Irish Thunder

by Bob Halloran

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY - ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY - TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

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  Copyright © 2008 by Bob Halloran

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to The Lyons Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  The Lyons Press is an imprint of The Globe Pequot Press.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the United States of America

  Designed by Kim Burdick

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN 978-1-59921-220-3

  eISBN : 97-8-159-92159-6

  CHAPTER ONE

  A dozen bellies cozy up to the bar. Shots and beers for a small group of men. It’s nine o’clock in the morning, and drinking seems like a good idea. It had been this way at the Highland Tap for the better part of three decades, and if it stayed that way for three more, that would suit these men just fine.

  The Tap was their comfort zone. It was dark, and it was quiet. The faces were as familiar as the conversations. The tap was no-frills with a handful of tables and enough wooden stools to surround a small, oval bar. Pictures of fighters hung from the walls, local boxers whose images filled these patrons with a sense of parochial pride. If you grew up in Lowell, you were tough, because Lowell made you that way. There were times in Lowell’s history when it had been a good place to raise a family. The rest of the time, it was a good place to raise a little hell. Most of the men who ventured into the Highland Tap had done both.

  “This used to be one helluva tough town,” one man says to no one in particular. The speaker turns out to be Manny Freitas whose picture hangs on the wall only a few feet away. The photo was taken some thirty years earlier when Freitas was still able to pick up a few bucks fighting in small New England venues from Providence to Portland.

  Freitas had had the privilege of being knocked out in the first round by the great Marvin Hagler in Portland, Maine, in 1973, when Hagler’s career was just getting started and Freitas’s career was much closer to its end. Freitas reminisces humbly, “I’d seen him in the amateurs, so I knew he was a good fighter, but he surprised me with his hand speed. I never even saw the punches.” Hagler was supposed to fight a tomato can by the name of Curtis Phillips that night, but Freitas was the last-minute replacement. Freitas makes no pretenses about his boxing skills, never really thinking of himself as a boxer anyway. He never trained as a boxer. He was just a guy who got into a lot of fights. One of those fights was against a man with a machete, knocking Freitas into jail at MCI-Concord and a few more years in a work-release program in Lancaster. He had hoped to open a boxing gym with his brother, but he works behind the counter at the liquor store down the street instead. It’s a job, and Manny is in no hurry to get to it this morning.

  Freitas finished his boxing career with a record of 20-27-2. Besides losing to Hagler, his greatest achievement in boxing may have come when he broke Tommy Dragon’s jaw in Providence. Probably the best legal punch he ever threw.

  Freitas commands respect because, here, a man earns respect simply by stepping into the ring.

  “It’s still a tough town,” Freitas hears from across the bar. He thinks about some of the kids from Lowell, like himself, who regularly took beatings to make money.

  There was Roy “Baby Face” Andrews, who went the distance with Willie Pep for the World Featherweight Title in Boston in 1950. Andrews lost to a man who entered the ring that night with a record of 145 and 2.

  There was Blonde Tiger who lost more than 100 of his 155 professional fights in the 1930s and 1940s.

  There was “Irish” Jim Mulligan, the light heavyweight who wouldn’t retire until he had lost fifteen of his last eighteen fights.

  And there were so many more, including some who had enjoyed varying degrees of success, such as Larry Carney and “Irish” Beau Jaynes. Carney was a former New England middleweight and light heavyweight champion. He lasted longer than a lot of tough kids from Lowell, but like many of them, he was beaten by the drink. Carney died at the age of fifty-eight, on New Year’s Day 1992, after he fell down a flight of stairs and cracked open his head.

  Jaynes is the only man in history who ever held five New England titles at one time. He was the featherweight, junior lightweight, lightweight, junior welterweight, and welterweight champion, gaining and losing weight for each title fight. He grew up in the Acre, the toughest part of Lowell. He was eight years old the day he came home from school to hear his father say, “It’s time you learn how to fight. Tomorrow you’re getting in the ring.”

  That was 1955, and he stayed in the ring for the next twenty-five years. He started fighting at the Immaculate Conception CYO and in the Silver Mittens, moved on to the Golden Gloves, and kept his hands up until he was punched out. It took him 160 amateur fights and 95 professional fights, including 43 pro losses, to get there, and then he stayed there, in Lowell. He married Donna Eklund, a pretty young girl from a large Lowell family, and started working for the Lowell Department of Public Works some thirty years ago. Oddly enough, Carney had also married into the Eklund family, hooking up with Gail, the one known as “Red Dog,” the one with the long red hair. Without those marriages, Carney’s and Jaynes’s brothers-in-law Micky Ward and Dickie Eklund might never have been introduced to boxing, and many lives would have been very different.

  “It ain’t as tough as it used to be,” Freitas says as much to himself as anyone who might be listening. “Kids around here used to know what it was like to throw a punch and what it was like to take one in the chops. They used to choose boxing over drugs. Now, the gyms are empty, and you can spit in any direction from where you’re standing and you’ll hit somebody who’s ready to sell you some drugs.”

  Cleo Surprenant, the owner and tender of the bar at the Highland Tap, listens to Freitas and nods his head in agreement. Cleo, a white-haired, thin man in a red shirt buttoned all the way up, has the face of many a New Englander, friendly and worn. He knows that the pride of Lowell has taken some hits in recent years because of its failure to produce a boxer of any magnitude. In fact, the West End Gym on Middlesex Street, the gym that opened in 1970 and put up signs such as THE MORE YOU SWEAT, THE LESS YOU BLEED was gaining a reputation as an opponents’ gym. That meant that boxers from other parts of the state, such as Brockton or Southie, would come here looking for a kid who didn’t have much chance of winning. Opponents were just club fighters. The other kids were the contenders. Lowell kids climbed the wooden stairs to Art Ramalho’s tworing, dusty gymnasium on the second floor of an abandoned textile mill and trained in isolation
.

  Still Lowell had the occasional hopeful. Folks thought for a while that Jackie Morrell could have been a contender. He was one of the West End Gym’s top prospects in the early 1980s, but after losing his last eight fights he started to worry he’d end up like Ding Dong, the old fighter who was either punch-drunk from boxing or shell-shocked from one of America’s wars. The Lowell kids on the school buses used to taunt the old man, yelling “Ding Dong” whenever they drove by him. Ding Dong would chase the bus and hit it with his fists. His knuckles would bleed. Other kids would throw rocks at him. He would turn around and chase them. And this ritual continued for years. That was not the future Morrell wanted for himself; he hung up his gloves and passed the speed bag on to the next kid who thought he might be tough enough to climb through the ropes and up the ranks. But that kid hadn’t shown up in years.

  The days when there were thirty-five professionals fighting out of the West End Gym were long gone. Morrell quit soon after he was knocked out by Kevin Rooney and Marlon Starling. Another Lowell kid, a heavyweight named Don Halpin, fought some big guys with big names like Mike Tyson, Jimmy Young, Tex Cobb, and Tony Tubbs, but Halpin lost to all of them. In fact, he lost twenty-three of his thirty-two pro fights, getting knocked out fourteen times. He was a prison guard at the Concord Reformatory and only fought on the side for the five hundred bucks of easy money.

  Morrell was the same way. His real job was laying track for the Boston and Maine Railroad, but he’ll never forget the day he got the call from the West End’s owner and trainer, Art Ramalho. Ramalho, who had trained his own son David to become the New England featherweight champion, was known as the “Lowell Connection” because he had been delivering fighters from Lowell for the better part of three decades. If a boxing event needed four fighters, he produced four fighters. Usually they lost, but promoters knew that they could count on him to produce game, competitive fighters.

  So when Marlon Starling, the young up-and-coming welterweight out of Hartford, Connecticut, was scheduled to make his first appearance at Madison Square Garden and his opponent canceled on him the day before the fight, Ramalho got a call asking about Morrell. Morrell, who hadn’t been training, took the fight for four thousand dollars, and was stopped in two rounds. When he regained consciousness, he gave Ramalho his cut (one-third) and then bought a 1982 Corvette.

  But Morrell and Halpin stopped fighting in the 1980s, along with other promising young West End kids—Roberto Colon, Ricky Camaro, and Tom Ignacio. All of them eventually succumbed to injury, limited skills, or hard living.

  “We got no contenders here,” Morrell would explain. “Anyone who thinks he is goes down to Marvin Hagler’s gym in Brockton.”

  True, when the Petronelli brothers, Goodie and Pat, opened up their gym, the West End ranks were decimated. The last fighter with any real promise from Lowell was Micky Ward, the brother-in-law of Beau Jaynes and Larry Carney, but Ward had retired in 1991. That was three years ago.

  “Did you hear Micky’s coming back?” Cleo asks.

  “Micky Ward?

  “Yeah, Micky’s coming back.”

  “He never left. I see him paving the streets all the time.”

  “I don’t mean he’s coming back to Lowell. I mean he’s making a comeback—to boxing!”

  That didn’t surprise Freitas, who attempted his own ill-fated comeback nine years after he retired, only to be knocked out in the first round again.

  “Yeah, I hear that cop, Mickey O’Keefe, has him in the gym, and they’re looking to get Micky on a card somewhere,” Cleo says while drawing another beer.

  Freitas knew about O’Keefe. They were friends, good-enough friends so that when Freitas was training for a fight, he’d use O’Keefe as a sparring partner. And when O’Keefe split Freitas’s eye open during one of those sparring sessions, there were no hard feelings. Their friendship continued even when Freitas was an inmate at the Billerica House of Correction and O’Keefe was a guard.

  Freitas could still remember the day O’Keefe was closing up the weight room by himself. Only four men were there at the time: O’Keefe and three inmates, Freitas, Joey Andel, and Eddie Fielding. Freitas watched as Joey and Eddie approached O’Keefe, intent on persuading him by any means possible to keep the room open a little longer.

  Joey started with this: “Fuck you, asshole! We’re not leaving!”

  O’Keefe, knowing that his job and, by association, his life depended on how he handled situations such as this, wouldn’t back down. Eddie threw the first punch, and Joey jumped right in. A real donnybrook ensued. O’Keefe was doing the best he could to fight off both of them, but he started to lose the battle when he was cracked over the back by a cue stick. That’s when Freitas joined the fight to protect his friend. Freitas the street fighter was accustomed to taking on two and three guys at a time, and he already knew the pain of being stabbed and shot, so he let his instincts take over.

  “O’Keefe is good people. He’ll take good care of Micky,” Freitas said. Then he added. “But isn’t it kinda strange for Micky to be working with a cop? I mean, after what happened and all.”

  Everyone knew the story, and nobody seemed to mind hearing it or telling it again, least of all Mike Lutkus, who was sitting on the other side of the bar. Lutkus looked up from his beer to recount the events of May 9, 1987. “I was there that night,” he says.

  Mike Lutkus was there pretty much from the beginning. He was Micky Ward’s cousin, and he and his brothers Jerry and Gary used to hang out with Micky and his brother, Dickie. Micky was the youngest, but even at the age of five, Mike remembers that Micky could hit pretty hard. He’d tell people, “We used to take him down to our house in the backroom, and we’d put the little gloves on him, and he used to come right at us. We used to bang each other good.”

  When the five boys weren’t shining shoes, they were in the gym or sneaking into Boston on the T. They got to know the conductor, Red, and if they didn’t have enough money, Red would give them five dollars, which was enough to get them to Fanueil Hall to hang out. They’d make their way over to the Garden Gym, the one up the street from Boston Garden, and they’d watch guys like Johnny Dunn, Marvin Hagler, and Vinnie Curto. Those were the days when it was still safe for five kids under the age of fourteen to walk the streets by themselves. Besides, it was a lot safer in Boston than it was in the Acre where they all grew up.

  “Boxing saved us,” Lutkus has said many times. “The Boys Clubs saved us. We were there all the time. That’s how Mickey O’Keefe found us. He’s the one who kept us out of trouble. None of us ever got arrested. At least not as kids.”

  That changed for Micky that night at the Cosmopolitan Café, a well-known danger zone that attracted all kinds of rough characters: druggies, bikers, transvestites, you name it. Micky had won his first thirteen pro fights. In the fight just prior to the Cosmo incident, he had beaten a kid named Kelly Koble at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on the undercard of the Hagler-Sugar Ray Leonard fight. Hagler lost a twelve-round split decision, but Micky knocked Koble out in the fourth round.

  A month after giving Koble a beating, Micky was on the receiving end of a beating from the Lowell police. Micky tells the story this way:

  “I was out with a friend at some bars in Lowell, and we ended up at the Cosmo. I saw my brother, Dickie, in there, and some other guys. It’s a wicked bad bar, very violent, real bad. I was with my friend Mike Lapointe. His mother had gone out with this Puerto Rican guy and the guy had hit his mother. So, when my friend saw him in the bar, they started arguing. They took it outside and started fighting, beating the Puerto Rican guy up. Dickie comes out, and Mike Lapointe has this Puerto Rican guy on the ground, and he’s hitting him. And Dickie comes over and tries to help the guy out, saying, ‘He’s a friend, I know him.’ As Dickie’s picking the guy up off the ground, the cops show up and think Dickie’s beating him up. They tackle Dickie and now he’s arrested. Nothing you can do, and they’re walking him back to the wagon. That’s fine. Then they ta
ke him and pull him down, throw him on the ground. That’s when I went over and yelled, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Boom! They must have thought I was gonna do something to them.

  “They dragged me, and got me on the ground. One cop was yelling, ‘Break his fucking hands! Break his fucking hands!’ I don’t know who it was who said it. I was cuffed at the time. They split my head wide open. I got seven stitches in my head, and I got my hands busted up.”

  The police account of the story isn’t much different, though the report filed by Officer Edward Dowling failed to mention Micky’s injuries or the fact that twelve other officers had responded to the Cosmopolitan Café on Market Street that night.

  Dowling details arriving at the scene and witnessing Dickie punching and kicking twenty-nine-year-old Angel Rosario. Several police officers attempted to subdue and arrest Dickie, but he punched Dowling several times and attempted to escape. Suddenly, Dickie’s older sister, Gail Carney, rushed from the crowd that had gathered and attacked Officer Dowling from behind. She kicked and clawed and threw a few punches that demonstrated she’d been around the fight game for a while, but after a brief struggle she was cuffed and led to a patrol wagon. Meanwhile, Dickie was finally captured and cuffed as well. Dickie continued to thrash around and was crying out for help. This time it was Micky who emerged from the crowd, throwing himself into the mix. He tackled Dowling, forcing him to the ground, and another man kicked Dowling while he was down.

  “It wasn’t me,” Lutkus claims to this day. “When the cops showed up, I was getting ready to run.”

  But Micky didn’t run. He never did, not in the ring and not in the streets. All he wanted to do was to get the cops off his brother. Once he had accomplished that, he was prepared to accept the consequences, but he had no idea what the extent of those consequences would be.