New York City
September 2019
Bad choices put them all in early graves. They died violently and stupidly, in a Boston that no longer exists.
They'd been fighters.
They thought bullets were nothing to fear. They thought their toughness in the ring would help them survive on the street.
Their deaths made headlines.
But they remained small players in a story much bigger than their own.
They deserve to be brought to the front of the story, to be pulled out of the background and prepared for their close-ups.
Their tales should be told.
Just once.
Chapter 1
The Shooting Gallery
Guns, Knives, and Desperate Lives . . .
The end of the Gustin Gang: Frankie “Gustin” ambushed on Hanover Street in Boston’s North End. Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection
He was one hell of a criminal, but he'd never been much of a fighter.
That was the word on Frankie Wallace, a South Boston flyweight who made his professional ring debut on September 25, 1922. Frankie's older brother Stevie had been a featherweight of some renown, earning a place on the 1920 U.S. Olympic team and taking part in thirty-five professional bouts. But Frankie, as the cops would later say, wasn't quite as “hard-boiled” as Stevie. He ended up losing his first pro start to another local kid, Jimmy Manning. The humiliating defeat inspired Frankie's buddies to appear at Manning's house the next day. They beat him senseless. This resulted in a prolonged series of street skirmishes all around Southie.
Frankie Wallace became better known as Frankie Gustin, leader of South Boston's notorious Gustin Gang. By the time he was thirty, Frankie's group of Irish American thugs had become famous during the Prohibition era for robbing liquor trucks. Frankie became such a big player in the city's underworld that his eventual murder in 1931 was one of Boston's biggest stories of the year. It also shaped the city's crime landscape for decades to come.
Frankie had always been a riddle to the police. He was soft-spoken and friendly, though he had a steep record of arrests, was a suspect in at least one murder, and was on the verge of forming his own criminal empire. The Gustins, so named after a street in Southie, developed such a reputation that they began to irritate Boston's growing Italian Mob. The breaking point came when Frankie's gang wanted control of all bootlegging along Boston's waterfront, which had previously been wide open. The Gustins had even robbed a few trucks that had been targeted by the Italians. This was an example of the Irish gang's increasing arrogance. And it was bad news for Frankie.
Two days before Christmas of 1931, Frankie arrived in Boston's North End to discuss how the local booze trade could be divided between the Gustins and the Italians. He showed up with two of his sidekicks, including Bernard “Dodo” Walsh, a twenty-four-year-old described by police as “just a punk and a gun-toter.” The meeting was held on the third floor of 317 Hanover Street in the office of C and F Importers, allegedly where Mob “underboss” Joseph Lombardo oversaw his own bootlegging operation. Frankie should've been wary. The area was so known for gunplay that neighborhood cops had dubbed it “the shooting gallery.” On the fourth floor, a charity group wrapped Christmas baskets for poor children of the North End. The roar of gunfire soon startled them. Frankie and Dodo had been ambushed and killed.
Frankie spent the final seconds of his life the way James Cagney might've in an old Warner Brothers crime drama—he stumbled down the hallway and into the office of an attorney who had leased space in the building. A female stenographer who had been filling out Christmas cards looked on in horror; the sound of guns a moment earlier had shattered the holiday mood, and now she was confronted by the sight of Frankie in the doorway, blood gushing from his wounds. Without saying a word, he walked in. Then he pitched forward, dead.
He landed awkwardly, his head wedged into the under-railings of a wooden chair. As Frankie bled out on the attorney's floor, so went his plans to dominate the waterfront.
The story was a sensation. Boston police fanned out as far north as Portland, Maine, in search of Lombardo and his men, while The Boston Globe built up Frankie as a little terror who had dominated the local crime scene “with a grip of steel.” Also played up was the seemingly minor detail of how Frankie and his brother “fought within the squared circle.”
One had to wonder if Frankie's life would've been different had he been victorious in his first and only professional fight. Would he have pursued boxing, or would he still have gone into crime? Then again, Stevie was very successful in the ring, and his taste for robbing was just as developed as Frankie's. Maybe crime and boxing were in them in equal parts. Maybe it was inevitable that one of them would be killed in a North End gun battle. After all, Boston already had a history of fighters being killed gangland style.
The boxer gunned down by gangsters may be a fixture of old movies, but it is not a myth. The melodrama of a desperate fighter pursued by seedy killers, the crack of gunfire, the bullet-riddled corpse dumped in a secluded area; these situations were not solely the work of screenwriters during Hollywood's Golden Age. They were rooted in truth.
Of course, these murders weren't very cinematic. They rarely, if ever, had anything to do with fixed fights, and the murdered boxer would be familiar to only the most astute fans of the fight game. A famous fighter wouldn't let himself get sucked into this kind of trouble. Instead, it was the fighter on the fringe of the business, the preliminary kid, who found himself staring down a gun barrel or, as was usually the case, shot behind the ear.
Just six months before Frankie Gustin's murder, the body of East Boston pugilist Jerry DiAngelis turned up in Chelsea. He'd been shot to death and left in a wooded area known as a gangland dumping ground. Prior to that was the 1925 murder of former boxer Johnny Vito, a North Ender whose corpse was found in Braintree, face down in mud. The murderer remained unknown, though police believed Vito had been killed trying to hijack a liquor truck. In December of 1915, a shady character named Joseph Damico was found stabbed to death in an East Boston alley. The Globe savored every gash, noting Damico was “struck on the neck, the blow severing the jugular vein and nearly cutting through the spine.” Damico, who had fought more than twenty times as “Tommy Young,” turned out to be an unsavory character with gang connections in New York. Rivaling Gustin's death for coverage was the February 1929 murder of North Ender Anthony “Sparky” Chiampa. Nineteen-year-old Sparky was found dead in a Revere barn, bullet holes in the back of his head and under each eye.
Though he hadn't turned professional, Chiampa was known for boxing at various athletic clubs around the city, and the news coverage of his murder made several references to him as “the little fighter.” Boxing, even at the amateur level, was a major North End attraction during the 1920s. The sport had flourished throughout the world, but the Italian Americans of Boston's North End believed their boys were as good and tough as anyone. North End lightweight Sabino Ferullo, who took the name “Sammy Fuller” and became the most popular Italian fighter in Boston, would give away a hundred tickets to the neighborhood children; they showed up at his fights with trumpets and bugles, blaring away as he punched his opponents. For North Enders, boxing was as much a celebration of Italian life as the annual Saint Anthony's Feast in June, which is partly why Chiampa's murder hit Boston like a hammer.
Like many of the city's young men, Chiampa dabbled in crime.