The sea-change decades of depression and war did little to alter the pattern of Joe Morelli’s life. On his return from Leavenworth he moved from Providence to the scarcely more scenic environment of adjacent Pawtucket. In that gray three-decker jungle city he was to spend the rest of his days—when not in prison—in a house at 70 Toledo Avenue, a convenient half-mile beyond the attentions of the Providence police.
In 1928 he was picked up by the Pawtucket police in connection with a clothing theft, the next year for smuggling liquor into the Providence county jail. In 1932 Secret Service agents arrested him for possessing counterfeit bills and engaging juveniles, including a thirteen-year-old female state ward, to pass them. He managed to get himself acquitted. Later that year the Secret Service raided his house and uncovered a cache of bogus five-dollar bills. The agents also found parts of a book he was writing about his gangland career.
At his trial Joe tried but failed to put the blame for the counterfeit money on his son, John. Sentenced to five years in the new federal prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, Joe had the distinction of being the first Rhode Islander to arrive there.
In 1941, he was arrested for keeping a house of prostitution in his home, setting up slot machines, and selling liquor without a license. A neighbor, James Prete, who had complained to the police about the goings-on at 70 Toledo Avenue had his house wrecked by dynamite.
While Joe was out on bail he was again arrested for counterfeiting. Not until March 1946 was he paroled. Nine months later he was picked up for running a house of prostitution. In March 1947, he was seized for violating his parole and sent to the Danbury Federal Penitentiary.
The following year he was released, only to be arrested on the old prostitution charge. In moments of self-pity Joe liked to predict that he would one day die in jail.
In 1931 Joe boasted to Morris Ernst, a New York lawyer connected with various civil liberties committees, that he and his gang had staged the South Braintree holdup and that he had ridden in the murder car. Ernst had taken no part in the Sacco-Vanzetti defense nor until the execution of the two men had he formed any fixed opinion as to their guilt or innocence, although he had concluded that there had been a lack of due process. Reading the six volumes of the case record as they were published in 1928 and 1929, he was struck by the amorphous Morelli hypothesis appearing in Volume V. “Being what I am,” he explained at the Massachusetts Judiciary Committee hearing in 1959, “and for no sensible reason probably, I went on the trail of Joe Morelli. I have had talks with Joe Morelli. I have had letters with him. I have seen him with his counsel. I am told that I am the only person who had examined the man who really did the job for which Sacco and Vanzetti went to the chair.”
Ernst started his private investigation by arranging a meeting in the Providence office of Joe Morelli’s lawyer, Louis Jackvony, a former Rhode Island attorney general whom Joe had known as a boy. After being introduced to Ernst Joe did not sit down, but stood for several minutes by the window while the latter talked. Finally he gave a signal to someone in the street, explaining then that he had decided Ernst was “jake.”
Ernst had prepared a list of detailed questions about the South Braintree holdup: Were there two cars or one? Were they open or closed, and where did they go? Where did the license plates come from? Who was in the car? Were the payroll boxes metal or wood? Who picked them up? How much money was in them and how many people divided it? Was there anyone leaning against the fence? Was there a team of horses? An excavation? A water tower? Why did they double back at the Matfield crossing? For two hours Joe answered all questions affably and correctly.
No person of this man’s make-up [Ernst wrote later] would have read the minutes of the trial with enough precision to fit all his answers into the known facts, down to the description of the flapping of the side curtains on the murder car. Nor could any human being have guessed the answers as to time and place of the many details of the shooting day about which I confronted him. I left completely satisfied that the gang chieftain was in the murder car and knew all the details of the planning of the robbery, the details of the shooting, and the technique of escape.
Joe was even willing to sign a statement—for a price—but he became angry when Ernst let slip that an underworld intermediary had been promised fifteen hundred dollars for his assistance in the case. Joe hinted that his price would be ten times that. Ernst finally offered him twenty-five hundred if he would produce the metal payroll boxes. “You couldn’t get them out of Canapa Pond,” Joe told him.
Later, while Morelli was doing his stretch at Lewisburg, Ernst said he learned that Canapa Pond was the local name for a body of water on the route of the escaping murder car, but he made no effort to recover the boxes.
During his three years at Lewisburg Joe continued writing his life history, accumulating almost six hundred pages by the time of his 1936 parole. Back at Toledo Avenue, he made various attempts to cash in on the manuscript. For some time he corresponded with Silas Bent, a friend of Jack Callahan, the journalist who had brought Frank Silva’s confession to the Outlook in 1928. Bent was impressed enough to get in touch with the Outlook and with Upton Sinclair, to whom he wrote:
Joe Morelli has asked me to write you about his autobiography, which he has completed. I have not seen it, and do not know whether he goes fully into the South Braintree holdup; but I have talked to him more than once about it, and if he is free to tell the whole story, the book should be a smash.
When Bent asked Joe’s price for a sworn confession that he had organized and committed the South Braintree holdup, Joe, apparently with an author’s vanity, insisted that his whole book appear, not just a chapter. After some further dickering, the deal fell through.
Meantime Joe had been angling Ernst, promising him “the real truth and not baloney” about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and when Ernst again met him in Jackvony’s office, Joe had the manuscript with him. His price was twenty-five thousand dollars, and he would not allow the pages to be inspected even briefly. All Ernst managed to see was the cover. Subsequently, with the help of Oswald Garrison Villard, Ernst raised an initial five thousand dollars. Joe still held out for his twenty-five thousand, which in Ernst’s court-hardened mind meant he would settle for ten thousand.
Some time in 1939 Ernst took Joe to lunch in Boston with Robert Lemond, an editor of Little, Brown & Co., to discuss publishing the confession-autobiography. Joe had his sealed manuscript with him, but he still refused to turn it over for less than his price. He and Ernst were not to meet again.
With the shadow of World War II moving across the landscape, interest in the Morellis faded. The only person still concerned with them was Ben Bagdikian, a reporter on the Providence Journal. In August 1950, he learned that Joe was dying of cancer. Hopeful of getting some last statement from him, Bagdikian went to Jackvony, one of the few men Joe trusted. Jackvony in turn went to Joe’s bedside and told him that a friend wanted to see him about the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
At first Joe refused to see anyone, but a few days later he whispered to the lawyer: “All right, tell him to come. I’ll tell him the whole story.” Jackvony reminded Joe that he did not have to say anything, but if he had something to get off his chest, this was the time. “Tell him to come,” Joe said again.
On August 25 Jackvony and Bagdikian drove to the house on Toledo Avenue. Jackvony went in alone, arranging to signal from the porch when Joe was ready. Bagdikian waited in the car for twenty-five minutes. A man in a large yellow convertible pulled up behind him, watched him suspiciously for fifteen minutes, then drove away. Bagdikian learned later that he was Joe’s brother Frank.
As soon as Jackvony entered Joe’s bedroom he was aware of the death smell. The white face on the pillow gave him one frightened appealing glance of recognition, the blue lips moved slightly, then Joe slipped into a coma. Jackvony stepped to the bed, tapped Joe’s knee, and called out his name, but there was no reply. He bent down, put his mouth to Joe’s ear, and shouted, “Sacco and Vanzetti!” There was no response. The secret still hovered inside Joe’s skull, but it was to remain there. Early next morning he died.
On a summer morning in South Braintree, just forty years after the 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.
“Why,” he said, “Van Amburgh’s son has those things. I thought 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.