Читать книгу Slaughter in the Streets. When Boston Became Boxing’s Murder Capital онлайн

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The killing of Chiampa was especially ominous. There'd been no signs of robbery, and his murderer hadn't even bothered to remove an expensive diamond ring from his hand; he was killed solely to shut him up, to keep him from talking in court. It was an event described in one newspaper as “the first real introduction of Chicago gang warfare into Boston.”

But it was the ambush of Frankie Gustin that was drilled into the minds of rough kids who grew up in the post-Depression neighborhoods of the North End and East Boston, which were predominantly Italian, and South Boston and Charlestown, which were mostly Irish. Those neighborhoods, wrote the Globe more than six decades later, “spawned most of the city's gangsters, who carried ethnic-based animosities like chips on their shoulders.”

Simultaneously, Gustin's murder was part of a second story playing out, that of a boxer being murdered in Boston. It is an unusual status to claim, but few cities can match Boston for its number of slain fighters. Of the more than three hundred and fifty professional and amateur fighters murdered worldwide since Gustin's death in 1931, a shocking amount of those killings took place in Boston and its neighboring towns. Most were gang related. Many were unsolved.