Weeks did not know. He had seen Bibber Barone at the Bluebird Inn, he said, and he knew Frank Morelli, and he remembered Joe Morelli’s name as well as the others in his gang: “Joe, Butsy, Patsy and a fellow called Gyp the Blood.”
With further questioning Weeks grew confused, talking in the same sentence about the shooting in South Braintree and the gunfight with Barney Monterios at the Bluebird Inn, speaking also of an unidentified holdup where Madeiros had been double-crossed and that “he told me many times that it was the one that Sacco was in on.”
Kelley left Weeks to his confusion, warning him he was at liberty to talk all he wanted but if “anyone comes here to see you and wants information, you have to look out for yourself. If they write out what you say and want you to sign papers, you yourself have to decide what you want to do.”
With the salvo of Weeks’ counterconfession, accompanied by a triple volley of sworn statements from Kelley, Fleming, and Plett, there began the battle of the affidavits. Relations between Assistant District Attorney Ranney—now in charge of the post-trial developments in the Sacco-Vanzetti case—and the defense lawyers remained alertly decorous. Any asperity was after all tempered by the fact that they were all Harvard men as well as lawyers in the same city.
As soon as Ehrmann or Thompson produced an affidavit, Ranney felt obligated to come up with a counteraffidavit. Thompson suggested to Attorney General Jay Benton that all important witnesses connected with Madeiros should be interviewed jointly by representatives of the defense and the Commonwealth in order that the case “not degenerate into a contest of affidavits in which each party’s trying to offset the affidavits of the other party, or to contradict affidavits already obtained.” District Attorney Wilbar would not agree to any such combined operation, and the battle was on. During June and July eighty-seven affidavits were filed—in addition to forty-six miscellaneous statements, depositions, and letters—the engagement reaching the ultimate point where affidavits were being filed about affidavits.
During the afternoon of May 25 Thompson returned to Weeks with a typewritten affidavit based on the notes he had made of their morning conversation. Weeks signed it without saying anything of the assistant district attorney’s noontime visit. The next day Thompson assembled the affidavits he and Ehrmann had ready and filed a motion with the clerk at Dedham for a new trial based on Madeiros’ statement. Not until two days later did he learn of Weeks’ maunderings. He went at once to Charlestown.
Weeks, shuffling into the rotunda in his prison denims, quivered when he saw Thompson’s set face. Thompson asked about his conversation with Fleming and Kelley. Weeks said that they threatened him about what might happen to him if he signed an affidavit for Thompson. Kelley had taken out a package of Camels and given him one, asking him if anything had been offered him to make a statement in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Weeks told Thompson he had replied, “No, Mr. Kelley, you have just offered me this cigarette, and not so much as this cigarette had been offered to me by anyone concerned in the Sacco-Vanzetti case.”[19]
He had admitted to Kelley that Madeiros told him and a since-murdered gangster named Steve Benkosky about taking part in the South Braintree holdup. For Thompson he now added several new details. Joe Morelli before his arrest had owned a Cole touring car and had given him rides in it several times. There was a second Mike, called Mike the Rug, in the Morelli gang; his real name was Cameron O’Connor. Weeks knew him as well as he knew Gyp the Blood, Fred Morelli, and Bibber Barone. They would sometimes come to the Bluebird Inn in an open Cadillac. Weeks claimed that some of his conversation with Kelley and Fleming had not been taken down by the stenographer. Both men had warned him about talking too much if he ever hoped to have his sentence commuted, adding that Madeiros was only eighteen at the time of the South Braintree affair and they knew he had nothing to do with it.
When Assistant District Attorney Ranney read the copy of the Madeiros confession that Thompson sent him, he arranged to have the Portuguese examined as to his sanity. Madeiros, sullen and challenging, stuck to his statement about having taken part in the South Braintree crime. He had admitted being in on it “because it was true,” although he had “done no shooting.” Beyond this he would say little. Whatever the doctors who examined him may have thought of his story, they at least concluded that he was sane.