Turning south from the inn, he drove to the dingy Providence police headquarters on Fountain Street. What he now needed to know was whether there had been, as Madeiros said, a local gang of Italians engaged in robbing freight cars.
Ehrmann put his questions to Chief Inspector Henry Connors. The answers were more of a corroboration than he would have dared hope. Yes, there had been a gang in Providence robbing freight cars who had finally been arrested on October 18, 1919. They were American-born Italians, known as the Morell or Morelli gang from the five brothers who formed its nucleus. Joe, Fred, and Pasquale Morelli had been tried in May 1920, but during April they had been out on bail. Connors had no tangible reason for suspecting that the Morellis had been in on the South Braintree holdup, but he suggested that Ehrmann see Captain Ralph Pieraccini of the New Bedford police, who might know something of the doings of Frank and Mike Morelli in that city, and John Richards, who had been a United States marshal at the time the Morellis went on trial.
On the way back to Boston Ehrmann reflected on the South Braintree robbery. It was apparent to him that someone must have scouted the factories in advance and learned all about the day and time of the payroll deliveries.[17] If he could now find some connection between the Morellis and South Braintree, that would show too much coincidence for Madeiros to have invented his story.
Three days later, Ehrmann drove the fifty miles down to Providence again with his wife Sarah. While he interviewed the Morellis’ former defense lawyer, Daniel Geary, she spent the afternoon looking up the indictments of the Morellis in the clerk’s office of the United States District Court. Geary reminded Ehrmann that he could not ethically disclose confidential communications from his clients, nor would he in any way implicate the Morellis in the South Braintree murders, but he would be glad to help in collecting any information that had been made public during their trial.
The Morellis had been systematic in their freight-yard robberies, confining their thefts to shoes and textiles which they disposed of through fences in New York. Ehrmann wanted to know how the gang received information on the shipments of merchandise. Geary thought that they sent spotters to adjacent industrial towns to watch shipments being loaded and get the numbers of the cars. Joe Morelli had taken a railroad detective, Robert Karnes, who had been gathering evidence against the gang, to various towns in Massachusetts and shown him where the shipments were spotted. Probably this was a maneuver of Joe’s to divert suspicion from himself, for the individualistic Joe did not follow the gangster’s code of loyalty.
Ehrmann asked whether Karnes had mentioned any specific places, and Geary recalled his having said something about Rice & Hutchins. The name had no particular significance for him until Ehrmann exclaimed: “That’s in South Braintree where the murders occurred.”
Geary whistled. “That brings it home, doesn’t it!” he said.
Geary could not find the portion of the trial record containing the detective’s testimony—although the court stenographer remembered the reference—and later when he signed an affidavit he referred less specifically to “Taunton, Attleboro and other places in Massachusetts.” In the battle of affidavits that followed, Assistant District Attorney Ranney got Karnes to deny that he had ever gone or said he had gone with Joe Morelli to South Braintree. He did not deny, however, having gone with Joe to towns in that general vicinity.
When, after the interview with Geary, Ehrmann met his wife in the lobby of the Providence-Biltmore he found her as full of information and as excited about it as he was about what he had discovered. She had learned in the clerks’ office that the first four counts of the Morelli indictment covered the theft of 611 pairs of ladies’ shoes from Rice & Hutchins, while the eighth count was for 78 pairs of men’s shoes from Slater & Morrill. For Ehrmann that was proof enough. There must have been a spotter for the Morellis in South Braintree who had studied the two factories and noted when the payroll arrived and how it was delivered. He was certain that when he told this to his Harvard classmate, Dudley Ranney, the district attorney’s office would want to investigate the whole matter of the Morellis and probably arrange a new trial. But when Ehrmann telephoned the next day, Ranney was not at all interested in the discovery and his voice had an edge to it as he told Ehrmann so.[18]
While Ehrmann was in Providence on Tuesday, May 25, Thompson was interviewing Jimmy Weeks in Charlestown. He had talked with him five days before, but Weeks had then said no more than that Madeiros’ confession was true. Thompson asked Deputy Warden Hoggsett to try to persuade him to make a statement, and several days later he learned that Weeks was willing to talk.