the final seconds of his life the way James Cagney might've in an old Warner Brothers crime drama—he stumbled down the hallway and into the office of an attorney who had leased space in the building. A female stenographer who had been filling out Christmas cards looked on in horror; the sound of guns a moment earlier had shattered the holiday mood, and now she was confronted by the sight of Frankie in the doorway, blood gushing from his wounds. Without saying a word, he walked in. Then he pitched forward, dead.
He landed awkwardly, his head wedged into the under-railings of a wooden chair. As Frankie bled out on the attorney's floor, so went his plans to dominate the waterfront.
The story was a sensation. Boston police fanned out as far north as Portland, Maine, in search of Lombardo and his men, while The Boston Globe built up Frankie as a little terror who had dominated the local crime scene “with a grip of steel.” Also played up was the seemingly minor detail of how Frankie and his brother “fought within the squared circle.”
One had to wonder if Frankie's life would've been different had he been victorious in his first and only professional fight. Would he have pursued boxing, or would he still have gone into crime? Then again, Stevie was very successful in the ring, and his taste for robbing was just as developed as Frankie's. Maybe crime and boxing were in them in equal parts. Maybe it was inevitable that one of them would be killed in a North End gun battle. After all, Boston already had a history of fighters being killed gangland style.
The boxer gunned down by gangsters may be a fixture of old movies, but it is not a myth. The melodrama of a desperate fighter pursued by seedy killers, the crack of gunfire, the bullet-riddled corpse dumped in a secluded area; these situations were not solely the work of screenwriters during Hollywood's Golden Age. They were rooted in truth.
Of course, these murders weren't very cinematic. They rarely, if ever, had anything to do with fixed fights, and the murdered boxer would be familiar to only the most astute fans of the fight game. A famous fighter wouldn't let himself get sucked into this kind of trouble. Instead, it was the fighter on the fringe of the business, the preliminary kid, who found himself staring down a gun barrel or, as was usually the case, shot behind the ear.
Just six months before Frankie Gustin's murder, the body of East Boston pugilist Jerry DiAngelis turned up in Chelsea. He'd been shot to death and left in a wooded area known as a gangland dumping ground. Prior to that was the 1925 murder of former boxer Johnny Vito, a North Ender whose corpse was found in Braintree, face down in mud. The murderer remained unknown, though police believed Vito had been killed trying to hijack a liquor truck. In December of 1915, a shady character named Joseph Damico was found stabbed to death in an East Boston alley. The Globe savored every gash, noting Damico was “struck on the neck, the blow severing the jugular vein and nearly cutting through the spine.” Damico, who had fought more than twenty times as “Tommy Young,” turned out to be an unsavory character with gang connections in New York. Rivaling Gustin's death for coverage was the February 1929 murder of North Ender Anthony “Sparky” Chiampa. Nineteen-year-old Sparky was found dead in a Revere barn, bullet holes in the back of his head and under each eye.
Though he hadn't turned professional, Chiampa was known for boxing at various athletic clubs around the city, and the news coverage of his murder made several references to him as “the little fighter.” Boxing, even at the amateur level, was a major North End attraction during the 1920s. The sport had flourished throughout the world, but the Italian Americans of Boston's North End believed their boys were as good and tough as anyone. North End lightweight Sabino Ferullo, who took the name “Sammy Fuller” and became the most popular Italian fighter in Boston, would give away a hundred tickets to the neighborhood children; they showed up at his fights with trumpets and bugles, blaring away as he punched his opponents. For North Enders, boxing was as much a celebration of Italian life as the annual Saint Anthony's Feast in June, which is partly why Chiampa's murder hit Boston like a hammer.
Like many of the city's young men, Chiampa dabbled in crime. At the time of his death he was scheduled to appear in court to testify against some of his cronies. It was also believed that he'd recently robbed a dice game on Friend Street and hadn't shared the loot with his partners. Investigators had dozens of theories and suspects, but no one was ever charged with Chiampa's murder.
The killing of Chiampa was especially ominous. There'd been no signs of robbery, and his murderer hadn't even bothered to remove an expensive diamond ring from his hand; he was killed solely to shut him up, to keep him from talking in court. It was an event described in one newspaper as “the first real introduction of Chicago gang warfare into Boston.”
But it was the ambush of Frankie Gustin that was drilled into the minds of rough kids who grew up in the post-Depression neighborhoods of the North End and East Boston, which were predominantly Italian, and South Boston and Charlestown, which were mostly Irish. Those neighborhoods, wrote the Globe more than six decades later, “spawned most of the city's gangsters, who carried ethnic-based animosities like chips on their shoulders.”
Simultaneously, Gustin's murder was part of a second story playing out, that of a boxer being murdered in Boston. It is an unusual status to claim, but few cities can match Boston for its number of slain fighters. Of the more than three hundred and fifty professional and amateur fighters murdered worldwide since Gustin's death in 1931, a shocking amount of those killings took place in Boston and its neighboring towns. Most were gang related. Many were unsolved.
Frankie's brother Stevie stepped in as the gang's new leader, but within ten years the Gustins were considered relics of the Prohibition age. However, their work was already done. They had established a criminal archetype. Cocky, brash, and daring, they were forerunners of the South Boston criminals to come, the poor, scrappy Irish boys who emerged from the worst parts of Southie to embark on unlawful careers. The most notorious, of course, was James “Whitey” Bulger, who in his early days was simply another Southie hood following the template of the Gustins. Yet he would become America's most famous criminal and turn the Boston FBI into his partners. When the FBI eventually brought down the city's Italian Mob in the 1980s, it was with Whitey's help. Before he was done, Bulger would wield a kind of influence that would've been unimaginable to the boys on Gustin Street.
And fifty years after the Gustins, boxers were still playing a part in the Boston crime scene. Bulger never had more than a passing interest in boxing, but he certainly used local fighters as henchmen. More than one of his boxing flunkies landed in prison for an extended stay. In 1975, Bulger and an accomplice decided they couldn't trust a retired local middleweight named Eddie Connors. They shot him to bits in a phone booth and created a scene as gory as anything from the old Hanover Street shooting gallery. Connors, who had boxed many times at the Boston Garden, made the mistake of getting too familiar with his criminal pals. For his trouble, he was cut nearly in half by a carbine and left to soak in his own blood.
As for Joseph Lombardo, he was acquitted in connection to the Gustin murder and went on for many years as the North End's underboss. During the 1950s and 60s, Lombardo served as consigliere for a new generation of mobsters, namely the Patriarca crime family in Providence, and was a mentor to Boston's new underboss, Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo. In the years before his death in 1969, when he was an elderly restaurant owner, Lombardo still commanded respect. Even the craziest young soldiers of the city's new Mafia knew that “J. L.” had stopped the Gustins.
The murder of Frankie Gustin established a long-term understanding that the Irish crooks and the Mafia would coexist in the city as separate but not quite equal entities. At times they'd work together. At times they would be at war. Boston's criminal world was complicated, always evolving, often confusing. And Frankie, the failed flyweight, wouldn't be the last fighter caught in the crossfire.
Boston was on its way to becoming boxing's murder capital.
Chapter
