It was the snowiest winter in fifty years. The weeks followed into the lengthening afternoons of February. On the sixth a mockingbird was seen by the members of the Bridgewater Bird Club. Five days later a blizzard swirled in from the northeast and the town was snowed under again. In the Superior Court in Brockton Judge Webster Thayer fined a young Brava (the local name for the colored Cape Verde Island Portuguese) two hundred dollars for manslaughter under extenuating circumstances, and asked that the fine be turned over to the victim’s family for funeral expenses. The thaw began on March 19, and the basement of the Bridgewater Central Square Congregational Church was flooded.
Then on April 15 a South Braintree paymaster and his guard were killed during a holdup. Having already gone to press, the April 17 edition of the Independent made no mention of the murders. Yet the event had already impinged on Bridgewater. Shortly after the passage of the 1918 Deportation Act, Chief Stewart had assisted the Immigration Service in arresting six Italians charged with spreading literature advocating the overthrow of the government. The six were marked down for deportation and released on bail. Stewart supposed they had all long since been sent back to Italy.
But that spring at least one of the six, Ferruccio Coacci, was still living in a section of West Bridgewater called Cochesett. Coacci, sometimes known as Ercole Parrecca, had come to Quincy in 1915 and taken up with a woman named Ersilia Buongarzone. Ersilia had borne him two children, both delivered at the state almshouse in Tewksbury. For a period Coacci was employed at the L. Q. White Company. At the time of his arrest, Joseph Ventola, an anarchist friend from Hyde Park, had posted the thousand-dollar bond, and Coacci was released on condition that he marry Ersilia and support her children. While awaiting his deportation order he worked for Slater & Morrill in South Braintree. Early in April 1920, after receiving his notice to report on the fifteenth at the East Boston Immigration Station, he quit his job.
Since the first of the year Coacci had been living in Puffer’s Place, at the corner of Lincoln and South Elm Street, in the empty flatland about a mile from West Bridgewater’s Elm Square. Puffer’s Place was a small, decayed two-story structure with a rust-colored mansard roof and irregularly spaced gables. Once it had been the office of the long-since-defunct Alger Iron Foundry. Then Clarence Puffer, a local handyman, had turned it into a dwelling. Mario Buda, a young Italian who called himself Mike Boda, had rented it early in the winter, and a month or so later Coacci had moved in from Quincy. Ersilia, who was pregnant again, kept house and did the cooking.
The Italians in Puffer’s Place were scarcely noticed by their scattered Yankee neighbors. At times cars would be parked on the corner on Sunday afternoons and talk and singing would echo from inside, but for the most part the newcomers were orderly enough. No one knew what Boda did for a living. With the Eighteenth Amendment in force, some people on South Elm Street suspected the Italians might be engaged in selling liquor. In this they were right. At one time Boda and his brother had run a dry-cleaning shop in Wellesley, adjoining Needham, but after prohibition he became a bootlegger. His avocation was anarchism. All his spare time and his enthusiasm he devoted to distributing radical pamphlets and journals to the Italian colonies of eastern Massachusetts.
Boda was a dapper man, five feet six inches tall, with a short mustache, aquiline nose, and deep-set hazel eyes. If anyone happened to ask him what he did, he replied that he was a salesman for a New York fruit-importing firm. Since coming to West Bridgewater from Hyde Park he had bought a green Overland which he kept in a shed beside the house. The car was a 1912 model, more often than not laid up for repairs. Boda had not registered it for 1920.
During the two years he had been out on bail Coacci had maintained that he wanted to go back to Italy and that he was just waiting for a free ride. When his bondsman, Ventola, learned from the Immigration Service that Coacci had not turned himself in on April 15, he was as surprised as he was dismayed. He drove at once to West Bridgewater, arriving at Puffer’s Place at half past four. There was no one home but the door was open. He went into the kitchen to wait. About five o’clock he at last saw Boda coming down the road from Elm Square, wearing a green velour hat and carrying a leather bag.
Boda said he had just come back on the trolley from Brockton. Ventola told him that Coacci had not reported at the immigration station and that he was worried about his bond. Boda assured him that Coacci would report next morning. For the time being Ersilia and the children would stay in the United States. Ventola, relieved, offered to help them.
The following afternoon Coacci telephoned the Immigration Service and told Inspector Root that he could not come in. His wife was sick, he said, and he needed a few extra days to take care of her. Root in turn called Chief Stewart in Bridgewater and suggested they both drop in on Coacci that evening. But Stewart had to attend a dress rehearsal of Aunt Jerusha’s Quilting Party, a play in which he had a part. Besides, West Bridgewater was a separate town outside his jurisdiction. However, he agreed to send his night patrolman, Frank LeBaron.
Root and LeBaron arrived at Puffer’s Place after dark. Coacci admitted them and announced that he was ready to leave. There seemed to be nothing wrong with his wife. Root, who had a lodge meeting that night, offered to have the deportation postponed another week, but Coacci refused, saying that he wanted to get back on the first steamer to his sick father. When Root suggested that Coacci leave his wife some money, Coacci—who had two hundred dollars with him—said she did not need any. As the inspector led him down the steps with his baggage, Ersilia and the children stood in the doorway crying.