Silva, at the time of the Bridgewater holdup, was thirty-five years old. He had come to Boston from Italy at the age of ten, and still spoke English with an accent, although his close-set face with its clipped mustache looked more American than Italian. Sensual, indolent, usually down on his luck, as readily a pimp as a mugger, Silva was the petty-criminal type not uncommon in the North End, where the brown, wrinkled-faced old women would draw their shawls tighter in contempt as he passed. When the police seemed too active Silva would take a job, but never for long. In 1916, he told Callahan, he had worked briefly in the L. Q. White factory in Bridgewater, but soon returned to Hanover Street. His favorite hangout there was Jimmy “Big Chief” Mede’s shoeshine parlor and cigar stand, where a few of the boys were always talking about easy money, figuring things out. Jimmy was a dark-eyed, heavy-browed Sicilian who asked questions and let others do the answering. According to Silva, he had told Jimmy it would be easy enough to go down to Bridgewater the day before Christmas and snatch the payroll. He figured it would amount to twenty or thirty thousand dollars. Several times in the autumn of 1917, Silva said, he and Mede and Joe Sammarco, a nineteen-year-old Italian corner boy known as Joe Nap because he had come from Naples, went to Bridgewater to look over the factory, the bank, and the connecting streets. Then on November 14, 1917, Mede and some of his boys were caught after robbing the paymaster of the American Net & Twine Company in Cambridge, and the Big Chief found himself doing a seven-to-ten-year rap in Charlestown. Silva, left to himself, joined the Army. After his discharge in 1919 he returned to the North End and ran into Joe Sammarco. They were both broke. Silva remembered the L. Q. White payroll, waiting there in Bridgewater like a Christmas turkey. The job would need two more to pull it off. Sammarco said he knew just the two. Next day he appeared with “Doggy” Bruno, a chunky fellow with a short mustache like Silva’s, and “Guinea” Oates, who owned a touring car. Silva told Callahan that the four of them had driven to Bridgewater several times to check the roads. They had walked around the town, shot a little pool in the parlor under the post office, and taken a long look at the Bridgewater Trust Company, where the White truck picked up the payroll. Because Christmas would fall on Thursday, they knew the delivery would be made on Wednesday. Monday of Christmas week, Silva told Callahan, Guinea had driven them to Needham and at a garage near the police station Silva asked a man about license plates. When the man walked away for a moment, he spotted an old car that had dealer’s plates tied on with string. He untied them, tucked them under his coat, and cleared out to meet the others. From Needham they drove to Bridgewater for another rehearsal.