bag pulled tight over the head; shot on the street, in saloons, behind the wheel of a car, in a phone booth in the dead of night; shot in the temple and left floating in the Mystic River, hands and feet bound together with wire; bodies left in car trunks, on the side of the road, in the gutter.
A sane person would rightfully conclude that these were ignominious endings. Certainly, it is not the way you would want a loved one to ride out their final hours on earth.
Some might say, and did say, that these men got what they deserved. Most of them had crossed over to the dark side and were involved in crime: petty larceny, illegal gambling, fencing stolen goods, narcotics, burglary, murder—you name it. Some of these men were used and manipulated by high-level gangsters and Mafiosi. To coin a phrase, they lived by the sword and died by the sword. They were the embodiment of that old-school term “palooka,” a loser, of sorts, whose life seems destined for a brutal demise.
That these men were wayward souls is hard to deny, but they were also once somebody's little boy, somebody's brother, uncle, or father. All of them started out with a dream, which was to rise up out of humble circumstances—out of the gutter—and find fame and glory through the sport of boxing.
The historical fact that the city of Boston has seen more than its share of this breed—boxers who became intertwined with the criminal underworld—is the literary gold that author Don Stradley mines so beautifully in this book. There are moments of triumph in the ring, and some failures; Stradley is right to focus as much on the boxing careers (often misbegotten) of these men as well as their criminal associations and habits. They lived hard lives and died horrible deaths, and some might even surmise that their lives are better off forgotten. But even the lowliest of lives has much to reveal to us about the city in which these men toiled.
A few years back, in the summer of 2013, I had the occasion to attend the duration of gangster boss Whitey Bulger's criminal trial in the city. The proceedings took place at the Moakley Courthouse in the Seaport District. The Seaport was once home to the city's thriving commercial waterfront, where more than a few of the men profiled in this book found work as longshoremen and union “delegates” (i.e., leg breakers for the International Longshoremen's Association).
At the time of the trial, the area had already begun its startling transformation from a hardscrabble workingman's environment to the conglomeration of high-rise condos, glass office towers and chic restaurants that it is today.
Gentrification can be a brutal process. It does not involve snub-nosed revolvers, lead pipes, or switchblade knives, but it does involve wholesale displacement of poor and working people, unnatural alterations of the landscape, the destruction of lives. One man's economic development is another's predatory capitalism.
Few would disagree that the Seaport District—and the city of Boston—is not better off than it was during the historical era that this book so vibrantly evokes. Even so, it is useful to remember that the ground beneath these glistening new condos and office towers is saturated with the blood of those who came before, men who lived and died in a city known for its hard-nosed working-class, rough-and-tumble politics and pitiless criminal underworld. In many ways, the lives lived by this oddball collection of palookas laid the foundation for the thriving international city that Boston is today.
Their legacy, as detailed in Slaughter in the Streets, is in the air we breathe. Their DNA, quite literally, is embedded in the soil beneath our feet.
T. J. English
New York City
September 2019
Bad choices put them all in early graves. They died violently and stupidly, in a Boston that no longer exists.
They'd been fighters.
They thought bullets were nothing to fear. They thought their toughness in the ring would help them survive on the street.
Their deaths made headlines.
But they remained small players in a story much bigger than their own.
They deserve to be brought to the front of the story, to be pulled out of the background and prepared for their close-ups.
Their tales should be told.
Just once.
Chapter 1
The Shooting Gallery
Guns, Knives, and Desperate Lives . . .
The end of the Gustin Gang: Frankie “Gustin” ambushed on Hanover Street in Boston’s North End. Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection
He was one hell of a criminal, but he'd never been much of a fighter.
That was the word on Frankie Wallace, a South Boston flyweight who made his professional ring debut on September 25, 1922. Frankie's older brother Stevie had been a featherweight of some renown, earning a place on the 1920 U.S. Olympic team and taking part in thirty-five professional bouts. But Frankie, as the cops would later say, wasn't quite as “hard-boiled” as Stevie. He ended up losing his first pro start to another local kid, Jimmy Manning. The humiliating defeat inspired Frankie's buddies to appear at Manning's house the next day. They beat him senseless. This resulted in a prolonged series of street skirmishes all around Southie.
Frankie Wallace became better known as Frankie Gustin, leader of South Boston's notorious Gustin Gang. By the time he was thirty, Frankie's group of Irish American thugs had become famous during the Prohibition era for robbing liquor trucks. Frankie became such a big player in the city's underworld that his eventual murder in 1931 was one of Boston's biggest stories of the year. It also shaped the city's crime landscape for decades to come.
Frankie had always been a riddle to the police. He was soft-spoken and friendly, though he had a steep record of arrests, was a suspect in at least one murder, and was on the verge of forming his own criminal empire. The Gustins, so named after a street in Southie, developed such a reputation that they began to irritate Boston's growing Italian Mob. The breaking point came when Frankie's gang wanted control of all bootlegging along Boston's waterfront, which had previously been wide open. The Gustins had even robbed a few trucks that had been targeted by the Italians. This was an example of the Irish gang's increasing arrogance. And it was bad news for Frankie.
Two days before Christmas of 1931, Frankie arrived in Boston's North End to discuss how the local booze trade could be divided between the Gustins and the Italians. He showed up with two of his sidekicks, including Bernard “Dodo” Walsh, a twenty-four-year-old described by police as “just a punk and a gun-toter.” The meeting was held on the third floor of 317 Hanover Street in the office of C and F Importers, allegedly where Mob “underboss” Joseph Lombardo oversaw his own bootlegging operation. Frankie should've been wary. The area was so known for gunplay that neighborhood cops had dubbed it “the shooting gallery.” On the fourth floor, a charity group wrapped Christmas baskets for poor children of the North End. The roar of gunfire soon startled them. Frankie and Dodo had been ambushed and killed.
Frankie
