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.