Boston Mob
The Rise and Fall of the New England Mob and Its Most Notorious Killer
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1.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The New England Mafia was a hugely powerful organization that survived by using violence to ruthlessly crush anyone that threatened it, or its lucrative gambling, loansharking, bootlegging and other enterprises. Psychopathic strongman Joseph "The Animal" Barboza was one of the most feared mob enforcers of all time, killing as many as thirty people for business and pleasure.
From information based on newly declassified documents and the use of underworld sources, Boston Mob spans the gutters and alleyways of East Boston, Providence and Charlestown to the halls of Congress in Washington D.C. and Boston's Beacon Hill. Its players include governors and mayors, and the Mafia Commission of New York City. From the tragic legacy of the Kennedy family to the Winter Hill-Charlestown feud, the fall of the New England Mafia and the rise of Whitey Bulger, Mark Songini's Boston Mob is a saga of treachery, murder, greed, and the survival of ruthless men pitted against legal systems and police forces.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Despite what the title promises, this is not another account of the most notorious Boston underworld figure, Whitey Bulger, but a study of a more pedestrian mob enforcer, Joseph "the Animal" Barboza, active in the 1960s and '70s. The accounts of hits he carried out and the machinations of the Mafia will be familiar to readers of Henry Hill. Journalist Songini (The Lost Fleet) narrates in over-the-top fashion, for example, when Barboza is kept behind bars after an arraignment, while his cousin is released, Songini writes: "Finally, two thousand years after the Crucifixion, the thief and murderer with a name beginning with the letter B remained in custody, while Jesus walked covering his face with a hat to defend it from the awaiting photographers." The book would have benefited considerably from more historical context; Robert Kennedy's crusade against the Mafia as attorney general is presented as a shock, as if he had not spent time on the McClellan Committee during the previous decade. Given that Barboza was himself gunned down in 1976, some account of what followed, to put his time in perspective, would also have enhanced this forgettable book.
