turned down Broad Street—divided in the middle by a single streetcar
track—moving at a cautious ten miles an hour because of the ice on
the road. A streetcar moving in the same direction had just stopped
at the corner of Hale Street, seventy-five yards away. At the same
moment a curtained touring car swung over the tracks and pulled up
on the corner, its wheels on the sidewalk. Three men jumped out
and dog-trotted toward the oncoming truck. The man in the lead,
bareheaded, with a dark mustache and wearing a long black coat,
carried a shotgun. The two behind him held pistols.
Graves had first noticed the touring car—a Hudson, he thought it
was—while he was passing Harlow’s blacksmith shop. He watched the men
get out and start running, but it was not until the mustached man
knelt and took aim that he realized he was in for a holdup. Yanking
on the gas lever, he veered the truck across the tracks. Bowles
reached for his revolver. When the truck was some twenty-five yards
away the mustached man fired both barrels. A few pellets rattled
against the truck’s metal body without doing any damage. One of
the men with pistols, standing eight feet behind the man with the
shotgun, exchanged random shots with Bowles until the streetcar came
between them. Then the mustached man dashed across the street and
fired again at the slithering truck.
Cox, from his seat on the cashbox, saw the kneeling figure and the
smoke from the discharged shotgun, “everything like the snap of a
camera.” As the truck skidded, Graves lost control of the wheel.
Bowles grabbed it out of his hands. Wavering from one side of the
street to the other, the truck finally crashed against a telephone
pole, smashing headlights and radiator. In the meantime the three
gunmen had scurried back to their car with its waiting driver and
spun out of sight down Hale Street in the direction of the normal
school.
When Frank (“Slip”) Harding, an auto-parts salesman on his way to
Bassett’s Garage just across from the corner of Hale Street, first
saw the men carrying guns, he thought it was some kind of movie
stunt. He was only four feet away as they began firing and he watched
them, too astonished to move. Then within seconds they had run back
to their car and driven off. Harding later described the car as a
black Hudson Six with the license number 01173C.
Dr. John Murphy, a young general practitioner with his house and
office at 76 Broad Street, was getting dressed when he heard the
shots. He looked out his window just in time to glimpse the touring
car moving away. By the time he reached the street, about the only
thing he could see was the litter of glass where the truck was rammed
against the pole. Then he noticed a spent shotgun shell in the
gutter. He picked it up and put it in his pocket.
For Bridgewater’s police chief, Michael Stewart, the robbery attempt
lay outside the range of small-town peccadilloes with which he was
used to dealing. His force consisted of two officers, one patrolman,
and one night patrolman. In addition there were the specials, one at
the normal school, one for the night performances at the Princess
Theater, one at the L. Q. White factory, and six for the Fourth of
July only. Stewart, in his forties, had held his job since 1915.
Before this he had spent four years as chief of the two-man force in
Rockland, another of the flat semirural manufacturing towns lying
inland between Boston and Cape Cod. In Rockland most of his trouble
had come from the foreign workers. The same was true in Bridgewater,
where a third of the population was now made up of Poles, Russians,
Greeks, and Armenians. As a second-generation Irish-American Stewart
tended to be suspicious of these newcomers. He had an idea that the
holdup men might be Russians, with a confederate working in the
factory. Inspector Albert Brouillard of the State Police, who was
sent down to Bridgewater to work with Stewart, was more inclined to
think the holdup the work of one of the gangs that had moved into the
area after the recent Boston police strike. Graves thought the men
were Italians.
The license number that Harding had written down was traced through
the Registry of Motor Vehicles to George Hassam’s garage in Needham,
a Boston suburb, twenty-three miles northwest of Bridgewater. It
turned out to be a dealer’s plate. Hassam owned five sets of them.
On Monday, December 22, a foreigner had come into Hassam’s office and
asked if he could borrow a set of plates. In broken English he told
Hassam he had just bought a car in Wellesley and wanted to take it
away. When Hassam said he could not lend his dealer’s plates, the man
left. He was a surly man of about forty, as Hassam remembered him,
dark, with a close-cropped mustache.
Hassam forgot about him until the police telephoned regarding the
plates on the Bridgewater car. Then, as he went to the back of his
garage to look at a secondhand Hupp that had been carrying a set of
his dealer’s plates, he found them missing. When or how they had been
taken he did not know.
On December 26 the Pinkerton operative Henry Hellyer noted in his
report that on Sunday evening, December 21, a Buick touring car
belonging to Daniel H. Murphy of Natick had been stolen from 115 Fair
Oaks Street, Needham, not far from Hassam’s Garage. Hellyer was right
about the Buick though not about some of his other details. The car,
belonging to a Francis J. Murphy had actually been stolen in Needham
a month earlier, on November 23, from in front of a house in Fair
Oaks Park.
That same November night a Dedham police officer, Warren Totty,
standing under the arc light in the granite shadow of Memorial Hall,
had seen the car speeding across Dedham Square. He had stepped out
with his hand raised, but the car swung past him down the hill and
under the railroad bridge toward Hyde Park. The license number that
Totty managed to copy down turned out to be Murphy’s.
“It is thought,” Hellyer reported, “that this car may have been used
by the men last Wednesday.” The connection between the Murphy Buick
and the Needham license plates appealed to Stewart, even though both
Graves and Harding had said that the car was a Hudson. Hellyer now
interviewed Richard Casey, a student at Rhode Island State College,
who had seen the car on Main Street before the shooting, and John
King, who noticed it afterward near the normal school. Whether or not
Chief Stewart had prompted them, both said it was a Buick.
Stewart and Brouillard had managed to trace the car as far as
Stoughton. Beyond that point, although they called at all the garages
in the vicinity, their leads came to nothing. Chief Shine of Dedham
had a notion that an Italian gang in East Dedham might be involved.
Stewart visited Dedham, Needham, even some suspects in Newton, and
arranged meanwhile for circulars describing the car to be distributed
to the local garages and gas stations. He now began to think the car
was hidden somewhere between Stoughton and Dedham.
Meanwhile the Pinkerton agents had been spreading out through the
Italian districts of Quincy and Boston. On December 30 Assistant
Superintendent Henry Murray reported:
_Today informant telephoned in; later met him at supper and in the
course of conversation stated that he had learned that the Italian
mentioned yesterday had said that the men who were implicated in
the Bridgewater holdup had occupied temporarily a shack in close
proximity to Bridgewater and that the car that had been used was
left there along with some overalls or disguise of a similar nature,
used by one of the men implicated in the holdup; that these men
were Italians, had deserted the car, returned to Quincy by trolley;
that they are believed to be residing in the vicinity of Fore River
Shipyard and are known as Anarchists._
The “Italian mentioned yesterday” was a floater who spent most of his
time hanging around the Boston American Building near Summer Street
or in Monahan’s Bar in the North End. It took the Pinkerton agents
several days to track him home to 31 Waverly Street, in the massed
tenement district of Brighton. The house was a brick three-flatter,
and there was a SCARLET FEVER card on the front door. Hellyer,
Stewart, and Brouillard went there the afternoon of January 3,
1920. By ringing the three doorbells until they got an answer they
learned that the man they wanted had left for Allston earlier in the
day. They waited almost five hours on the upper landing until he
came back. He turned out to be a flashily dressed Sicilian, Carmine
Barasso, who had anglicized his name to C. A. Barr. Quite willing to
talk, he invited the three men in to his flat. According to Hellyer’s
report:
_Barr related a rambling statement about a machine that he had
invented with which he could detect who had committed a crime no
matter where it was committed. He stated that one Mrs. Vetilia of 2
Lexington Street East Boston, had looked into the machine and saw the
holdup happening and saw the man plainly but did not know who they
were._
As Stewart drove back to Bridgewater along the empty snow-edged roads
of the Blue Hills he added another piece to the puzzle he was fitting
together in his mind. If the Pinkerton information was right, the
holdup men were anarchists. It was not a difficult conclusion to come
to in the winter of 1919-1920. A group of 249 anarchist and Communist
aliens that included Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman had just been
deported to Russia. That very day, January 3, the headlines of the
papers were flaring with the news of Attorney General Palmer’s raids
that had taken place all over the country the previous evening. RAIDS
TO HEAD OFF REVOLUTION was the heading of the weekly Bridgewater
_Independent_. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE MAKES PUBLIC COMMUNISTS’ PLAN TO
OVERTHROW GOVERNMENT. ARRESTS IN FIFTY TOWNS.
But such incidents and antagonisms, the social change and struggle
of the postwar period, were sensed only vaguely in Bridgewater. By
the time the wave of history reached the inland cape towns it was
scarcely a ripple. The same issue of the _Independent_ made Charlotte
Randall’s twenty-first birthday party in West Bridgewater the subject
of its editorial.
When the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect on January 16 the
December holdup no longer seemed worth discussing. The Pinkerton men
had gone. The thousand-dollar reward posted by Loring Q. White for
the gunmen’s capture was unclaimed. At his headquarters in the back
room of the wooden-pilastered town hall, Chief Stewart still thought
about the crime, but he could find no more pieces to add to his
puzzle.
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.
After his rehearsal, Chief Stewart hurried back to headquarters.
LeBaron was already there, behind the desk. “That Dago,” he said.
“There wasn’t nothing wrong with his wife. Just a stall.” As Stewart
walked home from the town hall, under the elms of the deserted
common, he kept mulling over LeBaron’s remark. He suddenly recalled
what Barr-Barasso had said in December about some anarchists
living in a shack near Bridgewater. On April 15 these anarchists
had been—where? It was in this evening moment, in Chief Stewart’s
responding mind, that the Sacco-Vanzetti case had its origin.
* * * * *
On the afternoon of April 17, Charles Fuller, the business manager
of the Brockton _Enterprise_, locked his office, walked over to the
Fair Grounds where he kept his horse, and started out with his friend
Max Wind on their usual Saturday ride. They left the Fair Grounds at
half past two, riding out the back gate toward West Bridgewater. Once
over the railroad track on Manley Street, not far from the Poor Farm,
they headed down a bridle path through the thick secondary growth of
maple and scrub oak and alder known as the Manley Woods. Fuller rode
ahead. About six hundred feet in from the road, he came face to face
with a Buick touring car. So close were the bushes that he and Wind
had to dismount and lead their horses past it. The car had apparently
been there overnight, for the windshield and hood and fenders were
streaked with dew. Fuller glanced in as he went by and saw a few
coins on the front seat and a coat in the back. A moment later when
he looked back to see if Wind could get by, he noticed that the glass
was missing from the rear window.
Before remounting the two men stopped to look at the smeared
dark-blue car. It had no license plates, but otherwise it seemed to
resemble the holdup car they had read about the day before. Just
ahead of the car they made out the thin tracks of a smaller car,
perhaps a Ford, leading to Manley Street. They rode back the way
they had come, stopped at the first house, and called the Brockton
police. Within fifteen minutes City Marshal Ryan arrived with Officer
William Hill.
Together the four men examined the car inside and out. Besides the
coins and the old brown overcoat, they found a phial that was thought
afterward to have contained dope, and on the floor the glass from the
rear window. Since Fuller was more familiar with a Buick than the
others he drove it out through the snagging bushes. Reaching Manley
Street, he turned the car over to Hill, who drove it to the police
garage in Brockton. The next morning the police, examining the car a
second time, found a bullet hole in the rear door.
Stewart and Brouillard were notified, and they inspected the car
Sunday evening. The Buick’s spare tire was missing, and the maker’s
number near the gas tank had been chiseled off. The engine number,
however, was still intact: 560,490. It was the number of the Murphy
car stolen in Needham on November 23. The Registry of Motor Vehicles
had reported that the license plate, _49783_, had been stolen from
a Ford belonging to Warren H. Ellis of 602 Webster Street, Needham.
Just after ten o’clock on the night of January 6 Ellis had put his
car in his garage. Next morning the plates were gone.
Stewart learned about the Ellis plates on Monday. In December he had
connected the missing Needham Buick with the Bridgewater holdup. Now
it turned out to be the car used in South Braintree. And both the
Bridgewater and the South Braintree license plates had been stolen
in Needham within an interval of about two weeks. The two crimes now
seemed to him to be the work of the same gang—another piece added to
his puzzle. It was curious too—a kind of corroboration of his theory
of the other night—that the car should have been found less than two
miles from Puffer’s Place. Coacci again!
Unfortunately, Coacci was at this point somewhere on the Atlantic.
Nevertheless Stewart felt there might still be some evidence to be
found in the South Elm Street house. He telephoned Brouillard and
they arranged to go over to Puffer’s Place on Tuesday.
That same Monday Joseph Ventola turned up at Puffer’s with a truck
to move Ersilia, her children, and her belongings to a house in
South Braintree. Not long after he had gone Simon Johnson and his
brother Samuel arrived from their Elm Square Garage with a tow truck
to haul away Boda’s broken-down Overland. Boda helped them push the
car out of the shed at the side of the house. After they had hitched
it up, Boda, who had known the Johnsons ever since he had moved to
Cochesett, rode the mile to Elm Square with them in the truck. The
Italian wore his velour hat and was carrying his leather bag. The
Johnsons let him off at the car stop and he boarded the Brockton
trolley.
Tuesday afternoon Stewart picked up Brouillard and they drove to
Puffer’s Place. In the fading light, the ramshackle gabled house with
the gnarled apple tree in front of it and the leafless grapevine in
the rear looked as if it might have been cut out of cardboard. Broken
windows in the shed had been tacked over with burlap.
After Stewart knocked several times, Boda came to the door in
his shirtsleeves. Stewart said he and Brouillard were from the
Immigration Service and that they wanted a photograph of Coacci. Boda
said Coacci had already sent in two photographs. Stewart explained
that one of them had been lost. Boda let the men in. When Stewart
asked about Coacci’s friends, Boda said that they sometimes came to
the house but he did not know who they were. They were, he told the
chief, “bad peoples.” More than that he could or would not say. When
Stewart asked if Coacci had owned a gun, Boda said he had kept one
in the kitchen drawer. Stewart opened the drawer. Though he found
no gun, the drawer contained the manufacturer’s diagram of a Savage
automatic.
Still ostensibly looking for photographs, Stewart and Brouillard
searched the house while Boda tagged after them. When they asked if
he himself had a gun, Boda produced a Spanish-type automatic from
his bureau. He said he had no license, but that he never carried
the gun outside. Brouillard removed the clip and examined the three
cartridges. Each was of a different make; all were American.
When the three men went out on the porch, Stewart asked about the
padlocked shed. Boda said he kept his car there, but just now it was
at the Johnson’s garage. Stewart asked if he could look inside the
shed. Boda unsnapped the padlock and slid the door back.
On the right of the dirt-floored shed stood two planks on which the
Overland had rested. To the left of the planks the floor had recently
been raked. Stewart and Brouillard inspected the shed carefully.
Afterward Stewart chimed that a small unraked patch near one of the
planks showed the clear imprint of a U. S. Royal tire, much too large
for an Overland but the right size for a Buick.[1]
Boda locked the shed again and Stewart thanked him for his
cooperation, saying he might have a chat with him later.
The more Stewart thought about Boda afterward the more dubious the
Italian began to appear. Later, he felt he should have arrested
him on the spot, but at the time there had seemed nothing tangible
except the pistol. Early the next morning he drove over to Puffer’s
Place alone. Boda was eating breakfast at the kitchen table when he
glimpsed the chief’s car coming down South Elm Street. By the time
Stewart knocked on the door, he had slipped out of sight. Stewart
knocked several times, peered through the window at the breakfast
table, and then drove off.
For Boda that second visit was conclusive. The police would be
coming back. Whatever they might want, he preferred not to be there.
An Italian friend came down from Brockton and helped him get his
belongings together. He left on the Boston train that afternoon, and
for the next few weeks stayed under cover with an Italian family in
East Boston.
Just as Boda had suspected, Stewart returned the following evening.
But this time, when he flashed his light through the kitchen window,
there was nothing to see. Except for a few tin cans in the corner the
place was empty.