CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MORE HISTORY, WRITTEN
AND OTHERWISE
The sea-change decades of depression and war did little to alter the pattern of Joe Morelli’s life. On his return from Leavenworth he moved from Providence to the scarcely more scenic environment of adjacent Pawtucket. In that gray three-decker jungle city he was to spend the rest of his days—when not in prison—in a house at 70 Toledo Avenue, a convenient half-mile beyond the attentions of the Providence police.
In 1928 he was picked up by the Pawtucket police in connection with a clothing theft, the next year for smuggling liquor into the Providence county jail. In 1932 Secret Service agents arrested him for possessing counterfeit bills and engaging juveniles, including a thirteen-year-old female state ward, to pass them. He managed to get himself acquitted. Later that year the Secret Service raided his house and uncovered a cache of bogus five-dollar bills. The agents also found parts of a book he was writing about his gangland career.
At his trial Joe tried but failed to put the blame for the counterfeit money on his son, John. Sentenced to five years in the new federal prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, Joe had the distinction of being the first Rhode Islander to arrive there.
In 1941, he was arrested for keeping a house of prostitution in his home, setting up slot machines, and selling liquor without a license. A neighbor, James Prete, who had complained to the police about the goings-on at 70 Toledo Avenue had his house wrecked by dynamite.
While Joe was out on bail he was again arrested for counterfeiting. Not until March 1946 was he paroled. Nine months later he was picked up for running a house of prostitution. In March 1947, he was seized for violating his parole and sent to the Danbury Federal Penitentiary.
The following year he was released, only to be arrested on the old prostitution charge. In moments of self-pity Joe liked to predict that he would one day die in jail.
In 1931 Joe boasted to Morris Ernst, a New York lawyer connected with various civil liberties committees, that he and his gang had staged the South Braintree holdup and that he had ridden in the murder car. Ernst had taken no part in the Sacco-Vanzetti defense nor until the execution of the two men had he formed any fixed opinion as to their guilt or innocence, although he had concluded that there had been a lack of due process. Reading the six volumes of the case record as they were published in 1928 and 1929, he was struck by the amorphous Morelli hypothesis appearing in Volume V. “Being what I am,” he explained at the Massachusetts Judiciary Committee hearing in 1959, “and for no sensible reason probably, I went on the trail of Joe Morelli. I have had talks with Joe Morelli. I have had letters with him. I have seen him with his counsel. I am told that I am the only person who had examined the man who really did the job for which Sacco and Vanzetti went to the chair.”
Ernst started his private investigation by arranging a meeting in the Providence office of Joe Morelli’s lawyer, Louis Jackvony, a former Rhode Island attorney general whom Joe had known as a boy. After being introduced to Ernst Joe did not sit down, but stood for several minutes by the window while the latter talked. Finally he gave a signal to someone in the street, explaining then that he had decided Ernst was “jake.”
Ernst had prepared a list of detailed questions about the South Braintree holdup: Were there two cars or one? Were they open or closed, and where did they go? Where did the license plates come from? Who was in the car? Were the payroll boxes metal or wood? Who picked them up? How much money was in them and how many people divided it? Was there anyone leaning against the fence? Was there a team of horses? An excavation? A water tower? Why did they double back at the Matfield crossing? For two hours Joe answered all questions affably and correctly.