of a local barroom had killed him. Wolf, a thirty-four-year-old still living with his mother on Harrison Avenue, had tried to shake the owner down for “protection” money. Big mistake.
In December of 1937, David “Beano” Breen, a former boxer who became a big name in the Boston rackets, was fatally shot in the lobby of the Metropolitan Hotel on Tremont Street. In March of 1939, Patrick J. “Paddy” Flynn died after being shot in a Malden gambling house. Ironically, Flynn had been an opponent of Nate Siegel. Siegel beat Flynn three times, but they both ended up dead, Siegel by shotgun, Flynn courtesy of a .22-caliber slug in the brain.
Chiampa. DiAngelis. Wallace. Brogna. Wolf. Siegel. Breen. Flynn. Eight fighters killed in ten years. The police occasionally found an abandoned weapon, but few arrests were made. The killers seemed to vanish like one of those cloaked gunmen in an old-time radio serial.
All of these fighters were involved in liquor, gambling, and extortion. Is it a coincidence that they were working in the domain of Phil Buccola? There is a terrible irony here, in that the Mob boss who purportedly loved boxing may have known at least a few of these doomed fighters, may have watched them train, may have spoken to them. And he may have played a part in some of their murders.
One never knew exactly what was going on with Buccola. In a city filled with slick operators, he was probably the slickest.
Chapter 3
Boxing Booms in Boston
But Killers Never Rest . . .
Promoter Sam Silverman and Muhammad Ali in Boston, 1965. AP Photo
In July of 1944, in between reports about the Normandy invasion, Bostonians read that another local fighter had been killed in the city. Vincent “Pepper” Martin, who had been born as Yaparan Alajajian, was found dead in a car on Ipswich Street in Back Bay. He had fifty bucks in his pocket and a bullet in each lung.
A South End bookie with a record of carrying unregistered guns and passing counterfeit bills, Martin had served eighteen months at Deer Island for shooting a woman, and had once attacked his ex-wife with a knife. Martin was also known as a smirking punk who liked to flash big wads of money. Certain his murder was linked to his gambling habit, police began rounding up a local gang known for sticking up dice games.
Though he'd had only a handful of fights, newspapers placed heavy focus on Martin's boxing background. More was made of Martin's boxing career than the fact that he'd once stabbed his ex-wife in the head.
The killing of Pepper Martin was front-page material. As America was learning from the movies, fighters attracted a certain undesirable element. Hence, the murder of a fighter made for an easy, attention-grabbing headline. Then again, a fighter didn't have to be killed to make news. They were increasingly involved in tawdry scenes, and Boston papers couldn't get enough headlines about the city's boxers behaving badly. Stories rolled out of the Globe with almost comical frequency: “Hub Divorcee Held in Slaying of Ex-Boxer,” “Ex-Boxer Runs Amok, Killed by Patrolman,” “Ex-Pugilist Sought for Taxi-Cab Murder,” “Former Boxer Held for Assault on Revere Mayor,” “Ex-Boxer in Cell for Safe-Keeping,” “Ex-Boxer Sentenced in Narcotics Case,” “Hub Ex-Boxer Gets Year for Probation Break,” “Ex-Boxer Wants Sentence Cut But Won't Talk,” “$40,000 Bail Set for Ex-Boxer in Extortion Plot,” “Bullet Misses West End Boxer; Manager Held,” “Trio Under Arrest for Beating of Boxer,” “Ex-Boxer Gets 18–20 Years in Woman's Death.”
Even if a fellow had boxed only a few times in the amateurs or in the Navy, the term “ex-boxer” was jammed into these gruesome stories as often as possible. A mere thirty years later, the opposite would be true. When Leon Easterling fatally stabbed Harvard football star Andrew Puopolo in Boston's Combat Zone in 1976, Easterling's past as a professional boxer was never mentioned in the media's massive coverage of that case—but in the 1940s, the term had juice. The term conjured up stinking gyms, smoky arenas, violence, gambling, and a hint of corruption. Newsroom editors never hesitated to exploit boxing's dark and degenerate aura, especially since the sport had thrived in Boston during the war years.
Though the rest of the country noticed a drop in boxing attendance during the war, Boston promoters observed a sudden spike in ticket sales. New York remained the premier boxing city, but Boston enjoyed an unexpected wartime boom. Stars such as Sugar Ray Robinson, Fritzie Zivic, Ike Williams, and Henry Armstrong began to fight there with regularity Featherweight champion Willie Pep came to Boston twice in 1943 to fight East Boston's great featherweight Sal Bartolo. Even heavyweight champion Joe Louis, the most revered fighter in the world, arrived in Boston in December of 1940 to beat Al McCoy at the Garden. From 1942 to 1945, the city hosted an average of one boxing show per week, a chaotic pace that would never again be matched.
Boston venues could actually draw a near sellout with nothing but homegrown talent. Tommy Collins, a modestly gifted lightweight from Medford, became a certified star in Boston, while Tony DeMarco—short, awkward, with a blood sugar problem that caused him to fall apart in the late rounds—emerged from Fleet Street in the North End to win the city's heart. (The trick to being a local success, of course, was to be Irish or Italian. African American fighters were a harder sell.)
When DeMarco (real name Leonardo Liotta) defeated Johnny Saxton for the welterweight championship in 1955, a cavalcade of Boston boys took up boxing. According to local aficionados, there was a period of time when Clark Street in the North End was the address of no less than eight professional fighters.
The city's growing success as a boxing market was due largely to the efforts of two men, Sam Silverman and Anthony “Rip” Valenti. Silverman, who had been promoting fights since the 1930s, was not without enemies. In 1951, a bullet ripped through a window of his Chelsea home. In 1954, someone rigged Silverman's house with a bomb. It was thought that Silverman was being targeted because he wouldn't submit to national matchmakers wanting to control the sport. As he shuffled through the broken glass and debris in his living room, he told reporters it hadn't been a bomb but merely a defective refrigerator. In 1968, Silverman found himself in court defending himself against charges of bribing an undercard fighter to take a dive; the case ended in a mistrial.
As for Valenti, he'd been part of the Phil Buccola–Dan Carroll–Johnny Buckley era. At various times he was a matchmaker, an agent, a discoverer of talent, a gadfly, and a promoter. Because of his police record he spent many years without an official manager's license; he compensated by guiding a fighter's career from a backroom and using local men as fronts. By the time of his death at age eighty-three in 1986, Valenti had become a treasured local character, partly because he presented himself as an old-time operator at odds with a constantly changing world. As the Globe noted, Valenti “always looked sad because of his big eyes and drooping lids.”
But sad old Valenti had a stronger hand than anyone realized.
“Rip was well connected,” said Jerry Forte, a North End fighter who later served as the state's assistant boxing commissioner. “He was tight with Joe Lombardo, who was Buccola's right-hand man.” This, according to Forte, was why New York managers or promoters could never snatch a Boston fighter from Valenti's grasp.
“The New York Mob wouldn't touch Rip,” Forte said. “There was an incident where a New Yorker tried to take one of Rip's fighters; Rip went to New York and had a meeting with some people. That was the end of that. There was respect for Rip in that way.”
Valenti was also known to be a friend of Frankie Carbo, the former Mafia gunman who controlled much of the boxing landscape in the
