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.