Each step Ehrmann took reinforced his feeling that he was on the right path. Joe Morelli’s giveaway remark, “See Mancini,” sent Ehrmann to the penitentiary at Auburn, New York, where Mancini was serving his life sentence. Mancini had none of Morelli’s Uriah Heep quality. He seemed much more the big-time gangster: a square-set impervious face, an on-and-off smile, glazed gray eyes that looked through rather than at anyone. Ehrmann told him that Joe Morelli had said to see him about Sacco and Vanzetti. “He must have been eating something,” was Mancini’s noncommittal reply. Ehrmann pointed out that Joe was a coward at heart who might be able to plan a big job but would need someone like Mancini along to give him courage.
At this point [Ehrmann wrote later], Mancini gave his estimate of Joe Morelli, deliberately, his gaze turned toward the window and the scene beyond.
“Unless you know that a man has killed, you can’t judge what he is capable of doing.” There was a long pause. “Take me for instance. If I hadn’t been caught, I would not be known as a murderer. At that, they gave me too stiff a sentence. The cops disappointed me, for I relieved them of a man who was worse than I am. The man I killed had killed others.” Mancini paused, then added, “It was his life or mine.”
Then very quietly, almost gently, he condemned people who tell on others. “I have first-hand knowledge of Joe’s trial in Providence. Gyp and Joe got nothing by blaming each other. They’d have been better off, or just as well off if they hadn’t given each other up. But if you’re going to tell, why not tell the whole truth? Why didn’t Madeiros tell a whole-story instead of a half-story? He might as well come clean if he started. If Madeiros wanted to tell a half-truth he might have named as his confederates men who had died and then let the State believe it or not.”
Mancini claimed not to have heard of Benkosky or Weeks. He studied the photographs of Sacco and Vanzetti that Ehrmann handed him, then pointed to Vanzetti’s and announced: “They’re not stick-up men. That’s not a stick-up man. Of course, you can’t judge only by a man’s appearance—you can’t be always right on that. But the type of Sacco and Vanzetti—they’re radicals, not stick-up men.” He could see no resemblance, though, between Joe Morelli and Sacco. As the interview came to an end he shook hands, saying he was sorry he could not be more helpful. “I hope they won’t execute Sacco and Vanzetti,” he concluded. “Killing them won’t bring the dead to life.”
Whether Mancini had anything more to tell remained his own secret. There was, however, something else that might tell Ehrmann much—the 7.65-millimeter gun Mancini had used to kill Alterio. Tests could soon show if it had fired the five unclassified South Braintree bullets. Ehrmann went straight to New York City to his old friends Henry Epstein, the assistant attorney general. Epstein was able to locate the report on the gun in the files without any trouble. But the weapon itself, like a tantalizing mirage, had vanished.
Everywhere that Ehrmann went, the Commonwealth investigators went too. Lieutenant Ferrari was dispatched to Leavenworth to see Joe Morelli. Joe swore that he had never seen Jimmy Weeks in his life and accused Ehrmann of trying to bully him into signing a confession for the South Braintree crime. Wilbar and Ranney followed up in Providence with an interrogation of the Morelli trio of Patsy, Fred, and Butsy. Fred had an alibi similar to Bibber Barone’s—he had been in jail on April 15, 1920—and tried to maintain that Joe had shared the same accommodations, although Joe was actually out on bail. The other two swore that they had been living in quiet innocence in Providence all that April, that they had never known either Weeks or Madeiros, and that they had never been to the Bluebird Inn. After their remarks had been taken down and transcribed the three were seized with scruples and declined to sign on the grounds that they feared for their personal safety.
The clerk’s office at Dedham became inundated with affidavits and counteraffidavits from Georgia, Kansas, New York, New Bedford, Providence, Fall River, Charlestown; from police officials, wardens, jailbirds, streetwalkers, and citizens interested, disinterested, and uninterested.
Manuel Pacheco, one of the floaters found in bed with Madeiros at his arrest, signed an affidavit in the Charlestown prison, where he was serving eight to ten years for a holdup, stating that Madeiros and he had known each other from 1919 to 1921 and that Madeiros had once told him he was “working with a good mob in Providence,” which to Pacheco meant the Morellis.