committed the crime in Bridgewater and Braintree and they mistook
Sacco for Martini. Witner in his heart knew that Martini had nothing
to do with it, because Martini was with Witner together in New York
at the time these robberies and murders were committed._
Luban’s rambling affidavit was of course as suspect as his character.
Sacco was never accused of participating in the Bridgewater attempt,
although Luban seems to have got it into his head that he was the
leader. Nor did Sacco in the least resemble Silva. Luban called Sacco
and Vanzetti good union men, but the two had never belonged to a
trade-union and as anarchists were opposed to them. Nor, of course,
was there ever any indication that Massachusetts officials were
interested in finding a way to free Sacco and Vanzetti.
Witner, safe behind the shield of language, undoubtedly told Luban
some story about Silva in Yiddish, and it is apparent from Luban’s
confused accounts of Pelser, Gould, and Lola Andrews that he had
heard something about the witnesses. Moore made no further attempts
to get in touch with Luban.
Silva, too, made an affidavit for Hurwitz in which he admitted he had
known Jocomo for sixteen years and claimed that the latter’s brother
Joe, who lived in Mattapan, “had come in possession of $12,000 of the
money that was stolen at Braintree holdup, and an investigation was
started to find from where he got that money.”
He stated that he told Moore he had nothing to do with either the
Bridgewater or the Braintree holdups and knew nothing about them
since on both dates he was living in a house belonging to Luban on
West 46th Street in New York. It was on Luban’s advice that he had
agreed to play along with Moore and pretend he had taken part in the
Bridgewater business. Moore, Witner, and Jocomo had coached him on
the dates of the holdups, and Moore had promised to show him maps of
Bridgewater and Braintree.
Nothing more was to be heard from Silva until after Sacco and
Vanzetti were dead. As soon as Mede was let out of Charlestown in
1923, Moore tried to persuade him to make a statement about the
Bridgewater attempt. Mede, with the shadow of Charlestown still
large behind him, refused, but agreed for a salary to go to New York
and see what he could find out about the Braintree affair from the
underworld there. A few weeks later Moore’s investigator Tommy Doyle
had a talk with him in the Hotel McAlpin, and Mede agreed again that
he had planned the Bridgewater job and that Sammarco and Silva had
miscarried it.
Doyle made notes of this conversation. They remained among Moore’s
papers until Thompson dug them out in the desperate spring days of
1927 and decided to ask Mede for an affidavit. Mede was then a boxing
promoter in Massachusetts, doing a little bootlegging on the side. He
still hesitated to say anything, for fear that his athletic license
might be revoked, but finally agreed to tell what he knew to Governor
Fuller if the governor would promise not to pass the information
on to the State Police or take away his license. Six weeks before
the executions the Big Chief, accompanied by Tommy Doyle, told the
disbelieving governor his story of the Bridgewater holdup; of how he
had planned it originally with Silva and later learned the outcome
from Sammarco at State Prison. At the end of the interview Fuller
called in Captain Blye of the State Police and told Mede to repeat
his story. Mede refused.
As August arrived, with the execution date set for the tenth, a
Hanover Street lawyer of clouded reputation, Joseph Santosuosso,
urged Mede to make one more attempt to save the two men’s lives.
Mede finally agreed to make a sworn statement about the Bridgewater
affair to the State Police. With Santosuosso he went to Captain
Blye’s office. Blye now refused to listen to him. And Mede’s earlier
apprehensions turned out to be only too well justified, for his
license was revoked soon after he talked with Fuller.
* * * * *
There were other echoes from Moore’s visit to Atlanta. On November
1, 1923, an envelope arrived in Boston addressed “The Sacco-Vanzetti
Case.” It was delivered to the Boston Bar Association and turned
over to Moore. Inside was a to-whom-it-may-concern letter from Emil
Moller, a Dane awaiting deportation in a Washington, D.C., jail.
“I have information about the Sacco-Vanzetti Case,” Moller wrote.
Through his friendship with Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana, Moore
managed to get Moller’s deportation postponed, and sent Carpenter,
his investigator, to talk with him.
A petty criminal, Moller had made the tactical mistake of breaking
into a house within the District of Columbia, thus making a minor
crime a federal offense that sent him to the penitentiary in
Atlanta. There he had shared a cell with one Joe Morelli, the leader
of a Providence, Rhode Island, gang who was serving twelve years
for robbing interstate shipments from freight cars. Moller had a
typewriter in his cell and used to write letters and appeals for
Morelli as well as for two other acquaintances, Luban and Silva.
Sometimes in the long evenings after the lights were out Morelli
would tell Moller of the things he had done “that would make your
hair stand on end.” Once, according to Moller, he boasted that his
gang had pulled off the South Braintree robbery. Morelli told about
it in detail: how the gang had started out before sunrise from a
Providence saloon, how they had driven up Pearl Street in a stolen
Buick, how afterward as they were changing cars in the woods they
had almost been caught when the wheels of the second car got stuck
in the mud. Looking for an alibi in case any of this ever came to
light, Morelli asked Moller to swear that during April 1920 he had
been living at the American Lodging House in East Side New York—a
place run by Luban’s wife—and that on the night of the fifteenth he
had been playing poker with Morelli, Silva, and Luban. Moller had
pretended to go along.
Telling this story to Carpenter and later to Moore, Moller was the
first to mention the name—Morelli—that would run like a dark thread
through the fabric of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Moore considered that
much of what Moller had to say was hearsay. Not for another two years
would his story receive any corroboration, and by that time Moore
would no longer be connected with the case, and Moller himself would
have been deported.
* * * * *
On November 18, 1925, Edward Miller, a trusty in the Dedham jail,
stopped at Sacco’s cell, handed him a magazine, and told him to look
inside it. A few minutes later Miller passed Sacco’s cell again and
found him leaning against the wall trembling, a slip of paper in his
hands, his eyes full of tears. “What is this?” he asked, his voice
barely under control.
“Can’t you read English?” Miller returned.
The note read:
_I hear by confess to being in the south Braintree shoe company crime
and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime._
_Celestino Madeiros_
The writer was a sallow, stoop-shouldered twenty-three-year-old
Portuguese who had shot and killed the cashier of a Wrentham bank
during a gang holdup in November 1924. He was being kept in the
Dedham jail while his conviction for murder was appealed. Several
times Madeiros had sidled up to Sacco in the washroom and said under
his breath: “Nick, I know who did the South Braintree job.” Once he
had sent Sacco a crude map of Oak Street in Randolph, with a house
marked “Thomas” and the scrawled notation that Sacco should look up
this Thomas.
Sacco had thrown the paper away, deciding that Madeiros was cracked
or else another spy, like that Carbone they had put next to him four
years ago. But this note in the magazine seemed to be another matter.
Sacco sent it to Thompson, who came at once to the jail to talk with
Madeiros. The three men talked together in the reception room for
an hour, Madeiros answering Thompson’s questions while the lawyer
made notes on the back of an envelope. The Portuguese was quite
willing to tell about what he claimed was his part in the South
Braintree holdup, but he said he would not identify any of his
companions. Sacco, sitting beside him, shaking with excitement, kept
interjecting: “For Jesus’s sake, tell the truth!”
Madeiros’ story was that on April 15, 1920, he was picked up at 4
A.M. at Zack’s Hotel in Providence, Rhode Island, by four Italians
who arrived in a five-passenger Hudson touring car. They drove to
some woods near Oak Street in Randolph, Massachusetts, where they
found another Italian waiting with a Buick. Changing cars, they drove
to South Boston, where they stopped at a saloon in Andrews Square.
Then, after returning to Providence, they headed for South Braintree,
where they arrived about noon. They killed a few more hours in a
speakeasy a few miles from the shoe factories and then, just before
three, left for South Braintree.
During the holdup Madeiros said he sat in the back seat “scared
to death” with a Colt .38, which he did not use, in his hand. The
payroll money, he said, had been in a large black bag.
“These four men,” he told Thompson, “persuaded me to go with them
two or three nights before when I was talking with them in a saloon
in Providence. They talked like professionals. They said they had
done lots of jobs of this kind. They had been engaged in robbing
freight cars in Providence. Two were young men from twenty to
twenty-five-years old, one was about forty, the other thirty-five.
All wore caps. I was then eighteen years old. I do not remember
whether they were shaved or not. Two of them did the shooting—the
oldest one and another. They were left on the street. The arrangement
was that they should meet me in a Providence saloon the next night to
divide the money. I went there but they did not come.
“They had been stealing silk, shoes, cotton from freight cars and
sending it to New York. Two of them lived on North Main Street, in
lodging houses. I had known them three or four months. The old man
was named Mike. Another was called Williams or Bill. I don’t remember
what the others were called.”
Madeiros said that he knew their last names but he refused to give
them. After Thompson had his notes typed up into an affidavit,
Madeiros signed it without hesitation. A year and a half later he
elaborated on this story when he was examined jointly by Thompson
and an assistant district attorney, Dudley Ranney. In this dual
examination Madeiros said that one of the men in the South Braintree
murder car was not Italian but “Polish or Finland.” He still claimed
that the payroll money had been in a black bag that had been tossed
in the back of the car and a blanket thrown over it. As to how South
Braintree had looked on that spring afternoon, he could not remember.
He had been drinking and, huddled half-drunk in the back seat with
shots echoing round him, he noticed no landmarks. However, he
remembered that just before they got to the Stoughton turnpike they
came to a fork in the road and stopped at a house where there was a
woman in the yard. They asked her how to get on the Providence road.
From the back seat Madeiros could not see her. At the Randolph Woods
hideout they had changed back to the Hudson, and the Italian who had
been waiting there had driven away alone in the Buick. They drove
very fast in the Hudson through Randolph, where they were seen by a
boy named Thomas who lived on Oak Street. Madeiros became acquainted
with the boy four years later when he went to live on the same
street. Thomas told him then that he had seen the South Braintree car
go whizzing by.
There were parallels between the Wrentham and South Braintree
holdups, as Thompson soon learned, that made it seem as if the
Wrentham gang had used the earlier holdup as a model. Two stolen
cars had again been used at Wrentham, a Buick and then a Hudson. The
rear window of the getaway car had been removed and the bandits had
carried a shotgun in the rear seat to discourage pursuit.
Madeiros was captured a few days after the Wrentham crime, and
shortly afterward two of his associates were picked up—Jimmy Croft,
usually known as Weeks, and Alfred Bedard, the driver of the car. The
fourth bandit, Harry Goldenberg, got away.
Bedard, on arraignment, was represented by Katzmann—now in a law
partnership with John Vahey—while Madeiros’ counsel was the same
Francis Squires who had been involved with Angelina DeFalco in the
bribery trial.
Katzmann went to District Attorney Winfield Wilbar, who had
succeeded Harold Williams, to see if he could make a deal. Bedard
had been waiting in the car when the holdup killing took place, and
Katzmann argued that his client should be allowed to plead guilty to
manslaughter. Wilbar refused. “Second degree murder or go to bat” was
his ultimatum.
Bedard and Weeks pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received
life sentences. Madeiros, who had done the actual shooting,
always maintained that Detective Lieutenant Joseph Ferrari of the
State Police had promised him a second-degree murder sentence if
he confessed. Left alone to stand trial for his life, he felt
double-crossed.
His trial began on May 11, 1925, before Judge Henry Lummus, a
waddling three-hundred-pounder with a black Van Dyke beard. Scarcely
more than a formality, it lasted only a few days. The car used in the
holdup, a conspicuous blue Hudson speedster, was traced to Bedard
in Providence. Madeiros himself had been picked up in Providence at
Zack’s Hotel, where he was found in bed with two other Portuguese
floaters, Mingo and Pacheco. Under his pillow was the gun he had used
at Wrentham. The most that Squires could do for his doomed client was
to question his sanity. It took the jury less than an hour to decide
that Madeiros was sane and to bring in a verdict of guilty. There the
case would have ended with a short walk to the electric chair except
for a crotchet of Judge Lummus’. The bulky judge had long wondered
why it was considered necessary at the outset of any criminal trial
to instruct the jury that a defendant was presumed to be innocent.
Deliberately he omitted the banal phrase, and because he did so
Squires appealed the verdict. It was while this appeal was pending
that Madeiros had written his note to Sacco.
The question was soon raised as to whether Madeiros had done this
because, in his version, “I seen Sacco’s wife come up here with the
kids and I felt sorry for the kids,” or whether he thought that the
confession might be of help to him in his second trial. He already
knew that the Defense Committee had spent a quarter of a million
dollars defending Sacco and Vanzetti. According to Oliver Curtis, the
deputy jail master, Miller, the trusty, had come to him one afternoon
to ask if Madeiros might borrow a pamphlet from Sacco containing the
committee’s financial report. Thirty or forty minutes later Miller
returned it to Curtis with a scrawled note:
_I hear by confess to being in the shoe company crime at south
Braintree on April 15 1920 and that Sacco and Vanzetti was not there_
_Celestino F. Madeiros_
Curtis kept the note but did nothing about it. After waiting three
days Madeiros sent the second note to Sacco. The Portuguese did not
deny he had read the financial report but claimed he had read it
after he had written the two notes, not before.
A liar, thief, murderer, Madeiros was a man whose uncorroborated word
would be worth nothing. His sister and friends testified that he
had the mind of a child of ten, and like his parents was subject to
epileptic fits. Even before he had quit school at age fifteen he had
been arrested a dozen times. In Providence, Rhode Island, in January
1920, he emerged resplendent in the blue-gray uniform of a lieutenant
in the American Rescue League and proceeded to solicit money. The
League existed mostly in the imagination of one Arthur Tatro, who
wore more elaborate insignia on his Salvation-Army style uniform and
called himself captain. He and Madeiros bivouacked in the four-story,
bathless, threadbare Zack’s Hotel—its ground floor conveniently
a saloon—Tatro sharing a room with Madeiros’ sister Mary, who
was given the rank of second lieutenant for her services, while
Madeiros bedded in with a young red-headed girl, the sole private of
their little army. For some months they drummed the streets in Fox
Point—the Portuguese section of Providence—and in neighboring Fall
River, Taunton, and New Bedford. On May 1 Tatro’s private army was
outflanked by the police and arrested for fraud and impersonation.
Madeiros was picked up at his rescue work in New Bedford’s Bristol
House, a combination cabaret and brothel. While he was out on bail
the Providence police caught him breaking into a shop on May 25.
In July, beginning his term in the House of Correction, he apparently
had no money. Yet five months later he left Providence with
twenty-eight hundred dollars of unknown origin in his pocket. Not
until 1923 did he return. Then for a time he set himself up as a
contractor and built several garages, none of which made him a
profit. However, with a little hijacking on the side he managed to
keep himself in funds. In March 1924, he went to work for Barney
Monterios, a Cape Verde Island Brava, who ran the Bluebird Inn at
Seekonk, about four miles from Providence.
Conveniently just over the Massachusetts line, this rural haven
combined the features of a roadhouse, dance hall, and speakeasy, in
which Providence gangsters could relax undisturbed by thoughts of the
police. Upstairs there were always a few girls available. Barney ran
the place with the help of a brass-blonde companion, Mae Boice, who
was sometimes thought to be his wife.
Madeiros helped build a dining annex at the end of the dance floor,
drove Mae around on errands, acted as bouncer in the evenings when
the boys got a little too steamed, and spent much of his spare time
upstairs with a new girl, Tessie, a plum-smooth little Italian. He
had two revolvers with him, a .38 and a .45, and sometimes as he lay
on the bed he used to scare Tessie by shooting the flies off the
ceiling. Once when he was in the yard amusing himself by shooting at
trees, he picked off Mae’s cat as it passed with its three kittens.
Mae was furious, although she later forgave him and with time
developed a certain affection for him.
One July evening, Bibber Barone, a trigger man associated with the
Morelli gang of Providence, pulled up in front of the inn with a
Cadillac full of his pals and announced loudly that he had come for
Tessie. Madeiros went out on the porch with his revolver and Bibber
stood on the grass, his hand in his pocket, staring at him. Mae Boice
and Jimmy Weeks, who often used to drop in at the Bluebird, watched
them through the open window. Weeks heard Madeiros tell Bibber “that
he and his gang had double-crossed him once on the job, and that he
might forgive them for that, but if they took the girl he would bump
them all, and that it would be sure death.” Bibber wilted back to the
Cadillac.
By autumn Madeiros had grown tired of Tessie’s olive plumpness
and more attentive to the blonde Mae. Once he flashed a roll of
thirty hundred-dollar bills in Mae’s face and tried to persuade
her to run off with him. This was too much for Barney, who fired
his carpenter-bouncer at the point of a revolver. Some time after
Madeiros had left the inn he drove back with Weeks and picked a
gunfight with Barney in the front yard. Madeiros hit nothing except
the house, but as he and Weeks drove off Barney managed to shoot out
the taillight of their car.
* * * * *
Although the Madeiros confession was signed and ready in November
1925, Thompson did not make it public while his death-sentence appeal
was pending, since both he and the district attorney felt that if it
became known that Madeiros had admitted to a second murder the fact
would damage him in any new trial. Then, too, Thompson was optimistic
about the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s pending decision on the
defense’s appeal from Judge Thayer’s denial of the supplementary
motions—he had argued the appeal before Chief Justice Arthur Rugg in
the Pemberton Square Court House through three bleak January days.
Four months later, on May 12, 1926, the court ruled against the
defense on all points.
Madeiros had better, if brief, luck. His conviction was reversed by
the Supreme Court in March 1926, thus demonstrating to Judge Lummus
and other whimsically inclined judges that the formula must not be
tampered with. Madeiros went on trial again in May. During most of
the proceedings he slumped in his chair with his feet on the rail and
his eyes shut as if he were asleep. The jury took less than two hours
to find him guilty.
On the second day of the Madeiros trial, Thompson drove down to Oak
Street in Randolph to locate the house Madeiros had marked on his
crude map and see if there was any trace of the boy called Thomas.
He found the house more easily than he had expected. It was occupied
by a Thomas Driver, who regretfully admitted knowing both Weeks and
Madeiros. Weeks, in fact, had been arrested in the house, and the
publicity that followed had caused the Drivers much humiliation.
For six months before the Wrentham holdup, Weeks with his wife and
children had lived in a shack on Cedar Street a half-mile down the
road. A friendly neighbor, he used to run small errands for the
Drivers in his Ford, often gave a lift to young Tom, then in high
school, and even promised to teach the boy how to drive.
Driver scarcely knew Madeiros in the brief time that the latter lived
with Weeks, but shortly before their arrest he had begun to wonder if
the pair might not be bootleggers. He could not say whether his son
had seen the holdup car on the day of the South Braintree murders.
The boy himself was away at sea, working for the United Fruit
Company. Thompson saw him later when he returned from his voyage.
Young Driver told him that he had not personally seen the car go past
but that his mother had, and that after she had read about the crime
in the paper she thought the men must have been the South Braintree
bandits.[16]
Thompson, faced with increasing demands on his time, found the added
complications of the Madeiros confession too much for him. He needed
an energetic young lawyer to devote all his time to investigating
Madeiros’ story. In search of one he turned to Dean Roscoe Pound
of the Harvard Law School. Pound mentioned Herbert Ehrmann, then
in his thirties, a lawyer who had come to Boston from Louisville,
Kentucky, via Harvard College and the Law School. Four years
before, Pound and Felix Frankfurter had edited a survey, _Criminal
Justice in Cleveland_, and Ehrmann had contributed a chapter on the
city’s courts. It seemed to Pound that Ehrmann, with his Cleveland
experience in investigating civic scandals, would be just the man to
track down the intricacies of Madeiros and the Providence gang.
At the outset Ehrmann did not have the conviction he came to
share later so burningly with Thompson that Sacco and Vanzetti
were innocent. When, on May 22, 1926, two days after Madeiros had
been found guilty for the second time, he set out for Seekonk and
Providence, he did not expect much.