the marks of a foreign-make ejector claw. A Steyr was an Austrian gun, a Star Spanish, but both were of the same caliber and both were common in the United States in 1920.[20]
Ehrmann at once sensed the possibility that Mancini’s gun might have been used at South Braintree. If Mancini himself could be set down tentatively as Berardelli’s killer, that left only the driver to be accounted for—the man who (even Katzmann finally admitted) had been pale and fair-haired.
Both McDevitt and Benkosky, the dead hijackers, answered the description, but Ehrmann found no witnesses who would identify McDevitt’s picture. However, when he confronted the two Slater & Morrill workers, Minnie Kennedy and Louise Hayes, with a rogues’-gallery photograph of Benkosky, Minnie felt it “looked more like the driver of the car than any photograph I have ever seen,” and Louise found that “the picture very much resembles him.”
It seemed to Ehrmann that an encompassing pattern was beginning to emerge. Still, he realized, his hypothesis could be destroyed by a single granite fact. Joe Morelli could provide the key piece—if he could be induced to tell the truth.
Truth and Joe Morelli, however, were scarcely on intimate terms. Joe’s one steadfast quality was an exclusive loyalty to himself. At the Providence trial he had been quite willing to let his brothers take the rap for him. In fact, the day after he and his gang had been robbing freight cars he had tipped off Marshal Richards, with the idea of diverting suspicion from himself, that the same thieves would be at it the following night. When the Morellis, minus Joe, returned to the yard that evening they walked into a trap.
Joe liked to maintain whimsically that he was in the piano business. He lived with Pauline Gray, who appeared in the police court records as “a common night walker,” and used his house as a depot in supplying girls for out-of-town roadhouses and as a distribution center for drugs and counterfeit money. A few months before his arrest he had persuaded his invalid widowed mother to deed over her house to him, then had her confined as a pauper in the state almshouse. Even gangsters tended to disapprove of Joe’s morals. He liked to drop the names of big New York gangsters and boast that he had been mixed up in such headline events as the 1912 Herman Rosenthal murder. Years later he was to come forward to offer his services for making contact with the kidnapers of the Lindbergh baby.
This was the man from whom the young Boston lawyer hoped to extract the truth about the South Braintree crime when, on June 1, 1926, he and Richards went to the federal penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.[21] What struck Ehrmann at once, what would have struck anyone who saw both men, was Joe Morelli’s singular resemblance to Sacco—the identical cheekbones, thin hairline, jutting chin, heavy eyebrows, and nose almost the same except that Joe’s had a Cyrano tip.
To all explanatory statements and questions Joe replied with denials. He had never heard of South Braintree or Rice & Hutchins or Slater & Morrill. He had never known Madeiros or any other Portuguese. Weeks’ name meant nothing to him. As for Mancini, which Mancini did they mean? There were a lot of Mancinis. When Richards countered with references to the Morellis’ activities in Providence, Joe cut him off with the whine: “You are trying to spoil my record with my warden, my good warden!” As for Sacco and Vanzetti, Joe had read something about their case in the paper. He repeated the name Sacco several times, then, as if he were thinking aloud, said “See Mancini about that.” Then he wound up in a flurry of indignation. If the Massachusetts people thought he committed the South Braintree crime, let them prove the charges against him and send him to the electric chair!
On returning to Boston, Ehrmann provided himself with a rogues’-gallery photograph of Joe Morelli and tried it on several of the witnesses. Some of the Italian laborers who had been digging in the excavation exclaimed “Sacco!” when they saw the likeness. Mary Splaine also thought it was Sacco. Lewis Wade, after reluctantly examining it, admitted that it was “strikingly like” the man he had seen. Frank Burke took one look, slapped the face of the photograph, and exclaimed: “That’s the fellow who snapped his pistol at me and yelled ‘Get out of the way, you son of a bitch!’”
Each step Ehrmann took reinforced his feeling that he was on the right path. Joe Morelli’s giveaway remark, “See Mancini,” sent Ehrmann to the penitentiary at Auburn, New York, where Mancini was serving his life sentence. Mancini had none of Morelli’s Uriah Heep quality. He seemed much more the big-time gangster: a square-set impervious face, an on-and-off smile, glazed gray eyes that looked through rather than at anyone. Ehrmann told him that Joe Morelli had said to see him about Sacco and Vanzetti. “He must have been eating something,” was Mancini’s noncommittal reply. Ehrmann pointed out that Joe was a coward at heart who might be able to plan a big job but would need someone like Mancini along to give him courage.
At this point [Ehrmann wrote later], Mancini gave his estimate of Joe Morelli, deliberately, his gaze turned toward the window and the scene beyond.
“Unless you know that a man has killed, you can’t judge what he is capable of doing.” There was a long pause. “Take me for instance. If I hadn’t been caught, I would not be known as a murderer. At that, they gave me too stiff a sentence. The cops disappointed me, for I relieved them of a man who was worse than I am. The man I killed had killed others.” Mancini paused, then added, “It was his life or mine.”
Then very quietly, almost gently, he condemned people who tell on others. “I have first-hand knowledge of Joe’s trial in Providence. Gyp and Joe got nothing by blaming each other. They’d have been better off, or just as well off if they hadn’t given each other up. But if you’re going to tell, why not tell the whole truth? Why didn’t Madeiros tell a whole-story instead of a half-story? He might as well come clean if he started. If Madeiros wanted to tell a half-truth he might have named as his confederates men who had died and then let the State believe it or not.”
Mancini claimed not to have heard of Benkosky or Weeks. He studied the photographs of Sacco and Vanzetti that Ehrmann handed him, then pointed to Vanzetti’s and announced: “They’re not stick-up men. That’s not a stick-up man. Of course, you can’t judge only by a man’s appearance—you can’t be always right on that. But the type of Sacco and Vanzetti—they’re radicals, not stick-up men.” He could see no resemblance, though, between Joe Morelli and Sacco. As the interview came to an end he shook hands, saying he was sorry he could not be more helpful. “I hope they won’t execute Sacco and Vanzetti,” he concluded. “Killing them won’t bring the dead to life.”
Whether Mancini had anything more to tell remained his own secret. There was, however, something else that might tell Ehrmann much—the 7.65-millimeter gun Mancini had used to kill Alterio. Tests could soon show if it had fired the five unclassified South Braintree bullets. Ehrmann went straight to New York City to his old friends Henry Epstein, the assistant attorney general. Epstein was able to locate the report on the gun in the files without any trouble. But the weapon itself, like a tantalizing mirage, had vanished.
Everywhere that Ehrmann went, the Commonwealth investigators went too. Lieutenant Ferrari was dispatched to Leavenworth to see Joe Morelli. Joe swore that he had never seen Jimmy Weeks in his life and accused Ehrmann of trying to bully him into signing a confession for the South Braintree crime. Wilbar and Ranney followed up in Providence with an interrogation of the Morelli trio of Patsy, Fred, and Butsy. Fred had an alibi similar to Bibber Barone’s—he had been in jail on April 15, 1920—and tried to maintain that Joe had shared the same accommodations, although Joe was actually out on bail. The other two swore that they had been living in quiet innocence in Providence all that April, that they had never known either Weeks or Madeiros, and that they had never been to the Bluebird Inn. After their remarks had been taken down and transcribed the three were seized with scruples and declined to sign on the grounds that they feared for their personal safety.
The clerk’s office at Dedham became inundated with affidavits and counteraffidavits from Georgia, Kansas, New York, New Bedford, Providence, Fall River, Charlestown; from police officials, wardens, jailbirds, streetwalkers, and citizens interested, disinterested, and uninterested.
Manuel Pacheco, one of the floaters found in bed with Madeiros at his arrest, signed an affidavit in the Charlestown prison, where he was serving eight to ten years for a holdup, stating that Madeiros and he had known each other from 1919 to 1921 and that Madeiros had once told him he was “working with a good mob in Providence,” which to Pacheco meant the Morellis.
Even Barney Monterios managed to forget his old grudge long enough to visit Madeiros at Dedham, bringing Mae with him. Madeiros again complained to them that he had been double-crossed on the South Braintree job, and insisted that Sacco and Vanzetti had had nothing to do with it. As Mae later related in an affidavit, she asked Madeiros:
“Is it really true, the statement you made about the South Braintree murders, and were you really in it?” and he said, “Yes, it is the truth, I was in it.” He didn’t give me any more particulars. He said that he would like to save Sacco and Vanzetti because he knew they were perfectly innocent, and he felt sorry for Sacco because he had seen his wife and two children go by, but he said he hated to bring others into it where there were more than two; and he said “If I cannot save Sacco and Vanzetti by my own confession, why should I bring four or five others into it?” I said “It is an awful thing to see two innocent men lose their lives and the guilty escape.” He said, “Yes I know it.”
Each side in this battle of paper used its affidavits like pieces on a chessboard. On the whole, Thompson played a more skillful game. But it was a game, as he realized, in which a checkmate was not possible. Finally a measure of sense was brought into the proceedings when Ranney proposed that they take a joint deposition from Madeiros.
On June 28 Thompson, Ehrmann, Ranney, and Ferrari and Fleming of the state police spent the day at Dedham interviewing the convicted Portuguese. Madeiros was brought to the sheriff’s office in his blue prison denims, his rheumy eyes full of challenge.
As he had before, but in more detail, he told of taking part in the South Braintree holdup. He still declined to give the real names of the men who had been in the car with him, but he admitted that he had known them in Providence and said they had been in a lot of jobs there robbing freight cars. When Thompson showed him photographs of Joe, Patsy, and Fred Morelli he refused “for private reasons” to say whether he recognized them. He also refused to identify Bibber Barone and Jimmy Weeks, although finally he picked out the latter, saying “It doesn’t make much difference. It is Weeks, I guess.”
He stuck to his story that the payroll money had been in a black bag. There should, he thought, have been over four thousand dollars apiece in the division of the payroll, but he would not say directly whether he had considered himself double-crossed. Indirectly, he agreed that he did not feel he had been used right. He admitted that he had known Steve the Pole, but would not say whether he had ever mentioned the South Braintree holdup to him. He also admitted that he had confronted Bibber Barone in the yard of the Bluebird Inn when they quarreled about Tessie. However, he refused to tell where he had met Bibber or if Bibber had ever double-crossed him.
Ranney, cross-examining, asked Madeiros if it was true, as his mother had sworn, that when she visited him he had told her: “You think I am tough because I am in this case, but there is a man in here for five years who killed two men.” Madeiros could not remember saying any such thing. It was Ranney’s contention that Madeiros had made up his confession out of whole cloth after reading the Defense Committee’s financial report, that he was hoping to tap some of this money for his own defense and that he knew nothing about the South Braintree crime beyond the casual gossip he had picked up. The assistant district attorney kept trying to pin Madeiros down. What kind of a place was South Braintree? Had he seen any factories? Was there a water tank? A railroad crossing? Madeiros did not recall any of these things, nor any stores or excavations. All he remembered was the car going up the slope after the shooting and that “there were houses there. I don’t know how thickly populated it was. It was not country.” He did not deny that the money he used on his Mexican jaunt came from the South Braintree loot, but to any queries about the details he gave the set reply: “I ain’t saying anything about it.”
After the holdup, he said, he and his gang had changed from the Buick to the Hudson in the Randolph Woods and from there driven over the back roads to Providence. Yet an hour and a quarter had elapsed from the time the getaway car left South Braintree until Reed saw it at the Matfield crossing. Desperate men in a high-powered car would certainly not have taken so long to cover twenty-two miles. Even allowing the car a modest average speed of twenty-five miles an hour, there was still a time-lag of nineteen minutes. The question remained whether the lag occurred in the Randolph Woods, as in Madeiros’ story, or in the Manley Woods a dozen miles south where the Buick was found.
The getaway car was seen at 3:12, before it reached the Randolph Woods, by the tobacco salesman, Walter Desmond. Seven or eight minutes later the Farmers spotted it on the other side of the woods moving at about twenty miles an hour. Although the distance between these points was less than two miles, there would not have been time enough for the bandits to drive a hundred yards into the underbrush, change cars and license plates, transfer the payroll boxes, and drive out again.
When the car passed Clark, the bakeryman, twenty minutes after the Farmers had seen it, he noticed the first two digits of the license plate 49783 that had been identified at South Braintree. Julia Kelliher, going home from school at Brockton Heights, had missed the first digit but scratched the last four in the sand by the road. If, as Madeiros claimed, the bandits had switched cars in Randolph, then they must have taken the license plates from the holdup car and attached them to the second car that Clark and Julia Kelliher noted.
From Brockton Heights to where the abandoned Buick was found is 3.2 miles, and it is 5.3 miles further to the Matfield crossing. When the Kelliher girl saw the oncoming car at 3:45, its speed of fifty miles an hour scared her. Half an hour later it arrived at the crossing. Yet even if the driver had slowed down to forty he should have made the distance in twelve minutes or less. By any reckoning there was a lag of almost twenty minutes in the running time of the getaway car between Brockton Heights and the Matfield crossing. It was a lag easily accounted for if the car shift had taken place in the Manley Woods. Nor was it merely a matter of time. Even the trail to the woods ran directly off the route that the driver must have taken to get to Matfield.
Madeiros’ confession just did not fit into the time sequence. His claim that the gang had driven back and forth twice from Providence to Boston before the holdup seemed as unlikely as his account of the getaway, for if the gang had spent so much time driving, no one in South Braintree would have had a glimpse of them or their cars that morning.