Slaughter in the Streets. Don Stradley

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 1950s. For his part, Valenti played dumb. In 1982, the Globe asked him about the Mob's impact on boxing. “Organized crime has nothing to do with boxing,” he said. “What does organized crime need with boxing, anyway?” As for Carbo, Valenti shrugged. “Carbo was all right. He used to help me make matches.”

      Valenti could deny that the Mob had anything to do with boxing, but when Ted Williams had trouble with Red Sox brass, he didn't consult the local Mafia boss. Consider the way Valenti and DeMarco once dealt with a problem.

Near the end of his career, DeMarco wanted to break from Valenti and manage himself. Since Phil Buccola was no longer in the city, DeMarco sought out advice from Raymond Patriarca, the ruthless crime boss who had replaced Buccola as New England's Mafia kingpin. Like characters from The Godfather, DeMarco and Valenti journeyed to Patriarca's Providence office bearing tributes—Cuban cigars, North End cannoli—and explained their cases. Patriarca, who probably had more pressing issues to consider, squinted at the pair through a cloud of Cuban cigar smoke. He politely told DeMarco to stay with Valenti for three more fights. DeMarco claimed to be happy with the edict, but it's not as if he would argue with Patriarca. It's safe to say Valenti probably benefited from his old Mob ties to get DeMarco for three more bouts. But according to Valenti, the Mob had nothing to do with boxing. (And according to DeMarco, Patriarca was just a businessman.)

      Boston's run as a successful boxing market continued until the establishment of the International Boxing Club in 1949. The IBC, headed by James Norris with Carbo as his unofficial matchmaker and “convincer,” quickly grabbed the contracts of the day's top fighters, tied up television coverage, and brought fights to New York, or to cities where the wealthy Norris owned pieces of venues. Boston was out of the IBC loop. (That a few marquee names fought DeMarco in Boston has been attributed to Valenti's connection to Carbo.) In 1957, Silverman cited an illegal restraint of trade and sued the IBC for nine million dollars. The out-of-court settlement—for much less than nine million dollars—made Silverman look like a tough businessman but didn't help Boston in terms of hosting important fights.

      The courts eventually dissolved the IBC, but former IBC president Truman Gibson told Senate investigators in 1960 that the Boston trio of Silverman, Valenti, and Johnny Buckley had been under Carbo's control all along. The stunned trio insisted their interaction with the former Mob killer was minimal, but Gibson's bombshell had made their reputations wobble. They recovered, but despite the dismantling of the IBC, Boston continued to struggle. By the late 1960s, Boston had dried up as a major fight town.

One thing that didn't change was the continuous melding of boxers and wise guys. You could tell where fighters stood in the Mob's pecking order by the jobs they were given: driver, bodyguard, doorman at a Mob restaurant. What brought so many of Boston's fighters into the criminal life? Was it because boxing itself requires a certain cold-bloodedness, which translates well to gangland activities? Was it unavoidable in a compact city such as Boston? When asked how it was so easy for these fighters to get involved with criminals, retired New England welterweight Eddie Grenke said simply, “neighborhood friends.”

      Eddie Spence, a popular Boston fighter of the 1960s, recalled a rather dark element that hovered around the boxing scene: “I would see semi-literate criminal types around the gyms,” he said. “I remember a fellow who claimed to be Silverman's friend. Out of the blue he tells me that he has a beef with some guys. Then he shows me a handgun. He says, ‘I plan to get them before they get me.’ My manager told me to relax, but I was looking for the escape hatch.”

      In those secretive Boston enclaves, it grew increasingly difficult to tell the fighters from the felons. Sometimes you didn't know about a fighter's secret life until he got killed. That was the case in 1953 when old-time featherweight Morris “Whitey” Hurwitz was murdered outside his house in Brookline. Hurwitz, who had been a bodyguard for underworld figures, had his hand in everything from bookmaking to crooked dice games.

      Then there was the savage 1955 murder of Fall River welterweight Al Frias. A rarity among New England's murdered fighters, twenty-six-year-old Frias was actually killed in New York. His body was found in a ditch beside Route 210. A fighter of minor talents—he'd lost several fights in a row and was in trouble with the Massachusetts commission for competing with an expired license—he'd been staying at a Manhattan hotel, frantically writing notes to his family back home that he'd come into some money. It was later learned that Frias was in New York on a mission to acquire $20,000 in counterfeit bills. Working for a “New England syndicate,” Frias was to pay a couple of creeps $6,000 for the $20,000. His contacts changed their minds, robbed him, and shot him in the head.