everyone round knew. They were in the State Police lab for years, and
then one of the Van Amburghs—I don’t know whether it was the old man
or the son—took them away with him when he retired. That’s where they
are. Young Van Amburgh has them down at Kingston.”
I wrote Van Amburgh twice, received no reply, and finally telephoned
him to ask if he had possession of the exhibits in the Sacco-Vanzetti
case.
“I have a lot of things around here,” he said.
“But do you or do you not have the pistols and the bullets that were
examined by the Lowell Committee?”
His voice grew frostier. “I’d have to go through everything to know
that.”
I did not have a very good hand but I dealt another card. “I have
been told that you do have them.”
“I might,” was all he would answer.
I tried to explain why I wanted to see the bullets. The question had
never been settled, I said, as to whether Bullet III might have been
substituted for the one found in Berardelli’s body.
The voice cut me off. “You and I seem to be working along the same
lines. I’m writing a book on the evidence in the case myself. I’m
not going to let you see my private material. Why should I?” The
telephone clicked at the other end.
Van Amburgh became singularly more communicative when Bob McLean
drove down to see him. He told McLean that he regarded himself
merely as a custodian of the exhibits “to be kept inviolate.” His
custodianship lasted until the following week end when the Sunday
_Globe_ ran McLean’s front-page feature story of his discovery.
The Commissioner of Public Safety, J. Henry Goguen, was one of the
_Globe’s_ early Sunday readers.
“He hit the roof,” McLean told me afterward. “They say he was
shouting in his office, ‘How did they get out of here? Who let Van
Amburgh take them? Send two men down to Kingston with a warrant and
if he doesn’t give them up, arrest him!’ But Van Amburgh turned them
over without a bleat. After all, if you’re getting a state pension
you can’t fool around. The stuff was in a big package that looked as
if it hadn’t been opened in years.”
I saw the exhibits on their return in the State Police ballistics
laboratory, a room with a grille in the front like a cage and a
metal door that opens by an electric button. It is a macabre room,
the walls hung with the confiscated evidence of old crimes—a Heinz’
variety of pistols, rifles, submachine guns, even a grenade-thrower,
dirks, switchblade knives, a Malayan _kris_, brass knuckles with
inch-long prongs, blackjacks, homemade zip guns.
Sacco’s Colt, Vanzetti’s revolver, and the bullets were spread out on
Lieutenant Collins’ desk next to a china ashtray in the shape of a
revolver.
“The way they handled these exhibits from the beginning makes my
hair stand on end,” Collins said. “The way I do is to impound any
exhibits, then call in the defense, the prosecution, make whatever
tests I have to make in front of them, and ask them if they’re
satisfied. I’ve testified now in over sixty murder trials and nobody
on either side has ever disputed my findings. But these things”—he
swept his hand toward the display on the desk—“I don’t know whether
you could prove anything with them now or not. I wouldn’t touch them
myself. No matter what tests might show, somebody would be bound to
accuse me of cooking the results. There ought to be some expert from
outside Massachusetts to run the tests. That’s the way it should
be handled.” He picked up one of the bullets. “You think that this
Number III might have been switched from the one they cut out of
Berardelli?”
“Some of the defense lawyers claimed it was,” I told him.
He cupped it in his hand. “The markings on the base do look somewhat
different. Those scratches—it’s hard even to be sure if there are
three of them. There’s so much muck on it you can’t really tell. They
ought to clean them, but first of all they ought to make blood tests.
Had you ever thought of that?”
I said I had not. He explained that it might still be possible to
detect residual blood with proper tests and even to determine the
blood type. Forty years were nothing. They could even blood-type
mummies. If bullets I, II, and IV showed traces of blood when tested,
while III showed none, it would be fairly conclusive that the mortal
bullet was a substitute. If, on the other hand, all four showed
blood, then it would be practically certain that all of them came
from Berardelli’s body.
“Of course it’s possible that there won’t be any blood traces on any
of the bullets,” said Collins.
I had thought that once the ballistics exhibits were back in the
hands of the State Police, I should have no difficulty in having
tests run on the bullets. When I went to see Commissioner Goguen,
a gray, diminutive man, sharp-eyed as a chameleon, I soon learned
otherwise. Instead of being grateful to me for recovering the
material, he seemed aggrieved. “Why don’t you just forget the whole
thing?” he asked me querulously. “I’m not going to allow any of your
tests. No, sir, I don’t want any of that Sacco-Vanzetti business
stirred up again.”
He wore a silver tie-pin engraved with the seal of Massachusetts, and
in the buttonhole of his sharkskin suit I noticed the rosette of the
Legion of Honor. Someone at the _Globe_ told me he had been awarded
it ex officio as president of L’Union St. Jean Baptiste d’Amérique,
the largest French-Canadian fraternal-insurance association in the
United States—from which he still received his salary while serving
as Commissioner of Public Safety.
“No tests!” he announced, but a week after I had coaxed an editorial
from the _Herald_, “Do Not Let Sleeping Bullets Lie,” he said I
had quite misunderstood him. He would have no objection to tests
made by properly qualified experts; he just did not want amateurs
fooling with the exhibits. I thought my difficulties were over when
I returned with the names of the honorary curator of the West Point
Museum and of an internationally known hematologist. But I still
could not get a straight answer from the commissioner. This time
he said that before any tests could be made, he must first have
permission from the attorney general’s office. Undoubtedly he thought
this would not be forthcoming, but after a delay of several months I
managed to turn up with it.
Goguen’s eyes darted at me as if I were a fly on the wall while he
explained that he would have to consult with the members of his
department. It was a consultation that took two more months. Then
he told me that although he personally would be happy to allow
such tests, his term of office was coming to a close and he did
not want to commit his successor. The governor’s council, that
archaic colonial survival, delayed month after month confirming the
successor, and the gray little commissioner stayed on.
On my last visit to him, a year after the exhibits had been
recovered, he had finally evolved what no doubt seemed to him the
ideal politician’s formula—to say yes and to mean no. He now told me
that if the American Academy of Forensic Sciences wanted to appoint a
committee of experts to examine all the ballistics evidence, he would
allow them to do so; but he could not allow any examination, even by
experts, merely at the request of a private individual.
Not until Goguen was out of office did I finally get my permission.
His successor, Frank Giles, raised no objections at all. A few weeks
later Dr. William Boyd of the Boston University School of Medicine
made the blood tests, although he said in advance he doubted whether
after so many years and so much handling the bullets would still
indicate anything. So it turned out. Dr. Boyd tested the four bullets
taken from Berardelli’s body and the two taken from Parmenter. The
result with all six was negative: no longer any trace of blood on any
of them.
* * * * *
Frank Silva was dead, as was Guinea Oates. Of the other two mentioned
in Silva’s confession of the Bridgewater attempt, Doggy Bruno had
long since vanished, but in 1960 I was surprised to discover that Joe
Sammarco was no farther away than Everett, where he was working as
a janitor. He had been parolled in 1953 after thirty-three years in
prison. At sixty-two, I thought, he should not have much to lose or
be afraid of. If I could get him to admit that he had been one of the
four in the Bridgewater holdup, that would corroborate Silva and go a
long way to proving finally that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent.
“I don’t know about Joe,” the parole officer told me in the
department offices on Tremont Street, appropriately opposite
Brimstone Corner. “Sometimes he comes in here and acts as if I were
his uncle. He’d tell me anything. Then the next time he’s as cold as
a brick. I’ll ask him about this Bridgewater business, but I can’t
promise he’ll give out anything.”
Two months later I got a call from a Somerville lawyer, Anthony
DiCecca, who said Joe might talk to me but that he himself wanted
to talk to me first. I drove over the following afternoon. The law
office was on Broadway, a lower-middle-class neighborhood, in a
remodeled three-story house that had been transformed by plate glass
and concrete until it stood out against its drabber surroundings with
the glitter of a funeral home.
DiCecca, a bustling, determined man, shook my hand in his paneled
office, then sat down behind a vast desk on which a pastel-green
telephone kept flashing a warning light. He stared at me for a
moment, his eyes calculating in his grave Latin face.
“Now,” he said, as if he were satisfied. “I want you to understand
I know nothing about the Sacco-Vanzetti case. I have no opinion and
don’t want to have one. When I was watching that TV show in the
spring I began to feel myself getting an opinion so I got up and shut
it off. I understand you want to ask Joe about the Bridgewater holdup
he was supposed to be in on that they later hung on Vanzetti. I want
the details of that.”
I gave him a summary of Silva’s confession, while he took notes.
“Joe can either confirm this or not,” I told him finally, “but it
will blow a big hole in the Sacco-Vanzetti conviction if he does
confirm it.”
He sat there, indifferent to the flashing telephone light. “If it’s
true, Joe could have spoken thirty-five years ago. It’s a terrible
thing if he kept quiet and let an innocent man die. Maybe he won’t
want to admit anything because of that, even though there’s nothing
anyone could do to him now. Let me have a talk with him and then
the three of us can get together here Sunday night. Just one thing,
though,” he went on as I rose to go. “There’s no money going to enter
into this. I need it like I need a hole in the head. If Joe has any
idea that he’s going to make a little on a deal, then I want nothing
to do with it or with him.”
The following Sunday I again drove to Somerville. I kept thinking
of Joe Sammarco and his thirty-three years in state prison, all the
years back to when I was a schoolboy in corduroy knickerbockers. I
felt depressed, half wishing I were not going to see him.
As I walked upstairs and into DiCecca’s long anteroom I had my first
glimpse of Joe. Squatting on a leather couch before a television
set, he was watching the Ed Sullivan show. He was a slight, stooped
man with an elongated, almost bald head, cheeks creased against high
cheekbones, and eyes that seemed incongruously blue in his wasted
face. When we shook hands I could feel his misshapen fingers. He told
me DiCecca was out but would be right back. We sat there half an hour
in silence. For once I was grateful for the sight of Ed Sullivan’s
jacked-up shoulders and melon face.
Finally we heard drum-tap footsteps on the stairs. DiCecca brushed
in, apologized, and we moved to the inner office, he to his desk, I
to the seat I had taken before, and Joe to sit by the window, partly
in the shadows.
“Now, Joe,” DiCecca began quietly, “I just want you to tell us what
you told me here the other night—about Bridgewater, Silva, Jimmy
Mede—just as it comes to you.”
“Mede is a rat,” Sammarco said without anger, his face set like a
barrier between himself and the outside world.
“Wait,” DiCecca said. “We’ll get to that. Now as I read through that
article of Silva’s—remember, I knew nothing about the case—it seemed
pretty convincing. According to that, Silva and you and Doggy Bruno
and Guinea Oates drove down to Bridgewater to try to steal the L.
Q. White payroll. You’d cased the joint two years before with Jimmy
Mede.”
Sammarco shook his head, laughed silently, and then spoke again.
“It’s a pack of lies, every bit of it. Silva got some fellow to write
that piece after he got out of jail, and he got paid plenty for it. I
know, because he told me.” He looked at me quizzically, as if he were
wondering whether I believed him. “Not a word of truth in it, not a
word.”
“Wait a minute!” DiCecca interrupted him. “Let me just ask you these
questions in order. Before you went to jail, did you know Jimmy Mede,
Frank Silva, Guinea Oates, and Doggy Bruno?”
“Sure I knew them. I was just a kid then and we was all brought up
in East Boston together. I knew them since I was that high. We used
to hang around Nick’s Restaurant just across the street from Jimmy
Mede’s shoeshine parlor. Frank Silva met this guy Luban in jail or
somewheres and cooked up all this story. Why, Silva was too yellow
to pull a real holdup. He’d roll some drunk sailor down on Atlantic
Avenue, he’d steal when it was safe, but nothing dangerous, not him.
Bruno wasn’t yellow. He was in dope, robberies, everything, and he
got his own living. He never would of worked with Silva or anyone
like that. And Guinea Oates, he was younger than the rest of us and
never got in no kind of trouble.”
Again DiCecca interrupted him. “Did you ever ride in a car with Silva
and Mede to plan a holdup?”
“Yes, I did. In 1917 Silva and Mede and me and a guy named Gargalino
and someone else went to Braintree. We was going to get a payroll
from the factory there when the paymaster come out with it.”
“You went down there several times to case it?”
“Yes. Then when we went to pull the job, Mede and Silva got cold
feet, so we turned round and come back.”
“How do you know it was Braintree?”
“We called it Braintree, where two railroad lines crossed.”
“Couldn’t it have been Bridgewater?”
“No, it was nearer than that.”
I could see the shrug of DiCecca’s shoulders. “A matter of a few
miles one way or the other. You didn’t know any of those places well.
It could have been Bridgewater.”
“I don’t think so,” Sammarco said reflectively. “They kept saying it
was Braintree. Anyhow, nothing happened. I went into the Navy after
that. I was overseas. When I come out they said Jimmy was in jail for
holding up a factory in Cambridge. After I took the rap for killing
the cop I see Jimmy in Charlestown. He tells me that story about him
and Silva. All Jimmy did was take the Braintree trip we made before
the war and make it sound like it was Bridgewater afterward. He asked
me to string along with his story, so I was dumb enough I says at
first I’d go along for a gag. All the Big Chief wanted was to see
what he could shake out of Moore. Moore said he’d help him get a
pardon and gave him some money. Moore had a lot of money. After he
got out Moore was paying him to investigate things in New York until
they drove him out of there.
“Ferrari, the state detective, when he heard it, give it to me good.
He’s still alive, down at the track now. Talk with him and he’ll
tell you about me and Jimmy Mede. When that piece of Silva’s in the
_Outlook_ come out he come and hit me in the face with it. ‘What
are you holding out on me for?’ he says. ‘I never had nothing to do
with it,’ I told him. Afterward I wrote a letter to Commissioner of
Correction Sanford Bates and told him so.”
“Now,” said DiCecca, steering him back, “were you offered any money
by anyone to say you had taken part in the Bridgewater holdup?”
“Yes, Moore come to see me a couple times in Charlestown. He says if
I’d confess to the Bridgewater job he’d give me ten thousand and he’d
see I got a gun and a getaway car on the way to court.”
DiCecca’s voice crackled with annoyance. “Look, Joe, a story like
this is too stupid for anyone to believe. A sharp lawyer like Moore
offering you a gun and a getaway car. That’s plain silly. No one
would swallow that. Moore wasn’t a fool.”
“That’s what he said,” Joe persisted. “I told him I wouldn’t. Even if
he meant it, what the hell could I have done with a bunch of guards
round me with shotguns!”
DiCecca turned to me. “It sounds crazy, all right. But Joe told me
exactly the same story the other night when he was here. That’s why I
say you need a lie detector on this thing.”
“All I can think,” I told him, “if it’s really true—and it certainly
sounds fantastic—is that Moore would have said anything, promised
anything to get Joe to talk. Moore was a brilliant man, but he
thought this whole thing was a frame-up from beginning to end, and
he was willing to do or say anything to get his clients off.” Then I
asked Joe, “Did Thompson ever offer you money?”
“Him? No. He just talked legal. I guess in the end he knew I had
nothing to do with it. He never bothered me none. Jimmy brought him
in with some other lawyers one day and said in front of them, ‘Joe,
I want you to give this man the real lowdown on Bridgewater—and then
kind of under his breath he says quick, ‘_No dice nienta questa no
bon paga_’—‘Don’t say nothing, they won’t pay.’ I never see Mede
again in jail after that. The Big Chief looks tough but he’s yellow.
After I got out in fifty-three I went to see him in his joint in
Revere and I told him what he was to his face. Afterward I see Silva
in a bar on Hanover Street and he says ‘You should of stuck with us,
you could of made ten or fifteen grand!’ I told him what I thought of
him right to his face. He’s dead now.”
“But why,” I asked him, “would Mede go to the governor afterward with
his story and lose his boxing license?”
Joe’s voice was scornful. “Ah, that’s not why he lost it. He lost it
for stealing a load of booze. He was never on the level in nothing he
done.”
“Vanzetti,” I said. “You knew him in prison. If Mede and Silva were
lying, do you think he was part of the Bridgewater gang?”
“No,” said Joe emphatically, “he wasn’t any stick-up guy. I was in
the next cell to him awhile. I used to work in the number plate shop
with him. People always coming to see him, old Boston ladies bringing
him books and candy and things. He’d give me some. He used to read
all the time. I always knew he wasn’t guilty.”
“The other prisoners, how did they feel about him?”
“They all felt the same way,” Joe said in his faded far-off voice.
“Most of the guards thought he was innocent too. The night they was
executed we made a hell of a row. It used to be the lights went dim
at an execution for a couple seconds, but this time they wasn’t using
Edison current and nothing happened, but we all knew when it was
midnight just the same.”
His mind groped back to that August night thirty-three years before
and he was silent for several seconds before he continued. “I
remember Vanzetti come to me once, he was crying. He says, ‘You know
I’m innocent. Tell them if you had anything to do with Bridgewater.’
I told him I would if I had—but I hadn’t nothing to do with it. Even
my sisters and my cousins come in before the execution and asked me
and I says ‘I wasn’t there, I didn’t do it.’ Sometimes I used to
think, maybe that fellow Weeks had something to do with both the
robberies. He was smart, he was. But Vanzetti never had nothing to do
with them. He wasn’t that kind.”
DiCecca swung toward me in his swivel chair as if to call an end to
the interview.
“Joe says he’s willing to take a lie-detector test along with Mede to
see who’s telling the truth.”
“Or I’ll take it all by myself,” Joe broke in. “You’ll never get the
Big Chief to take no test like that. He might try to con some money
out of you, but he’d never take the test.”
“That’s the size of it,” said DiCecca. “Whether we believe Joe or not
doesn’t matter until we give him a lie-detector test.”
“I’ll take it any time,” Joe said. We stood up. Joe and I left
DiCecca there, walking out together through the echoing anteroom and
down the stairs. The pinched and hostile face I had first encountered
had now become relaxed, softened, the face of a human being.
“I was a dumb kid, no education,” said Joe reflectively. “I took that
rap for thirty-three years because I didn’t know no better.” It was
the second time he had used the word _rap_. I stopped on the stairs
where the arc lamp shone through the doorway. “You’re telling me,
then, that you didn’t kill that policeman?”
His voice was low, quite passionless. “Him or anyone else. I never
did. Maybe you won’t believe that neither, but I never did. It was my
gun all right, but if I’d of said at the trial who pulled the trigger
I’d of got a bullet through my head. The one who done it got killed
in a gunfight four years later. Back in thirty-one I come up before
the parole board and his widow come and told them he done it, but
they wouldn’t listen to her, just asked her why she didn’t tell it
before. And she says, ‘I got to live too.’”
I remembered that Vanzetti in his speech to the court had said that
no human tongue could say what he and Sacco had suffered in seven
years’ imprisonment. Yet if what Joe had just told me was so, he had
suffered over four times as long, unknown, inarticulate, without
friends and partisans to speak for him, without the satisfaction of a
well-advertised martyrdom, and yet no tongue could truly say—not even
his own—what he had suffered.
“Would you be willing to trust that to a lie detector, too, whether
or not you killed the policeman?”
“Yes,” he said simply. We continued to the bottom of the stairs. Then
at the door he held out his maimed hand to me and smiled slightly.
* * * * *
On January 30, 1961, John Conrad, an expert with many years of
experience in operating the polygraph lie detector, conducted an
examination on Joe Sammarco to verify the truthfulness of the answers
to the following questions:
Q. _Were you ever in a holdup attempt in Bridgewater with Doggy
Bruno, Guinea Oates, and Frank Silva?_
A. _No._
Q. _Were you ever in a car with Bruno and Oates?_
A. _No._
Q. _Did you ever tell Jimmy Mede at Charlestown that you had
participated in the Bridgewater holdup?_
A. _No._
Q. _Did Silva tell you that he and Mede received money from Moore to
invent a story on the Bridgewater holdup?_
A. _Yes._
Q. _Did Moore offer you ten thousand dollars if you would confess
that you had participated in the Bridgewater holdup?_
A. _Yes._
Q. _Have you any knowledge of who did take part in the Bridgewater
holdup?_
A. _No._
Q. _Did Frank Silva later admit to you that his confession was false?_
A. _Yes._
As a result of this examination Conrad certified that in his opinion
Sammarco had told the truth.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
1926
After the flare-up in 1921, the Sacco-Vanzetti case smoldered
obscurely for five years. Occasional sparks were thrown up, as when
Ettor and Giovannitti returned to Boston in 1925 to speak for their
imprisoned comrades and Eugene Debs visited Vanzetti in Charlestown,
but for the most part the issues seemed lost in a lawyer’s maze.
Across the Atlantic the case had become overlaid by other events and
other conflicts. If the average demonstrator of 1921 had suddenly
been asked in 1926 whether Sacco and Vanzetti were still alive, he
would probably not have known.
In the United States, except in restricted circles of urban liberals
and radicals, the names aroused no more response. The Defense
Committee continued its Boston meetings. In December 1925 it
published the first number of the _Official Bulletin_, a four-page
booklet containing a message from Debs, a review of the ballistics
evidence by Mrs. Evans, and an appeal to Governor Cox signed by
George Lansbury, Ellen Wilkinson, James Maxton, and other members of
the English Labor Party.