Boston Murder Map - On Our Way To 64K

It's "killings" that I mean by "K", not "kilobytes". Attached is a Boston Globe link that lists the 48 that have taken place in our fair city thus far this year. Considering that only about three quarters of the year have elapsed, and that 48 is neatly divisible by 3, it's as easy as pie to conclude that the count will reach 64 by the year's end.

Far and away the largest plurality (if not the majority) of the victims appear to have been young black males between the ages of 16 and 34. They were killed, with depressing regularity, in inner city neighborhoods like Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan - and the murder weapon was overwhelmingly a "Gun". The identities of some of the victims are actually "unknown". It's one thing to have the identity of the murderer remain "unknown" - which I'm sure it has in many of the cases here - but quite another to have the victim remain that way as well. The poor continue to bear the brunt of violent death, just as they continue to bear the brunt of our failed economy - and the 50 percent employment rate among inner city youth is only making matters worse. Remember that old saying that "Idle hands are the devil's workshop"?

The page for the Boston 2011 Murders also provides links to similar pages for 2008, 2009 and 2010. (The map displayed above is from 2010.)

Reviewing the list, I was surprised to learn that a 30-year old "Unknown Female" was slain at an address I walk past almost everyday on my way to (or from) work. And, no, she was not one of my hits.

Murders in Boston during 2011 (Boston Globe)

Civil Disobedience - The Best Sort Of Boston Crime

Let's forget about bank robbers and murderers for a while, and consider instead another great tradition of Bay State crime - civil disobedience. Our own Henry David Thoreau, native of Concord and the illustrious author of Walden, wrote an essay by that name in 1849. He argued "that individuals should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that they have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice." He practiced what he preached. He was a tax evader with a difference, refusing to pay poll taxes for six years running not because he needed to buy a second Lamborghini - but because he did not support either the imperialistic war in Mexico or the U.S. government's tolerance of slavery. He was also a squatter of no mean commitment, living off in the woods by himself in a tiny house for which he hadn't even gotten a mortgage. No bank would love him today, that's for sure.

I saw something of Thoreau's spirit in Boston this Monday, as I dutifully came into town to fix one of my own legal lapses. My driver's license had expired several weeks ago, you see, and I needed to renew it. On my way to the Motor Vehicle Registry in Chinatown, I swung by the intersection of Summer Street and Atlantic Avenue. Here a kind of shanty town had been erected - a latterday Hooverville almost - by the demonstrators of Occupy Boston. They had pitched their sorry tents in the shadow of the spotless and towering Federal Reserve building, and it was here that they began their siege on corporate greed. Like so many other Americans, they were fed up with a sociopathic financial system that flourishes in direct proportion to the number of human lives it stunts. They were tired of being downsized, outsourced and overworked as stockbrokers and investment bankers and C-level executives line their pockets with the would-be pay packets of the never-to-be-hired and the freshly laid-off. They were angry that not only were the moral crimes of the corporations perfectly legal, but also that the laws that shielded tham had been bought with cash, the product of legislators which themselves had been purchased like so much shiny new merchandise. (And, yes, Scott Brown, I'm thinking of Gigolos of The Body Politic just like you.)

These supposed disturbers of the peace, many them unemployed or in debt, outed themselves as representatives of the 99 percent of American society that has not prospered in our modern era, in which the top one percent get all the wealth. I heard no commotion and saw no violence. In fact, their counterparts in New York City - the Occupy Wall Streeters - did not even resist the police who arrested them, but merely reminded them that they were fighting for the rights of the police themselves to retain their own pensions as much as for any other cause. If these people are criminals, they are truly my kind of criminal.

I felt tempted to join them. Or, if not that, to walk amongst them, poke my face into their tents, shake their hands and volunteer to sign every petition they had available. But I did not. It was a moment of moral hesitation that I regret. It reminded me of the time I was in Rome, and I was walking up toward St. Peter's with the intention of visiting the Vatican, of seeing the Sistine Chapel. Beggars lined the street like it was their own little Via Dolorosa. Some - most even - you could disregard. Except for one. There was a kid in his early twenties who seemed to be holding his hands up for a hand-out - until I saw that he had no hands at all. I tried not to look at him. All I had in my wallet was a twenty euro note, and I was pathetically unwilling to give him that. As I passed, he held up the stumps of his wrists to his face in despair. I don't care if he had a nice warm room in some halfway house somewhere, and was just trying to play me. Being a young guy with no hands has to be a hard row to hoe no matter how cynically you respond to it. When I finally broke that twenty euro note, I hurried back to give the kid some cash - but he was gone. The Vatican guard had chased him away. Anything not to disturb the tourists with any pleas for Christian charity.

That's how I feel sometimes about America. Rich patriots revel in the flag and the dollar and their own meritocratic magnificence, but when it comes to the idea every American should have an equal chance - well, let us just say that these grandees do not respond in the spirit of democracy, much less that of Christian charity - and yet they claim to be such fervent God-lovers too, at least some of them. The Vatican guard of the American state wants to chase away the disadvantaged and the unlucky so that its more fortunate citizens can luxuriate in the chapel of the wealthy, for they are the only ones that matter - the only ones who have "earned it".

Me, I'm not as good a person as the folks of Occupy Boston and Occupy Wall Street. My instinct is to counter economic violence with actual violence - or at least to fantasize about it. (Thus my indulgence in this "crime blog".) But the resistance against the gilded sociopaths of the Wealth-Industrial Complex may not stay non-violent forever.

The Science Of Being Streetwise

In 2005, Malcolm Gladwell published a book called Blink, in which he examined the surprising effectiveness of what most of us call "snap judgments", but which he re-dubbed as "thin slicing" with his usual pseudo-scientific trendiness. It turns out that quick takes on people, things and situations can be quite accurate. Common sense dictates that if a few seconds or minutes can tell you a lot, then a few hours, days, months or whatever can tell us even more - but that's not a cost-effective way of doing things. And cost-effectiveness is one of Gladwell's goals. Although Gladwell purports to write for popular science fans, he's really writing for businessmen, and all his initially fresh and exotic insights into things ultimately boil down to how you can use those things in advertising or something similarly mercenary and shallow. I think the main value Gladwell (and his followers in the corporate world) see in "thin slicing" is that you get the biggest bang for the buck in the smallest amount of time - and time, as they say, is money. Even if you are able to refine your insights into something or someone over time, your efforts will inevitably result in diminishing returns - and, besides, you might have to act quickly on what you see anyway. God knows, business bozos do like to make quick decisions in every venue from job candidate interviews to board meetings. Reflection and "deep thinking" are not so much bad, in their eyes, as simply uneconomical. The other way in which snap judgments are useful to business is in how they can be engineered in other people - in, say, customers. That's where those Madison Avenue dudes come into the picture.

However, business is not the only domain that relies on snap judgments. Early in the book, Gladwell talks about how policemen use snap judgments to identify who is lying, who is telling the truth, who has just committed a crime and who is likely to commit one in the near future. He focuses on one detective in particular who was so sharp he was practically clairvoyant, like that dude in The Mentalist. Gladwell also discusses the value of quick thinking - or, more properly, thinking without actually stopping to think - when police have to engage suspects in shootouts and the like. Snap judgments are a necessary element of what many call "situational awareness". They are also the essence of what it means to be streetwise.

Anti-intellectual folks - in sports, in business, in life in general - tend to caricature the difference beween "book smarts" and "street smarts". Academically bright people are thought to be distracted, woolly-headed creatures unaware of the social dynamics of the world around them. They can't "think on their feet", as the saying goes. Those with "street smarts", on the other hand, can. Such people, even if they have never read a book in their lives, are masters at reading people - and of taking control of any social situation. We live in an age that reveres such individuals. Be they entrepreneurs, pick-up artists, action heroes, super-salesmen or political manipulators, we worship anyone who knows instinctively how to thrive "in the moment" and to take advantage of the rest of us. Many criminals - especially con men - fall into the same category.

In truth, there is no impermeable barrier between "book smarts" and "street smarts". Smart is smart, whatever the context, and a lot of people are good at both - or good at neither.

Are you streetwise? Am I? I'd like to think at least that my "criminal radar" is okay. This power would sort of be like gay-dar, but it would help me identify crooks rather than gays. I met a few people during my pub-crawling days that struck me as psychopaths, and boy did I stay away from them. I mean, I'm still alive, aren't I? I remember when I lived in North Carolina, and my wife and I visited our favorite coffee place one Sunday morning on the main street of the town (actually, Port City Java on Front Street in Wilmington, NC). I saw some young black dude, who was sitting on a bench in front of the shop, rise up a little to shake hands with a beefy white biker dude before we went inside. I thought nothing of it then. About five minutes later, when my wife and I were sipping coffee beside the window, I saw that same black dude rise up again and shake some other guy's hand. I figured that nobody who's not mentally defective is that compulsively friendly, so I said, "Look at that guy. He's dealing..." "What?" asked my wife. "He's dealing drugs," I said. "He reaches out with the drugs, pretends to shake hands, and pulls back his hand with the money in it." "Oh," said my wife. But I know I was right. I was proud to be able to identify miscreants on the streets of our town. Pleased as freakin' punch to "out" those outlaws.

There was another time, years ago, when I was drunkenly trolling the Combat Zone for hookers. I was a deranged priapism wandering the streets of Boston. I caught sight of some Chinese chick, supposedly a pro, asking folks if they wanted "a date". About six or seven yards to her left, some guy was lurking in an alcove. A young white guy in a windbreaker, with healthy-looking skin and neatly cut hair. He was sure as hell no pimp. He seemed to fidget a little when he saw me watching him. I nodded at him as I passed, and said, "Evening, officer..." He stood stock still after that. If it wasn't so dark, I believe I would have seen him blush.

Blink (Wikipedia)
What is Blink about? (Gladwell.com)

The Fate Of An Accomplice, After The Fact

When fur salesman Charles "Chuck" Stuart murdered his pregnant wife Carol in 1989, a furor erupted not merely over the crime itself, but over the lies Stuart told in his attempt to get away with it. On the night of October 23rd, Stuart drove his wife to Mission Hill, one of the Roxbury neighborhoods closest to downtown Boston. He parked the car, shot his wife once in the head, and then shot himself in the abdomen. Seriously injured by this self-inflicted wound, he called up his 23-year old brother Matthew and had him swing by and pick up the gun. Then he called 911, informing the police that he and his wife had been robbed and shot by a black man. This promptly led police on a grim wild goose chase to find the inner city tough who had dared to assault this up-and-coming young golden couple from the suburbs. They even apprehended a suspect, a hapless fellow by the name of Willie Bennett.

One has to understand the context of this event to understand how heinous Stuart's accusations were. 1989 was only a year after Michael Dukakis was clobbered in the 1988 presidential election, in large part due to an infamous campaign ad that held Dukakis responsible for the actions of one Willie Horton. Willie Horton, who was serving a life sentence for the vicious murder of a Bay State gas station attendant in 1974, was released on furlough in 1986 - and soon after absconded to Maryland, where he brutally raped a woman. The ad, possibly concocted by Karl Rove's mentor, Lee Atwater (who later died of a brain tumor for his sins), introduced the strategy of race-baiting to the 1988 campaign - a strategy that, unfortunately, worked all too well and swept the charisma-challenged George Bush The Elder into office. The Willie Horton scandal not only sunk Dukakis. It also smeared Massachusetts as soft on crime and a breeding ground for sinister black criminals. Stuart's ruse exploited that reputation, and for a while only made it worse.

Trained in the culinary arts, but blessed with good looks and the gift of gab, Stuart had left the kitchen for the glamor of selling fur coats on high-toned Newbury Street in Boston's Back Bay. Married to a lawyer named Carol DiMaiti, the 29-year old Stuart apparently grew distant from his wife when she became pregnant. He started staying out late, and even began to fantasize about a new relationship with a young Brown University grad who worked alongside him at Kakas Furs. One might say the lad was overreaching, but such behavior certainly exemplifies the delusions of grandeur to which sociopaths are prone. At any rate, Stuart eventually decided that his wife (and their unborn child) would have to die. At first, he actually seemed to be getting away with it. But when his brother Matthew confessed to his part in the slaying, attention shifted to Stuart and he knew that he was doomed. Already afflicted with a colostomy in the wake of his rather stupidly aimed self-injury, Stuart leaped to his death off Tobin Bridge. Not the site I would have chosen for such a thing, but hey.

The idea of some felonious white suburbanite blaming the murder of a loved one on a Black Man rapidly became a toxic meme in the American psyche. There were a number of copy cat cases, including the very high profile example of Susan Smith, who murdered her own children by drowning them in a lake in South Carolina, and then pointed a finger at the local bloods. There was even a movie made about Charles Stuart, starring Thirtysomething's Ken Olin - who, incidentally, was a classic example of bad casting as Olin was a gloomy Gus who couldn't charm his way out of a paper bag, much less sell anything. Variations of the Stuart and Smith cases found their way into crime novels like Robert B. Parker's Small Vices and Richard Price's Freedomland.

More importantly, the case inflamed racial tension nationwide, perhaps helping to ramp up the tenor of black outrage over the treatment of Rodney King barely a year and a half later, which led to the catastrophic L.A. riots of 1992.

Matthew Stuart was never charged with murder for his part in the crime, but he was convicted of conspiracy, insurance fraud and the illegal possession of a firearm in 1992, and served three years. On parole in 1997, he was arrested for dealing cocaine, but this charge was later dropped. Regardless of how little time he served, the crime ruined his life. His time in prison may well have been harder than most. Although prison is never a paradise for any good-looking white kid, there must always have been the additional threat of vengeance from black inmates who hated his brother for his racist lies. Matthew continued to have a troubled life on the outside, and died of a drug overdose in the bathroom of a Cambridge homeless shelter earlier this month.

Charles (Chuck) Stuart (Wikipedia)
Matthew Stuart dies, helped brother cover up killing (Associated Press)
Stuart found dead in shelter (Boston Globe)
Charles Stuart’s brother found dead (Boston Herald)

My Friend, The (Borderline) Sociopath

When I lived in Providence, my closest friend was something of a con man. I first met him in the boardinghouse we shared with some other folks - e.g., parolees, recovering alcoholics, former mental patients (among them a future girlfriend of mine), a young journalist who would later die of cancer at the age of 34, several starving artists from RISD (my future girlfriend was also included among this crowd, along with some dude who joked about his "one-eyed snake" in the communal restroom and declared David Smith the greatest American sculptor) and - let me not forget - one terrified old woman who was a concentration camp survivor. My friend, whom I will refer to only as Mr. P___, and I were as nutty as anyone else, but Mr. P___ was unusually charismatic. He arrived in Providence full of bluster, six-foot-five, humorously folksy and sonorously baritone, boasting to anyone who would listen that he was going to start a newspaper. Even the Providence Journal got curious, and wrote an article about him under the headline "Who Is Mr. P___?"

I was working as a PR flack for a chemical firm then, in my waywardly aspiring youth, and we got to know each other. We used to gallivant about town in his VW van, as he introduced himself to folks left and right, spreading his charm and his plans for the future. It can be great fun to attach oneself to such an extrovert. He brought me in to write a book review for an alternate weekly, which I did - but which he promptly stole, along with other editorial material, when he hauled off and started his own rag. I wrote some more book reviews for that, and did the weekly crossword. He rarely paid me. He rarely paid anyone. In fact, it took all his willpower to produce any newspaper at all. He spent most of his days driving around Southeastern Mass., drumming up advertising sales, but dragged his feet when it came to putting out the actual paper. He borrowed 500 bucks from me when things got tough, but never paid it back. The paper eventually folded. I don't know if he reneged on his advertising customers, but I do know the "partners" whom he'd convinced to buy an electronic typesetting machine eventually sued him. He convinced his girlfriend of the time to put 25 grand into yet another publication project, then piddled away his (and her) time until that folded, too. I don't know if she sued him, but she certainly wasn't his girlfriend anymore. I hired him to print my company's newsletter (for which I did the text, the photos and the layout) - at least until he started to charge more and more money while working slower and slower, and eventually even I had to cut him loose.

He was in Providence because his ex-wife (his second ex-wife of two) was raising their three kids, and he wanted to be a hands-on Dad. After his newspaper-advertising-printing business failed, he stayed in the area. He vacated his original apartment, which I took over, and moved into a dilapidated social club in a tricky part of town. He became the manager of an equipment rental shop, and often borrowed the merchandise for his own renovations. I had met my girlfriend by then, through him, because they were friends. But not lovers (although my petite little honey once confided to me that she had been afraid for a while that he would rape her). I got the girl, so to speak, but all three of us hung out. He would serve us plates of chili, and after dinner we would play hearts at his huge oak dining room table while smoking Vantages and guzzling cheap Lambrusco. The two of us got drunk on banana daiquiris one scurrilous evening, and he brought out his .22 caliber pistol, which he proceeded to point at me repeatedly. Unknown to me, he still had a copy of the key to the apartment that I took over, and one afternoon I came home to find that my week's pay - which I'd cashed the night before and had left on my coffee table - was gone. On another occasion, my girlfriend and I left him alone in her apartment to go out to dinner, and a month later several hundred dollars in long-distance calls he had made without telling her showed up on her telephone bill. I stored my furniture with him after I left the Providence job, and when I passed through on my way to a new job in New York, I made an appointment to stop by and pick it up. Was he there when I arrived? No. For all I know, he still has my furniture even now.

Mr. P___ continued to make promises to people that he never made good on. He continued to charm folks and use them until they turned their backs on him and walked away. A few years ago I googled him to see what he was up to. I found an online document from the Providence court that said he had been sentenced to five years in the Rhode Island ACI for defaulting on his child support. I could only shake my head when I saw that. Something like that was bound to happen. And his kids were the ones he loved the most.

My Take (So To Speak) On "The Brink's Job"

I saw this movie on one of the Encore cable channels over the weekend. It was an oldie-but-goodie about a Boston crime that was itself an oldie-but-goodie, the notorious Brink's robbery of January 1950 in which the perps made off with $2,775,395. I'm pretty certain there have been way bigger robberies since, but imagine what nearly three million in 1950 simoleons would be worth now, if we adjusted for inflation. The eight principal players in the robbery were nabbed in 1956, and thereafter sent to jail, but they were all paroled by 1971 - and only $58,000 of the loot was ever recovered. The implication - and the madcap note of optimism on which the movie ends - is that the perps retired on the dough after prison and lived "comfortably" for the rest of their lives. Which could not have been forever really, as most of these guys were in their forties when they committed the crime.

William Friedkin, of French Connection fame, directed the movie and the cast was stellar. Peter Falk, whom I thought until his obituary came out was some kind of Irish-Italian mix, was actually a Jewish guy from Chicago who made a living playing Italian dudes - sort of the way James Woods, who is himself an Irish Catholic born in Pawtucket, has made a living playing Jewish guys. But here, too, Falk plays an Italian - an immigrant from Sicily named Tony Pino. The incomparable Warren Oates plays Specs O'Keefe, the demolition expert whose 1955 arrest in Springfield, Mass. on a gun charge led to the final apprehension of the other guys. Sadly, Oates, despite his performance, is totally unconvincing as a Boston native. I mean, I've never met anybody who was born here who talked like he came from Louisville, Kentucky. Paul Sorvino puts in a serviceable performance as the kind of well-spoken and dapper (but still fat) dude that he usually plays. Peter Boyle reprises the sinister-fixer-behind-the-scenes role that he played in The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Interestingly, Frank McCourt's brother, Malachy McCourt, puts in a fine cameo as a patriarchal suburban money launderer, and Gena Rowlands - like Falk, another actor with experience in Cassavetes films about husbands and wives - here plays wife to Falk's husband, common-law or otherwise.

The movie was a fun exercise in mid-20th century Boston nostalgia, but little else. There was more comedy than suspense. It had more the feel of an all-star caper film made in the early 1960's than of something made in 1978. I know, 1978 seems like ages ago - very nearly the Cretaceous period of American life - but stop to consider that movies like Thief with James Caan and Scarface with Al Pacino were made just three years and five years later, respectively. And what about Bonnie and Clyde, made in 1967, or that creepily edgy Tony Curtis film, The Boston Strangler, made in 1968? Both precede The Brink's Job by at least a decade and seem infinitely more modern. Not to mention The Friends of Eddie Coyle itself from 1973 or Friedkin's own The French Connection. All of these films resonate with serious thoughts about the consequences of criminal activity that are nowhere in evidence in The Brink's Job. Virtually all of the characters behave like regular guys who would never hurt a fly. It's implicit that their criminality was a scrappy response to Depression-era poverty, not a result of their being "bent" or because their parents abused them or whatever. Most of them come across as reasonably clever dudes who, if they'd been born a generation or two later, would have gone to U.Mass. and ended up respectable and prosperous and even law-abiding citizens. Even the prospect of these guys serving another 14 years in the joint is glossed over merrily, as if that would pass in an instant, what with all the loot they have to look forward to afterward.

I think the target audience of this movie was not Baby Boomers, still a skeptical and rebellious bunch in 1978, but their parents - the Greatest Generation. They would have actual memories of the Brink's robbery, and of the time it portrayed. This fun little movie about lovable mooks - all middle-aged white guys, you notice - who commit felonies without malevolence was meant as a sop to conservative tastes. The same kind of folks for whom Dirty Harry and Death Wish were made, but aimed at that crowd from an entirely different angle. The real tip-off comes when the sound track of the movie ends with an Andrews Sisters hit from the 1940's - not the sort of thing middle-aged thieves would have listened to back then, but definitely the kind of thing that folks who were around 50 in 1978 would have remembered from their youth.

I recommend it to Boston crime buffs nonetheless. It was made largely in Boston, and includes scenes filmed in the North End, Roxbury, the Combat Zone, and various other downtown locales.

(Odd factoid: According to Wikipedia, the makers of the film were ripped off while it was being made: "Ironically, in August 1978, 15 unedited reels of the film were stolen at gunpoint. The robbers demanded a $600,000 ransom. The money was never paid, because the robbers, showing a distinct lack of filmmaking knowledge, hijacked outtakes and dailies, positive prints of negatives were being held by Technicolor in New York City. The material was replaced with no significant delay. The robbers, however, made a ransom call, which triggered an investigation by the FBI. During the ransom call, Friedkin told the robbers to 'get a projector and enjoy the film; it was all theirs'.")

The Brink's Job (Wikipedia)
Great Brink's Robbery (Wikipedia)
CRIME: The Big Payoff (Time)
Great Brink’s Robbery “Crime of the Century,” 1950 (Looking Backward)
Brinks Job Exhibit (Boston Public Library)

Could Anthony "The Moron" Be Still Alive?

Above is a rare photograph of Anthony Mirabella, the Providence mafioso believed to have been slain in 1982. I wrote about Mirabella in a blog post dated July 28, 2011. Just this week, an anonymous source left a comment asking me to contact him (or her). I emailed this source using the address provided, and we corresponded. The source sent me the picture shown here. The source hinted that Mirabella may not actually be dead. When I sent the source a second email asking for more details, I received the following note:

"Well, there are more people that share my beliefs than you think. Many say he was a so-called 'Moron' but that's what he wanted them to think. I'm not saying he [was] some kind of huge mafia figure, hardly. But hit men in the mob keep their mouths shut and their ears open. They see and hear more facts, dates and so forth. Just the right thread when you're trying to sew the pieces together in a case. I find it funny that it is difficult to find legal documentation about [Mirabella]. Searches and such [yield] tidbits at best. The only way to identify the body was dental records, that's easy enough to cover up. Around the same time he was [supposedly "killed"] in 1982 the FBI had a long ongoing investigation into the mob. See, he knew his clock was ticking on the outside [and] what better way to keep breathing? I do not believe anyone ever did time for his murder. Bobo [Marrapese] was found not guilty and no one else was ever charged... There is a lot more to this story, Mr. Elliott. Everyone would just rather sweep it under the rug."

Such speculations can explain why neither "Bobo" Marrapese nor anyone else was found guilty of his murder. It is entirely possible that Mirabella turned himself in to the FBI and they put him in Witness Protection. It would make a nice plot for an episode of In Plain Sight, as a matter of fact.

Anthony "The Moron" Mirabella & Friends (Jimmy Elliott - Gangland Scribe)