Frank Silva was dead, as was Guinea Oates. Of the other two mentioned in Silva’s confession of the Bridgewater attempt, Doggy Bruno had long since vanished, but in 1960 I was surprised to discover that Joe Sammarco was no farther away than Everett, where he was working as a janitor. He had been parolled in 1953 after thirty-three years in prison. At sixty-two, I thought, he should not have much to lose or be afraid of. If I could get him to admit that he had been one of the four in the Bridgewater holdup, that would corroborate Silva and go a long way to proving finally that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent.
“I don’t know about Joe,” the parole officer told me in the department offices on Tremont Street, appropriately opposite Brimstone Corner. “Sometimes he comes in here and acts as if I were his uncle. He’d tell me anything. Then the next time he’s as cold as a brick. I’ll ask him about this Bridgewater business, but I can’t promise he’ll give out anything.”
Two months later I got a call from a Somerville lawyer, Anthony DiCecca, who said Joe might talk to me but that he himself wanted to talk to me first. I drove over the following afternoon. The law office was on Broadway, a lower-middle-class neighborhood, in a remodeled three-story house that had been transformed by plate glass and concrete until it stood out against its drabber surroundings with the glitter of a funeral home.
DiCecca, a bustling, determined man, shook my hand in his paneled office, then sat down behind a vast desk on which a pastel-green telephone kept flashing a warning light. He stared at me for a moment, his eyes calculating in his grave Latin face.
“Now,” he said, as if he were satisfied. “I want you to understand I know nothing about the Sacco-Vanzetti case. I have no opinion and don’t want to have one. When I was watching that TV show in the spring I began to feel myself getting an opinion so I got up and shut it off. I understand you want to ask Joe about the Bridgewater holdup he was supposed to be in on that they later hung on Vanzetti. I want the details of that.”
I gave him a summary of Silva’s confession, while he took notes.
“Joe can either confirm this or not,” I told him finally, “but it will blow a big hole in the Sacco-Vanzetti conviction if he does confirm it.”
He sat there, indifferent to the flashing telephone light. “If it’s true, Joe could have spoken thirty-five years ago. It’s a terrible thing if he kept quiet and let an innocent man die. Maybe he won’t want to admit anything because of that, even though there’s nothing anyone could do to him now. Let me have a talk with him and then the three of us can get together here Sunday night. Just one thing, though,” he went on as I rose to go. “There’s no money going to enter into this. I need it like I need a hole in the head. If Joe has any idea that he’s going to make a little on a deal, then I want nothing to do with it or with him.”
The following Sunday I again drove to Somerville. I kept thinking of Joe Sammarco and his thirty-three years in state prison, all the years back to when I was a schoolboy in corduroy knickerbockers. I felt depressed, half wishing I were not going to see him.