closed by the police. It looked a traditional New England farmhouse
gone to seed. A few chickens were wandering about the dusty front
yard, and at the side an open kitchen door sagged on its hinges.
Going up to the door, Ehrmann found a wrinkled Brava woman in a red
bandana sitting just inside, plucking a fowl. She said she was Barney
Monterios’ mother. When Ehrmann asked about her son, she slipped
into the next room and returned with Mae Boice, who told him curtly
that her husband was not at home. Ehrmann got nowhere with her until
he mentioned that he had just talked with Madeiros. At the name the
hard face beneath the brass hair softened and the voice was full of
concern as she asked about the surly Portuguese. Did Ehrmann think it
fair to execute a man who was not really sane? As she talked she led
him out of the kitchen, across the dance floor, and past the piano
to the dining alcove. He told her of Madeiros’ confession. At first
she said it could not be true because on April 15, 1920, he had been
in Mexico, but after thinking it over she agreed that he had not
left New England until the following January. Mae remembered that he
had said he had twenty-eight hundred dollars with him. Ehrmann knew
that when Madeiros was arrested in June 1920 he had no money at all.
Yet six months later and just out of the house of correction he had
acquired a sum, it struck Ehrmann at once, equal to just about a
fifth of the South Braintree payroll. That was all the Boston lawyer
found out at the Bluebird Inn. Nevertheless, he felt he was on the
track of something tangible.
Turning south from the inn, he drove to the dingy Providence police
headquarters on Fountain Street. What he now needed to know was
whether there had been, as Madeiros said, a local gang of Italians
engaged in robbing freight cars.
Ehrmann put his questions to Chief Inspector Henry Connors. The
answers were more of a corroboration than he would have dared hope.
Yes, there had been a gang in Providence robbing freight cars who had
finally been arrested on October 18, 1919. They were American-born
Italians, known as the Morell or Morelli gang from the five brothers
who formed its nucleus. Joe, Fred, and Pasquale Morelli had been
tried in May 1920, but during April they had been out on bail.
Connors had no tangible reason for suspecting that the Morellis had
been in on the South Braintree holdup, but he suggested that Ehrmann
see Captain Ralph Pieraccini of the New Bedford police, who might
know something of the doings of Frank and Mike Morelli in that city,
and John Richards, who had been a United States marshal at the time
the Morellis went on trial.
On the way back to Boston Ehrmann reflected on the South Braintree
robbery. It was apparent to him that someone must have scouted the
factories in advance and learned all about the day and time of
the payroll deliveries.[17] If he could now find some connection
between the Morellis and South Braintree, that would show too much
coincidence for Madeiros to have invented his story.
Three days later, Ehrmann drove the fifty miles down to Providence
again with his wife Sarah. While he interviewed the Morellis’ former
defense lawyer, Daniel Geary, she spent the afternoon looking up
the indictments of the Morellis in the clerk’s office of the United
States District Court. Geary reminded Ehrmann that he could not
ethically disclose confidential communications from his clients, nor
would he in any way implicate the Morellis in the South Braintree
murders, but he would be glad to help in collecting any information
that had been made public during their trial.
The Morellis had been systematic in their freight-yard robberies,
confining their thefts to shoes and textiles which they disposed
of through fences in New York. Ehrmann wanted to know how the gang
received information on the shipments of merchandise. Geary thought
that they sent spotters to adjacent industrial towns to watch
shipments being loaded and get the numbers of the cars. Joe Morelli
had taken a railroad detective, Robert Karnes, who had been gathering
evidence against the gang, to various towns in Massachusetts and
shown him where the shipments were spotted. Probably this was
a maneuver of Joe’s to divert suspicion from himself, for the
individualistic Joe did not follow the gangster’s code of loyalty.
Ehrmann asked whether Karnes had mentioned any specific places, and
Geary recalled his having said something about Rice & Hutchins. The
name had no particular significance for him until Ehrmann exclaimed:
“That’s in South Braintree where the murders occurred.”
Geary whistled. “That brings it home, doesn’t it!” he said.
Geary could not find the portion of the trial record containing the
detective’s testimony—although the court stenographer remembered
the reference—and later when he signed an affidavit he referred
less specifically to “Taunton, Attleboro and other places in
Massachusetts.” In the battle of affidavits that followed, Assistant
District Attorney Ranney got Karnes to deny that he had ever gone
or said he had gone with Joe Morelli to South Braintree. He did not
deny, however, having gone with Joe to towns in that general vicinity.
When, after the interview with Geary, Ehrmann met his wife in the
lobby of the Providence-Biltmore he found her as full of information
and as excited about it as he was about what he had discovered. She
had learned in the clerks’ office that the first four counts of the
Morelli indictment covered the theft of 611 pairs of ladies’ shoes
from Rice & Hutchins, while the eighth count was for 78 pairs of
men’s shoes from Slater & Morrill. For Ehrmann that was proof enough.
There must have been a spotter for the Morellis in South Braintree
who had studied the two factories and noted when the payroll arrived
and how it was delivered. He was certain that when he told this
to his Harvard classmate, Dudley Ranney, the district attorney’s
office would want to investigate the whole matter of the Morellis and
probably arrange a new trial. But when Ehrmann telephoned the next
day, Ranney was not at all interested in the discovery and his voice
had an edge to it as he told Ehrmann so.[18]
While Ehrmann was in Providence on Tuesday, May 25, Thompson was
interviewing Jimmy Weeks in Charlestown. He had talked with him five
days before, but Weeks had then said no more than that Madeiros’
confession was true. Thompson asked Deputy Warden Hoggsett to try to
persuade him to make a statement, and several days later he learned
that Weeks was willing to talk.
Weeks, a deceptively mild-mannered man, gave Thompson much the same
information about the Morellis that Ehrmann was to bring back from
Providence. He had been familiar with that large and notorious family
when the brothers were living near Eagle Park, Providence. Once he
had helped Joe steal a load of whisky out of a warehouse on Smith
Hill, but Joe had claimed that the whisky was vinegar and refused to
pay him off. It was true, Weeks said, that the Morellis worked on
tips. They always had plenty of money and they liked to flash it at
the races and at ball games.
Weeks said he had known Madeiros for six years. A short while before
the Wrentham holdup, the two of them had talked over their plans in
a barroom in Andrews Square, South Boston, Madeiros remarking that
it was strange he should be in the very same bar he had been in four
years before on the way to South Braintree. The men concerned in that
job, whom Madeiros in his first confession had called Mike and Bill,
he had called by their real names in talking to Weeks. They were,
according to Weeks, the Morellis of Providence. Madeiros had often
talked about the South Braintree crime. The four who had been with
him there were Joe, Mike, Bill, and Butsy Morelli.
In the Wrentham job Madeiros had used a Hudson as a getaway car. He
told Weeks he had enough of Buicks after South Braintree, where they
had used a Buick and switched to a Hudson afterward. Joe Morelli, he
said, had double-crossed him on his cut of the payroll.
As soon as Weeks had signed the statement, Thompson drove to the
Dedham jail to see Madeiros. Sheriff Capen telephoned Assistant
District Attorney William Kelley to ask permission for the interview.
Then Thompson himself took the telephone and explained to Kelley that
he hoped to clear up the Sacco-Vanzetti case in a few days and that
he wanted to question Madeiros about the confession that Weeks had
just made to the South Braintree holdup.
Kelley gave his permission, then left at once for Charlestown with
State Detective Michael Fleming, who knew Weeks, and Lieutenant Henry
Plett of the State Police to act as a stenographer. They met Weeks in
the rotunda and moved to a small side room where they sat around a
table.
“Jimmy, did you make a full confession in regard to the holdup in
South Braintree?” Fleming asked him with professional sternness.
“Jesus, no,” Weeks answered fearfully. “I didn’t make any confession
like that.”
Fleming said he heard otherwise. “Well, I did not!” the other
insisted. The detective warned him that he would be very foolish to
try to help someone else out of a scrape by making statements like
that. Kelley then asked Weeks what he had told Thompson.
Weeks said that Madeiros had told him in 1924 “that Sacco was not in
the stick-up at South Braintree.” Madeiros admitted that he himself
had been in on the South Braintree job but never went into details or
said how much of the money he received.
Fleming at this point turned paternally reproachful: “Now all the
time we used to ride up to see you here you told us nothing about
this. If a man is innocent I want to get him out of it. Joe and I are
the first fellows you should have told. You don’t know whether you
believe Madeiros?”
Weeks did not know. He had seen Bibber Barone at the Bluebird Inn, he
said, and he knew Frank Morelli, and he remembered Joe Morelli’s name
as well as the others in his gang: “Joe, Butsy, Patsy and a fellow
called Gyp the Blood.”
With further questioning Weeks grew confused, talking in the same
sentence about the shooting in South Braintree and the gunfight
with Barney Monterios at the Bluebird Inn, speaking also of an
unidentified holdup where Madeiros had been double-crossed and that
“he told me many times that it was the one that Sacco was in on.”
Kelley left Weeks to his confusion, warning him he was at liberty to
talk all he wanted but if “anyone comes here to see you and wants
information, you have to look out for yourself. If they write out
what you say and want you to sign papers, you yourself have to decide
what you want to do.”
With the salvo of Weeks’ counterconfession, accompanied by a triple
volley of sworn statements from Kelley, Fleming, and Plett, there
began the battle of the affidavits. Relations between Assistant
District Attorney Ranney—now in charge of the post-trial developments
in the Sacco-Vanzetti case—and the defense lawyers remained alertly
decorous. Any asperity was after all tempered by the fact that they
were all Harvard men as well as lawyers in the same city.
As soon as Ehrmann or Thompson produced an affidavit, Ranney felt
obligated to come up with a counteraffidavit. Thompson suggested to
Attorney General Jay Benton that all important witnesses connected
with Madeiros should be interviewed jointly by representatives of the
defense and the Commonwealth in order that the case “not degenerate
into a contest of affidavits in which each party’s trying to offset
the affidavits of the other party, or to contradict affidavits
already obtained.” District Attorney Wilbar would not agree to any
such combined operation, and the battle was on. During June and
July eighty-seven affidavits were filed—in addition to forty-six
miscellaneous statements, depositions, and letters—the engagement
reaching the ultimate point where affidavits were being filed about
affidavits.
During the afternoon of May 25 Thompson returned to Weeks with
a typewritten affidavit based on the notes he had made of their
morning conversation. Weeks signed it without saying anything of
the assistant district attorney’s noontime visit. The next day
Thompson assembled the affidavits he and Ehrmann had ready and
filed a motion with the clerk at Dedham for a new trial based on
Madeiros’ statement. Not until two days later did he learn of Weeks’
maunderings. He went at once to Charlestown.
Weeks, shuffling into the rotunda in his prison denims, quivered when
he saw Thompson’s set face. Thompson asked about his conversation
with Fleming and Kelley. Weeks said that they threatened him about
what might happen to him if he signed an affidavit for Thompson.
Kelley had taken out a package of Camels and given him one, asking
him if anything had been offered him to make a statement in the
Sacco-Vanzetti case. Weeks told Thompson he had replied, “No, Mr.
Kelley, you have just offered me this cigarette, and not so much as
this cigarette had been offered to me by anyone concerned in the
Sacco-Vanzetti case.”[19]
He had admitted to Kelley that Madeiros told him and a since-murdered
gangster named Steve Benkosky about taking part in the South
Braintree holdup. For Thompson he now added several new details. Joe
Morelli before his arrest had owned a Cole touring car and had given
him rides in it several times. There was a second Mike, called Mike
the Rug, in the Morelli gang; his real name was Cameron O’Connor.
Weeks knew him as well as he knew Gyp the Blood, Fred Morelli, and
Bibber Barone. They would sometimes come to the Bluebird Inn in an
open Cadillac. Weeks claimed that some of his conversation with
Kelley and Fleming had not been taken down by the stenographer. Both
men had warned him about talking too much if he ever hoped to have
his sentence commuted, adding that Madeiros was only eighteen at the
time of the South Braintree affair and they knew he had nothing to do
with it.
When Assistant District Attorney Ranney read the copy of the Madeiros
confession that Thompson sent him, he arranged to have the Portuguese
examined as to his sanity. Madeiros, sullen and challenging, stuck to
his statement about having taken part in the South Braintree crime.
He had admitted being in on it “because it was true,” although he had
“done no shooting.” Beyond this he would say little. Whatever the
doctors who examined him may have thought of his story, they at least
concluded that he was sane.
* * * * *
While the battle of affidavits grew warmer in Boston, Ehrmann was
making daily shuttle runs across the placid countryside to Providence
and New Bedford. He had become convinced that the Morelli gang alone
was at the bottom of the South Braintree crime, and each trip he made
seemed to him to make this more certain.
The same day that Thompson was having his second session with Jimmy
Weeks, Ehrmann questioned the New Bedford police captain, Ralph
Pieraccini. The captain listened quietly to the lawyer’s request
for information about Mike Morelli, but came to life when Madeiros’
confession was mentioned. “We’d better have Jake in,” he said.
Jake turned out to be Sergeant Ellsworth Jacobs, who in 1920 had
been a department inspector. When he heard Ehrmann’s request he
slipped out and came back with his 1920 notebook which he opened to
the entry: “R.I. 154E, Buick touring car, Mike Morell.” This, he
explained, meant that a few day before April 15, 1920, he had seen
Morelli driving what looked to be a new Buick touring car. Knowing
Mike, he suspected the car was stolen and wrote down the license
number. On the afternoon of April 15 he caught a glimpse of the same
car sometime between five and five-thirty. The license plate was the
same, _R.I. 154E_.
On the afternoon of April 12 he saw a Cole Eight touring car with the
license plate _R.I. 154E_ parked in front of Joe Fiore’s restaurant
at the comer of Kempton and Purchase streets. “The whole thing looked
fishy,” Jacobs told Ehrmann, “so I went into the restaurant to
inquire, although I was not on duty at the time. At a table inside
I saw four men who looked like Italians, one of whom was Frank
Morell. The men at the table were extremely nervous when they saw me
come in. I can’t say just what it was, but they acted apprehensive
of something. One of the Italians whom I remember distinctly was a
short heavy-set man with a wide, square face, high cheekbones, smooth
shaven and dark brown hair. I can never forget that man’s face.
As I approached the group, this man made a movement with his hand
towards his pocket and I thought he was going to draw a gun. As I was
unarmed at the time I was badly scared, but tried not to show it.
Fortunately, Frank spoke up and relieved the situation somewhat.
“‘What’s the matter, Jake?’ he said quickly. ‘What do you want with
me? Why are you picking on me all the time?’
“‘Look here, Frank,’ I said, ‘there’s a Cole car downstairs with
a number-plate that I’ve seen on your Buick car that Mike’s been
driving. How did that happen?’” At that the bunch eased up somewhat.
“‘Oh,’ said Frank, ‘that’s a dealer’s plate. You see, I’m in the
automobile business and we just transfer plates from one car to
another.’
“At that time I had no way of contradicting Frank, so I left the
restaurant and talked the matter over later with Ralph Pieraccini.
At the time of the South Braintree murders and payroll robbery he
and I had suspected the Morells, especially on account of Mike and
the Buick car so that the actions of that bunch at Fiore’s made us
more suspicious. Shortly after that, however, Sacco and Vanzetti were
arrested and as I had no definite evidence, I dropped the matter. I
never saw Frank again since approximately that time, but Mike hung
around New Bedford for possibly a year afterwards.”
Ehrmann fitted another piece to his puzzle when he visited John
Richards, now adjutant general of Rhode Island. Richards, a big-boned
solid man with slate-colored eyes and a yellow mustache, had been in
his youth a soldier of fortune, and even as a middle-aged United
States marshal he had not lost his taste for excitement. Several
times he had shot it out with the Morelli gang in the shadows of the
Providence freight yards.
Listening to Ehrmann, Richards became instantly sympathetic to this
young, dark-eyed lawyer, so different from him in temperament and
physique and racial background. Ehrmann showed him Weeks’ affidavit
and Richards agreed that the composition of the gang was as Weeks
had made out: Joe, the oldest and the leader; Pasquale or Patsy;
Frank; Fred or Butsy; Bibber Barone; Gyp the Blood. They had owned a
Cole touring car and also a Reo truck. In a later affidavit Richards
admitted that, like Weeks, he had confused Fred Morelli with Frank
and that it was the latter who had been nicknamed Butsy. Richards
recalled two other gang members, Paulo Rosso and Tony Mancini. There
had also been a pair of young hijackers who were handy with cars: a
light-complexioned man named Raymond McDevitt and another known as
Steve the Pole. Both had since been killed in gunfights.
From the stories of Weeks and Sergeant Jacobs and Richards, and
from the various court, police, and jail records, from his pokings
about in Providence and New Bedford, Ehrmann now began to assemble
a hypothetical cast of characters for the South Braintree affair.
Madeiros had admitted to Ranney that he had shaped his story to
Thompson to shield a gang. For Ehrmann, Madeiros’ Mike was an obvious
transplant. The leader, “the oldest of the Italians,” must, in
Ehrmann’s opinion, have been Joe, a gangster capable of just such
careful planning as had gone into the South Braintree holdup. Butsy,
the most dangerous of the brothers, was another who seemed to qualify
for South Braintree. When Gyp the Blood showed signs of informing,
Butsy in open court had threatened to kill him. The milder-mannered
Mike was, as Sergeant Jacobs had noted, merely a car thief to whom
would probably have fallen the job of guarding the second car in the
woods. Madeiros crouched in the rear fitted the assistant district
attorney’s trial reference to the “man we cannot describe in the back
seat.” As for the gunman called Bill who, Madeiros said, had got out
of the car with the leader to do the actual shooting, Ehrmann thought
at first he might have been Bibber Barone, until it turned out that
Bibber had provided himself with the perfect alibi of being already
in jail. Gyp the Blood, though out of jail, was not the shooting
type. Richards had mentioned two other members of the gang, Paulo
Rosso and Tony Mancini, but soon advised Ehrmann later to eliminate
Rosso. That left Mancini, and the more Ehrmann learned about him the
more he seemed to fill the bill.
Mancini, besides being Joe Morelli’s close friend, was a nerveless
killer. In February 1921, in New York City, he had shot down Alberto
Alterio on Broome Street, almost across the street from police
headquarters. When the police captured him they found in his pocket
a Star 7.65-millimeter automatic—a type of gun that takes American
32-caliber cartridges. James Burns, Moore’s ballistics expert, had
testified at Dedham that five of the South Braintree bullets could
have been fired from a Steyr, and one of the few things that Dr.
Hamilton had been able to demonstrate to Van Amburgh’s satisfaction
was that three of the shells Bostock had picked up from the gravel
bore the marks of a foreign-make ejector claw. A Steyr was an
Austrian gun, a Star Spanish, but both were of the same caliber and
both were common in the United States in 1920.[20]
Ehrmann at once sensed the possibility that Mancini’s gun might have
been used at South Braintree. If Mancini himself could be set down
tentatively as Berardelli’s killer, that left only the driver to be
accounted for—the man who (even Katzmann finally admitted) had been
pale and fair-haired.
Both McDevitt and Benkosky, the dead hijackers, answered the
description, but Ehrmann found no witnesses who would identify
McDevitt’s picture. However, when he confronted the two Slater
& Morrill workers, Minnie Kennedy and Louise Hayes, with a
rogues’-gallery photograph of Benkosky, Minnie felt it “looked more
like the driver of the car than any photograph I have ever seen,” and
Louise found that “the picture very much resembles him.”
It seemed to Ehrmann that an encompassing pattern was beginning to
emerge. Still, he realized, his hypothesis could be destroyed by a
single granite fact. Joe Morelli could provide the key piece—if he
could be induced to tell the truth.
Truth and Joe Morelli, however, were scarcely on intimate terms.
Joe’s one steadfast quality was an exclusive loyalty to himself. At
the Providence trial he had been quite willing to let his brothers
take the rap for him. In fact, the day after he and his gang had been
robbing freight cars he had tipped off Marshal Richards, with the
idea of diverting suspicion from himself, that the same thieves would
be at it the following night. When the Morellis, minus Joe, returned
to the yard that evening they walked into a trap.
Joe liked to maintain whimsically that he was in the piano business.
He lived with Pauline Gray, who appeared in the police court
records as “a common night walker,” and used his house as a depot
in supplying girls for out-of-town roadhouses and as a distribution
center for drugs and counterfeit money. A few months before his
arrest he had persuaded his invalid widowed mother to deed over
her house to him, then had her confined as a pauper in the state
almshouse. Even gangsters tended to disapprove of Joe’s morals. He
liked to drop the names of big New York gangsters and boast that
he had been mixed up in such headline events as the 1912 Herman
Rosenthal murder. Years later he was to come forward to offer his
services for making contact with the kidnapers of the Lindbergh baby.
This was the man from whom the young Boston lawyer hoped to extract
the truth about the South Braintree crime when, on June 1, 1926, he
and Richards went to the federal penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth,
Kansas.[21] What struck Ehrmann at once, what would have struck
anyone who saw both men, was Joe Morelli’s singular resemblance to
Sacco—the identical cheekbones, thin hairline, jutting chin, heavy
eyebrows, and nose almost the same except that Joe’s had a Cyrano tip.
To all explanatory statements and questions Joe replied with denials.
He had never heard of South Braintree or Rice & Hutchins or Slater &
Morrill. He had never known Madeiros or any other Portuguese. Weeks’
name meant nothing to him. As for Mancini, which Mancini did they
mean? There were a lot of Mancinis. When Richards countered with
references to the Morellis’ activities in Providence, Joe cut him off
with the whine: “You are trying to spoil my record with my warden, my
good warden!” As for Sacco and Vanzetti, Joe had read something about
their case in the paper. He repeated the name Sacco several times,
then, as if he were thinking aloud, said “See Mancini about that.”
Then he wound up in a flurry of indignation. If the Massachusetts
people thought he committed the South Braintree crime, let them prove
the charges against him and send him to the electric chair!