by Bridget Heos
In a final twist, while Sacco and Vanzetti were appealing the verdict, another man confessed to the crime. Celestino F. Madeiros was in prison for bank robbery when he passed a note to Sacco through the jail messenger; it read, “I hear by confess to being in the South Braintree and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime.”6
Madeiros said he was confessing out of a sense of guilt: “I seen Sacco’s wife come up here with the kids and I felt sorry for the kids,” he said.7 His role in the supposed plot had been minor: he’d sat in the backseat as a sort of lookout for the more experienced gang members. He refused to name the others who had participated, but investigators believed it to be the Morelli gang, a group accused of stealing freight from trains in Braintree.
Several parts of Madeiros’s story made sense. One gang member, Joe Morelli, had a Colt .32 at the time, and while in prison for another crime he had apparently asked a fellow prisoner to give him an alibi for April 15, 1920. Another gang member, a man named Mancini, owned a gun that matched the other bullets found on the bodies. Madeiros also had $2,800 in the bank, which would have been his even share of the loot. Moreover, the account jibed with the feeling some investigators had that the robbery was carried out not by an anarchist fish peddler and a shoe factory worker, but by professional criminals who knew what they were doing.
On the other hand, Madeiros got some details wrong about the case. For instance, he said the money was in a bag, when it was really in boxes. He also couldn’t accurately describe the neighborhood where the crime occurred. Investigators who looked into the confession believed Madeiros was just blowing smoke. True, he gained nothing from the confession, but he didn’t really lose anything either. After all, he didn’t confess to the murder or theft, merely to being there.
Sacco and Vanzetti were denied all motions for a new trial, and on April 9, 1927, they were sentenced to death amid worldwide protests. As a result of the protests, Massachusetts Governor A. T. Fuller appointed a commission to determine if Sacco and Vanzetti should be freed. The commission recommended that the convictions be upheld. Soon after, Goddard offered to test the bullets. He fired rounds from Sacco’s gun and compared the shells and bullets to those found at the scene. Interestingly, he found that one shell and one bullet matched the gun. A 1961 panel of forensic firearm experts confirmed the same thing.
Does that mean the men were guilty? Some insiders believed only one man to be. Carlo Tresa, an anarchist leader who was originally set to defend the men in trial, said in 1943, “Sacco was guilty, but Vanzetti was innocent.”8 Another member of the defense team said, “Sacco was guilty. . . . Vanzetti was innocent as far as the actual participation in killing.”9 Even the prosecution may have believed only one of the men to have been guilty. Vanzetti’s guilty verdict reportedly brought the assistant prosecutor to tears.
In 2005, a letter turned up containing new information about the Sacco and Vanzetti case. It was penned in 1929 by Upton Sinclair, famed author of The Jungle. In the letter, Sinclair told his lawyer about the turmoil he felt while writing his new novel, Boston, a fictionalized account of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. While researching the novel, he heard shocking information from defense attorney Fred Moore: that both men were guilty and that the defense team fabricated their alibis. Sinclair decided that the information was unreliable. (He suspected that Moore was on drugs and knew that Moore had had a bitter falling out with the rest of the defense team. Sinclair also learned from Moore’s ex-wife that during the trial, he had said he thought the men were innocent.) From others in the anarchist community, Sinclair heard conflicting reports: that both men were guilty, that neither was, and that Sacco alone was. Sinclair stayed the course in writing the novel as if the men were innocent, though clearly he had his doubts. If it was true that Sacco, at least, bore the guilt, then the firearm analysis—linking Sacco’s gun to the bullets found at the scene—told the real story of what happened in Braintree that day, or part of it, anyway.
Goddard weighed in on another sensational murder case of the 1920s: the gangland shooting known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. In 1929, gun violence was rampant in Chicago. The town was run by the mob, and the mob was run by Al Capone. Prohibition had been good for Capone and other organized crime leaders. Though making, distributing, and selling alcohol were outlawed in 1920, all these things were still happening through the practice of bootlegging. And because bootleggers were outside the law, they didn’t have to follow any rules. They could take over as many distilleries, breweries, and bars as they wanted without it being called a monopoly. And rather than negotiating, like normal people, they could simply kill anyone who stood in their way. This no-holds-barred style of business was extremely lucrative. Capone’s illegal enterprises were estimated to earn $100 million a year. Some of the profits from bootlegging went toward bribing police and politicians so that the illegal businesses wouldn’t be shut down. These alliances made gangs even more powerful. Prohibition was such a boon to organized crime that leaders even held a national convention in 1928. Twenty-three crime bosses—all from Sicilian families—met in Cleveland, Ohio, to collaborate and share ideas. But rival gangs didn’t always play nice.
Al Capone
George “Bugs” Moran
In the late 1920s, George “Bugs” Moran, leader of a North Chicago gang, began stealing shipments of bootlegged whiskey from Capone. If you were going to steal whiskey from someone, Capone probably wasn’t your best target. Besides being a gangster, he was a certifiable psychopath. At one point, he beat three of his former gang members to death with a baseball bat during a company dinner. Bugs would soon know Capone’s wrath.
Capone had placed a spy in Bugs’s gang, and that spy arranged a shipment of stolen whiskey to be delivered to Bugs’s warehouse on February 14, 1929—Valentine’s Day. That morning, the Moran gangsters began arriving: Johnny May, Adam Heyer, Pete and Frank Gusenberg, James Clark, and Albert Weinshank, along with Dr. Reinhardt Schwimmer, an eye doctor who was not a gangster but was friends with the group. Weinshank looked like Bugs, and upon seeing the lookalike, Capone’s men mistakenly put the plan in action before their main target had even arrived.
Capone’s gangsters pulled up in a black Packard—the make of police cars at the time. Two were dressed as police officers, and two or three others wore overcoats. Bugs arrived at about the same time but, seeing what he thought was a police raid, fled the scene. His gangsters weren’t so lucky. The phony police officers ordered Moran’s men to line up against a brick wall and surrender their weapons. When they obeyed the orders, the gunmen pulled out their machine guns and opened fire. Capone’s men then fled the scene posing as police officers making an arrest. The men wearing overcoats held their hands in the air, and the men dressed as police officers followed, guns drawn.
The real police arrived to find a bloody scene. The bodies contained thirty-nine bullets and bullet fragments. Many more littered the floor, along with dozens of shell casings. Dr. Goddard was brought in to analyze the firearm evidence. Goddard had his work cut out for him. He had never seen so many bullets and shells from a single murder scene. But he was able to draw several conclusions. First, all the bullets and shells came from one or more .45 automatic submachine guns. Because the casings had different markings, two guns must have been used. The bullets had six right-twisting grooves—the kind found in the barrel of a Thompson submachine gun or “Tommy gun.”
Chicago police reenacting the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
Goddard was able to show that the bullets didn’t come from any of the Chicago police’s Tommy guns (something the public suspected since the gangsters had posed as police officers). In spite of Goddard’s analysis, the police were unable to find the matching guns, even after several arrests. Bugs himself voluntarily came forward to talk to the police, famously stating, “Only Capone kills like that.”10 Capone, however, had an alibi: at the time of the killings, he was being questioned by Miami police for other crimes.
Officials examinin
g machine guns thought to be used in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
Then, ten months later, a man named Fred Burke was involved in a traffic accident in Michigan. While being escorted to the police station, he shot and killed a police officer and hijacked a car, which he later abandoned. Documents in the car led police to Burke’s home. There, officers found two Tommy guns that Goddard was able to link to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Burke was finally captured in the spring of 1930, but instead of being tried for the Chicago shoot-up, he was tried in Michigan for the murder of the police officer and sentenced to life. Another suspect in the killing, Jack McGurn, was killed by machine-gun fire by rival gangsters in 1936. As for the gang leaders, Al Capone was never brought to trial for his violent crimes, but he was convicted of tax evasion in 1931. Upon his release, he was suffering from syphilis and too sick to regain his power. Bugs Moran was later convicted of bank robbery and died in prison. Goddard, on the other hand, got a happy ending. Hearing about his work on the case, wealthy philanthropists donated money to fund a new lab for him: the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory at Northwestern University.
By 1930, firearm analysis was common in criminal cases. Oftentimes, the type of bullet found at the crime scene pointed to a certain type of suspect. A woman leaving a Brooklyn movie theater in June of 1937 suddenly collapsed. She said to her husband, “John, I think I’ve been shot.”11 An ambulance arrived and found a gunshot wound. At first, the police suspected gangsters. Her husband was a contractor, and the construction business had been infiltrated by gangs.
It worked like this: a gangster would join a union and work his way into a leadership position. Then he would steal from union members’ salaries, dues, and pensions. Needless to say, this must have infuriated union members, but they couldn’t exactly speak up—the gang’s complaint department had guns. In other cases, union leaders formed alliances with gangs so that they could strong-arm employers for better wages. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, bootleggers were no longer needed, and so gangs shifted their focus more heavily to racketeering. For this reason, the police thought organized crime might have been involved in the shooting, and that the real target was John, not his wife.
But the police discovered that the deadly bullet came from a .22-caliber small rifle—hardly the type of gun associated with organized crime. Gangsters preferred heavy-caliber weapons. (Caliber refers to the size of the gun barrel. A .22 rifle has a diameter of approximately 22/100 of an inch and is considered low-caliber. A .38 and a .45 have diameters of approximately 38/100 and 45/100 of an inch, respectively, and are high-caliber.) A .22 was—and still is—a rifle given to young people who are just learning to shoot. The entrance wound suggested that the shot had been fired from the tenements across the street. Police searched every apartment and finally found an eighteen-year-old with a .22. He’d been aiming at the lightbulbs on the theater marquee and tragically misfired.
A .38 was a common weapon among gangsters, including Francis “Two Gun” Crowley, one of many gangsters whose careers flourished during Prohibition. His string of violent crimes was traceable by the bullets found at the crime scenes, though he himself was hard to track down. Born on Halloween of 1911, Francis was placed in the poor but loving foster home of Anne Crowley. While in her care, he came to idolize his foster brother John, who was not exactly a stellar role model.
John was constantly in trouble with the law and, as a result, had a real problem with cops. He particularly disliked Officer Maurice Harlow, who had arrested John for drunkenness and disorderliness. One night, John was at a rowdy party when the police were called, and as fate would have it, Harlow responded. John fired on Harlow, who shot back. Both men died. Francis, just thirteen at the time, blamed the police for his brother’s death. He later explained that he hated cops “because they were always suspecting me, on account of my step-brother having been killed in a fight with a patrolman.”12
Francis began stealing cars for the gangs that had become so powerful. By 1931, he was a wanted man. But when a police officer tried to arrest Francis, he opened fire, seriously injuring the officer. A preeminent firearms expert, Sergeant Harry Butts, examined the recovered bullets and said they matched those found after a gunfight at an American Legion dance. Bullets of the same type were also found on the body of Virginia Brannen, a twenty-three-year-old dance hall hostess (a job that entailed dancing with customers for ten cents a dance). Highly motivated to catch the elusive killer, police distributed a wanted poster. Police officer Fred Hirsch was carrying the poster in his pocket when he approached a suspicious-looking car parked on Black Shirt Lane. He recognized Francis behind the wheel, sitting next to his girlfriend, Helen Walsh. When Hirsch asked Francis for his license, he pretended to reach for it but grabbed his gun instead. He shot Hirsch, stole the officer’s revolver, shot him again with that, and sped away. Hirsch, a father of four, was supposed to have already ended his shift but had stayed to help his younger partner.
The police told reporters that Francis had surely killed Helen, who was just sixteen, since she was a witness to the murder, but really, the two lovebirds were on the run together, along with Francis’s friend Rudolph “Tough Red” Duringer. (It had actually been Tough Red who had shot Virginia with Francis’s gun—he said out of jealousy, though witnesses said it was a hired hit.) Helen reassured her mother of her safety in a letter.
“Dear Mom: I’m all right and don’t worry about me. I am being well taken care of. We were married today. He is taking me to Canada tonight.” As to what they were doing in the car, Helen reassured her mother about that, too: “We were not petting. We were sitting there talking and Shorty was afraid that I would get shot and that’s why he got away so fast.”13 The letter helped lead the police to Francis.
By now, the city was crawling with cops and reporters wanting a piece of Francis. His options for hideouts were limited. Still, he probably could have done better than to ask his recently jilted girlfriend for help. But that’s exactly what he did. He moved himself, Helen, and Tough Red into the apartment of Irene “Billie” Dunne, who Francis had recently dumped to go out with Helen. Billie apparently tipped off the police, and soon, Officers Dominick Caso and William Mara arrived at her West Nineteenth Street apartment. A note on her door said she’d gone out shopping, but it was clear that someone was home. The officers called for backup, and several detectives arrived. Francis must have heard the commotion, because he fired through the door and walls of the apartment. More backup was called in.
Detectives on the roof of the apartment where Francis Crowley and two others were caught by police
Soon, 150 officers were gathered in the streets below the apartment. Francis fired at them from the window while Helen and Tough Red took turns hiding under the bed. Officers and onlookers alike dodged bullets by diving behind cars. The officers returned fire, and debris fell from the building as it was peppered with bullets. A team of officers climbed onto the roof, cut a hole in the ceiling, and threw tear gas into the apartment. But Francis hurled the gas canisters into the street and opened fire at the officers through the ceiling. By now, the bad guys were running low on ammunition.
Fearing the end, Francis wrote a semi-rhyming, semi-coherent note explaining his violent rampage.
To whom it may concern:
I was born on the thirty-first. She was born on the thirteenth. I guess it was fate that made us mate. When I die put a lily in my hand, let the boys know how they’ll look. Underneath my coat will lay a wary kind heart what wouldn’t harm anything. I hadn’t nothing else to do. That’s why I went around bumping off cops. It’s the new sensation of the films. Take a tip from me to never let a copper go an inch above your knee. They will tell you they love you but as soon as you turn your back they will club you and say “the hell with you.” Now that my death is so near there is a couple of bulls at the door and saying “come hear.” I’m behind the door with three thirty-eights one which belongs to my friend who put on weight so quick in Nort
h Merrick. He would have gotten me if his bullets were any good.14
The last reference was to Officer Hirsch, who apparently had shot back at Francis but had a faulty pistol and so missed. “Put on weight” referred to the weight of the lead bullets.
The police were anxious to bring the shootout to an end. A crowd of 10,000 had gathered to watch and were breaking through the police barriers. Neighbors in the building were leaning out their windows to see the action. The police worried someone would be shot. As Francis threw another round of tear gas canisters out the window, police hit him with machine-gun fire. Confident that he had been wounded, they stormed the apartment. When they broke down the door, Helen was crouched in the corner and Tough Red was not very toughly hiding under the bed. Francis still stood, but said, “I’m shot. I give up. Anyway, you didn’t kill me.” He was apparently out of ammunition and had been shot three times—on the legs and arm. In the ambulance, police found two pistols strapped to his legs. He’d planned to shoot his way out of the ambulance. He was sentenced to death, saying before his execution, “My last wish is to send my love to my mother.”15 Too bad that love didn’t extend to the rest of humankind.
Today, guns and career criminals still go hand in hand. There is an ongoing case in which bullets found at the scene match the gun of a hired hit man. He has even confessed to the shooting. But a man claiming to be innocent is imprisoned instead—all because of what appears to have been a false confession. Davontae Sanford, a fourteen-year-old with a learning disability, was prone to making up stories—a trait that would have tragic implications. At around one a.m. on a September night in 2007, Detroit police responded to a call on Runyon Street, where four people had been shot and killed.