Common Ground (29 page)

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s the bells in St. Mary’s steeple tolled three, Alice Kirk and her schoolmates chanted a perfunctory “Hail Mary,” then filed onto the crooked pitch of Winthrop Street. Nuns, severe in their coal-black habits, marshaled them into two lines, one facing up the slope toward the Bunker Hill Monument, the other downhill toward the shabby jumble of Main Street. Promptly at 3:15, the Sisters led their charges in opposite directions. When the “up-street line” reached the rectory at the top of the hill and the “down-street line” passed the church at the bottom, they broke for home. But they never forgot the catechism of class they learned in those daily processions.

For the nuns were steeped in Charlestown’s social geography. Once, Breed’s and Bunker hills had been a preserve of the Puritan ascendancy, while the Celtic newcomers huddled by the docks on either side. Now that the Yankees had decamped for the countryside, the heights were held by the lace-curtain Irish, with the lower slopes and valleys occupied by their less fortunate countrymen. Even the least experienced nun realized that donations from the hills were heavier than those from the valleys.

Alice and the five other Kirks who attended St. Mary’s School were assigned to the “down-street line” because they lived nearer the bottom than the top of Breed’s Hill. But soon they worked out a private accommodation with the Sisters that permitted them to cut through a firemen’s alley from Winthrop Street to their back door on Soley Street. Strictly speaking, they were neither “up-street” nor “down-street” kids, but a third, ill-defined category, swimming in social ambiguity.

The Kirks’ Monument Avenue address was enough to lend them a certain cachet. A graceful thoroughfare which ran straight up the hill toward the granite obelisk from which it took its name, the avenue had once been a Yankee bastion. In the years before World War I, a few Irish moved into the spacious brick town houses—among them Dr. Dan Hurley, the first Irishman to captain
Harvard’s football team—but it was decades before they claimed the avenue as their own. During World War II, many of its stately dwellings were converted to rooming houses for sailors and war workers from the Navy Yard. In others, Irish spinsters and their bachelor brothers passed their declining years in a clutter of Victorian geegaws and dusty house plants, but it was still Charlestown’s most prestigious thoroughfare.

The Kirks, with their six children, were naturally drawn to the few neighbors who had kids about the same age: among them the Galvins, who lived near the top of the hill at No. 49, and the McLaughlins, who lived near the bottom, at No. 25. The Kirks, at No. 31, were bracketed by Charlestown’s most renowned family and what would soon be its most notorious clan.

Billy Galvin and Bernie Kirk had grown up together on Charlestown’s streets and docks, later disporting themselves in the Indian Club, of which Billy was the longtime president. But the boozy camaraderie of a dozen “Pow-Wows” could hardly disguise their temperamental differences. If Bernie was an industrious plodder, Billy was a gregarious showman. For a time he worked as a candy packer, a jewelry salesman, and a real estate broker, but soon he gravitated to more flamboyant enterprises, which, during Prohibition, apparently involved liquor. At a political rally some years afterwards a rival leveled an accusing finger at him and shouted, “Are you going to vote for that guy? He ran the biggest booze joint in town.”

“That’s okay,” Billy blithely responded, “you were my best customer.”

After an unsuccessful run for office in 1935, Galvin made it into the Boston City Council in 1937, remaining four years, the last two as Council President. When Mayor Maurice Tobin was out of town, Billy served as acting mayor, the first time a Townie had occupied that exalted position. But in November 1941, he lost his Council seat to a younger challenger, the defeat attributed in part to his support for a controversial Charlestown housing project, in part to his support for Mayor Tobin in a district loyal to James Michael Curley. Six months later, Tobin rewarded his Charlestown lieutenant by making him city Superintendent of Markets, a political plum he held for twenty-six years.

On occasion, Billy could still flash his old street style. In June 1942 he came before the Boston School Committee to oppose a plan, devised by Chairman Clement Norton, which would postpone student holidays from summer to winter in order to save fuel. Galvin called Norton “Boston’s No. 1 political faker.” Norton called Galvin “Boston’s No. 1 political gangster.” As the epithets escalated, Galvin heaved a seven-inch plaster ashtray, which narrowly missed Norton and shattered against a wall. The Superintendent of Markets and the committee chairman had to be physically restrained.

But such exhibitions notwithstanding, Billy Galvin assumed the mantle of Charlestown’s elder statesman, becoming known to one and all as “Mother Gal,” ostensibly because of the favors he’d done for his constituents (though a few malcontents suggested that the name derived from the old days when he could be counted on to supply a bottle or two). Settling on Monument Avenue in 1935, he and his wife, a striking woman of Swedish descent, had seven
daughters, one more beautiful than the next. Living just nine doors apart, the seven Galvin sisters and the four Kirk girls spent a lot of time together, sleeping over at one another’s houses, trading clothes, doing each other’s hair. Alice Kirk and Mary Galvin were particular friends, as were Donalda Kirk and Ellen Galvin.

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.