Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  But once “Mother Gal” became President of the City Council, a subtle change seemed to creep over the Galvins. Bernie Kirk remained loyal to his fellow Indian, but Bernie’s wife and children thought their neighbors were putting on airs. Gertrude Kirk, in particular, resented Galvin’s refusal to help reduce the assessment on their house, a favor he’d done for other families up and down the block. The Kirk and Galvin girls drifted apart. The Galvins sent their daughters to the best Catholic schools, gave them elocution and ballet lessons, and dressed them elegantly (Alice Kirk never forgot their little black velvet jackets with white ermine trim). They were getting a little “hoity-toity.” Years later, when Kathryn Galvin married the up-and-coming Boston politician Kevin White, Alice wasn’t surprised.

  If the Galvins were quintessential “top-of-the-hillers,” the Kirks’ other neighbors, the McLaughlins, were characteristic valley dwellers. Johnny McLaughlin, a wizened railway clerk, and his wife, Annie, a gargantuan earth mother, produced eleven children—six girls and five boys. The McLaughlin kids were a little older than the Kirks, so the girls all served at one time or other as their neighbors’ babysitters, and when troubles developed at the McLaughlins’ house, several of their younger children came to live with the Kirks for a while. Georgie McLaughlin wanted to enlist in the Navy, but couldn’t make the weight, so night after night he put down prodigious quantities of Bernie Kirk’s mashed potatoes until the Navy capitulated.

  The troubles began with the oldest son, Eddie, known to one and all as “Punchy.” A longshoreman and a pretty good club fighter, Punchy began using his fists outside the ring. His public brawls with South Boston’s Tommy Sullivan were legendary: once he went after Sullivan in a bar with a five-inch railroad spike. Soon he was working as an “enforcer” on the docks, collecting money for professional loan sharks. Inexplicably he was a shoplifter as well, arrested for stealing a pink negligee from a Roslindale department store. In the early fifties, Punchy went off to Montreal, where he served an apprenticeship with the mob. Returning to Charlestown, he muscled in on gambling and loan-sharking operations, gradually enlisting his younger brothers Bernie and Georgie.

  Bernie became a renowned enforcer, specializing in “the vigorous treatment.” If a guy didn’t pay back a loan with full interest, Bernie beat him with a lead window sash weight wrapped in newspaper, often breaking an arm or a leg.

  But the best known of the brothers was Georgie McLaughlin. Given a bad-conduct discharge from the Navy, where he was tagged a “psychopathic personality with marked aggressive traits,” Georgie worked for a time as a longshoreman. But he kept bad company.

  In August 1960, Georgie went to a party in a Salisbury Beach cottage with members of a gang which owed its allegiance to James “Buddy” McLean, a longshoreman from neighboring Somerville who “looked like an altar boy but fought like the devil.” Georgie got drunk and insulted the wife of one of McLean’s men, calling her a “whore,” then spitting a mouthful of beer in her face. An hour later, McLaughlin’s body was dumped on the lawn of a Newburyport hospital. The “going-over” left him virtually unrecognizable, with all but two teeth knocked out, his scalp split open from his forehead to the base of his skull, the tip of one ear bitten off.

  Georgie refused to tell the police who’d beaten him, growling, “I’ll take care of it my own way.” Two days later, Punchy and Bernie went to Buddy McLean with an ultimatum: give us the guys who beat up our kid brother or we’ll get you. McLean declined. The feud was on. Two months later, five sticks of dynamite were found in Buddy’s car parked outside his Somerville home. The next day—Halloween—Bernie McLaughlin did some drinking at Charlestown’s Morning Glory Cafe. Shortly after noon, he came into the midday shade beneath the El in City Square. Linda Lee, a nightclub singer he knew, sashayed by and Bernie said, “Hi, beautiful, how you doing?” For a few more minutes he stood in front of Richards’ Liquor Store, boasting to a friend that he’d “squash” Buddy McLean.

  “That’s not the way I heard it, Bernie,” said a man in tortoiseshell glasses who’d been lurking behind a stanchion of the Mystic River Bridge. Then he pumped five .38 caliber slugs into Bernie, jumped in a car, and sped away. Later, police arrested Buddy McLean and Alex Petricone for the killing, but the grand jury failed to indict. There’d been fifty-seven people in City Square when Bernie was killed, but not a one cared to testify.

  Bernie wasn’t widely mourned in Charlestown. It is said that as he lay dying on the pavement, a longshoreman who had suffered “the vigorous treatment” at his hands walked over, looked down at him, and said, “Whatever bastard did that should get a medal.” But if nobody else cared, Bernie’s brothers—and their associates—did. The newspapers described it as a war between Charlestown and Somerville gangs, but the men all had much the same background, most of them having worked at one time on the Charlestown docks. Rarely holding a steady job, they lived by their wits—loan-sharking, robbing bookies, or pulling minor stickups. Most of them had done prison time together.

  Now they were killing each other off at a record rate. One ex-con was beheaded and dumped in a car trunk. Another body was found dismembered in three suitcases in a parking lot. Harold Hannon, Georgie McLaughlin’s best friend, was discovered floating in Boston Harbor, strangled to death with piano wire. In five years, forty-three men associated with the two gangs lost their lives.

  In May 1964, Georgie McLaughlin was placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for shooting a bank teller in Roxbury. After an eleven-month manhunt, he went on trial for murder.

  That left only Punchy McLaughlin at large. But Punchy led a dangerous life. In November 1964, as he sat outside a Brookline hotel, a shotgun ripped half his jaw away. Eight months later, his right hand was shot off when his car was ambushed in Westwood. Barely a month after he was released from the hospital with an artificial hand, he began attending Georgiens trial. The police warned him he was a sitting duck, but he just shrugged. One morning in September 1965, as he was about to board a bus to the courthouse, a man in tortoiseshell glasses stepped out of the bushes and blew Punchy away with a shotgun blast. Georgie—who was soon convicted and is still in prison—was sitting at the defense table when a court officer told him what had happened. The baby of the family broke into tears. “One-two-three,” he said. “The ball game’s over.”

  If mutual decimation of the McLaughlins and the McLeans marked the end of Charlestown’s “gangster era,” a host of gangs endured in the Town. These were less criminal bands than expressions of territorial allegiance. Every street and alley, every park and pier had its own ragged troop which hung on the corner, played football, baseball, and street hockey, and defended its turf against all comers. The Wildcats hung at the corner of Frothingham and Lincoln streets, the Bearcats at Walker and Russell streets, the Falcons outside the Edwards School, the Cobras on Elm Street, the Jokers in Hayes Square, the Highlanders on High Street, the Crusaders at the Training Field. Each had its distinctive football jersey (on which members wore their street addresses), its own legends and traditions.

  The Highlanders, for example, took their identity from the Bunker Hill Monument, which towered over their hangout at the top of Monument Avenue. On weekends and summer afternoons, they gathered there to wait for out-of-town tourists visiting the revolutionary battleground. When one approached, an eager boy would step forward and launch his spiel, learned by rote from other Highlanders:

  “The Monument is 221 feet high, has 294 winding stairs and no elevators. They say the quickest way up is to walk, the quickest way down is to fall. The Monument is fifteen feet square. Its cornerstone was laid in 1825 by Daniel Webster. The statue you see in the foreground is that of Colonel William Prescott standing in the same position as when he gave that brave and famous command, ‘Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes.’ The British made three attempts to gain the hill …” And so forth. An engaging raconteur could parlay this patter into a fifty-cent tip.

  The Bobcats, a gang which hung out near
the high school, were credited with a game called “halfball.” Unique to Charlestown, it was played with a broom handle and a rubber ball sliced in half so that it wobbled like a dying quail. The batter stood in the street about fifteen yards from the school’s granite façade. A ball which reached the sidewalk was a single, a blow off the first story a double, a hit off the second story a triple, and anyone who could swat the erratic missile off the third story was given a home run. Soon the game became Charlestown’s “national sport.” Every August, the town’s best players competed in the All-Charlestown Championships, which drew hundreds of raucous, beer-swilling spectators.

  But Charlestown’s most characteristic pastime had long been the reckless sport of “looping.” The young “looper” played by a rigid set of rules. First, he stole a car in downtown Boston. Then he roared into Charlestown, accelerating as he reached City Square, where the District 15 police station stood in a welter of bars, nightclubs, and pool halls. Often he had to take a turn around the square before the first policeman dashed for his patrol car or motorcycle. Then the chase was on: down Chelsea Street to Hayes Square, up the long slope of Bunker Hill Street to St. Francis de Sales’ Church at the crest, then down again, picking up speed, often to 70 or 80 miles per hour, until a screeching left into Sullivan Square took him onto Main Street, where, dodging the stanchions of the El, he roared into City Square again, completing the “loop.” All that remained was to ditch the car before the police caught up.

  Looping was an initiation rite, proof that a Townie had come of age. But it was something else as well: a challenge flung at authority, a middle finger raised to the powers that be. Before long, looping became a kind of civic spectacle, pitting the Town’s young heroes against the forces of law and order. Plans for a loop circulated well in advance. At the appointed hour, hundreds of men, women, and children gathered along Bunker Hill Street, awaiting the gladiators. When the stolen car came in sight, racing up the long hill, a cheer would rise from the spectators, followed by jeers for the pursuing policemen.

  The first recorded “loop” was performed in 1925 by a sixteen-year-old daredevil named Jimmy “Speed King” Murphy, but most renowned of all was “Shiner” Sheehan, the teenage son of a federal alcohol agent, whose exploits so electrified the Town that he drew round him a group of young acolytes. Membership in their “Speeders Club” was limited to those who could produce newspaper clippings showing they had bested the police.

  For some the sport proved fatal. In November 1932, two eighteen-year-olds were killed when their car, careering down Bunker Hill Street, smashed into a steel stanchion. Innocent bystanders also suffered. A twenty-two-year-old woman was killed when a car hit her as she waited for a trolley. A young attorney died while trying to cross the street.

  By the early thirties, Boston’s press began taunting the police for failure to capture the “young hoodlums.” Stung, the police devised new “anti-looping” measures. Motorcycle cops were instructed to conceal themselves by St. Francis de Sales’ Church and cut the loopers off as they crested the hill. But the drivers quickly caught on, heaving bricks or firing pistols at the cops. Then plainclothesmen were ordered to mingle with the crowds, sidle to the curb, and “shoot to kill” as the loopers passed; undeceived by the policemen’s disguises, the crowds proved so hostile that this plan too had to be abandoned.

  Finally, the police devised the “Magic Carpet,” a forty-foot leather strip studded with 1,400 spikes. When police got word of a loop, they spread the carpet across the roadway. On several occasions it worked, but on June 5, 1934, as Patrolman James Malloy, dressed in plain clothes, unrolled the carpet across Bunker Hill Street, the car swerved directly toward him and dragged his lifeless body 125 feet. Two young Townies were charged with Malloy’s murder. One confessed he had been seeking revenge on the cop for the death of two loopers in 1932.

  By 1937, Charlestown’s civic leaders were fed up with the practice, which had blighted the Town’s reputation. A committee demanded that the Police Commissioner end looping “at all costs.” Late that year, authorities announced that any captured looper would be publicly flogged on a platform in City Square. The plan was never implemented, but increased police surveillance led to the arrest of seventy-seven loopers in 1937 alone. The next March, Mayor Maurice Tobin ordered Bunker Hill Street dug up at three locations to create “bottlenecks” slightly wider than an automobile wheel base and filled with low concrete pyramids. If these traps weren’t negotiated at low speeds the pyramids would rupture the car’s undercarriage.

  But all through the forties, as the Kirks grew up on Monument Avenue, an occasional looper still blazed his defiant path across the Town. As late as March 1949, police fired four shots while they pursued a twenty-two-year-old along Main Street. As the car screeched into City Square it overturned three times, pinning the looper beneath the wreckage. The Kirks and their neighbors watched as the police cut the miscreant out with a blowtorch and dragged him off to jail.

  The Kirk boys were raised to shun such confrontations with the law. “Remember who you are,” their mother warned. “You’re the Kirks from Monument Avenue!” Each hung out with a street gang—Jim with the Jokers, Bobby with an unnamed outfit on Monument Square—but their activities were relatively innocuous: playing football, baseball, and halfball in the summer, coasting the icy hills in the winter, playing pinball at Vic’s Place, occasionally jousting with rivals from an adjacent corner.

  After hanging out with the Crusaders for several years, Alice Kirk transferred her allegiance to the Eagles, a gang which occupied a stretch of Bunker Hill Street dubbed “Stony Beach” because Townies took the sun there in canvas chairs as if it were an ocean beach. It was there, in the fall of 1953, that Alice met Danny McGoff.

  Like the Kirks, the McGoffs were third-generation Irish-Americans, but their route to Charlestown had been more circuitous: a long stint as New Hampshire farmers followed by a stay in South Boston. Not until early 1941 did Mike McGoff, a supermarket accountant, bring his wife and six children to Charlestown to take a much-sought-after place in the brand-new Bunker Hill housing project.

  The notion that government ought to play some role in providing decent housing for its citizens was not much older than the Charlestown project itself. It took the Depression—with its mass foreclosures, blighted housing industry, and runaway unemployment—to make most Americans see what Franklin Roosevelt called “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” In 1934, a limited housing program began under the Public Works Administration, but not until the Housing Act of 1937 did Congress accept the idea that the federal government should aid local authorities in providing housing for the poor at rents they could afford.

  The program awakened large expectations. When Mayor James Michael Curley dedicated one of Boston’s first public housing colonies, he boldly asserted, “With this project we will forever have solved the problem of housing in Boston.” From the start, such projects were political prizes, strenuously sought by Boston’s needy neighborhoods. The city’s first—among the first in the nation—went to South Boston, whose congressman, John McCormack, was Democratic floor leader in the House of Representatives. Later came projects in the South End, Roxbury, and Charlestown.

  Charlestown’s twenty-four-acre site encompassed most of the “Point” section along the Mystic River, where Irish immigrants had first settled in the 1850s. The neighborhood had changed little, its narrow streets still lined with soot-stained clapboard dwellings, most of them without hot water, bathtubs, or central heating. Charlestown’s civic leaders were dismayed by the Point’s “odious condition,” but to many of its elderly residents it was the only home they’d known. Long after the deadline for evacuation had passed, dozens of families held out in their houses, vowing to resist if deputy sheriffs tried to remove them.

  Families evicted from the area received preference on new apartments in the project, so long as they met income criteria; 36 percent ultimately resettled there. But thousands o
f other Bostonians clamored for one of the 1,149 apartments ballyhooed in the Boston press as “modern, efficient, inexpensive and neighborly … a colony where sunshine and happiness are available.” The forty-five three-story brick buildings, set around square courtyards, were almost painfully plain, with all embellishments—elevators, vestibules, even doorbells—omitted. But they boasted modern conveniences new to many tenants. When the first families moved in around Thanksgiving 1940, they were delighted by the white enamel sinks, gas stoves, refrigerators, and washable pastel walls. “I never thought I’d be able to afford anything as lovely as this,” said Mrs. John Shackleford, the wife of a parking attendant. Rents were heavily subsidized: three-room apartments went for fourteen dollars a month, utilities included.

  In April 1941, the McGoffs of South Boston learned that their application for the Bunker Hill project had been accepted (perhaps with a little help from Mrs. McGoff’s brother, a policeman who knew James Michael Curley and John McCormack). They moved into a nineteen-dollar-a-month six-room apartment the following month, just in time to attend the project’s gala dedication, which coincided with the annual Bunker Hill Day parade.

  Six years old when his family moved into the project, Danny McGoff grew up in its alleys and courtyards, went to St. Catherine’s parochial school, then on to Cathedral High in the South End. When his father died in 1952, Danny quit school, taking a job at the Schrafft’s candy factory to help support the family. After work each day he joined the Eagles on Stony Beach across from the project. One afternoon, at Scalli’s Coffee Shop, he met Alice Kirk. Soon the two teenagers were seeing each other regularly.