The football rivalry between Harvard and Yale universities, the Crimson versus the Bulldogs, is called The Game. The tradition between the two schools began on November 13, 1875, the final game of the season, and it’s the last game for seniors who graduate in the spring.
On Saturday, November 13, 1976, Yale defeated Harvard, 21 to 7.
After the team’s traditional dinner at the Harvard Club, a cadre of players embarked on another custom and descended on the Combat Zone. Starting cornerback Andrew Puopolo, Class of ’77, and his teammates partied at the Naked i Cabaret, located at the ominous address of 666 Washington Street, until the 2am closing time.
Possibly to save the prestigious university from embarrassment, no media outlet revealed that there were 50 Men of Harvard in The Zone. Newspapers and television stations relayed inconsistent versions of what happened.
Andrew was walking with a group of his friends.
Andrew was with classmate Thomas Lincoln.
Andrew was with Lincoln and Charlie Kaye ’78.
One account says ‘they’ were walking to their cars, another says towards a coach’s van, and yet another said that Charlie was already inside the van when a prostitute or prostitutes solicited the players for sex, or that one and only one working girl had targeted Charlie, stolen his wallet and run off with it
Again, the details are clear as mud because either Andrew alone or a group of his teammates chased her. What was reported in most newspapers was that Andrew and Charlie clashed with Richard Allen, Leon Easterling, and Edward Soares, who were either described as “the three men in the sex worker’s company” or simply as “pimps.” No one thought it odd that one lady of the night (or was it two?) would have three business managers.
A trial document, which is online now, explained what had happened.
On their way to their van, the students meet two Black women. Sexual favors are discussed. The two women accompany the group to the van, but no money changes hands. The women leave. Charlie Kaye notices his wallet is missing. Charlie and his teammates jump from the van and pursue the two women.
Richard Allen, a bouncer at the Carnival Lounge, stops them. The players return to their van, get in and drive around looking for the two women. One of the passengers inside the van sees one of the Black women. Someone jumps out of the van to pursue her, then more players empty out and give chase. She screams and runs. She falls but flees again, this time towards LaGrange Street. When she’d fallen, a student named Stephen Saxon helped her up.
Edward Soares appears and shoves Saxon to the ground. Saxon’s friends converge on Soares and surround him. They realize he doesn’t have the wallet and begin to disperse. At this point and from across the street, Easterling appears, brandishing a knife. A heated confrontation that includes racial epithets between parties begins and Easterling knifes two men. He stabs Thomas Lincoln in the arm and abdomen and Andrew Puopolo in the heart and lungs.
Lincoln is taken to Mass General Hospital and discharged days later.
An ambulance transports Andrew to New England Medical Center. The ER determines that he has a collapsed lung, and that his heart is perforated in two places. Although the hospital is less than a mile away and surgery repairs his wounds, Puopolo has lost too much blood and is placed on life-support. After a month on a ventilator and now brain dead, his family makes the difficult decision and Andrew Puopolo dies on December 17. He was 21.
In the weeks between the fatal encounter in November and his demise in December, every newspaper in the country reported on the event, on the seediness of the Combat Zone, and the arrest of three Black men that fateful night. Journalists across the nation worked a narrative about privilege and poverty, though the victim had come from a family of modest means in Boston’s Italian North End. The subtext on race was not subtle.
If the sequence of events, of who did what and when that night, was battleship-gray, what happened after Puopolo died was not. The District Attorney filed charges for first-degree murder and other assault charges against three Black defendants. Police presence in the Zone increased, and arrests multiplied. Sex workers and business owners in the Zone were quoted in such far-flung newswires as the Los Angeles Times as saying, “uniformed officers [stood] in pairs every 50 feet along the streets.” With Puopolo on life-support, public perception was that the Boston Police Department did a poor job of policing the Zone, but when the Harvard student had died, a PR nightmare ensued.
Black suspects, white victims, and a predominantly white police force became straw for the fire in a city with a troubled history of poor race relations.
Real was the fear of riots in the streets and how the police would act in Black neighborhoods. Fresh in the minds of many Bostonians was another event: the murder of singer Franklin Lynch inside Boston City Hospital in March of 1970. Lynch was a singer with a song, “Young Girl,” climbing the R&B charts at the time of his death.
After the hospital trustees and doctors at BCH had lent their support to institute a zero-tolerance policy for weapons on hospital grounds, the BPD dispatched armed officers to the hospital to show that no one could tell them what they couldn’t do in their city.
When protestors and community activists demanded that the officer who had shot Lynch be placed on administrative leave while the shooting was investigated, Police Commissioner McNamara and Mayor White refused. Then matters escalated. The Department of Justice, the FBI, the state’s Attorney General and the District Attorney’s offices, the Boston Police’s homicide squad, and the NAACP were ready to mount their investigations when the Suffolk County medical examiner made an unexpected request. He asked Judge Elijah Adlow to decide whether to charge Officer Duggan.
On the bench since 1928 until he was forced to retire in 1973, Judge Adlow made Judge Julius Hoffman, born one year before him and who presided over the trial of the Chicago Seven in 1968, seem quaint. Like a hanging judge from the Old West, Adlow seldom showed leniency and he did not believe in rehabilitation. His pronouncements from the bench received press coverage.
Adlow had to decide on two deaths now. In the course of shooting Lynch, a stray bullet wounded another patient, Edward Crowley, who died days later. Notorious for saying the most outlandish things from the bench, the judge declared that had Duggan not shot Lynch he would’ve been “discredited” within the BPD. Put another way, Duggan would’ve been in dereliction of his duty if he had not shot Lynch. Nothing was said about Crowley who, incidentally, was the father of a Boston patrolman. One could only assume that the Crowley family believed in the Blue Wall and shielded Duggan by not petitioning for charges. Case closed. Duggan had shot and killed Lynch in the performance of his duty. In 1973, an all-white jury would find Officer Walter Duggan not responsible for Lynch’s death.
Boston City Hospital would provide another example of the tense confrontation between race and the legal system one year before Puopolo’s death. Detective Dorothy E. Harrison whom Shane meets at The General mentions a doctor. Incidentally, I did not alter her name. She was a real person and the first African American police officer in the Boston Police Department, which she served from 1944 to 1972.
In 1975, Dr. Kenneth Edelin was tried for performing an elective abortion in October of 1973, nine months after the landmark court decision. He was Boston City Hospital’s first Black chief resident in obstetrics and gynecology. Prosecutors did not contest the legality of Roe v. Wade, rather their argument was that he had acted recklessly and deprived the fetus of oxygen once it was separated from the uterine wall and was therefore, they argued, a “person.” The jury deliberated seven hours before they returned with the verdict: guilty of manslaughter.
The judge ordered one year of probation, said that the doctor could keep his license, but reminded Dr. Edelin from the bench that he could’ve been sentenced to twenty years. It was later revealed that the jurors, ten of whom were Catholic, used racial epithets when they discussed the physician. The conviction was overturned on appeal. In 2007 Dr. Edelin published his memoir, Broken Justice: A True Story of Race, Sex and Revenge in a Boston Courtroom.
One more item of forgotten history to provide social context and backdrop to HUSH HUSH. Boston at the time of Puopolo’s murder was mired in a school busing crisis. In 1974, Judge Wendell Arthur Garrity Jr. ordered schools to desegregate and demonstrate racial balance in school registrations. He mandated diversity. A city with distinctive ethnic neighborhoods—The Irish in South Boston, Italians in the North End, and Blacks in Roxbury and Dorchester—seethed. Enrollment in the public school system dropped 50%.
Response on the streets was swift. Stones pelted white motorists driving through Black neighborhoods, and if they lingered at a red light, drivers and passengers were ripped from their cars and beaten. Black sailors on leave in the North End were attacked. Roaming gangs in “Southie” skirmished with BPD’s Tactical Patrol Force daily. Adding to the difficulty of enforcing an unpopular law, the New York Times had this to say about Boston’s police force on September 12, 1976:
There are 2,328 officers in the Boston Police Department, of whom 87 are black, eight are of Hispanic origin and two are Asian‐American. Twenty-nine are women. The number of black and other minority police officers represents a quantum leap in the past three years. Some 55 percent of the police force now lives outside the city limits.
While the violence would decline, desegregation remained a volatile issue in Boston well into the late 1980s.
One final puzzle piece to establish the scene in Boston. The week prior to Puopolo’s stabbing, Police Commissioner Robert diGrazia resigned. He claimed he had left over a salary dispute with the mayor. I doubt it. DiGrazia was charismatic and outspoken. His stance on corruption, police reform, and his ethnicity had not endeared him to the rank and file. He was the city’s first commissioner who wasn’t Irish or appointed by the mayor or governor. He didn’t sugarcoat the reality of policing and the perception of law enforcement with the public. Where police officers pinned a small American flag on their lapel, he wore an enamel pin in the shape of a pig.
When he left office, he did two things. First, he took his number-two man, Philip ‘The Shadow’ Marks, with him to his next job. His second act was to drop a massive report on Mayor Kevin White’s desk. The report confirmed what most people knew or suspected about police corruption and misconduct. Boston police officers were receiving drinks on the arm in the Zone and some moonlighted there as security for a variety of bars and clubs. He declared the District I Police Station an infestation of corrupt cops, and he provided detailed evidence.
Remember the quote of officers every 50 feet?
His successor, Joseph Jordan, was responsible for putting the squeeze on The Zone. He launched an aggressive crackdown on prostitution in the wake of Andrew Puopolo’s death, whereas diGrazia and the mayor had agreed in private that prostitution was a victimless crime, and police efforts should be directed at other illegal activities.
A few words now on what was happening on the national scene on that deadly night in November of 1976. Weeks earlier, Jimmy Carter had been elected President of the United States. Ironically, the top song on the pop charts the night Puopolo was stabbed belonged to Rod Stewart, with “Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright),” and the top two television shows were nostalgias, Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley. Slipping from the top ten ratings was another show, which I think represents a retreat from a discussion of social issues in the living room, and that was Norman Lear’s All in the Family.
Archie Bunker was a caricature of the American family man of a certain age. The show addressed topics, such as homophobia, income disparity, women’s equality, America’s role in international politics, especially after the nation’s defeat in Vietnam, and race. A member of The Greatest Generation, Archie was a bigot, pure and simple. The country laughed at him and we laughed at ourselves. He had a big heart, a small mind, and an extensive vocabulary, none of it, politically correct.
Which brings me to my use of the N-word in HUSH HUSH. I used the word because it was appropriate to the story and the era. For the record, I spent more time tracing the linguistic heritage of alternate words, such as Black, Colored, Negro, and African American.
The word was in plain sight, and not far from reach. Literally. The Agatha Christie novel we now call And Then There Were None was originally published in the UK as Ten Little Niggers in 1939. The US edition, which appeared in 1940, was retitled And Then There Were None to avoid controversy, and editions from the 1960s to the 1980s were titled Ten Little Indians (another epic fail). Foreign language editions retained Christie’s original title. The French version, for example, is Dix petits nègres. The infamous counting rhyme I referenced in HUSH HUSH appears in Christie’s novel, framed and on the walls of the rooms of each of the ten guests in her mystery.
Agatha Christie said it was her most difficult novel to write. Historians who track bestsellers say that it is the sixth best-selling novel of all time, regardless of language. Mystery Writers of America place And Then There Were None in the top ten mysteries of all time, and in the top ten among Christie’s works.
Now comes the Puopolo murder trial. The judge denied the defense’s motion to sever the proceedings into three separate trials. He ruled that the three defendants acted “in joint enterprise to commit murder.” Moreover, the DA rejected 12 of 13 Black jurors, leaving the one he approved to act as the jury’s foreman. This jury would return three verdicts of guilty of murder in the first degree for each defendant, and the judge sentenced Allen, Soares, and Easterling the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment, without any chance of parole. However, on appeal on the grounds that the prosecutor had systematically excluded Blacks from jury selection, a second trial in 1979 resulted in acquittals for Richard Allen and Edward Soares. Leon Easterling, who admitted to the stabbings, received twenty years for manslaughter.
If you’ve read HUSH HUSH, you know where Fact and Fiction met and parted ways, how I tinkered with when the Commissioner had left office. In real life, he left the office before Puopolo was stabbed. In the novel, Shane’s client is working his way through the appeals process when the Commissioner delivers his report as a middle finger to Boston.
I should mention that in my research of the murder I could find no evidence that a prostitute or prostitutes were arrested the night Puopolo had been stabbed, or that any had given statements to the police, a grand jury, or to any jury. Readers interested in recent research into the events of that awful night and its aftermath should consult journalist and novelist Jan Brogan’s Combat Zone.
I chose not to weave in quotes of the verbal exchange between the boys from Harvard and the three men from the case file online. Racial animosity flowed both ways. What I read online wasn’t offensive; it was ugly, and the malice and intent to harm on both sides of the class and color line was palpable. When I revisit the dialogue after I completed HUSH HUSH, I am reminded just how puritanical and easily offended we’ve become.
I am not the first nor the last writer to have found inspiration à la “ripped from the headlines.” Crime fiction is sociology. I simply consulted pages of forgotten history to tell a story. I tried to deliver interesting and relevant history because textbooks in the classroom strive for a smooth and fluid narrative, of cause and effect. This is an illusion because history is anything but linear and static. It is dynamic.
When Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” he acknowledged the trauma that is History and our inability to see the consequences of the present moment in the future. We look to the past because it’s known and less threatening, despite the danger of seeing it with toxic nostalgia, as if “life was simpler then.” It wasn’t and it never was. When we read The Great Gatsby in school, we were incapable of understanding just how seductive and sinister the green light is in it. The American Dream is much more visceral and dramatic. It is the mafioso Paulie Cicero in Goodfellas explaining to the wannabee wise guy Henry Hill that no matter what happens to you in life in America, there is one constant, one truth, and that is someone is screaming at you, “Fuck you. Pay me.”
So, if we’re lucky we’ll see how the past informs the present. The other danger, in my opinion, is amnesia, when the pages are forgotten, or torn out, not taught, and tossed. Students would never know the history.
I’m afraid that is the case in HUSH HUSH. Few know the story of Andrew Puopolo, the two trials, or the numerous fault lines beneath Boston, then and now. The postscript is modest.
There are two scholarships, one at Boston Latin and another at Harvard, and an athletic field in the North End named after Andrew Puopolo.
The Combat Zone is gone, the dive bars, porn theatres, and adult bookstores converted into restaurants, stores, or low-income housing.
666 Washington Street is a parking lot.