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.