The New Orleans mob’s problems with the Kennedys was a case of history repeating itself. Like Chief Hennessy, Joe Kennedy was another “Irish bastard” who represented the legitimate world but was as duplicitous as any underworld hoodlum. To Carlos Marcello and other mafiosi with a deep connection to the region’s Sicilian bloodline, the insult struck at the core of the underworld’s twisted code of honor. They had been betrayed by people who were passing themselves off as incorruptible and above reproach, when they were as dirty as the lowliest mobster. The mob had been used, manipulated, and played for a fool, and now they were being persecuted. There was no worse insult. It was a transgression punishable by death.
Death to Giovanni
Joe Kennedy was unable to react much to the heartbreaking events that occurred in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Twenty-three months earlier, the patriarch had suffered a massive stroke that rendered him speechless and practically immobile. Confined to a wheelchair, the once powerful leader of the Kennedy clan retreated into his own private universe. The alliances he had formed and promises he’d made to help get his son elected president were now a blur. Whether or not he had any cognizance that the murder of his son might have been a kind of blowback effect from his own dealings with the mob, the world would never know. When told of President Kennedy’s assassination, he did not cry, although a family assistant claimed later to have seen the remnants of tears on his cheeks.
For Carlos Marcello, November 22 was a good day. Almost simultaneous with the announcement that his nemesis had been shot down in Dallas, he and his brother were found not guilty in a New Orleans courtroom on conspiracy and perjury charges. Marcello embraced his attorney and hurried home to watch reports of the assassination on television.
In the years that followed, theories on the Kennedy hit were hatched and expounded upon, with the official explanation put forth by the Warren Commission—that it was a single gunman acting alone—turning out the be the least likely scenario of all. Much credible evidence led back to New Orleans; respected criminal defense attorney Frank Ragano related a chilling snippet of conversation he had with his client, mobster Santos Trafficante, Carlos Marcello’s closest associate in the underworld. “Carlos fucked up,” Trafficante told his lawyer. “We shouldn’t have gotten rid of Giovanni. We should have killed Bobby.” Ragano, adhering to lawyer-client constraints, kept this and other details he learned from Trafficante under wraps until after the mobster passed away in 1987.
One person who was convinced that the Mafia killed the president was Bobby Kennedy. The attorney general went into a deep depression in the months immediately following his brother’s murder. Those who knew him best said he seemed to be racked not only with sorrow, but also with guilt. His personal vendetta against the Mafia had quite possibly boomeranged with horrible consequences. Bobby admitted as much in the summer of 1967, when he told close family friend Richard Goodwin that he believed his brother was killed by “the guy from New Orleans,” meaning Carlos Marcello.
History shows that the volatile melding of forces that brought about the assassination of J.F.K. was not without precedent. Police Chief Hennessy had straddled the same fault line with similar results. The Mafia had been dealing with characters like Joe Kennedy all along. To them, Papa Joe was merely a grandiose variation of all the other micks—Jimmy Walker, Jimmy Hines, T. J. Pendergast, Richard Daley—legitimate citizens whose careers were enhanced by their willingness to stoke the flames and play along. Bobby Kennedy was from the new generation; either he didn’t know the rules, or he knew the rules and was deliberately setting out to undo what his father had done. Either way, it was a lethal game, and Bobby’s posturing as a knight in shining armor was, to the aggrieved mafiosi, the height of hypocrisy and an insult that demanded retribution.
“The flower may look different, but the roots are the same,” was how Sam Giancana once put it to his brother, describing how he and the Kennedys, despite outward appearances, were operating within the same universe. Giancana, no doubt, was referring to the roots of the underworld, which had sprouted up to entangle people like Joseph P. Kennedy. Irish and Italian immigrants had been among the progenitors of the underworld, and so their offspring found themselves inheriting the old grudges. The Kennedys and the Mafia were engaged in a high-stakes game of social ascendancy that could be traced back to the earliest maneuverings for power in neighborhoods like Five Points, Little Hell, the Valley, and Hell’s Kitchen. In the wards and on the waterfront, Irish and Italian racketeers, gangsters, and quasi-legitimate operators had been engaged in this dance for nearly a century. Players like Joe Kennedy, Sinatra, and Momo Giancana raised the stakes to new levels, but the game was the same.
Key details surrounding the J.F.K. assassination would take decades to surface. When they finally did, the most compelling explanation, that the killing was a mob-generated conspiracy enacted as payback for Joe Kennedy’s double-crossing, had roots that could be traced back nearly to the beginning of organized crime in America. The Kennedy hit was merely the latest and loudest salvo in the ongoing war between the dagos and the micks. The war wasn’t over yet.
CHAPTER # Ten
10. irish vs. irish
The assassination of JFK altered the course of U.S. history, but for most Irish Americans the significance of the Kennedy presidency had been carved in granite nearly three years earlier, on Inauguration Day, 1961. The moment Jack Kennedy was swept into office, the issue of his Catholicism was effectively taken out to sea, given a ten-gun salute, and dumped overboard. Three years later, after the shots were fired on a November day in Dallas, the transformation was complete. How could anyone, WASP or otherwise, question the fidelity of Irish Catholics when they had just offered up one of their most fortunate sons, an Irish prince whose youth and idealism, among other things, made terrific television. The shackles of anti-Catholic bigotry were shattered once and for all. Paddy was home free.
And so began the second great Irish exodus; this time from the city to the suburbs. It wasn’t as dramatic as the Great Potato Famine, but the numbers were, over the course of the next two decades, almost as startling. This process of white flight, later chronicled by untold social historians and academic ethnographers, would eventually lead to the reconfiguration of many U.S. cities, among them New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. In urban areas that had once served as incubation centers for the Irish American gangster, shifting ethnic trends in formerly white neighborhoods would lead to a slow dissolution of the Irish Mob over the next forty years.
Some cities were slower to change than others. In Boston, where Joe Kennedy’s family dynasty had been founded and forged, a stubborn Irish American working class was deeply entrenched. Having encountered an unparalleled level of WASP resistance, the city’s embattled Irish Catholics were not inclined to relinquish what they had fought so hard to obtain. By the early 1960s, neighborhoods like Charlestown and South Boston had become staunch working-class districts, predominantly Irish American, with a localized system of politics, civil service, law enforcement, and crime that had been in place for generations.
Gangs and gangsters were part of the equation in these neighborhoods and had been for decades. The Gustin Gang, named after a street in South Boston, had been a force in the city during the years of Prohibition and was one of the first bootlegging operations to do business with Joe Kennedy. More recently, the Mullin Gang, a gaggle of wharf rats based along the South Boston waterfront, had spawned a whole new generation of gangsters. In Charlestown, gang factions tended to be broken down into small groups of five or six members (many were family affairs comprised of brothers) and sometimes operated in conjunction with larger racketeering organizations, including the Mafia.
The city’s Irish American underworld was mostly a collection of working stiffs: men with wives, children, mortgages, and debt. In appearance and in terms of their family aspirations, the city’s racketeers were indistinguishable from other working men—except that they committed crimes and sometimes killed
people for a living. This chasm between perception and reality created a psychological disconnect for the gangsters themselves, one that hit home especially hard in the early 1960s. If televised images of Camelot were inspiring Irish Catholics nationwide to revel in their newfound upward mobility, in Boston, the rise of the Kennedys was the cornerstone of something different—an eruption of gangster violence that was without precedent in the long history of the Irish Mob.
For those who cared to notice, the irony was cruel: As J.F.K.’s election opened doors to most middle- and upper-class Irish Catholics, the world of the Irish gangster in Boston entered an era of almost total self-annihilation, which had little to do with the long-standing rivalry between the dagos and the micks, and everything to do with the concept of revenge—Irish revenge.
Gangland murders rarely take place in isolation. The laws of physics dictate that for every action there is a reaction. This would have been an appropriate motto for the Boston underworld or even the city in general. Unlike, say, New York or Kansas City, where a tradition of mobsterism sprang from would-be benevolent associations like Tammany Hall and the Pendergast Machine, Boston never had a centralized base of power, either criminal or legitimate. James Michael Curley, the most exalted of all Boston political chieftains, was not, technically speaking, a boss. Curley had been mayor, congressman, and governor—an elected official. He certainly had clout, but not so much that he could override local ward bosses, some of whom, within their own small domains of power, were at least as important as the mayor or the governor. Thus the city (much like ancient Ireland during the time of the clans) was broken down into a series of tribal villages: Dorchester, Roxbury, South Boston, and so on, each with local commercial interests and governing bodies.
The city’s underworld operated as a parallel universe, the main difference being that local hoods frequently formed partnerships based on expediency with crooks from other territories. Aside from the up-and-coming Mullin Gang in South Boston, the city’s underworld of the 1950s and early 1960s was comprised mostly of freelance operators—thieves, hijackers, bank robbers, bookmakers, policy runners, and hitmen-for-hire—old-style professional crooks who sold their services to the highest bidder. Irish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, and even crooks of Arab descent mixed freely in Boston, sometimes hatching schemes together and negotiating the division of spoils amongst themselves.1
Partly, this unusual level of interethnic fraternization came about because the dominant mafia faction in Boston was not even based in the city. The New England Mafia, as it had been identified by Joe Valachi during his incendiary senate testimony in October 1963, was led by the Patriarca family, who was based in Providence, Rhode Island. There was a Patriarca subgroup entrenched in Boston’s Italian North End, but they were small and toothless compared to Cosa Nostra families in other cities of comparable size. Therefore, Italian and Irish crooks were free to engage in joint ventures without having to kick back a percentage of their take to higher-ups—unless, of course, those higher-ups were directly involved in the planning and financing of a particular scam.
The decentralized nature of the Boston underworld made for some strange bedfellows. One of the most famous criminal capers in the city’s history was the Brinks Job, a skillfully planned and executed robbery by a small-time collection of local Irish and Italian hoods. Led by James “Specs” O’Keefe, a professional criminal best known for his brazen shakedowns of gamblers and bookies in the Boston area, the seven-man robbery crew—wearing identical Navy peacoats and Halloween masks—entered a Brinks storage facility in the city’s North End; they made off with $2.7 million in cash, checks, money orders, and other securities. The robbery took place on January 17, 1950, and was the largest single haul in U.S. history at the time. The crew agreed to keep the proceeds hidden for six years, until the statute of limitations ran out.
It was a good plan, but susceptible to the same sort of mistrust and paranoia that eats away at even the strongest of underworld alliances. In the months and years following the heist, while the FBI hunted for clues and sniffed around for cracks in the plan, the Brinks robbers retreated into mutually suspicious cliques. Specs O’Keefe sided with Carleton O’Brien, an old-time bookmaker and policy boss out of Rhode Island who had helped with the planning of the heist. When, in 1952, O’Brien was mysteriously gunned down in a professional hit on a street in Pawtucket, O’Keefe got nervous. He was also concerned about his mounting legal bills from an assortment of criminal charges.
Eventually, O’Keefe approached the Italian faction of the robbery crew and demanded that they fork over sixty grand from the Brinks loot. His request was flatly denied. As crooks often do when they don’t get their way, O’Keefe reacted badly: He kidnapped Vincent Costa, a member of the original break-in crew, and held him for ransom in a Boston hotel room. The Italian members of the Brinks gang arranged for Specs to be paid a portion of the ransom in exchange for Costa’s release. Specs should have known that the crew’s willingness to cough up the dough designated him as a marked man.
One night, while sitting behind the wheel of his car in his home neighborhood of Dorchester, a vehicle pulled alongside Specs, and someone inside opened fire. Specs ducked to the floor and survived the attack. For some reason, O’Keefe didn’t flee the city, even though he must have known there would be follow-up attempts on his life. He had a mistress in the Victory Road housing complex in Dorchester, and that’s where he hunkered down. Eight days later, sure enough, O’Keefe was walking on Victory Road late at night when a gunman appeared out of the darkness. Machine gun in hand, the gunman chased Specs through the courtyard of his mistress’s housing complex, firing rounds as they ran. O’Keefe returned fire with a handgun. The shootout between the two men lasted for nearly a half hour, with Specs getting the worst of it. By the time cops arrived, O’Keefe was lying in a pool of blood, hit in the chest and arm, but still alive. The hitman had fled the scene.2
Specs O’Keefe convalesced in a hospital under heavy guard. Realizing that he would forever be dodging bullets or hiding from the law, he did the unthinkable: He turned canary and testified against his fellow Brinks robbers in court.
The details of the Brinks Job became a permanent part of the local crime lore. There were many cautionary aspects to the yarn, particularly in the way that the robbery eventually unraveled, but few crooks paid any attention to that. The heist itself had been a thing of beauty—well-planned, professionally carried out, with a score that placed it high up in the Bank Robber Hall of Fame. So what if the participants all wound up in the joint. In the places where criminal schemes are hatched and discussed (saloons, social clubs, in the street) the prospect of a good score trumps a bad ending every time.
One young Boston kid who absorbed the local crime lore better than most was a brazen Irish-born thief named Patrick Nee. By the time Pat Nee had reached his mid-teens, he had become infatuated with the mostly Irish hoods and professional crooks who formed a subgroup within his home neighborhood of South Boston. Elsewhere in the city, kids may have worshipped the likes of Ted Williams, Carl Yastremski, and other local sports legends, but not young Pat. Had there been Topps bubble gum cards depicting the look and careers of men like Specs O’Keefe and Trigger Burke, Nee would have collected every one.
Since migrating with his family from County Galway in 1952 at the age of eight, the aspiring hoodlum set about to transform himself from a rural Irish culchie into a true-blue American. Nee’s father, the middle son of fourteen brothers and sisters, had been chronically unemployed back in the Old Country. In Southie, he found work through the Laborer’s Union. Gaelic speakers from Galway like Nee’s dad were first in line at the laborer’s local. Gaelic speakers from elsewhere in Ireland came next, followed by Irish-born who did not speak Gaelic. Irish Americans looking for work in the ancestral neighborhood of Southie came in a distant fourth.
Young Pat Nee was not interested in the pecking order of various trade unions in his new neighborhood. In fact, Nee rarely thought abo
ut gainful employment at all. By his early teen years, his main source of fascination was a bar located across the street from the Nee family home on East Third Street. Young Pat was not yet old enough to enter the Lighthouse Tavern, but he had a good view of the establishment’s back patio from the creaky wooden porch in back of his house. From there, with the eyes and ears of an adolescent, he heard the music and laughter, saw men playing cards and rolling dice, witnessed the occasional barroom brawl spill out into the street, and noted the fancy clothes and sleek automobiles pulling up in front of the place at all hours of the night. In later years, Nee would say there was never any hope for him; he was hooked on the glamour of the underworld before he was even old enough to vote. The Lighthouse Tavern became an obsession that would catapult the young Irish immigrant through the highs and lows of a long and winding career as a professional gangster.
Running with the Mullin Gang
No one knows for sure the precise origins of the Mullin Gang. What is known is that the gang got its name from an intersection in South Boston at the corner of East Second and O streets that commemorated a war veteran by the name of John Joseph Mullin. In Southie, there was a long-standing tradition of naming various intersections, parks, and town squares after war heroes, complete with small plaques that bore the names under a military star. Mullin may have been a veteran of World War I or World War II, no one knew for sure. The gang that first adopted his name in the late 1940s had no connection to Mullin himself; the intersection was simply in the middle of their territory, and the name Mullin had a nice Irish ring to it. And so the Mullin Gang was born.
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