From the stories of Weeks and Sergeant Jacobs and Richards, and from the various court, police, and jail records, from his pokings about in Providence and New Bedford, Ehrmann now began to assemble a hypothetical cast of characters for the South Braintree affair. Madeiros had admitted to Ranney that he had shaped his story to Thompson to shield a gang. For Ehrmann, Madeiros’ Mike was an obvious transplant. The leader, “the oldest of the Italians,” must, in Ehrmann’s opinion, have been Joe, a gangster capable of just such careful planning as had gone into the South Braintree holdup. Butsy, the most dangerous of the brothers, was another who seemed to qualify for South Braintree. When Gyp the Blood showed signs of informing, Butsy in open court had threatened to kill him. The milder-mannered Mike was, as Sergeant Jacobs had noted, merely a car thief to whom would probably have fallen the job of guarding the second car in the woods. Madeiros crouched in the rear fitted the assistant district attorney’s trial reference to the “man we cannot describe in the back seat.” As for the gunman called Bill who, Madeiros said, had got out of the car with the leader to do the actual shooting, Ehrmann thought at first he might have been Bibber Barone, until it turned out that Bibber had provided himself with the perfect alibi of being already in jail. Gyp the Blood, though out of jail, was not the shooting type. Richards had mentioned two other members of the gang, Paulo Rosso and Tony Mancini, but soon advised Ehrmann later to eliminate Rosso. That left Mancini, and the more Ehrmann learned about him the more he seemed to fill the bill.
Mancini, besides being Joe Morelli’s close friend, was a nerveless killer. In February 1921, in New York City, he had shot down Alberto Alterio on Broome Street, almost across the street from police headquarters. When the police captured him they found in his pocket a Star 7.65-millimeter automatic—a type of gun that takes American 32-caliber cartridges. James Burns, Moore’s ballistics expert, had testified at Dedham that five of the South Braintree bullets could have been fired from a Steyr, and one of the few things that Dr. Hamilton had been able to demonstrate to Van Amburgh’s satisfaction was that three of the shells Bostock had picked up from the gravel bore the marks of a foreign-make ejector claw. A Steyr was an Austrian gun, a Star Spanish, but both were of the same caliber and both were common in the United States in 1920.[20]
Ehrmann at once sensed the possibility that Mancini’s gun might have been used at South Braintree. If Mancini himself could be set down tentatively as Berardelli’s killer, that left only the driver to be accounted for—the man who (even Katzmann finally admitted) had been pale and fair-haired.
Both McDevitt and Benkosky, the dead hijackers, answered the description, but Ehrmann found no witnesses who would identify McDevitt’s picture. However, when he confronted the two Slater & Morrill workers, Minnie Kennedy and Louise Hayes, with a rogues’-gallery photograph of Benkosky, Minnie felt it “looked more like the driver of the car than any photograph I have ever seen,” and Louise found that “the picture very much resembles him.”
It seemed to Ehrmann that an encompassing pattern was beginning to emerge. Still, he realized, his hypothesis could be destroyed by a single granite fact. Joe Morelli could provide the key piece—if he could be induced to tell the truth.
Truth and Joe Morelli, however, were scarcely on intimate terms. Joe’s one steadfast quality was an exclusive loyalty to himself. At the Providence trial he had been quite willing to let his brothers take the rap for him. In fact, the day after he and his gang had been robbing freight cars he had tipped off Marshal Richards, with the idea of diverting suspicion from himself, that the same thieves would be at it the following night. When the Morellis, minus Joe, returned to the yard that evening they walked into a trap.
Joe liked to maintain whimsically that he was in the piano business. He lived with Pauline Gray, who appeared in the police court records as “a common night walker,” and used his house as a depot in supplying girls for out-of-town roadhouses and as a distribution center for drugs and counterfeit money. A few months before his arrest he had persuaded his invalid widowed mother to deed over her house to him, then had her confined as a pauper in the state almshouse. Even gangsters tended to disapprove of Joe’s morals. He liked to drop the names of big New York gangsters and boast that he had been mixed up in such headline events as the 1912 Herman Rosenthal murder. Years later he was to come forward to offer his services for making contact with the kidnapers of the Lindbergh baby.
This was the man from whom the young Boston lawyer hoped to extract the truth about the South Braintree crime when, on June 1, 1926, he and Richards went to the federal penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.[21] What struck Ehrmann at once, what would have struck anyone who saw both men, was Joe Morelli’s singular resemblance to Sacco—the identical cheekbones, thin hairline, jutting chin, heavy eyebrows, and nose almost the same except that Joe’s had a Cyrano tip.
To all explanatory statements and questions Joe replied with denials. He had never heard of South Braintree or Rice & Hutchins or Slater & Morrill. He had never known Madeiros or any other Portuguese. Weeks’ name meant nothing to him. As for Mancini, which Mancini did they mean? There were a lot of Mancinis. When Richards countered with references to the Morellis’ activities in Providence, Joe cut him off with the whine: “You are trying to spoil my record with my warden, my good warden!” As for Sacco and Vanzetti, Joe had read something about their case in the paper. He repeated the name Sacco several times, then, as if he were thinking aloud, said “See Mancini about that.” Then he wound up in a flurry of indignation. If the Massachusetts people thought he committed the South Braintree crime, let them prove the charges against him and send him to the electric chair!
On returning to Boston, Ehrmann provided himself with a rogues’-gallery photograph of Joe Morelli and tried it on several of the witnesses. Some of the Italian laborers who had been digging in the excavation exclaimed “Sacco!” when they saw the likeness. Mary Splaine also thought it was Sacco. Lewis Wade, after reluctantly examining it, admitted that it was “strikingly like” the man he had seen. Frank Burke took one look, slapped the face of the photograph, and exclaimed: “That’s the fellow who snapped his pistol at me and yelled ‘Get out of the way, you son of a bitch!’”