The two-bit thugs of Boston’s underworld star in this stark and gripping account.
This third installment of the Hamilcar Noir series examines key figures of an era when Boston’s boxing scene had strong ties to organized crime.
In his latest book, Stradley (Berserk, 2019) continues to explore boxing’s seedy underside by presenting readers with a gallery of biographical portraits from a period in Boston history when the sport and mob violence were frequently linked. Delivering staccato and cinematic details, the author looks at the 20th-century thugs, waterfront rats, and promising local youths whose lives became entangled with the gangsters, sharklike cops, and backroom politicians who created and sustained the old world of Boston ward politics. In economical passages, Stradley shows how surprisingly often the thread connecting all these men was boxing. The tough guys had entered the ring in their teens with varying degrees of success, and the mobsters used the sport as the hub of many of their racketeering operations. Chapters covering the late 1920s to the ’70s are quick and pithy, filled with colorful figures unearthed by the author’s exhaustive research. Readers learn about Eddie “Punchy” McLaughlin, who’d been a promising local Charlestown boxer in his youth but had quickly moved on to lead his own street fighters in a war against the notorious Winter Hill gang (“highlighted by daytime shootouts, car bombs, assassinations, and even a beheading”). In 1964, enemy shooters disguised themselves as rabbis to get close to McLaughlin (he survived this skirmish and a subsequent attempt on his life but was eventually gunned down on a street in broad daylight, like so many of the book’s characters). There was also the formerly well-regarded lightweight prospect Rico Sacramone, “just another Boston kid who fell in love with the cut-rate allure of gangsters,” as the author puts it, noting the paranoia that eventually took over the man’s thoughts: “He paid first with his mind, then with his life.” Stradley adheres fairly consistently to the Hamilcar Noir style for his gritty, true-crime narrative: The bizarre excitement of the stories is never allowed to drift into admiration or emulation. As in his previous work, the author narrates an almost unbroken string of horrible, unethical, and illegal choices on the part of all his characters, and he deftly acknowledges the dramatic nature of their mindsets. “He was a risk taker,” Stradley writes about 26-year-old Newton ex-fighter Rocco DiSeglio’s drift from boxing to crime. “To fight for a living, to put a lot of money down on a long shot, to rob someone at gunpoint, requires an element of risk unknown to the average person.” With hard-edged prose and a total absence of cheap moralizing, the author emphasizes that the gambles these men took were bad, immoral, and inevitably self-destructive. Well-known Boston mob figures like James “Whitey” Bulger and Stephen Flemmi crop up in these pages, and some of Stradley’s riveting tales manage to touch briefly on the mainstream world of ’70s boxing (one chapter recounts a grizzled Somerville has-been’s exhibition match with none other than Muhammad Ali). But the main focus here is on the small fry, the unknown losers caught up in the rush and tawdry thrills of mob violence, going from fights to shootouts to prison stays to more brutal acts until their luck finally ran out.
The two-bit thugs of Boston’s underworld star in this stark and gripping account.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-949590-25-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Hamilcar Publications
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Never especially challenging or provocative but pleasant enough light reading.
Former Dirty Jobs star Rowe serves up a few dozen brief human-interest stories.
Building on his popular podcast, the author “tells some true stories you probably don’t know, about some famous people you probably do.” Some of those stories, he allows, have been subject to correction, just as on his TV show he was “corrected on windmills and oil derricks, coal mines and construction sites, frack tanks, pig farms, slime lines, and lumber mills.” Still, it’s clear that he takes pains to get things right even if he’s not above a few too-obvious groaners, writing about erections (of skyscrapers, that is, and, less elegantly, of pigs) here and Joan Rivers (“the Bonnie Parker of comedy”) there, working the likes of Bob Dylan, William Randolph Hearst, and John Wayne into the discourse. The most charming pieces play on Rowe’s own foibles. In one, he writes of having taken a soft job as a “caretaker”—in quotes—of a country estate with few clear lines of responsibility save, as he reveals, humoring the resident ghost. As the author notes on his website, being a TV host gave him great skills in “talking for long periods without saying anything of substance,” and some of his stories are more filler than compelling narrative. In others, though, he digs deeper, as when he writes of Jason Everman, a rock guitarist who walked away from two spectacularly successful bands (Nirvana and Soundgarden) in order to serve as a special forces operative: “If you thought that Pete Best blew his chance with the Beatles, consider this: the first band Jason bungled sold 30 million records in a single year.” Speaking of rock stars, Rowe does a good job with the oft-repeated matter of Charlie Manson’s brief career as a songwriter: “No one can say if having his song stolen by the Beach Boys pushed Charlie over the edge,” writes the author, but it can’t have helped.
Never especially challenging or provocative but pleasant enough light reading.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982130-85-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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