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.