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

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With the city's top Irish and Jewish gangsters bumped off, Buccola seized the Boston underworld. He wasn't as bloodthirsty as his counterparts in New York or Chicago, but his clique was clearly Mafia, with rites and roots going back to feudal Sicily. It was later revealed that Buccola was also quite friendly with Charles “Lucky” Luciano, the man who introduced America to the concept of the organized crime “family.”

Though Buccola owned shares in a popular dog-racing track in Revere and a piece of The Bostonian Hotel, his real interest was boxing. He was known as a manager of fighters, sometimes alone, sometimes with Carroll or another well-known manager, Johnny Buckley. It wasn't unusual for top gangsters to own a fighter's contract the way they might a racehorse or a restaurant, but Buccola took the fight game seriously. He had a full stable of New England fighters, most of them from the North End. At one time there were as many as twenty-five fighters under the Buccola banner, including North Ender Sammy Fuller and Ralph “The Ripper” Zannelli, a granite-faced welterweight from Providence. But despite Buccola's genuine passion for boxing, he was, according to one journalist, “rated by colleagues as one of the world's worst fight handlers.”