Boston Mob: The Rise and Fall of the New England Mob and Its Most Notorious Kill

Description: Boston Mob by Marc Songini Journalist Marc Songini presents the brutal and bloody history of Bostons organized crime syndicates in the 1960s and 70s through the life of gangster Joseph Barboza. The New England Mafia was a hugely powerful organization that survived by using violence to ruthlessly crush anyone that threatened it, or its lucrative gambling, loansharking, bootlegging and other enterprises. And psychopathic strongman Joseph "The Animal" Barboza was one of the most feared mob enforcers of all time, killing as many as thirty people for business and pleasure. From information based on declassified documents and the use of underworld sources, Boston Mob: The Rise and Fall of the New England Mob and Its Most Notorious Killer spans the gutters and alleyways of East Boston, Providence and Charlestown to the halls of Congress in Washington D.C. and Bostons Beacon Hill. Its players include governors and mayors, and the Mafia Commission of New York City. From the tragic legacy of the Kennedy family to the Winter Hill-Charlestown feud, the fall of the New England Mafia and the rise of Whitey Bulger, Songinis account is a saga of treachery, murder, greed, and the survival of ruthless men pitted against legal systems and police forces. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography MARC SONGINI is a Boston-area journalist whose work has appeared in the Boston Herald, the Boston Globe and numerous other major publications. He is also the acclaimed author of The Lost Fleet, a chronicle of Yankee whaling and disaster at sea. Review "A stark reminder that the tropes and clichés familiar from countless books and movies about organized crime have their origins in bloody realities." --The Boston Globe "Its not a pretty story, but it is fascinating reading." --New York Daily News "A colorful, even gleeful, account of murder, mayhem and corruption during the heyday of the New England Mafia....The fast-reading narrative begins and ends with the turbulent history of Joseph Barboza....A romp through the violent misdeeds of thugs, with plenty of humorous asides." --Providence Journal "This excellent, well-researched book....is a gripping account of treachery, murder and greed." --GanglandNews.com "Boston Mob is an opera sung by thugs in polyester suits, cherry red Cadillacs, and cheap sunglasses. With this book, Marc Songini has written an indispensable guide to organized crime in New England." --Jay Atkinson, author of Legends of Winter Hill and Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man "With attention to detail both mesmerizing and macabre, Marc Songini delves deep into the sordid but fascinating lives of New Englands most lethal gangsters. Long before James "Whitey" Bulger grabbed the national spotlight, the bad boys of Boston and Providence ran lucrative criminal operations in which gruesome hits were just businesses as usual. Even if you think you know all there is to know about Bostons murderous gang wars of the 1960s and 1970s, this book is an eye opener." --Stephanie Schorow, co-author with Beverly Ford, The Boston Mob Guide: Hit Men, Hoodlums & Hideouts "This books a winner. With Boston Mob, Marc Songini guides us on a grand tour of New England organized crime. Rich in telling details, and impeccably researched, Boston Mob offers a fresh and compelling look at the usual suspects, and introduces us to underworld figures that have been long forgotten. Once you start reading, you wont be able to stop, because this book reads like a well-wrought thriller. Dont miss it." --Gary Braver, bestselling and awarding-winning author of Tunnel Vision "Boston Mob is a brilliant and thoughtful study of the events that helped spawn the Whitey Bulger fiasco within the FBI, both in Boston and beyond. Marc Songini has crafted a riveting tale of narrative nonfiction featuring bad guys from both sides of the law that raises the True Crime genre to heights often aspired to but seldom attained. A splendid historical document as well as a provocative cautionary tale, Boston Mob is equally at home on the mean streets and hallowed halls of justice run amok. A book that hits us in the gut and leaves its indelible mark long after the final page is turned." --Jon Land, bestselling author of Betrayal "An admirable attempt to tie together the lies, myths, facts and legends of the 1960s and 70s war between the Winter Hill Gang and the McLaughlin brothers outfit." --Kirkus Reviews Review Quote With attention to detail both mesmerizing and macabre, Marc Songini delves deep into the sordid but fascinating lives of New Englands most lethal gangsters. Long before James "Whitey" Bulger grabbed the national spotlight, the bad boys of Boston and Providence ran lucrative criminal operations in which gruesome hits were just businesses as usual. Even if you think you know all there is to know about Bostons murderous gang wars of the 1960s and 1970s, this book is an eye opener. Excerpt from Book 1. THE PORTUGEE FROM NEW BEDFORD "In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece." -Herman Melville, Moby-Dick On September 20, 1932, was born the infant destined to mutate into "one of the worst men on the face of the earth." Joseph Barboza Jr. spent his first years in the small coastal city of New Bedford. This once-legendary former whaling port nestled on a North Atlantic peninsula. But Joe had selected an inopportune time to join this citys oppressed and hard-toiling population. Eight decades before his arrival, the city was "perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New England," Herman Melville claimed. "It is a land of oil, true enough: but not like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine … nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford." Had Joe been born a hundred years prior, his savagery and viciousness would hardly have drawn attention in a whaleships forecastle. There had been legal opportunities back then for fierce, bold men like him. However, before Joe arrived, the whalers staple game, the sperm and bowhead leviathans, grew very scarce. The Civil War and a run of Arctic disasters pared down New Bedfords once-famous whaling fleet. In 1924, New Bedfords last whaler of note, the Wanderer, had smashed into the shallows off Cuttyhunk Island during a gale. That had clearly marked the death and burial of Yankee whaling. By the 1930s, New Bedfords smart money had relocated into unheroic and unglamorous industries, such as textiles or railroads. Graceful ships masts went out; smokestacks replaced them. With muscle, blood, spindles, smoke, grime, and decaying grandeur to sustain it, New Bedford persisted in a second (or third) life. Its ugly factories crowded the skyline, and its dirty and overflowing tenements competed for space with the fine houses, banks, shipyards, and church spires of a prior era. In short, the onetime "City of Light" was like any other New England factory metropolis on the slide down. At the time of Joes birth, the white leviathan sinking New Bedford was the Depression. In 1932, a local textile baron kindly loaned a desperate New Bedford $100,000 so it could make its payroll. But this was akin to applying a bandage to an incurable sore. Needless to say, a New Bedford working familys life was then very harsh, only slightly better than a slaves. Factory wages barely sustained life, and malnutrition and poverty killed off more children in New Bedford than in almost any other U.S. city. A favored child learned the useful skill of weaving from a parent, without pay. Hopefully, the apprentice lasted until age fourteen, when he started working legally and repaying the investment made in him. The second Barboza child, Joe was about as isolated as one can get. In tiny compartmentalized New Bedford, the Portuguese managed to stand apart, clannish, with a separate tongue and unique flavor of Roman Catholicism. In that little hardscrabble community, Joseph Barboza Sr. managed an uneasy truce with his wife, Palmeda "Patty" Camile, with whom, for a while, he raised five children. Barboza eked out a subsistence living, and sometimes less, as a milkman and factory worker. For cash, he also boxed, proving "one of the best little 160-pounders" from the region. But Barboza was also a convicted petty criminal, with a taste for women and drink, and not exactly monogamous. He was also a wifebeater, and once scattered Pattys front teeth with a blow. In the long-suffering manner of the time, Patty pretended he was faithful. But the domestic misery was as contagious as measles. "The house we lived in was more of sorrow than of happiness," as Joe later noted. "We were constantly on welfare." One day, Joe came home and found his mother unconscious, with the gas jet on. Patty survived, but her mate abandoned the family completely. Once, Patty ordered Joe to beg for his father to return home. While Patty waited on the street, the boy found Joseph Sr. outside in a yard with a woman hed "shacked up" with. "Get out of here, you little bastard," his father said. "The punk broke my heart," the future career criminal admitted. Crying, Joe turned and ran down the street to his mother. Having a change of heart, Joseph Sr. drove after him and found him with his mother. "He will never forget this," Patty told her husband. Joe wept all the way home. Although Barboza bought Joe a pigeon, he didnt return to the family flat. Minus the family breadwinner, Patty also worked as a waitress and even shoplifted, for which she was arrested. Shunned by her husband, for solace, Patty clung to Joe and his brother-who were then running "wild." Joe felt she used him as bait to keep something, any little bit, of her husband. Joe never forgot his extreme poverty, nor how his mother had suffered through it. This unhappy childhood packed him with enough explosive rage for a lifetime. Aware he was a shuttlecock between his parents, Joe took to freely roaming the streets with other urchins. There, as he put it, "I had a better type of love." And if his father ignored him, at least he could command the attention of New Bedford. Thus, Joe drifted steadily into wild waters. He started smoking at age seven; at fourteen, police arrested him, apparently for damaging an electronic streetcar signal. Lacking a stable family at home, Joe created another type of family by forming a gang. Joes criminal apprenticeship moved from shoplifting to burglary. During the day, Joes crew would go window-shopping, and then return later to steal whatever items the members had coveted. In 1945, the police arrested Joe for breaking and entering, and at age fourteen, Joe graduated to the Lyman Reform School, a "hellhole" of constant brutality. Orderlies beat Joe and the other residents with belts and pick handles. But the house specialty on the pain menu was the "hot foot," where orderlies struck the naked arch. To survive, Joe made himself the brawling champion of Lyman, getting into three hundred fights. When released, he began to box in the ring. "He was tough and strong," noted a New Bedford boxing fan, "a real crowd pleaser who could take an opponent out with one punch-if he could hit him." Few boxers wanted to mix with Joe, who was all attack without much defense. In one notable fight in a Boston arena, a lanky black middleweight knocked Joe down twice, but won by decision. "Actually, it was a hell of a fight; the guy beat Barboza only because he was the better sharpshooter and made his punches count," a fan recalled years later. Against very good fighters, Joe had little chance at all. The incarcerated boxing great (and fellow psychopath) Bobby Quinn sparred in jail with young Joe. "I used to beat him till my hands hurt," he recalled. * * * The state tried again to rehabilitate Joe, this time by sending him to a vocational school. After a woodworking teacher insulted him, Joe rallied his gang to trash the classroom at night. Newspapers claimed someone had hurled a pie at a wall, and a writer dubbed the crew the "Cream Pie Bandits." With the seventeen-year-old South End resident as their leader, the bandits allegedly broke into two hundred cars in six months. In December 1949, the gang launched a veritable petty reign of terror, entering unoccupied houses, restaurants, businessess, and cars and stealing anything it could spend, enjoy, or sell. The takes generally didnt top ten or twenty dollars apiece, and the goods included a necklace, socks, cigarettes, lighters, caulking tools, and, possibly, even Christmas trees. Before New Years Day, police arrested Joe, the ringleader, and another thief. In court without counsel, Joe and his colleague, the only two bandits of adult age, pled guilty to all counts. To mark Joes holiday season, a judge sentenced him to five years and a day in the Massachusetts Reformatory in Concord. This cut short his formal education at grade eight and put his fight career on hold. Concord existed to reform juvenile delinquents. Its record was reliable: 80 percent of its graduates committed more crimes. There, in the town of the prophets of freedom, Thoreau and Emerson, Joe worked as a penal slave in a weaving mill. Later, he graduated to the dining room, where he remained-until, during a brawl, he broke an older inmates jaw in two places with a left hook. For that, Joe went to solitary, then to the boiler room to shovel coal and stoke an ever-growing rage. "Being a convict sure is a lowly state & they dont let you forget it!" as he once observed. * * * In January 1951, Joe transferred to the relatively bucolic Norfolk County Prison, which functioned like a rehabilitation center. There, he boxed as a middleweight, knocking older men out routinely, he later boasted. Such a good thing couldnt last, and in September 1951, high on paint thinner, he challenged the guards to come and get him. After a two-hour stalemate, no longer intoxicated, Joe negotiated peace terms. This finalized the nineteen-year-old Animals contract in life. The authorities (presciently) determined him beyond rehabilitation. Back to Concord Joe went. Details ISBN1250060168 Author Marc Songini Short Title BOSTON MOB Pages 384 Language English ISBN-10 1250060168 ISBN-13 9781250060167 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 364.106 Year 2015 Publication Date 2015-05-19 Subtitle The Rise and Fall of the New England Mob and Its Most Notorious Killer UK Release Date 2015-05-19 Audience General Publisher St Martins Press Imprint St Martins Press Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States US Release Date 2015-05-19 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:94002995;

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