The Morelli Gang

The nascent New England mob became involved in the Sacco-Vanzetti case after the two men were convicted. A member of the gang, Celestino Medeiros, in jail and facing the death penalty confessed that the Morelli Gang pulled off the robbery that Sacco and Vanzetti were blamed for. There was enough of a story here that some today still believe the Morellis were involved. For instance, members of the gang had weapons similar to those used in the crime, one member of the gang bore a striking resemblance to Sacco, and the gang was already having shipments to the shoe factories involved "falling off the truck" or in this case the train.

Medeiros was not good on the details, however. He told authorities that the payroll was in a bag when it was actually in a metal box, and he was very careful not to implicate himself in the crime. I suppose it's possible that the Italian anarchist movement was buying it's ammo from the Morellis, but its hard to overcome the evidence of the shells in Sacco's possession mentioned in the last post. I still believe Sacco guilty, Vanzetti probably innocent. Someday we should look into a similar payroll robbery in Bridgewater that the men were possibly involved in.

The Braintree-Randolph-Holbrook area hadn't heard the last of the Morelli Gang. In the years after the robbery in Braintree, the gang used the bootleg trade to organize the first New England branch of the Mafia. Illegal alcohol was produced in a border area of Braintree called Hell's Kitchen so the police departments of all three towns became involved in both corruption and the suppression of the trade. I was lucky enough to have the grandchildren of the two police chiefs from this era in my class. In Holbrook that would be "Two Gun" Baker and in Randall Pat McDonnell. Both men often fought the mob single handedly as members of their department were on the side of the bootleggers. Baker's career needs research by some Holbrook local historian, but McDonnell's career in Randolph is better known because his wife kept a scrapbook of his newspaper clippings, and Pat himself lived to almost a hundred years old and served Randolph as a Selectman into his nineties.

I'll always think of McDonnell as the man with the motorcycle because in his early days on the force that was his vehicle of choice. The bootleggers knew this too and set a trap for him. McDonnell would often patrol the wooded road along the Braintree Reservoir. The bootleggers strung a wire across the road to decapitate him when he drove by. He was saved from this gory fate when a fish and game warden driving through snapped the wire and reported it to McDonnell. The town fathers of Randolph had turned to McDonnell as one of the youngest members of the force and the least likely to be corrupted. That was indeed true; he took to raiding speakeasies and stills on his own without telling the rest of the force. One day he busted a speakeasy only to find Randolph police officers among the customers.

As McDonnell's fame grew so did the power of the Morellis. There was little he could do about their operation in Braintree, but when the gang expanded into Randolph, McDonnell sent word that they should "get out of town." According to local legend, members of the gang marched on the police station in Crawford Square only to discover that McDonnell had his informants also. The gang members found him standing behind his motorcycle in the Square with guns drawn. The Morellis "git." Hard to believe that Massachusetts had a "High Noon" showdown in the 1920s, but you know what the newspaper editor said in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."