In 1927 two anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were executed for a 1920 Massachusetts robbery in which two victims were killed. The Sacco-Vanzetti case remains to this day a cause célèbre, with many feeling they were innocent of the charge and had been convicted in an era of superpatriotism and hysteria about foreign radicals.
Within mob circles there was never any doubt as to the pair’s innocence, a fact confirmed in the 1970s by underworld informer Vinnie Teresa (whose testimony has probably been of greater value to authorities than that of another renowned informer, Joe Valachi).
According to Teresa, the $15,776.51 payroll robbery of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company of South Braintree, Massachusetts, on April 15, 1920, was the work of the notorious Morelli gang. The Morellis were five brothers who moved to the New England area from Brooklyn during World War I. Two of them, Frank “Butsey” Morelli and Joseph Morelli, were the leaders of a terrorist mob that ran roughshod over several states, pulling all sorts of robberies and burglaries.
Much speculation by civil libertarians has tied the Morellis to the robbery for which Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted. Newspapers from time to time revived the case, and mentions were often made of Joseph, who died in 1950, and Butsey, who in the 1950s went so far as to sue the Boston Globe for printing a story linking him to the crime.
Butsey was at the time dying of cancer and his motive in this, says Teresa in his book My Life in the Mafia, had nothing to do with trying to clear his name—he was generally identified as the first Mafia boss of Rhode Island—but rather to shield his adopted son from the unwanted publicity. Butsey insisted to the boy he had nothing to do with the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Teresa said he asked Butsey, “What the hell are you suing them for? You can’t beat a newspaper.”
Butsey replied, “What they said was true, but it’s going to hurt my kid. I don’t give a damn about myself. I’m ready to die anyway. But look what it’s doing to my boy. He’s a legitimate kid. He never knew what was going on before.”
As to the murders, Butsey told Teresa: “We whacked them out, we killed those guys in the robbery. These two greaseballs took it on the chin. . . . That shows you how much justice there really is.”
The fact that Teresa’s testimony has been considered reliable enough to lead to the indictment or conviction of more than 50 mob figures certainly lends his disclosure about Sacco and Vanzetti a considerable measure of credibility.
