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

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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.