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.