Chapter FOURTEEN: The Confessions (2)

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!

On returning to Boston, Ehrmann provided himself with a 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.