rogues’-gallery photograph of Joe Morelli and tried it on several of
the witnesses. Some of the Italian laborers who had been digging in
the excavation exclaimed “Sacco!” when they saw the likeness. Mary
Splaine also thought it was Sacco. Lewis Wade, after reluctantly
examining it, admitted that it was “strikingly like” the man he had
seen. Frank Burke took one look, slapped the face of the photograph,
and exclaimed: “That’s the fellow who snapped his pistol at me and
yelled ‘Get out of the way, you son of a bitch!’”
Each step Ehrmann took reinforced his feeling that he was on the
right path. Joe Morelli’s giveaway remark, “See Mancini,” sent
Ehrmann to the penitentiary at Auburn, New York, where Mancini was
serving his life sentence. Mancini had none of Morelli’s Uriah Heep
quality. He seemed much more the big-time gangster: a square-set
impervious face, an on-and-off smile, glazed gray eyes that looked
through rather than at anyone. Ehrmann told him that Joe Morelli had
said to see him about Sacco and Vanzetti. “He must have been eating
something,” was Mancini’s noncommittal reply. Ehrmann pointed out
that Joe was a coward at heart who might be able to plan a big job
but would need someone like Mancini along to give him courage.
_At this point_ [_Ehrmann wrote later_], _Mancini gave his estimate
of Joe Morelli, deliberately, his gaze turned toward the window and
the scene beyond._
_“Unless you know that a man has killed, you can’t judge what he is
capable of doing.” There was a long pause. “Take me for instance. If
I hadn’t been caught, I would not be known as a murderer. At that,
they gave me too stiff a sentence. The cops disappointed me, for I
relieved them of a man who was worse than I am. The man I killed
had killed others.” Mancini paused, then added, “It was his life or
mine.”_
_Then very quietly, almost gently, he condemned people who tell on
others. “I have first-hand knowledge of Joe’s trial in Providence.
Gyp and Joe got nothing by blaming each other. They’d have been
better off, or just as well off if they hadn’t given each other up.
But if you’re going to tell, why not tell the whole truth? Why didn’t
Madeiros tell a whole-story instead of a half-story? He might as well
come clean if he started. If Madeiros wanted to tell a half-truth he
might have named as his confederates men who had died and then let
the State believe it or not.”_
Mancini claimed not to have heard of Benkosky or Weeks. He studied
the photographs of Sacco and Vanzetti that Ehrmann handed him, then
pointed to Vanzetti’s and announced: “They’re not stick-up men.
That’s not a stick-up man. Of course, you can’t judge only by a
man’s appearance—you can’t be always right on that. But the type of
Sacco and Vanzetti—they’re radicals, not stick-up men.” He could
see no resemblance, though, between Joe Morelli and Sacco. As the
interview came to an end he shook hands, saying he was sorry he could
not be more helpful. “I hope they won’t execute Sacco and Vanzetti,”
he concluded. “Killing them won’t bring the dead to life.”
Whether Mancini had anything more to tell remained his own secret.
There was, however, something else that might tell Ehrmann much—the
7.65-millimeter gun Mancini had used to kill Alterio. Tests could
soon show if it had fired the five unclassified South Braintree
bullets. Ehrmann went straight to New York City to his old friends
Henry Epstein, the assistant attorney general. Epstein was able to
locate the report on the gun in the files without any trouble. But
the weapon itself, like a tantalizing mirage, had vanished.
* * * * *
Everywhere that Ehrmann went, the Commonwealth investigators went
too. Lieutenant Ferrari was dispatched to Leavenworth to see Joe
Morelli. Joe swore that he had never seen Jimmy Weeks in his life
and accused Ehrmann of trying to bully him into signing a confession
for the South Braintree crime. Wilbar and Ranney followed up in
Providence with an interrogation of the Morelli trio of Patsy, Fred,
and Butsy. Fred had an alibi similar to Bibber Barone’s—he had been
in jail on April 15, 1920—and tried to maintain that Joe had shared
the same accommodations, although Joe was actually out on bail. The
other two swore that they had been living in quiet innocence in
Providence all that April, that they had never known either Weeks or
Madeiros, and that they had never been to the Bluebird Inn. After
their remarks had been taken down and transcribed the three were
seized with scruples and declined to sign on the grounds that they
feared for their personal safety.
The clerk’s office at Dedham became inundated with affidavits and
counteraffidavits from Georgia, Kansas, New York, New Bedford,
Providence, Fall River, Charlestown; from police officials, wardens,
jailbirds, streetwalkers, and citizens interested, disinterested, and
uninterested.
Manuel Pacheco, one of the floaters found in bed with Madeiros at his
arrest, signed an affidavit in the Charlestown prison, where he was
serving eight to ten years for a holdup, stating that Madeiros and
he had known each other from 1919 to 1921 and that Madeiros had once
told him he was “working with a good mob in Providence,” which to
Pacheco meant the Morellis.
Even Barney Monterios managed to forget his old grudge long enough
to visit Madeiros at Dedham, bringing Mae with him. Madeiros again
complained to them that he had been double-crossed on the South
Braintree job, and insisted that Sacco and Vanzetti had had nothing
to do with it. As Mae later related in an affidavit, she asked
Madeiros:
_“Is it really true, the statement you made about the South Braintree
murders, and were you really in it?” and he said, “Yes, it is the
truth, I was in it.” He didn’t give me any more particulars. He said
that he would like to save Sacco and Vanzetti because he knew they
were perfectly innocent, and he felt sorry for Sacco because he had
seen his wife and two children go by, but he said he hated to bring
others into it where there were more than two; and he said “If I
cannot save Sacco and Vanzetti by my own confession, why should I
bring four or five others into it?” I said “It is an awful thing to
see two innocent men lose their lives and the guilty escape.” He
said, “Yes I know it.”_
Each side in this battle of paper used its affidavits like pieces on
a chessboard. On the whole, Thompson played a more skillful game. But
it was a game, as he realized, in which a checkmate was not possible.
Finally a measure of sense was brought into the proceedings when
Ranney proposed that they take a joint deposition from Madeiros.
On June 28 Thompson, Ehrmann, Ranney, and Ferrari and Fleming of
the state police spent the day at Dedham interviewing the convicted
Portuguese. Madeiros was brought to the sheriff’s office in his blue
prison denims, his rheumy eyes full of challenge.
As he had before, but in more detail, he told of taking part in the
South Braintree holdup. He still declined to give the real names of
the men who had been in the car with him, but he admitted that he
had known them in Providence and said they had been in a lot of jobs
there robbing freight cars. When Thompson showed him photographs of
Joe, Patsy, and Fred Morelli he refused “for private reasons” to say
whether he recognized them. He also refused to identify Bibber Barone
and Jimmy Weeks, although finally he picked out the latter, saying
“It doesn’t make much difference. It is Weeks, I guess.”
He stuck to his story that the payroll money had been in a black
bag. There should, he thought, have been over four thousand dollars
apiece in the division of the payroll, but he would not say directly
whether he had considered himself double-crossed. Indirectly, he
agreed that he did not feel he had been used right. He admitted that
he had known Steve the Pole, but would not say whether he had ever
mentioned the South Braintree holdup to him. He also admitted that
he had confronted Bibber Barone in the yard of the Bluebird Inn when
they quarreled about Tessie. However, he refused to tell where he had
met Bibber or if Bibber had ever double-crossed him.
Ranney, cross-examining, asked Madeiros if it was true, as his mother
had sworn, that when she visited him he had told her: “You think I am
tough because I am in this case, but there is a man in here for five
years who killed two men.” Madeiros could not remember saying any
such thing. It was Ranney’s contention that Madeiros had made up his
confession out of whole cloth after reading the Defense Committee’s
financial report, that he was hoping to tap some of this money for
his own defense and that he knew nothing about the South Braintree
crime beyond the casual gossip he had picked up. The assistant
district attorney kept trying to pin Madeiros down. What kind of
a place was South Braintree? Had he seen any factories? Was there
a water tank? A railroad crossing? Madeiros did not recall any of
these things, nor any stores or excavations. All he remembered was
the car going up the slope after the shooting and that “there were
houses there. I don’t know how thickly populated it was. It was not
country.” He did not deny that the money he used on his Mexican jaunt
came from the South Braintree loot, but to any queries about the
details he gave the set reply: “I ain’t saying anything about it.”
After the holdup, he said, he and his gang had changed from the Buick
to the Hudson in the Randolph Woods and from there driven over the
back roads to Providence. Yet an hour and a quarter had elapsed from
the time the getaway car left South Braintree until Reed saw it at
the Matfield crossing. Desperate men in a high-powered car would
certainly not have taken so long to cover twenty-two miles. Even
allowing the car a modest average speed of twenty-five miles an hour,
there was still a time-lag of nineteen minutes. The question remained
whether the lag occurred in the Randolph Woods, as in Madeiros’
story, or in the Manley Woods a dozen miles south where the Buick was
found.
The getaway car was seen at 3:12, before it reached the Randolph
Woods, by the tobacco salesman, Walter Desmond. Seven or eight
minutes later the Farmers spotted it on the other side of the woods
moving at about twenty miles an hour. Although the distance between
these points was less than two miles, there would not have been time
enough for the bandits to drive a hundred yards into the underbrush,
change cars and license plates, transfer the payroll boxes, and drive
out again.
When the car passed Clark, the bakeryman, twenty minutes after the
Farmers had seen it, he noticed the first two digits of the license
plate 49783 that had been identified at South Braintree. Julia
Kelliher, going home from school at Brockton Heights, had missed the
first digit but scratched the last four in the sand by the road.
If, as Madeiros claimed, the bandits had switched cars in Randolph,
then they must have taken the license plates from the holdup car and
attached them to the second car that Clark and Julia Kelliher noted.
From Brockton Heights to where the abandoned Buick was found is 3.2
miles, and it is 5.3 miles further to the Matfield crossing. When the
Kelliher girl saw the oncoming car at 3:45, its speed of fifty miles
an hour scared her. Half an hour later it arrived at the crossing.
Yet even if the driver had slowed down to forty he should have made
the distance in twelve minutes or less. By any reckoning there was
a lag of almost twenty minutes in the running time of the getaway
car between Brockton Heights and the Matfield crossing. It was a lag
easily accounted for if the car shift had taken place in the Manley
Woods. Nor was it merely a matter of time. Even the trail to the
woods ran directly off the route that the driver must have taken to
get to Matfield.
Madeiros’ confession just did not fit into the time sequence. His
claim that the gang had driven back and forth twice from Providence
to Boston before the holdup seemed as unlikely as his account of the
getaway, for if the gang had spent so much time driving, no one in
South Braintree would have had a glimpse of them or their cars that
morning.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] Certain other leads, neglected at the time, are tantalizing in
their possibilities. One such concerns a professional car thief,
William Dodson, who worked in a Needham garage from 1917 to 1919 and
who in February 1921 was arrested in Providence after stealing Judge
Thayer’s car in Worcester. When, a year later, Dodson’s wife sued him
for divorce, she testified that in the spring of 1920 he had given
her eight hundred of the thousand dollars he had received for driving
the bandit car in South Braintree. Another concerns the Randolph
Savings Bank holdup of November 17, 1919. Although the bandits were
never identified, the robbery was apparently planned by four men and
a woman in a Brockton lodging house. Afterward a phial of cocaine was
found in their empty room. The plates of the car they used had been
stolen from Hassam’s Garage in Needham. According to the Brockton
_Enterprise_ of five days after the South Braintree holdup, “Thomas
Finnegan of Braintree picked up a small bottle said to have been
thrown from the murder car as it sped away. This leads police to
believe that dope played a part in the crime?” Needham again crops up
in the suspicion that the never-traced South Braintree payroll money
may have been hidden there. Two days after the holdup, Fred Lyons
passed a car that had stopped in the middle of an isolated road near
the Working Boys’ Home. A short, slightly built man was walking up
and down beside the car as Lyons drove by. Then, as Lyons continued,
the other car started up and followed him a mile to his home. There
it turned around and drove away. Next morning Lyons notified the
police. They found a freshly dug hole about two feet deep in a clump
of brush not far from where the strange car had stopped. After
digging down three more feet they struck rock. Several weeks later
it was discovered that someone had dug the hole several feet deeper,
removing two boulders to uncover a shelf of rock with a pocket
scooped out under it large enough to hold a suitcase.
[16] It may have been the mother rather than the son who saw the car
go by, but Driver then had a good position with United Fruit Company
and obviously did not want to become involved in a notorious case,
especially after his family’s embarrassing experience with Weeks.
[17] In his book _The Untried Case_ Ehrmann maintained that there was
no link between Sacco and Vanzetti and the South Braintree holdup
except for the negligible one that Sacco had worked a week at Rice
& Hutchins in 1917. He was apparently not aware that their friend
Coacci was working at Slater & Morrill until early in April 1920.
[18] Years later Ehrmann happened to meet his old classmate in the
Pemberton Square Courthouse, and for some reason Ranney began to talk
about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, speculating as to how he would have
felt if he had been on the jury. “I think,” he told Ehrmann finally,
“I should have considered the Commonwealth’s case not proven.”
[19] Kelley, in his affidavit, denied that any such conversation had
taken place.
[20] Boda’s gun, examined by Chief Stewart at Coacci’s house, was a
Spanish-type automatic. Stewart did not report the make.
[21] Joe had been moved from the Atlanta penitentiary after tipping
off the Atlanta warden to an inmates’ drug-smuggling ring—for which
he received a letter of commendation.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MORE HISTORY, WRITTEN AND OTHERWISE
The sea-change decades of depression and war did little to alter
the pattern of Joe Morelli’s life. On his return from Leavenworth
he moved from Providence to the scarcely more scenic environment of
adjacent Pawtucket. In that gray three-decker jungle city he was
to spend the rest of his days—when not in prison—in a house at 70
Toledo Avenue, a convenient half-mile beyond the attentions of the
Providence police.
In 1928 he was picked up by the Pawtucket police in connection
with a clothing theft, the next year for smuggling liquor into the
Providence county jail. In 1932 Secret Service agents arrested him
for possessing counterfeit bills and engaging juveniles, including
a thirteen-year-old female state ward, to pass them. He managed to
get himself acquitted. Later that year the Secret Service raided his
house and uncovered a cache of bogus five-dollar bills. The agents
also found parts of a book he was writing about his gangland career.
At his trial Joe tried but failed to put the blame for the
counterfeit money on his son, John. Sentenced to five years in
the new federal prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, Joe had the
distinction of being the first Rhode Islander to arrive there.
In 1941, he was arrested for keeping a house of prostitution in his
home, setting up slot machines, and selling liquor without a license.
A neighbor, James Prete, who had complained to the police about the
goings-on at 70 Toledo Avenue had his house wrecked by dynamite.
While Joe was out on bail he was again arrested for counterfeiting.
Not until March 1946 was he paroled. Nine months later he was picked
up for running a house of prostitution. In March 1947, he was seized
for violating his parole and sent to the Danbury Federal Penitentiary.
The following year he was released, only to be arrested on the old
prostitution charge. In moments of self-pity Joe liked to predict
that he would one day die in jail.
In 1931 Joe boasted to Morris Ernst, a New York lawyer connected with
various civil liberties committees, that he and his gang had staged
the South Braintree holdup and that he had ridden in the murder car.
Ernst had taken no part in the Sacco-Vanzetti defense nor until the
execution of the two men had he formed any fixed opinion as to their
guilt or innocence, although he had concluded that there had been a
lack of due process. Reading the six volumes of the case record as
they were published in 1928 and 1929, he was struck by the amorphous
Morelli hypothesis appearing in Volume V. “Being what I am,” he
explained at the Massachusetts Judiciary Committee hearing in 1959,
“and for no sensible reason probably, I went on the trail of Joe
Morelli. I have had talks with Joe Morelli. I have had letters with
him. I have seen him with his counsel. I am told that I am the only
person who had examined the man who really did the job for which
Sacco and Vanzetti went to the chair.”
Ernst started his private investigation by arranging a meeting in the
Providence office of Joe Morelli’s lawyer, Louis Jackvony, a former
Rhode Island attorney general whom Joe had known as a boy. After
being introduced to Ernst Joe did not sit down, but stood for several
minutes by the window while the latter talked. Finally he gave a
signal to someone in the street, explaining then that he had decided
Ernst was “jake.”
Ernst had prepared a list of detailed questions about the South
Braintree holdup: Were there two cars or one? Were they open or
closed, and where did they go? Where did the license plates come
from? Who was in the car? Were the payroll boxes metal or wood?
Who picked them up? How much money was in them and how many people
divided it? Was there anyone leaning against the fence? Was there a
team of horses? An excavation? A water tower? Why did they double
back at the Matfield crossing? For two hours Joe answered all
questions affably and correctly.
_No person of this man’s make-up_ [_Ernst wrote later_] _would have
read the minutes of the trial with enough precision to fit all his
answers into the known facts, down to the description of the flapping
of the side curtains on the murder car. Nor could any human being
have guessed the answers as to time and place of the many details
of the shooting day about which I confronted him. I left completely
satisfied that the gang chieftain was in the murder car and knew
all the details of the planning of the robbery, the details of the
shooting, and the technique of escape._
Joe was even willing to sign a statement—for a price—but he became
angry when Ernst let slip that an underworld intermediary had been
promised fifteen hundred dollars for his assistance in the case. Joe
hinted that his price would be ten times that. Ernst finally offered
him twenty-five hundred if he would produce the metal payroll boxes.
“You couldn’t get them out of Canapa Pond,” Joe told him.
Later, while Morelli was doing his stretch at Lewisburg, Ernst said
he learned that Canapa Pond was the local name for a body of water
on the route of the escaping murder car, but he made no effort to
recover the boxes.
During his three years at Lewisburg Joe continued writing his life
history, accumulating almost six hundred pages by the time of his
1936 parole. Back at Toledo Avenue, he made various attempts to cash
in on the manuscript. For some time he corresponded with Silas Bent,
a friend of Jack Callahan, the journalist who had brought Frank
Silva’s confession to the _Outlook_ in 1928. Bent was impressed
enough to get in touch with the _Outlook_ and with Upton Sinclair, to
whom he wrote:
_Joe Morelli has asked me to write you about his autobiography, which
he has completed. I have not seen it, and do not know whether he goes
fully into the South Braintree holdup; but I have talked to him more
than once about it, and if he is free to tell the whole story, the
book should be a smash._
When Bent asked Joe’s price for a sworn confession that he had
organized and committed the South Braintree holdup, Joe, apparently
with an author’s vanity, insisted that his whole book appear, not
just a chapter. After some further dickering, the deal fell through.
Meantime Joe had been angling Ernst, promising him “the real truth
and not baloney” about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and when Ernst again
met him in Jackvony’s office, Joe had the manuscript with him. His
price was twenty-five thousand dollars, and he would not allow the
pages to be inspected even briefly. All Ernst managed to see was the
cover. Subsequently, with the help of Oswald Garrison Villard, Ernst
raised an initial five thousand dollars. Joe still held out for his
twenty-five thousand, which in Ernst’s court-hardened mind meant he
would settle for ten thousand.
Some time in 1939 Ernst took Joe to lunch in Boston with Robert
Lemond, an editor of Little, Brown & Co., to discuss publishing the
confession-autobiography. Joe had his sealed manuscript with him,
but he still refused to turn it over for less than his price. He and
Ernst were not to meet again.
With the shadow of World War II moving across the landscape, interest
in the Morellis faded. The only person still concerned with them was
Ben Bagdikian, a reporter on the Providence _Journal_. In August
1950, he learned that Joe was dying of cancer. Hopeful of getting
some last statement from him, Bagdikian went to Jackvony, one of the
few men Joe trusted. Jackvony in turn went to Joe’s bedside and told
him that a friend wanted to see him about the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
At first Joe refused to see anyone, but a few days later he whispered
to the lawyer: “All right, tell him to come. I’ll tell him the whole
story.” Jackvony reminded Joe that he did not have to say anything,
but if he had something to get off his chest, this was the time.
“Tell him to come,” Joe said again.
On August 25 Jackvony and Bagdikian drove to the house on Toledo
Avenue. Jackvony went in alone, arranging to signal from the porch
when Joe was ready. Bagdikian waited in the car for twenty-five
minutes. A man in a large yellow convertible pulled up behind him,
watched him suspiciously for fifteen minutes, then drove away.
Bagdikian learned later that he was Joe’s brother Frank.
As soon as Jackvony entered Joe’s bedroom he was aware of the death
smell. The white face on the pillow gave him one frightened appealing
glance of recognition, the blue lips moved slightly, then Joe slipped
into a coma. Jackvony stepped to the bed, tapped Joe’s knee, and
called out his name, but there was no reply. He bent down, put his
mouth to Joe’s ear, and shouted, “Sacco and Vanzetti!” There was no
response. The secret still hovered inside Joe’s skull, but it was to
remain there. Early next morning he died.
* * * * *