Slaughter in the Streets. Don Stradley

he was also available to give advice on anything from domestic problems to business investments. In the 1930s and 40s, Italians in Boston still faced prejudice and couldn't always find assistance in the accepted manner. As future welterweight champion Tony DeMarco once put it, “When we couldn't go to the police or to our local congressman, we went to someone like Phil Buccola.”

By 1950, Buccola was on the radar of Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee senator out to smash organized crime. In 1954, weary of federal investigations and the Internal Revenue Service, Buccola returned to Sicily. When Mafia rat Joe Valachi spilled his guts in 1963 about the inner workings of the Mob, he informed the FBI that Buccola had indeed been La Cosa Nostra's top man in Massachusetts, possibly in all of New England, and that his underworld resume included extortion and murder. By the time Valachi squealed, Buccola was living in Sicily as a chicken farmer. He lived to be 101 years old.

      The generation of Boston boys who grew up during Buccola's reign saw an unmistakable link between boxing and crime. They saw that gangsters like Buccola were revered. Boxers had followings, but gangsters had real clout and were the unmistakable stars of the neighborhood. When North End gangster Carmelo Giuffre was slain in January of 1931, so many mourners crammed the Charter Street home where his body was on view that the second-floor hallway began collapsing; the fire department arrived to keep the stream of visitors down to groups of five.

      The adoration of gangsters was such a growing concern that Dr. A. Z. Conrad, the powerhouse pastor at Boston's Park Street Congregational Church, addressed the issue in a March 1932 radio address on WHDH. “The reason that so many boys almost worship gangsters is because we have made heroes of the gangster and the racketeer,” Conrad said. Known for his finger-wagging sermons from Boston's “Brimstone Corner,” Conrad blamed “the infernal moving pictures” that “presented crime in an attractive form.” But Boston's kids didn't need to go to the movies to see gangsters. The bad guys were right there in the neighborhood.

      By Buccola's era, the Italian American mobster was undergoing a change of image. They were no longer old-country types operating under the cloak of darkness and hiding their money in a mattress. They were increasingly Americanized. They understood the city's politics and knew how to manipulate the local power structures. If they indulged in criminal activity, the reasoning went, it was only because American society had yet to fully embrace the Italians. Legit jobs were scarce; a fellow made a buck where he could. An elegant, intelligent man such as Buccola wasn't to be lumped in with the Black Handers, narcotics dealers, or two-bit robbers. If the authorities ever accused Buccola of anything too sinister, his admirers simply wouldn't believe it.

As boxing fever swept the city in the 1930s and 40s, Boston's underworld grew as well. In this dangerously charged atmosphere, it was inevitable that the city's boxers would intertwine with gangsters. Not surprisingly, there was an uptick in the number of local fighters getting whacked. The most famous of them was Nate Siegel, a popular welterweight from Revere who had twice fought the legendary Mickey Walker. In 1934, an assassin shot Siegel to death in his own home. Siegel owned a tavern and was believed to have come between rival liquor distributors, but no one was ever charged with his murder.

      There were others: George Brogna, who fought as “Johnny DeLano,” was a twenty-six-year-old East Boston featherweight with a record of 12-9-5. He'd also been deeply involved in gangland activity and had allegedly killed a local bootlegger, “Big Mike” Richardi (who had been suspected of killing Johnny Vito). In 1933, Brogna's body was found in Revere. He'd been beaten about the head and shot three times. That same year saw the murder of Joseph Wolf, a petty criminal with gang ties who fought as “Charley ‘KO’ Elkins.” His ring resume was 15-9-2, plus seventy-two arrests and eleven appeals. He was found dead on a South End sidewalk. It was believed that the owner 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