Slaughter in the Streets: When Boston Became Boxing's Murder Capital

by Don Stradley

Overview

Boston was once a thriving boxing city. And it was also host to an ever-expanding underworld. From the early days of Boston's Mafia, to the era of Whitey Bulger, many of the city’s boxers found themselves drawn to the criminal life. Most of them ended up dead. SLAUGHTER IN THE STREETS, by Don Stradley, tells the violent and often tragic story of these misguided young men who thought their toughness in the ring could protect them from the most cold-blooded killers in the country.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949590258
Publisher:	Hamilcar Publications
Publication date:	02/25/2020
Series:	Hamilcar Noir True Crime Series , #3
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Don Stradley is the author of The War: Hagler-Hearns and Three Rounds for the Ages (Hamilcar Publications), Berserk: The Shocking Life and Death of Edwin Valero (Hamilcar Publications), Slaughter in the Streets: When Boston Became Boxing's Murder Capital (Hamilcar Publications), A Fistful of Murder : The Fights and Crimes of Carlos Monzon (Hamilcar Publications), Schooled, a dual biography of Lebron James and Jim Morris (Scholastic), and a chapter in The Ultimate Book of Boxing Lists by Bert Sugar and Teddy Atlas. Stradley is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in publications, including The Ring, Ringside Seat, and ESPN.com. Along with his boxing coverage, he's written about baseball, NASCAR, and professional wrestling. When not writing about sports, he's written about the movies for such magazines as Cinema Retro and Noir City.

T.J. English is a noted journalist, screenwriter, and author of the New York Times bestsellers Havana Nocturne and Paddy Whacked, as well as The Westies, a national bestseller, and Born to Kill, which was nominated for an Edgar Award. He has written for Esquire, Playboy, and New York magazine, among other publications. His screenwriting credits include episodes for the television crime dramas NYPD Blue and Homicide, for which he was awarded the Humanitas Prize. He lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword: T.J. English

Chapter 1: The Shooting Gallery

Chapter 2: Phil Buccola: Boston’s Beloved Mob Boss

Chapter 3: Boxing Booms in Boston

Chapter 4: Tommy Sullivan: Everybody’s Pal

Chapter 5: Eddie McLaughlin: They Called Him Punchy

Chapter 6: Joe Barboza: The King of East Boston

Chapter 7: Tony Veranis: The Tough Guy

Chapter 8: Rocco DiSeglio: Gambling Man

Chapter 9: Rico Sacramone: A Stylish Fighter

Chapter 10: Sammy Lindenbaum: Boxer, Bandit, Abortionist

Chapter 11: Eddie Connors: The Man Who Knew Too Much

Chapter 12: Tommy Tibbs: The Journeyman

Chapter 13: Paul Raymond: Heavyweight Homicide

Chapter 14: Johnny Pretzie: Sharkey’s Boy

Chapter 15: Frankie MacDonald: South Boston’s Hope

Chapter 16: Ghosts of Winter Hill

Editorial Reviews

Explore[s] 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…[A] gritty, true-crime narrative…with hard-edged prose and a total absence of cheap moralizing…[A] stark and gripping account.”—Kirkus Reviews

“[A] book that stands at the intersection of boxing and murder. These are the true-crime stories of men in Boston in the first half of the 20th century who dreamed of being great fighters but couldn’t make it past the fringe of the sport, and in their desperation chose criminal plots, resulting in grim ends. Boston itself, morphing into something new, in part by the violent actions of these boxer criminals, is a key feature of the book, which demonstrates that the confluence of boxing, poverty, crime, and the urban landscape is not the realm of fiction alone.”—CrimeReads, “The Classics of Boxing Literature"

"In a juicy mix of mayhem and pathos, Don Stradley writes movingly about the unusually high number of Boston boxers who found themselves on the wrong side of the law, usually with fatal consequences. Stradley weaves together details with dark humor but threads his narrative with compassion for the men who fought hard for our entertainment and were defeated by life. If you want to read about the Boston That Was, this is a captivating narrative of the past."—Stephanie Schorow, author of Inside the Combat Zone: The Stripped Down Story of Boston’s Most Notorious Neighborhood

"The word 'beautiful' may sound odd when describing a murderous volume in which men are shot, stabbed, strangled, and beaten to death with pipes and lead sashes, but Stradley so economically describes the lives of these men that [best-selling author T.J. English] is right, it is beautiful."—George Hassett, Dig Boston

From the Publisher