The “Italian mentioned yesterday” was a floater who spent most of his
time hanging around the Boston American Building near Summer Street
or in Monahan’s Bar in the North End. It took the Pinkerton agents
several days to track him home to 31 Waverly Street, in the massed
tenement district of Brighton. The house was a brick three-flatter,
and there was a SCARLET FEVER card on the front door. Hellyer,
Stewart, and Brouillard went there the afternoon of January 3,
1920. By ringing the three doorbells until they got an answer they
learned that the man they wanted had left for Allston earlier in the
day. They waited almost five hours on the upper landing until he
came back. He turned out to be a flashily dressed Sicilian, Carmine
Barasso, who had anglicized his name to C. A. Barr. Quite willing to
talk, he invited the three men in to his flat. According to Hellyer’s
report:
_Barr related a rambling statement about a machine that he had
invented with which he could detect who had committed a crime no
matter where it was committed. He stated that one Mrs. Vetilia of 2
Lexington Street East Boston, had looked into the machine and saw the
holdup happening and saw the man plainly but did not know who they
were._
As Stewart drove back to Bridgewater along the empty snow-edged roads
of the Blue Hills he added another piece to the puzzle he was fitting
together in his mind. If the Pinkerton information was right, the
holdup men were anarchists. It was not a difficult conclusion to come
to in the winter of 1919-1920. A group of 249 anarchist and Communist
aliens that included Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman had just been
deported to Russia. That very day, January 3, the headlines of the
papers were flaring with the news of Attorney General Palmer’s raids
that had taken place all over the country the previous evening. RAIDS
TO HEAD OFF REVOLUTION was the heading of the weekly Bridgewater
_Independent_. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE MAKES PUBLIC COMMUNISTS’ PLAN TO
OVERTHROW GOVERNMENT. ARRESTS IN FIFTY TOWNS.
But such incidents and antagonisms, the social change and struggle
of the postwar period, were sensed only vaguely in Bridgewater. By
the time the wave of history reached the inland cape towns it was
scarcely a ripple. The same issue of the _Independent_ made Charlotte
Randall’s twenty-first birthday party in West Bridgewater the subject
of its editorial.
When the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect on January 16 the
December holdup no longer seemed worth discussing. The Pinkerton men
had gone. The thousand-dollar reward posted by Loring Q. White for
the gunmen’s capture was unclaimed. At his headquarters in the back
room of the wooden-pilastered town hall, Chief Stewart still thought
about the crime, but he could find no more pieces to add to his
puzzle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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