Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (49 page)

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.
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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.
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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 about 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.

The original rulers of the gang were mostly World War II veterans who worked as longshoremen, men like Roger Kineavy, Pete Mansfield, and Wally Mansfield. A later generation took control over of the gang in the late 1950s—most notably Mickey McDonough and Mikey Ward, who were both veterans of the Korean War. These men often gathered at a Teamsters hiring hall located on the South Boston waterfront or at the Lighthouse Tavern, which was
the
gathering place for Boston hoodlums of every variety.

Pat Nee, late of Rossmuc, County Galway, made his first foray to the Lighthouse pub at the age of fifteen. An average-sized youth with a slight stutter, Nee began shining shoes in front of the bar and later ran errands for some of the area’s better-known criminals. The criminals liked Pat; he was respectful but not the least bit timid. Eventually, Mickey McDonough and Mikey Ward put Nee to work, allowing him to serve as stick man for the neighborhood’s card and dice games. The stick man’s job was to hold the money during a game and call out “no dice” if a player’s toss of the dice did not make contact with the wall—in which case the player crapped out and lost his wager, often blaming the stick man.

“You fuckin’ little prick,” they usually grumbled, smacking Nee on the head with an open hand.

Invariably, someone would come to Pat’s defense. “Hey, leave the kid alone. He’s only doin’ his job.”

Nee enjoyed every part of it, even the smacks to the head, because he knew it was all part of his apprenticeship as an aspiring hoodlum. “I knew about the Mullin Gang and wanted to be a part of it—desperately wanted to be a part of it,” he would say years later. “At some level I guess I wanted to be a criminal, but I wasn’t really thinking of it that way, you know,
criminal
in the legalistic sense of the word. I just wanted to be like those guys I saw at the Lighthouse. I wanted to do what they did. The money looked easy. At least they spent it like it was easy. I never saw the dark side, of course, the loans that went unpaid, the violence, the time in jail. That all came later.”
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Eventually, Nee started hanging out with a group of young kids his own age who thought of themselves as junior Mullins. They often loitered in front of McGillicudy’s, a pharmacy at O and Broadway, where they drank ice cream sodas and lime rickeys. Sometimes they gathered at Castle Island, an old fort located at the end of a peninsula that jutted out into Boston harbor. Castle Island was especially popular in the summer; it was in Mullin territory, a cherished spot along a stretch of the beach that was expected to be protected against outside forces—which sometimes resulted in gang confrontations.