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

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A few years back, in the summer of 2013, I had the occasion to attend the duration of gangster boss Whitey Bulger's criminal trial in the city. The proceedings took place at the Moakley Courthouse in the Seaport District. The Seaport was once home to the city's thriving commercial waterfront, where more than a few of the men profiled in this book found work as longshoremen and union “delegates” (i.e., leg breakers for the International Longshoremen's Association).

At the time of the trial, the area had already begun its startling transformation from a hardscrabble workingman's environment to the conglomeration of high-rise condos, glass office towers and chic restaurants that it is today.

Gentrification can be a brutal process. It does not involve snub-nosed revolvers, lead pipes, or switchblade knives, but it does involve wholesale displacement of poor and working people, unnatural alterations of the landscape, the destruction of lives. One man's economic development is another's predatory capitalism.