The Saddest Part:
NOAH, ROBERT
The Saddest Part The Untried Case. By Herbert B. Ehrmann. Vanguard. 268 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by Robert Noah Author of a recently completed play on Sacco-Vanzetti, "Before I Sleep" Until...
...And it served to provide history's strongest argument for believing that American justice had executed two innocent men...
...The Untried Case is the story of his findings...
...It's good to have Ehrmann's book available again, because it forms an indispensable part of the literature of Sacco and Vanzetti...
...Ehrmann's story begins with the note received by Sacco and takes us with him on a trail that leads to Providence and New Bedford as he gathers evidence that slowly begins to shore up what at first looked like a flimsy deathhouse confession...
...From the lawyer who defended them, Ehrmann learned that they had been familiar with the operations of the South Braintree shoe companies, having employed spotters who would have had ample opportunity to observe the manner in which the payroll was handled...
...But the trouble was that the arguments of the defense left unanswered a question that, properly, should never have been asked: If they didn't do it, who did...
...Then, a few days later, the same license plates were seen on another car being driven by Morelli...
...But it touched off an investigation that at last supplied an answer to the question that should have been irrelevant...
...It had been written by a confessed bank robber and murderer whose veracity was open to serious question...
...This, of course, should have been enough...
...Reviewed by Robert Noah Author of a recently completed play on Sacco-Vanzetti, "Before I Sleep" Until November 1925, it was impossible for any dispassionate defender of Sacco and Vanzetti to say more in their defense than that the case against them was far from conclusive and that their trial and the events that followed it had shown the overzealousness of the prosecution and the presiding judge more clearly than it had demonstrated the guilt of the defendants...
...Now, 40 years after the payroll murders were committed, interest in the case has been revived...
...From the police in Providence, Ehrmann found that there had indeed been such a gang, the Morellis...
...By itself, the note meant little...
...On the day the crime was committed, Morelli was seen in the car again, at an hour that would have given him time to return from South Braintree...
...it remains untested by courtroom procedures...
...A few days before the robbery, a New Bedford policeman had seen Mike Morelli driving a new Buick automobile that, he later realized, fit the description of the murder car...
...But whether or not the Morellis could have been convicted in a court of law is really beside the point...
...With those words, Thayer denied the motion for a new trial...
...First published in 1933, it now appears in a new edition with a foreword by the late Joseph N. Welch and an introduction by Edmund M. Morgan, himself coauthor of one of the finest and most complete volumes on the case, The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti...
...Madeiros had refused to name his accomplices in the payroll crime, but he had mentioned that it was a Providence gang that had previously been involved in freight car robberies...
...And therein lies the saddest, most incredible part of the story...
...The investigation was conducted by Herbert B. Ehrmann, then a young lawyer working with the defense...
...The note read: "I hereby confess to being in the South Braintree shoe company crime and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime...
...The Buick had suddenly disappeared at the very time that whoever had committed the South Braintree crime was known to have abandoned a car of the same make...
...Even after the defense had supplied an answer to the question of who had committed the crime, a judge—and later a Governor and three members of a select committee—refused to listen...
...Then, on November 13, 1925, four years after the shoemaker and the peddler had been convicted of the payroll robbery and murders at South Braintree, Sacco received a note from Celestino F. Madeiros, a fellow prisoner at the Dedham jail...
...It's possible, of course...
...And to that degree, Ehrmann's case remains untried in a sense he didn't mean...
...Could it have been coincidence...
...And, in New Bedford, Ehrmann discovered that the police there had reason to suspect one of the Morelli brothers, but had dropped their concern when Sacco and Vanzetti were accused of the crime...
...The true significance of the case Ehrmann builds against them lies in the fact that it serves to substantiate the Madeiros confession so strongly that it seems monstrous for a judge to have said, as Webster Thayer did: "This Court, if his natural feelings of humanity were stretched to the limit, cannot find as a fact that Madeiros told the truth...
Vol. 44 • February 1961 • No. 6
