holdup, I started off with Bob McLean of the Boston _Globe_ to
retrace the route of the 1920 getaway car. The day was heavy even
at nine o’clock. Bob just managed to squeeze his amiable bulk into
the driver’s seat of his ten-year-old Buick. I sat beside him as
navigator, with map board, green and red pencils, and the topographic
sheets of the U.S. Geological Survey—as I used to do with the survey
maps in the Army in what we called _tewts_—tactical exercises without
troops.
Suburban developments were sprouting up all round the Braintrees.
The hard little core of industrial South Braintree had also seen
changes. Opposite the station the mansarded Hampton House had been
torn down and the space was now a parking lot. The Romanesque
granite-and-sandstone station itself was boarded up and year-old
signs in the windows of the empty waiting room announced the
suspension of passenger service on the Old Colony Line. Rice &
Hutchins’ brick building was still standing, as was the wooden Slater
& Morrill factory, but both had been taken over by the Atlantic
Abrasive Corporation, whatever that was. South Braintree’s shoe
industry had long since disappeared. Where the Italians had been
excavating on April 15, 1920, there stood a brick building, no longer
a restaurant, occupied by a lamp firm and the Braintree _Observer_.
One afternoon in February I had dropped in at the _Observer_ office
to ask what Sacco-Vanzetti material they might have in their files.
The woman at the desk did not know, but she went in back to the
presses and returned with a man in his sixties wearing a printer’s
apron. As soon as he heard the words _Sacco_ and _Vanzetti_ his face
mottled. “Why do you people still come round writing sweet stuff
about those two gangsters?” he shouted at me. “Why are you wasting
your sympathy on them when you got none at all for that poor Mrs.
Parmenter that lost her husband? They raised thousands of dollars
for those two Eyetalians, and she got nothing. Afterward she had no
money, she lost her house. No one ever gave her a thought. Why don’t
you write about her? Why don’t you?” There was no arguing with him,
but I was surprised, as I was to be on other visits, that the old
emotions could still smolder beneath the small-town tranquillity and
be brought suddenly to a flame by some casual word.
Almost every inhabitant of South Braintree over fifty seemed to
have his own pet bit of gossip about the case. One story is that
Mrs. Sacco was seen early on the morning of the murders at a South
Braintree filling station. Another has it that Sacco and Vanzetti
were observed wandering about town several days before April 15.
The retired express agent tells of a local Italian who knew Sacco
before the crime and saw him do the shooting, but was too scared to
go to court to testify. Sacco is said to have confessed to one of
his lawyers, and Jerry McAnamey is said just before his death, to
have told a friend they were guilty. Amid the distortions of gossip
there is the more coldly remembered fact that those who testified for
the defense lost their jobs. Among others, Brenner and McCullum, who
contradicted Pelser in court, were discharged soon afterward, as was
Lewis Wade, who disappointed the prosecution by not identifying Sacco
positively. All South Braintree still firmly believes that Sacco and
Vanzetti were guilty.
“Criminal exercise without criminals,” McLean announced as we pulled
away from the curb where Berardelli’s body had lain. Pearl Street
still kept its underlying pattern even though the spindle-legged
water tower had gone, along with the gate-tender and his shack.
Cain’s livery stable had been replaced by the Pearl Street
Ramblertorium, and Schrout’s Bakery was now Adel’s Pizza Parlor. But
the outline was the same, the wooden two- and three-decker workers’
houses still kept their old gray ranks, the barber shop was still
there, and Torrey’s Drugstore—duly modernized—still hugged the corner.
“Here’s where they threw out the tacks,” McLean said as we turned
left into Washington Street. At the Plain Street railroad crossing we
made the sharp right turn and went up the hill past the white wooden
grotesqueries of the South Congregational Church, then dipped down,
skirting the edge of Sunset Lake.
Joe-pye weed spread in mauve masses along the roadside. There
were smaller white patches of boneset, and the first spatterings
of goldenrod. Most of the elms we passed were dying of the Dutch
elm disease, and even the leaves of the other trees looked frayed
and weary. I sensed the pause of the season, like the turn of the
tide—that short breathing space between summer and autumn. Somehow
it seemed more apparent in this flat browning landscape. Before
World War II such sandy outlying acres had been scarcely more than
squatters’ land. Now they had become dear to the heart of the
developer, with his flat-topped regular rows of pastel ranch houses.
The Randolph Woods were flat as a punctured tire.
We missed the right turn at Oak Street and drove almost to Randolph
before we realized our mistake. One thing was already clear to us:
The getaway driver and his crew must have been familiar with the
back roads. I had a hard enough time keeping on course even with my
map. And from the map it was plain how well they had known how to
avoid every center of population. The reason they had gone astray on
Orchard Street was apparent enough when we arrived there, for we made
the same mistaken left turn ourselves.
Down Chestnut Street and along the old turnpike the way still runs
straight and empty, the old pastoral landscape emerging as the ranch
houses recede. We found the lane into the Manley Woods where the
Buick had turned off, a scarcely visible dirt path branching to
the right between an empty shingled cabin and a derelict cemetery.
Two hundred yards from the highway we came to a field of stumps
surrounded by speckled alders, the earth bulldozed away at one corner
as if preparations were being made for another clutch of ranch
houses, but still empty and deserted enough to hide a car there all
day long without anyone being the wiser. It looked, in its accessible
isolation, much the most logical place on the escape route to shift
cars.
Ehrmann’s version seemed scarcely plausible—that Mike Morelli had
driven back from New Bedford that same night in a car with the
telltale missing rear window, a car for which by this time all the
local police had been alerted, just to leave it in the Manley Woods
when there were thirty-four miles of barren country lying between. As
we looked at the opening of the lane, it seemed to us it would have
been impossible to find it in the dark on the way north. McLean and I
agreed that the car must have been abandoned in the Manley Woods on
the way down and that the time lag had taken place there.
Why the escape car had returned after going over the Matfield
crossing became clear to us only when we had gone over the route
ourselves. Obviously the car had headed that way to avoid the
five-cornered traffic center of West Bridgewater, half a mile to the
south. But then, once beyond the railroad crossing, the driver had
found himself on the road to thickly populated East Bridgewater, and
had circled back.
Morris Ernst had said at the State House hearing in 1959 that Joe
Morelli told him he had thrown the empty cashboxes into Canapa Pond
and had even pointed out the spot. But when I had written to ask
Ernst about the location, he replied that he had no idea where Canapa
Pond was. As we traced our way from South Braintree I could find no
appropriate body of water, large or small. Sunset Lake would have
been too near, and anyhow I knew its original name had been Little
Pond.
After the Matfield crossing, the last point where the getaway car
was seen, we were on our own. We drove toward Providence, through
Bridgewater and over Route 44 by way of Taunton. Just before
Providence we stopped at Seekonk for whatever trace might remain
of the bullet-scarred Bluebird Inn. We found that unappreciated
landmark had long since been tom down. There were only the barest
traces of its foundations in an empty corner lot overgrown with
ragweed and tansy. Next to the corner was a white bungalow with
children swarming on the front steps and a zinc mailbox lettered _B.
Monterios_.
The air seemed to get heavier as we approached Providence, or perhaps
it was just the sad wooden decay of those submerged streets below the
anachronistic graciousness of Brown University’s island-hill.
I had pictured Ben Bagdikian as the dean of Providence reporters, a
Rhode Island Frank Sibley, perhaps wearing old-fashioned spectacles
on a ribbon, but when we met him in the city room of the _Journal_
he turned out to be a small gray-haired man in his forties, with the
long nose and dark animated eyes of his Armenian inheritance. He had
come to the _Journal_ from Stoneham, Massachusetts, after World War
II. Before he began writing his pieces on them, he had never heard of
the Morellis. I asked him if he knew anything about Canapa Pond and
told him of the uncommunicative Morris Ernst.
“That sounds like Ernst,” Bagdikian said, at the same time making
a note on a scratch pad. “I worked with him on the Morelli angle,
and I never could get anything really definite out of him. As for
Canapa, he mentioned it in a book and I asked him about it, too, and
got about the same answer you did. There isn’t any Canapa Pond. What
I think Joe said was _Canada_ Pond—and Ernst may just have changed
a letter to throw us off the track. Canada Pond’s only a couple of
miles north of here, half in Providence, half in Pawtucket. You can
see it from the new Woonsocket highway. It’s in an Italian district,
not very far from Joe’s old house. As I remember there aren’t many
houses right near it; lot of bushes and things, just the place
to throw old boxes. As a matter of fact they tossed a couple of
gangsters in there a few years back. But whether Joe threw any boxes
in there or not, Canada would probably be the first name that would
come into his mind.”
I asked Bagdikian if he had any idea what had become of Joe’s
autobiography.
“I never followed it up,” he told us. “Perhaps I should have. But
I have the feeling that if you should dig it up you wouldn’t find
much in it. It’s like Joe and the Lindbergh baby. Joe made contacts
with Jafsie Condon, and he was going to get to the bottom of the
kidnapping, but first of all he needed five thousand dollars. That
was Joe. Cash down!
“I’m not as sold on the Morelli theory as Ehrmann is” he went on,
“but I always meant to look up Mancini when I was working on this.
He was around here up till a few years ago. He was the toughest and
brightest of the gang, and if he decided to talk why he’d talk. But I
got off onto something else, and now he’s gone. Old Jackvony’s gone
too. His son could probably tell you a lot, but he won’t. The old man
was a criminal lawyer, and young Jackvony wants to get away from it
all. Once I saw his garage with the back of it all piled up with his
father’s papers. That autobiography might even be somewhere among
them. It would be odd now if you found the key after all these years.
Let me know if you get hold of it.”
McLean had copied down Frank Morelli’s address from the _Journal’s_
files. It was on Mount Pleasant Avenue, a boulevard cutting through
one of Providence’s many Italian districts. The house was easy enough
to find: a garish cube of red-and-yellow mottled tapestry brick, the
largest on the avenue. When we rang the bell a woman in her forties
came to the door. Her expression turned sour when we mentioned the
Morellis, and she announced with an equally sour voice that she knew
nothing about them except that a year or so before her husband had
bought the house from Frank. She did not know Frank’s address; she
did not know who might know it.
Pawtucket is like Providence without the green university enclave,
a brooding wooden decay of massed streets. It took us an hour to
find Joe Morelli’s Toledo Avenue house. This was a different avenue,
a still unpaved street on the outskirts, and Joe’s was the kind of
shapeless wooden house perched on granite foundations common in the
early 1900s. The layout would be routine—three rooms downstairs, four
smallish bedrooms upstairs, and a room or two on the top floor. I
walked up the steps to the long front porch. Everything looked neat,
freshly painted. The aluminum combination screen door had a scrolled
S on it.
No one answered when I rang, but as I looked over the porch rail I
saw a woman by the garage emptying garbage into a can. I waited until
she returned. When I mentioned the name Morelli, she winced. She
said she knew nothing about the family except Joe’s reputation. Some
years ago she and her husband had bought the house when it was in bad
shape, and since then they had fixed it up. It looked too neat and
too mild, really, for the place where Joe had kept his wenches and
stored his counterfeit money and hidden his stolen goods and at last
uncommunicatively died.
The chief of detectives at the Pawtucket police headquarters shook
his head when McLean offered him a cigarette, and picked up a cigar
with the end chewed so that it looked as if it were sprouting roots.
He was a tanned heavy man in a sport shirt and summer trousers, his
hair close-cropped almost to baldness, his only symbol of authority
the automatic strapped to his belt. The walls of his office were bare
of everything but the daily list of arrests and a safety calendar
contributed by Pawtucket firms to warn motorists to look out for
children at school crossings.
“Thank God I haven’t seen that crowd in a long time,” he said
when McLean mentioned the Morellis. “That Joe was one of the most
troublesome sons of bitches I ever had. I’d keep raiding his place
and he’d keep coming back for more. Why, when he was dying he still
had a couple of broads hustling upstairs.”
That might have ended our conversation if Bob had not somehow
mentioned bass fishing. A night light seemed to glow behind the
pupils of the chief’s smoky eyes. He picked up the cold cigar again
and for ten minutes they talked about hula lures with double wiggles,
ponds on Cape Cod that nobody knew about, and bluefish in the Canal
at Bourne turning the water red when they attacked other fish. The
chief had just come back from his vacation and the more he talked
about it, the mellower he grew.
“Come to think of it,” he said finally, “Joe Morelli’s granddaughter
was in here just a couple months ago. Her boy was up on some driving
charge. She was married to some Italian, then to a fellow named
Dunne. She’s married again. I don’t know his name, but here’s her
address.” He flipped open a file. “On Douglas Avenue, Providence.”
Douglas Avenue, when we returned to Providence, proved to be a line
of three-decker wooden tenements broken by an occasional barroom. The
top floor of the three-decker we were looking for was empty, a FOR
RENT sign in the blank center window. The second floor, too, looked
empty, though it had Venetian blinds at the windows. We almost turned
away, then decided to try the bells. A penciled card over the middle
button read _D’Agostino_. I rang, but the rumble of trucks was so
heavy anyone could have bawled down through the speaking tube without
my hearing it. Finally, through the wavy glass of the door, I had a
glimpse of a pair of legs that seemed to be walking by themselves in
the shadow of a dim stairway. Then a woman with frizzed metallic hair
opened the door. Long-chinned, with bright agate eyes, she seemed to
be in her late thirties. When I mentioned Joe Morelli she relaxed and
appeared almost amiable.
“Yes,” she replied, “I’m Helen Morelli. Joe Morelli was my
grandfather.” Still expecting that the door might shut in my face, I
said there were a few things about Joe I hoped I might talk over with
her.
“I guess I got a little time,” she said. She turned and led us
upstairs to an apartment that was being refinished: the paper off
the walls, the floors scraped but not yet varnished. The room had
a gypsy-like atmosphere, as if everything could and might be moved
out in ten minutes flat. We sat on maple chairs with plastic chintz
covers.
McLean said we were from the Boston _Globe_. At that she became
animated, telling us she had once studied journalism in New York. “I
used to know Walter Winchell there,” she went on. “My grandfather
had a restaurant there for a while and sometimes Winchell would
come in for a cup of coffee. My grandfather knew him, knew lots of
people—James Michael Curley, the mayor of Boston. You knew him? I
used to see him at Danbury. Remember how he got himself re-elected
mayor when he was in jail there? I got letters from him.”
When I could slip in a word, I told her that what we were really
interested in was the whereabouts of her grandfather’s autobiography.
She looked at me coldly. “You know, I had a feeling that’s what you
might of come for. Yes,” she went on, her full lips twisting down,
“I have it and it’s in a good safe place. As a matter of fact I’m
rewriting it myself.”
“I don’t know whether you could let us see it or not”—I tried to make
my voice sound matter-of-fact, watching her smile derisively and
shake her head—“but could you let us know what’s in it in relation to
Sacco and Vanzetti?”
I realized suddenly what the cliché about a veiled look coming over
someone’s face really meant. The derision became vocal. “Do you think
you’d get that out of me? A fat chance! But I can tell you this much,
the whole secret’s there. Why, if it ever came out I guess millions
of people would jump. Did you see that TV show? I had to laugh.
Making those two ditch-diggers make speeches like that! Maybe people
all over the country will fall for that stuff, but I had a good laugh
because I know the truth. Silas Bent and Sinclair Lewis offered ten
grand for that document. I could get big money for it. I know that,
all right. Don’t think I’m green.
“Look.” Her voice sharpened. “How do you think it felt to be a
Morelli when I was a child? When I was at school, any time I wanted
to do anything, people would whisper behind my back I was one of
them. Now I’m the last one. My Uncle Frank, he’s dying of cancer of
the throat and he never had kids. My father’s in California. So I’m
the last of the Morellis, the last legitimate one anyhow. Do you
think I’m going to let that come out against my own kids, have all
that stuff brought up again? No, sir!”
“Why bother to rewrite it then?” McLean asked her softly. “Why don’t
you just burn the thing?”
Again her veiled look. “No, I’m going to keep it. Maybe when I’m
gone. I don’t know. But I’m going to keep it.”
While we were talking her husband came into the room, naked to the
waist, a dark hairy-chested man, still damp from the shower. He shook
hands cordially enough, then turned to his wife.
“They want the document?”
She nodded. “I told them we’d never let it go.”
Her husband grinned knowingly.
“But did your grandfather know Sacco and Vanzetti?” I asked.
“Sure he knew them. I’ll tell you that much. You’d be surprised.
They’ve made such a big mystery of the whole thing, and underneath
it’s all very simple. They made them on TV like they had haloes. If I
ever told what I know there’d be an explosion.”
Bob had his try. “Won’t you at least tell us whether your grandfather
said they were guilty or not?”
She shook her head. “Sure they were guilty, but I’m not giving away
the secret. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” she added
enigmatically.
“Of course,” said Bob quietly, “there’s always a court order.”
She laughed. “What can they order me? It’s my property.”
I had a try at persuading her that the Sacco-Vanzetti case was part
of the history of our times, that it had all happened too long ago
for anyone to be hurt any more, and that if there really was anything
in her grandfather’s autobiography that would settle the unsettled
question, she had an obligation to reveal it. That was no good either.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “But I’m not changing my mind. There
isn’t any money would make me, either. Nobody’s going to see it. Some
things better stay a secret, I guess, and this is one of them.”
Not until a year after this interview did I finally manage to learn
the contents of Joe Morelli’s document. When he wrote it, Joe was
apparently still smarting from the remarks Ehrmann had made about him
in _The Untried Case_. Joe’s opening pages are full of jeers about
“smart Mr. Ehrmann,” “Ehrmann who thinks he knows so much.”
According to the manuscript the five men in the South Braintree
murder car were Sacco, Vanzetti, Coacci, Boda, and Orciani. Coacci
was the driver. Joe had known all five for several years, and in
fact they had been with him in a Pawtucket holdup in 1918, one never
solved by the police. He himself had planned to pull off the South
Braintree job with them. Any number of times he had driven over the
route to plan the getaway. He was familiar with South Braintree
because, with the help of Coacci, who was working in one of the
factories, he had occasionally stolen truckloads of shoes from there.
Berardelli, the guard, was another of his confederates.
Joe’s explanation of the actual holdup was that the others had
double-crossed him. He had set the job for April 22. They pulled it
themselves a week earlier to cut him out, and they killed Berardelli
because he recognized them. During the getaway Coacci had got lost
because he did not know the roads as well as Joe did.
Throughout his manuscript Joe refers to Madeiros as the Blind Pig—no
doubt a reference to his poor eyesight. Neither Madeiros nor Mancini,
according to Joe, had anything to do with the South Braintree affair.
Madeiros was just a small-time crook who made a fake confession
about South Braintree to try to beat his murder rap. There was not
even a house, just a vacant lot, at the place on North Main Street,
Providence, where Madeiros said he had started out on the morning of
April 15. As for the business of Canada Pond and the money-boxes,
that was simply a hoax to take in Morris Ernst, for whom Joe seemed
to have as much contempt as he did for Ehrmann.
Such, in its truth or untruth, was the confession of Joe Morelli.
* * * * *
On September 1, 1927, Alfred Foote, the Commissioner of Public
Safety, wrote to District Attorney Wilbar:
_As a finale to the Sacco-Vanzetti case, it appears to me that
it would be well to gather and secure certain of the exhibits,
particularly the firearms, bullets, cartridges and fired shells._
_I trust you will agree that these important objects should be placed
in our vaults for all time where they will be safe from opportunists
as well as enemies._
_The ample facilities of the State Police Laboratory will be
utilized to obtain a photographic record in the most graphic form
of each of the exhibits. The work contemplated will constitute an
important addition to the record in this great case._
Yet when I asked to examine these “important objects” thirty-three
years later, they were nowhere to be found. I tried first at the
clerk of court’s office in Dedham. The clerk, Willis Neal, a nephew
of the South Braintree express agent, said that from time to time
someone would drop in to ask about the exhibits, but that he had
never been able to locate them. He admitted he had never looked very
hard. Together we went down to the storage files in the basement and
spent several dusty hours going through the records. Finally he found
a 1927 memorandum that the guns and bullets had been forwarded to the
Lowell Committee.
I asked about them at the State Police ballistics laboratory on
Commonwealth Avenue. Lieutenant John Collins, in charge there, was
interested in the case, in fact had a private file on it that he had
put together himself, but he had no idea what could have become of
the exhibits.
I wrote to Governor Foster Furcolo about the missing exhibits,
explaining my belief that they had never been tested properly and
might still have much to reveal. After several weeks I received a
reply routed from the governor’s office to some subordinate of the
attorney general, who informed me that “we have no record in this
office of ever having had the exhibits or as to any disposition of
them after they were viewed by the Lowell Committee.” On reading this
I again wrote to Governor Furcolo to say that I did not think this
was good enough and that someone in the State House should look a
little harder. I received no reply.
By chance I came on the trail of the missing exhibits when I happened
to be in the Boston police headquarters talking to one of the men in
the laboratory there.