Tragedy in Dedham

The attempted robbery of the L. Q. White Shoe Company payroll in Bridgewater, on Wednesday, December 24, 1919, resulted neither in loss of money nor life. At twenty minutes to eight on that freezing overcast morning Alfred Cox, the company paymaster, was taking the week’s payroll of $33,113.31 in his delivery truck from the Bridgewater Trust Company to the factory at the foot of the hill by the railroad station. The truck, a Ford with a tarpaulin top and solid rubber tires, was driven by Earl Graves, with Constable Benjamin Bowles beside him. Cox sat just behind Graves, on a large galvanized-iron box containing the money.

Craves drove from the bank along Summer Street to the square, then turned down Broad Street—divided in the middle by a single streetcar track—moving at a cautious ten miles an hour because of the ice on the road. A streetcar moving in the same direction had just stopped at the corner of Hale Street, seventy-five yards away. At the same moment a curtained touring car swung over the tracks and pulled up on the corner, its wheels on the sidewalk. Three men jumped out and dog-trotted toward the oncoming truck. The man in the lead, bareheaded, with a dark mustache and wearing a long black coat, carried a shotgun. The two behind him held pistols.

Graves had first noticed the touring car—a Hudson, he thought it was—while he was passing Harlow’s blacksmith shop. He watched the men get out and start running, but it was not until the mustached man knelt and took aim that he realized he was in for a holdup. Yanking on the gas lever, he veered the truck across the tracks. Bowles reached for his revolver. When the truck was some twenty-five yards away the mustached man fired both barrels. A few pellets rattled against the truck’s metal body without doing any damage. One of the men with pistols, standing eight feet behind the man with the shotgun, exchanged random shots with Bowles until the streetcar came between them. Then the mustached man dashed across the street and fired again at the slithering truck.

Cox, from his seat on the cashbox, saw the kneeling figure and the smoke from the discharged shotgun, “everything like the snap of a camera.” As the truck skidded, Graves lost control of the wheel. Bowles grabbed it out of his hands. Wavering from one side of the street to the other, the truck finally crashed against a telephone pole, smashing headlights and radiator. In the meantime the three gunmen had scurried back to their car with its waiting driver and spun out of sight down Hale Street in the direction of the normal school.

When Frank (“Slip”) Harding, an auto-parts salesman on his way to Bassett’s Garage just across from the corner of Hale Street, first saw the men carrying guns, he thought it was some kind of movie stunt. He was only four feet away as they began firing and he watched them, too astonished to move. Then within seconds they had run back to their car and driven off. Harding later described the car as a black Hudson Six with the license number 01173C.

Dr. John Murphy, a young general practitioner with his house and office at 76 Broad Street, was getting dressed when he heard the shots. He looked out his window just in time to glimpse the touring car moving away. By the time he reached the street, about the only thing he could see was the litter of glass where the truck was rammed against the pole. Then he noticed a spent shotgun shell in the gutter. He picked it up and put it in his pocket.

For Bridgewater’s police chief, Michael Stewart, the robbery attempt lay outside the range of small-town peccadilloes with which he was used to dealing. His force consisted of two officers, one patrolman, and one night patrolman. In addition there were the specials, one at the normal school, one for the night performances at the Princess Theater, one at the L. Q. White factory, and six for the Fourth of July only. Stewart, in his forties, had held his job since 1915. Before this he had spent four years as chief of the two-man force in Rockland, another of the flat semirural manufacturing towns lying inland between Boston and Cape Cod. In Rockland most of his trouble had come from the foreign workers. The same was true in Bridgewater, where a third of the population was now made up of Poles, Russians, Greeks, and Armenians. As a second-generation Irish-American Stewart tended to be suspicious of these newcomers. He had an idea that the holdup men might be Russians, with a confederate working in the factory. Inspector Albert Brouillard of the State Police, who was sent down to Bridgewater to work with Stewart, was more inclined to think the holdup the work of one of the gangs that had moved into the area after the recent Boston police strike. Graves thought the men were Italians.

The license number that Harding had written down was traced through the Registry of Motor Vehicles to George Hassam’s garage in Needham, a Boston suburb, twenty-three miles northwest of Bridgewater. It turned out to be a dealer’s plate. Hassam owned five sets of them.

On Monday, December 22, a foreigner had come into Hassam’s office and asked if he could borrow a set of plates. In broken English he told Hassam he had just bought a car in Wellesley and wanted to take it away. When Hassam said he could not lend his dealer’s plates, the man left. He was a surly man of about forty, as Hassam remembered him, dark, with a close-cropped mustache.

Hassam forgot about him until the police telephoned regarding the plates on the Bridgewater car. Then, as he went to the back of his garage to look at a secondhand Hupp that had been carrying a set of his dealer’s plates, he found them missing. When or how they had been taken he did not know.

On December 26 the Pinkerton operative Henry Hellyer noted in his report that on Sunday evening, December 21, a Buick touring car belonging to Daniel H. Murphy of Natick had been stolen from 115 Fair Oaks Street, Needham, not far from Hassam’s Garage. Hellyer was right about the Buick though not about some of his other details. The car, belonging to a Francis J. Murphy had actually been stolen in Needham a month earlier, on November 23, from in front of a house in Fair Oaks Park.

That same November night a Dedham police officer, Warren Totty, standing under the arc light in the granite shadow of Memorial Hall, had seen the car speeding across Dedham Square. He had stepped out with his hand raised, but the car swung past him down the hill and under the railroad bridge toward Hyde Park. The license number that Totty managed to copy down turned out to be Murphy’s.

“It is thought,” Hellyer reported, “that this car may have been used by the men last Wednesday.” The connection between the Murphy Buick and the Needham license plates appealed to Stewart, even though both Graves and Harding had said that the car was a Hudson. Hellyer now interviewed Richard Casey, a student at Rhode Island State College, who had seen the car on Main Street before the shooting, and John King, who noticed it afterward near the normal school. Whether or not Chief Stewart had prompted them, both said it was a Buick.

Stewart and Brouillard had managed to trace the car as far as Stoughton. Beyond that point, although they called at all the garages in the vicinity, their leads came to nothing. Chief Shine of Dedham had a notion that an Italian gang in East Dedham might be involved. Stewart visited Dedham, Needham, even some suspects in Newton, and arranged meanwhile for circulars describing the car to be distributed to the local garages and gas stations. He now began to think the car was hidden somewhere between Stoughton and Dedham.

Meanwhile the Pinkerton agents had been spreading out through the Italian districts of Quincy and Boston. On December 30 Assistant Superintendent Henry Murray reported:

Today informant telephoned in; later met him at supper and in the course of conversation stated that he had learned that the Italian mentioned yesterday had said that the men who were implicated in the Bridgewater holdup had occupied temporarily a shack in close proximity to Bridgewater and that the car that had been used was left there along with some overalls or disguise of a similar nature, used by one of the men implicated in the holdup; that these men were Italians, had deserted the car, returned to Quincy by trolley; that they are believed to be residing in the vicinity of Fore River Shipyard and are known as Anarchists.

The “Italian mentioned yesterday” was a floater who spent most of his time hanging around the Boston American Building near Summer Street or in Monahan’s Bar in the North End. It took the Pinkerton agents several days to track him home to 31 Waverly Street, in the massed tenement district of Brighton. The house was a brick three-flatter, and there was a SCARLET FEVER card on the front door. Hellyer, Stewart, and Brouillard went there the afternoon of January 3, 1920. By ringing the three doorbells until they got an answer they learned that the man they wanted had left for Allston earlier in the day. They waited almost five hours on the upper landing until he came back. He turned out to be a flashily dressed Sicilian, Carmine Barasso, who had anglicized his name to C. A. Barr. Quite willing to talk, he invited the three men in to his flat. According to Hellyer’s report:

Barr related a rambling statement about a machine that he had invented with which he could detect who had committed a crime no matter where it was committed. He stated that one Mrs. Vetilia of 2 Lexington Street East Boston, had looked into the machine and saw the holdup happening and saw the man plainly but did not know who they were.

As Stewart drove back to Bridgewater along the empty snow-edged roads of the Blue Hills he added another piece to the puzzle he was fitting together in his mind. If the Pinkerton information was right, the holdup men were anarchists. It was not a difficult conclusion to come to in the winter of 1919-1920. A group of 249 anarchist and Communist aliens that included Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman had just been deported to Russia. That very day, January 3, the headlines of the papers were flaring with the news of Attorney General Palmer’s raids that had taken place all over the country the previous evening. RAIDS TO HEAD OFF REVOLUTION was the heading of the weekly Bridgewater Independent. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE MAKES PUBLIC COMMUNISTS’ PLAN TO OVERTHROW GOVERNMENT. ARRESTS IN FIFTY TOWNS.

But such incidents and antagonisms, the social change and struggle of the postwar period, were sensed only vaguely in Bridgewater. By the time the wave of history reached the inland cape towns it was scarcely a ripple. The same issue of the Independent made Charlotte Randall’s twenty-first birthday party in West Bridgewater the subject of its editorial.

When the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect on January 16 the December holdup no longer seemed worth discussing. The Pinkerton men had gone. The thousand-dollar reward posted by Loring Q. White for the gunmen’s capture was unclaimed. At his headquarters in the back room of the wooden-pilastered town hall, Chief Stewart still thought about the crime, but he could find no more pieces to add to his puzzle.

It was the snowiest winter in fifty years. The weeks followed into the lengthening afternoons of February. On the sixth a mockingbird was seen by the members of the Bridgewater Bird Club. Five days later a blizzard swirled in from the northeast and the town was snowed under again. In the Superior Court in Brockton Judge Webster Thayer fined a young Brava (the local name for the colored Cape Verde Island Portuguese) two hundred dollars for manslaughter under extenuating circumstances, and asked that the fine be turned over to the victim’s family for funeral expenses. The thaw began on March 19, and the basement of the Bridgewater Central Square Congregational Church was flooded.

Then on April 15 a South Braintree paymaster and his guard were killed during a holdup. Having already gone to press, the April 17 edition of the Independent made no mention of the murders. Yet the event had already impinged on Bridgewater. Shortly after the passage of the 1918 Deportation Act, Chief Stewart had assisted the Immigration Service in arresting six Italians charged with spreading literature advocating the overthrow of the government. The six were marked down for deportation and released on bail. Stewart supposed they had all long since been sent back to Italy.

But that spring at least one of the six, Ferruccio Coacci, was still living in a section of West Bridgewater called Cochesett. Coacci, sometimes known as Ercole Parrecca, had come to Quincy in 1915 and taken up with a woman named Ersilia Buongarzone. Ersilia had borne him two children, both delivered at the state almshouse in Tewksbury. For a period Coacci was employed at the L. Q. White Company. At the time of his arrest, Joseph Ventola, an anarchist friend from Hyde Park, had posted the thousand-dollar bond, and Coacci was released on condition that he marry Ersilia and support her children. While awaiting his deportation order he worked for Slater & Morrill in South Braintree. Early in April 1920, after receiving his notice to report on the fifteenth at the East Boston Immigration Station, he quit his job.

Since the first of the year Coacci had been living in Puffer’s Place, at the corner of Lincoln and South Elm Street, in the empty flatland about a mile from West Bridgewater’s Elm Square. Puffer’s Place was a small, decayed two-story structure with a rust-colored mansard roof and irregularly spaced gables. Once it had been the office of the long-since-defunct Alger Iron Foundry. Then Clarence Puffer, a local handyman, had turned it into a dwelling. Mario Buda, a young Italian who called himself Mike Boda, had rented it early in the winter, and a month or so later Coacci had moved in from Quincy. Ersilia, who was pregnant again, kept house and did the cooking.

The Italians in Puffer’s Place were scarcely noticed by their scattered Yankee neighbors. At times cars would be parked on the corner on Sunday afternoons and talk and singing would echo from inside, but for the most part the newcomers were orderly enough. No one knew what Boda did for a living. With the Eighteenth Amendment in force, some people on South Elm Street suspected the Italians might be engaged in selling liquor. In this they were right. At one time Boda and his brother had run a dry-cleaning shop in Wellesley, adjoining Needham, but after prohibition he became a bootlegger. His avocation was anarchism. All his spare time and his enthusiasm he devoted to distributing radical pamphlets and journals to the Italian colonies of eastern Massachusetts.

Boda was a dapper man, five feet six inches tall, with a short mustache, aquiline nose, and deep-set hazel eyes. If anyone happened to ask him what he did, he replied that he was a salesman for a New York fruit-importing firm. Since coming to West Bridgewater from Hyde Park he had bought a green Overland which he kept in a shed beside the house. The car was a 1912 model, more often than not laid up for repairs. Boda had not registered it for 1920.

During the two years he had been out on bail Coacci had maintained that he wanted to go back to Italy and that he was just waiting for a free ride. When his bondsman, Ventola, learned from the Immigration Service that Coacci had not turned himself in on April 15, he was as surprised as he was dismayed. He drove at once to West Bridgewater, arriving at Puffer’s Place at half past four. There was no one home but the door was open. He went into the kitchen to wait. About five o’clock he at last saw Boda coming down the road from Elm Square, wearing a green velour hat and carrying a leather bag.

Boda said he had just come back on the trolley from Brockton. Ventola told him that Coacci had not reported at the immigration station and that he was worried about his bond. Boda assured him that Coacci would report next morning. For the time being Ersilia and the children would stay in the United States. Ventola, relieved, offered to help them.

The following afternoon Coacci telephoned the Immigration Service and told Inspector Root that he could not come in. His wife was sick, he said, and he needed a few extra days to take care of her. Root in turn called Chief Stewart in Bridgewater and suggested they both drop in on Coacci that evening. But Stewart had to attend a dress rehearsal of Aunt Jerusha’s Quilting Party, a play in which he had a part. Besides, West Bridgewater was a separate town outside his jurisdiction. However, he agreed to send his night patrolman, Frank LeBaron.

Root and LeBaron arrived at Puffer’s Place after dark. Coacci admitted them and announced that he was ready to leave. There seemed to be nothing wrong with his wife. Root, who had a lodge meeting that night, offered to have the deportation postponed another week, but Coacci refused, saying that he wanted to get back on the first steamer to his sick father. When Root suggested that Coacci leave his wife some money, Coacci—who had two hundred dollars with him—said she did not need any. As the inspector led him down the steps with his baggage, Ersilia and the children stood in the doorway crying.

After his rehearsal, Chief Stewart hurried back to headquarters. LeBaron was already there, behind the desk. “That Dago,” he said. “There wasn’t nothing wrong with his wife. Just a stall.” As Stewart walked home from the town hall, under the elms of the deserted common, he kept mulling over LeBaron’s remark. He suddenly recalled what Barr-Barasso had said in December about some anarchists living in a shack near Bridgewater. On April 15 these anarchists had been—where? It was in this evening moment, in Chief Stewart’s responding mind, that the Sacco-Vanzetti case had its origin.

On the afternoon of April 17, Charles Fuller, the business manager of the Brockton Enterprise, locked his office, walked over to the Fair Grounds where he kept his horse, and started out with his friend Max Wind on their usual Saturday ride. They left the Fair Grounds at half past two, riding out the back gate toward West Bridgewater. Once over the railroad track on Manley Street, not far from the Poor Farm, they headed down a bridle path through the thick secondary growth of maple and scrub oak and alder known as the Manley Woods. Fuller rode ahead. About six hundred feet in from the road, he came face to face with a Buick touring car. So close were the bushes that he and Wind had to dismount and lead their horses past it. The car had apparently been there overnight, for the windshield and hood and fenders were streaked with dew. Fuller glanced in as he went by and saw a few coins on the front seat and a coat in the back. A moment later when he looked back to see if Wind could get by, he noticed that the glass was missing from the rear window.

Before remounting the two men stopped to look at the smeared dark-blue car. It had no license plates, but otherwise it seemed to resemble the holdup car they had read about the day before. Just ahead of the car they made out the thin tracks of a smaller car, perhaps a Ford, leading to Manley Street. They rode back the way they had come, stopped at the first house, and called the Brockton police. Within fifteen minutes City Marshal Ryan arrived with Officer William Hill.

Together the four men examined the car inside and out. Besides the coins and the old brown overcoat, they found a phial that was thought afterward to have contained dope, and on the floor the glass from the rear window. Since Fuller was more familiar with a Buick than the others he drove it out through the snagging bushes. Reaching Manley Street, he turned the car over to Hill, who drove it to the police garage in Brockton. The next morning the police, examining the car a second time, found a bullet hole in the rear door.

Stewart and Brouillard were notified, and they inspected the car Sunday evening. The Buick’s spare tire was missing, and the maker’s number near the gas tank had been chiseled off. The engine number, however, was still intact: 560,490. It was the number of the Murphy car stolen in Needham on November 23. The Registry of Motor Vehicles had reported that the license plate, 49783, had been stolen from a Ford belonging to Warren H. Ellis of 602 Webster Street, Needham. Just after ten o’clock on the night of January 6 Ellis had put his car in his garage. Next morning the plates were gone.

Stewart learned about the Ellis plates on Monday. In December he had connected the missing Needham Buick with the Bridgewater holdup. Now it turned out to be the car used in South Braintree. And both the Bridgewater and the South Braintree license plates had been stolen in Needham within an interval of about two weeks. The two crimes now seemed to him to be the work of the same gang—another piece added to his puzzle. It was curious too—a kind of corroboration of his theory of the other night—that the car should have been found less than two miles from Puffer’s Place. Coacci again!

Unfortunately, Coacci was at this point somewhere on the Atlantic. Nevertheless Stewart felt there might still be some evidence to be found in the South Elm Street house. He telephoned Brouillard and they arranged to go over to Puffer’s Place on Tuesday.

That same Monday Joseph Ventola turned up at Puffer’s with a truck to move Ersilia, her children, and her belongings to a house in South Braintree. Not long after he had gone Simon Johnson and his brother Samuel arrived from their Elm Square Garage with a tow truck to haul away Boda’s broken-down Overland. Boda helped them push the car out of the shed at the side of the house. After they had hitched it up, Boda, who had known the Johnsons ever since he had moved to Cochesett, rode the mile to Elm Square with them in the truck. The Italian wore his velour hat and was carrying his leather bag. The Johnsons let him off at the car stop and he boarded the Brockton trolley.

Tuesday afternoon Stewart picked up Brouillard and they drove to Puffer’s Place. In the fading light, the ramshackle gabled house with the gnarled apple tree in front of it and the leafless grapevine in the rear looked as if it might have been cut out of cardboard. Broken windows in the shed had been tacked over with burlap.

After Stewart knocked several times, Boda came to the door in his shirtsleeves. Stewart said he and Brouillard were from the Immigration Service and that they wanted a photograph of Coacci. Boda said Coacci had already sent in two photographs. Stewart explained that one of them had been lost. Boda let the men in. When Stewart asked about Coacci’s friends, Boda said that they sometimes came to the house but he did not know who they were. They were, he told the chief, “bad peoples.” More than that he could or would not say. When Stewart asked if Coacci had owned a gun, Boda said he had kept one in the kitchen drawer. Stewart opened the drawer. Though he found no gun, the drawer contained the manufacturer’s diagram of a Savage automatic.

Still ostensibly looking for photographs, Stewart and Brouillard searched the house while Boda tagged after them. When they asked if he himself had a gun, Boda produced a Spanish-type automatic from his bureau. He said he had no license, but that he never carried the gun outside. Brouillard removed the clip and examined the three cartridges. Each was of a different make; all were American.

When the three men went out on the porch, Stewart asked about the padlocked shed. Boda said he kept his car there, but just now it was at the Johnson’s garage. Stewart asked if he could look inside the shed. Boda unsnapped the padlock and slid the door back.

On the right of the dirt-floored shed stood two planks on which the Overland had rested. To the left of the planks the floor had recently been raked. Stewart and Brouillard inspected the shed carefully. Afterward Stewart chimed that a small unraked patch near one of the planks showed the clear imprint of a U. S. Royal tire, much too large for an Overland but the right size for a Buick.[1]

Boda locked the shed again and Stewart thanked him for his cooperation, saying he might have a chat with him later.

The more Stewart thought about Boda afterward the more dubious the Italian began to appear. Later, he felt he should have arrested him on the spot, but at the time there had seemed nothing tangible except the pistol. Early the next morning he drove over to Puffer’s Place alone. Boda was eating breakfast at the kitchen table when he glimpsed the chief’s car coming down South Elm Street. By the time Stewart knocked on the door, he had slipped out of sight. Stewart knocked several times, peered through the window at the breakfast table, and then drove off.

For Boda that second visit was conclusive. The police would be coming back. Whatever they might want, he preferred not to be there. An Italian friend came down from Brockton and helped him get his belongings together. He left on the Boston train that afternoon, and for the next few weeks stayed under cover with an Italian family in East Boston.

Just as Boda had suspected, Stewart returned the following evening. But this time, when he flashed his light through the kitchen window, there was nothing to see. Except for a few tin cans in the corner the place was empty.

Stewart drove to the Elm Square Garage. Boda’s Overland was still there. Stewart told Simon Johnson ominously that there was some pretty serious business afoot and that if Boda or anyone else should come for the Overland, Johnson was to string him along until he could call the police.