C H A P T E R   8

S T A N D - U P   G U Y

UNDEFEATED FRANK MACDONALD

Hard hitting Frank MacDonald of South Boston met and defeated a very comparable Jose Miguel from Cranston, Rhode Island. Frank totally devastated his opponent with a series of crippling punches to the body which succeeded in incapacitating Miguel, who was of great courage but unable to fathom Frank’s awesome body attack—congratulations Frank, and corner men Paul “Pole Cat” Moore and Tommy “Stove Man” Cronin.

—SOUTH BOSTON TRIBUNE

FRANKIE WAS ONE OF THE FEW YOUNG PEOPLE IN THE neighborhood not being dragged down by drugs and crime in 1980. His boxing career was one of the only things that brought good news to the streets of Old Colony in those days. Frankie was fast becoming a neighborhood hero, not only in Old Colony, but all over Southie. Everyone knew who he was, and he had a nickname now, “Frank the Tank,” for his “hard hitting” style that was bringing him championship titles, from Junior Olympics bouts at Free-port Hall in Dorchester to the New England Golden Gloves tournament in Lowell.

Mary and Kathy said all their girlfriends talked about Frankie’s looks, and the guys who hadn’t yet got caught up in the world of drugs talked about getting a ripped body like Frank’s. He was working out seven days a week, running from Old Colony, through the Point, around Castle Island, and back to the project, always in his combat boots from his days in the Marines—and sometimes he ran backwards. Frank was welcome all over Southie. The little kids in the neighborhood would run after him, asking him questions about his bouts and begging him to show how he knocked out his opponents. That’s why Frankie was so intent on being what they called “a stand-up guy” in Southie. That’s what they called anyone who would never snitch, even if it meant doing a life bid because of it. But in Frankie’s case, it just meant he was clean-cut. Sure, he knew all the top gangsters in the neighborhood; anyone with Frankie’s status in the Southie boxing world would. But he never got involved in their rackets, stayed away from the dust and coke they were pumping into the streets, and refused to work for Whitey, telling Ma that he never wanted to be “owned.”

But still Frankie had “the boys,” as we called Whitey’s troops, working in his corner as he fought his way through four years of New England Golden Gloves championships, starting out as a two-time middleweight champ in the novice class, and ending up a light heavyweight champ for the whole region in 1982 and 1983. South Boston Tribune articles always pointed out the sound advice and leadership “the boys” were giving Frank in the ring:

Following closely the instructions of trainer Paul “Pole Cat” Moore and manager Tommy Cronin, Frank pursued his opponent most aggressively with a savage body attack which … wore down O’Han to the point of becoming a bit careless and somewhat frustrated … at being unable to figure out MacDonald’s technique. Frank, once again following the instructions for his corner, succeeded in landing a barrage of lefts and rights to the jaw and head of his adversary. This will prove to have been a most excellent victory for Frankie in the upcoming bouts he is to have.

In Southie having the gangsters in your corner, in the ring or on the streets, meant that you had the ultimate protection and power. Grandpa didn’t believe that, though. He had warnings for all of us, from his own days as a longshoreman on the Southie docks, where he said he’d worked alongside some men who ended up in the Brinks robbery of 1950, “the big one.” Grandpa always told us how the rule on the docks was to keep your mouth shut about the rackets you saw. He said many a time the longshoremen were lined up by the cops and asked to step forward and speak about crimes. That’s how a waitress from the local diner got killed, after she stepped forward among the silent longshoremen. She was found murdered the next day, her blood scrawled into the letters SNITCH all over her cold-water flat. Grandpa had another rule of his own for the underworld: “Watch out whose hand you shake,” he told us. He said there was no such thing as a gangster giving something without wanting more in return. “They’ll give you a quarter for a dollar any day,” he said. Grandpa had been trying to get closer to us since Kathy’s coma and had even bought a condo in City Point. He got a closer look at the neighborhood, and he kept coming around the house cursing “that fuckin’ Whitey Bulger, a no-good bum if there ever was one,” and wondering if the Bulgers were even Irish at all, with Senate President Billy Bulger’s insulting Irish brogue imitations at drunken St. Paddy’s Day festivities. “They’re a shame to the Irish altogether,” he said, “and what respectable Irish person would name their kid William?” he asked. “That would be like a Jew naming a kid Adolf.”

We got a kick out of Grandpa’s ranting, but Frankie started to avoid him when he came knocking at his door to give more speeches. Frankie had as many admiring eyes on him now as any of the gangsters did, and he didn’t have to hijack trucks or sell poison in the streets to get that respect. He knew how to keep himself out of trouble. He was obsessed with the whole role model thing besides. One time Joe cracked open a can of beer while the two of them were walking down the street, and Frankie lashed out at him to “put that fuckin’ shit away. There are kids around,” he said. Frank called the booze “fuckin’ shit,” the same thing Whitey had called the pot Kevin was waving out the car window years earlier. But Frank meant it, not because it was illegal to be drinking in public, but because he knew that kids in Old Colony were watching his every move.

Kevin wasn’t selling drugs anymore; he’d gotten into the bigger stuff. By the time Kevin was sixteen, he hardly ever slept at our apartment, so I didn’t really know what exactly he was into, but I picked up a few clues. He was still very generous, so whatever scores he was making, it seemed the whole project would get some of the spoils. Like the time Kevin knew Ma needed money, and he gave her a few twenties. Ma was glad to get anything she could in those days, as the lines for welfare food seemed to be getting longer. But the guy at “Dirty John’s” Sub Shop told Ma her twenty was a fake, counterfeit. He let her use it anyway. “What the hell,” he said, “they’re all over the neighborhood.” Ma played dumb and off she went with her sandwiches, but she cursed Kevin all the way home. Not long after, when Kevin got locked up for driving a stolen car—he wasn’t getting caught for the big stuff—Ma got a call from him at Charles Street Jail. I heard Ma tell him, “Jesus Christ, then you better keep your mouth shut.” When Ma hung up the phone, she told Frankie that Whitey had sent someone into the jail to visit Kevin, to give him a warning to keep quiet about where he was getting the counterfeit money if it should come up. Whitey knew that any Southie kids arrested for anything were likely to be worked on for information about his operations. And he made sure kids like Kevin, who were in and out of jail, understood that silence was the only way to stay alive in Southie.

After beating his stolen car rap, Kevin was back out on the streets, sharing more winnings with the neighborhood. One night there was a block party on Patterson Way, after Kevin gave out cases of beer and bottles of whiskey and vodka. I knew sometimes Whitey’s boys hijacked trucks out on suburban highways, and I figured that was where Kevin had gotten all the booze. All Ma knew was that everyone out front was shitfaced and having a ball, and that we hadn’t even seen the delivery man from J.J.’s Liquors making his usual Friday night rounds that hot summer night.

Then there were the clothes. That’s when I got in line to get my share of Kevin’s generosity. Kevin had what looked like a truckload of Calvin Klein jeans. I picked up four pairs for myself. I ripped the Calvin Klein label off the back pocket, though. Unlike everyone else in the neighborhood, I was going to punk rock clubs, where it wasn’t cool to have designer clothes. My punk friends and I were rebelling against the fashion industry. So was Kevin, you could say, but I didn’t want to explain to my friends from outside Southie the ideology behind my brother’s robbing a truck.

It’s when we started seeing the guns that Ma got pissed off. Seamus and Steven were six and seven years old, playing in the abandoned second kitchen in our breakthrough apartment, and found a pistol. When Ma saw the gun they were playing with, she screamed at them to drop it. She told Kevin to keep shit like that out of this house, and he just took his gun and left.

Another time I found a .357 Magnum in the hall closet, underneath a pile of clothes Ma had heaped on the floor. That same night Kevin came to the house after everyone was asleep but me, and started ranting about cops and snitches, and telling me I should do something with my life rather than just going out to see bands at the Rathskeller looking like a nut. He wasn’t making a lot of sense. I knew he was high and by the way he paced the floors, I knew it was coke he was on. Then he went into the back hall where the gun was and disappeared into the room where he used to sleep when he was a kid. I heard one shot. I didn’t know if Kevin was still alive, and I felt so tired of it all right then that I didn’t have the energy to go look. Ma, Kathy, and the little kids never even woke up. Then Kevin came out, looking calmer. He said he felt better and thanked me for talking to him that night, even though I was thinking I’d hardly been able to get a word in. He left the house without the gun. I went into the back room to find the top half of the window open. He’d only fired a shot into the Old Colony sky. When I checked the closet, I felt the gun under the pile of clothes. And it was warm.

“Ma! Can I have fifty cents to go to the Irish Mafia store?” Seamus yelled up to the window, as loud as loud could be. Jesus, that kid has a worse Irish whisper than I ever did, I thought. Seamus was talking about the liquor store at the end of Patterson Way that Whitey had taken over, the one that had candy for little kids like Seamus, as well as being the drug headquarters for all of Southie. Whitey didn’t live in our part of town. No one was exactly sure where he slept at night. Some people said he had houses all over the South Shore, but that he often came to dinner at his girlfriend Theresa Stanley’s house on Silver Street, near City Point. Wherever he lived, I thought it was pretty smart of him to position his liquor and drug business right on the edge of our project, where more and more kids were doing whatever they could to get drug money. Everyone knew that no illegal activity in Southie took place without a stamp of approval from the back rooms of that store, Whitey Bulger’s office. George Grogan ran the other office for the boys at another liquor store across the street from the D Street Project. Georgie stood on the corner in front of the store through all seasons, waving to the cops who rode by, and wearing his Notre Dame cap pulled over what Ma called his “killer blue eyes.” I always thought it was funny how he stood in front of a red stop sign poster in the store window that said SAY NOPE TO DOPE. We all knew everything about who was running what, but we didn’t yell things like that up to windows on Patterson Way.

The Irish Mafia store was originally owned by one of the Stokes, but the news around town was that Whitey made him sell it to his associates, since Whitey couldn’t have all the things he owned in town under his own name, with no job and the feds keeping an eye on him. Everyone said the booze was cheaper before Whitey took the store over. Now all the liquor stores and bars in town were buying their booze from Whitey’s hijacking operations. They had to. No one was more powerful than Whitey, not the cops, not the politicians. “They work for him,” Ma would repeat. The liquor stores around town were charging way too much money, since they were forced to pay Whitey’s high prices. “But what can I do?” asked Ma’s friend Al, the one who partied until morning in his apartment next door. “Stop drinking?” Ma let out a howl of laughter at that one.

Frankie got closer to Kevin in those days, to keep an eye on him. Kevin went to all of Frank’s bouts, hanging out near the gangsters he knew, who were the biggest boxing fans. Frank did what he could to talk Kevin out of the business he was in, but more often protecting his little brother meant helping him get away from the cops. Kevin was staying at Frankie’s when David Reeves, a sixteen-year-old neighbor, yelled up to Frank’s window that the cops were planning to raid the apartment. David’s uncle, a detective with the Boston Police and I guess a boxing fan as well, had told him to go warn Frankie. Frankie figured there was nothing to raid, so he paid no mind. “Let them,” he laughed. When ten plain-clothed agents banged on Frankie’s door, he opened it looking groggy and scratching his head, as if the cops had woken him from a deep sleep. They pushed Frank aside and raided the house. They came up with nothing. What they didn’t know was that while they were knocking, Kevin was scrambling around the house in all of his hiding places, pulling out shotguns and revolvers. Frankie had no time to fight with Kevin. He could only help him climb out the back window to the rooftop, and pass him the duffel bag full of guns.

Frankie and Kevin got into fights over Kevin’s criminal enterprises, which always seemed to get Frankie into the mix. Frankie gave him a beating when he found out that Kevin had used his name again after being arrested, and then skipped bail. In the end, though, they always made up and were the best of friends.

Kevin started to go to the Rathskeller downtown, where Frankie along with some of the other boxers and some of the boys were working as bouncers. They were big and tough looking, and good for keeping the college students and punk rock types in line. Frank’s corner man, Pole Cat Moore, worked at the Rat, and introduced Frankie to Ricky Marino, an ex-state trooper, who became Frankie’s best friend. Then there was Kevin “Andre the Giant” McDonald, not to be confused with my brother Kevin “Mini Mac” MacDonald. He was a Southie champion too. Ricky and Paul Moore were pretty high up in what the papers in later years would call the “Southie underworld.” But Frankie knew his little brother wasn’t going to get involved in their plans, no matter how much he wanted to. They were too high up to be bothered with Kevin, who despite his involvement in some of the big stuff was still just a kid to guys like these. They also had a position to maintain, and weren’t about to bring someone with Kevin’s potential into their rackets.

My brother Joe would go to the Rat too, whenever he was on leave from the Air Force. Joe told Ma it was weird how Frankie’s friends pulled each other aside when they were “talking business.” We all knew Joe was the tattletale in our family—he told Ma everything—and the boys must have sensed this too. But one night at the Rat, he did overhear Pole Cat Moore telling Ricky that he’d be getting his cocaine directly through Whitey’s Colombian connections, rather than going through Ricky. Pole Cat had a job with the Boston Housing Authority, and an apartment with his brother, right next to ours on 8 Patterson Way. Pole Cat never touched the stuff. He was too into his body, coming and going from our building with a gym bag and a clean white towel around his neck. But he was starting to make a killing on the coke, by the looks of the number of kids knocking on his door day and night. Joe said he would know if Frankie was into that stuff, though, and that Frankie had never been involved in Pole Cat’s huddled conversations with Ricky at the Rat.

Then I started showing up at the back door of the Rat most nights. Ever since I was fifteen I’d gone there to see bands. Frankie’s friends knew who I was, and snuck me downstairs through the piss-puddled hallways, to where the bands played. Frankie snuck me in too, but he didn’t know I was there on weeknights, and I told his friends to keep it quiet. I hadn’t returned to Latin School since Kathy’s coma. They’d tried to make a deal with me that I could be promoted, despite all my absences, if I left Latin and went to Madison Park High School in Roxbury. “Yeah, right,” I said, “and be the only white kid in the class.”

Latin had been my only escape from the busing, and now I felt guilty for messing it up. I couldn’t believe I was a high school dropout. I’d always been the straight-A student Ma bragged about, along with Johnnie, and Davey. For a while I was still pretending to go to school, even after Kathy was out of the coma. I’d wander around Boston all day, freezing at bus stops when I didn’t have money for the three-hour-long coffee refills at Mug and Muffin, trying to stay awake after a night at the Rat. Ma eventually found a letter I’d written to myself about my guilt for being a dropout, and she was bullshit that I had pulled one over on her. She confronted me about it and said I’d have to go right to work the next day. She too knew high school in Roxbury wasn’t an option. That’s when I switched from pretending to go out to school every day to pretending to go out looking for a job. I was still freezing at bus stops, or getting warm at Mug and Muffin; and I still snuck out of the house at night to go to the Rat.

I had my own group of friends at the Rat. While Frankie, Pole Cat, Andre the Giant, and the rest of the gang hung out upstairs, I was down in the basement with misfits from all walks of life. Some were working-class kids, others were suburban white-picket-fence types, and others were rich. “What’s a trust fund?” I remember asking. “Ah, man, it’s nothing—just ’cause my dad’s rich doesn’t mean I am. I gotta wait on it. Got a dollar for a beer, dude?” But wherever these people came from, they didn’t like it. I’d always preferred black music—soul, then disco, and now hip-hop and rap. The words made more sense to me. But I also liked the energy and rage of punk rock; I just couldn’t relate to the lyrics about life in the suburbs, and having strict parents. Then I discovered the original version of punk, from England. I’d never thought about the fact that there were poor and working-class English people who hated the Queen, and her mother, and the whole British establishment. I could get into that. This was a movement of people who didn’t fit in where they came from, and they’d made that cool. I could get into that too.

Punk music became an escape for me, but I still had to come back to Old Colony every night. I often hitched a ride with Frankie’s friends, the whole way home not knowing what to say to men as powerful as “the boys.” Other times I had punk rockers drop me off on the outskirts of Southie, so they wouldn’t see that I lived in the project, or accuse me of being a racist for living in my neighborhood. But I was protecting them too; I didn’t want them to get bottles thrown at them for being different in Southie.

Even with all our bad luck over the years, Johnnie was a lieutenant in the Navy Seals now, Mary was becoming a nurse so she could save some money and move from her project apartment, and Joe was in the Air Force. They were “getting out.” That was what people in Old Colony said in hushed tones when they didn’t want anyone to hear them suggesting the neighborhood was a bad environment. And Frankie too was hoping to “get out,” making his way, earning honest money, and thinking about becoming a pro boxer.

And then suddenly even Kevin seemed to go straight. He’d been dating a girl named Laura, a rich girl from Wayland who was sometimes dropped off in Old Colony in a limousine. Ma said Laura was “slumming it,” hanging out in Old Colony and getting in on Kevin’s scams, like the time she helped him claim a back injury by walking ahead of him in a supermarket aisle, pouring liquid detergent for him to slip on. Instead the supermarket had to pay for Kevin’s front teeth, which he hadn’t planned on losing in the fall. Laura’s father was a lawyer in the financial district, “forty-two men under him,” Ma said, and her grandfather sat on a fortune from a popular brand of tennis clothes. Her father didn’t like Laura dating Kevin, and Kevin said it was because he was from the project, and because he wasn’t Jewish. And that was before Laura’s father found out Kevin was a criminal by trade. But by then Laura was pregnant, and the two of them were getting married. None of us knew of the wedding. They just got married one day, and when Ma asked about it, Kevin told her only that Whitey Bulger had been his best man.

Kevin was twenty-one and Laura two years younger when their daughter, Katie, was born in the spring of 1984. That’s when Kevin’s life of crime ended, and the three of them moved into Laura’s condo on Newbury Street, an “uppity” section of downtown, as Kevin used to call it. He got used to it, though. Kevin even looked different, when I’d bump into him walking through the Public Garden, carrying his baby girl in one arm and a bag of groceries in the other. He was getting chubby, so I didn’t always recognize him before he called over to me. All he talked about was how beautiful his “wittle wittle mosquito” was. I was so stunned I didn’t know what to say back to him. But I was glad he was going straight.

But the brightest hope of all now was Frankie, who was a neighborhood star, being looked at by boxing manager Lou Duva, who managed Evander Holyfield. Frankie wasn’t sure if he wanted to go pro, though. He talked to Ma about it, just like he talked to her about almost everything. Ma and Frankie were more like best friends than mother and son. We all knew Frankie was Ma’s favorite, but no one seemed jealous about that. It was just accepted; “two peas in a pod” is what Ma herself called their relationship. Frankie was solid, a foundation everyone felt anchored to. And Ma loved Frankie for that.

Frankie had gotten a flashy new Lincoln Continental, the size of a boat, from working in the Carpenters Union, working nights at the Rat, and saving his money. He spent any free time he had piling Seamus and Stevie and all their friends into his car—which they called a limo—for ice cream at Frosty Village, or taking Kathy to her physical therapy appointments, or kidnapping me on Dorchester Street on my way out of Southie, to lock me up in his room and make me punch the heavy bag hanging lopsided from his ceiling. And he drove Ma everywhere, taking her slowly down Broadway, waving to admiring kids, and stopping to talk to men-about-town like Pole Cat Moore. “Hey Ma, you wanna go to the graves?” Frankie would offer to take Ma to breakfast, and then to visit Patrick and Davey at the cemetery. They were buried all the way across Boston, at St. Joseph’s in West Roxbury, nearly impossible for Ma to get to before Frankie bought his Lincoln.

But Frankie wanted to give even more to Ma—and to Seamus and Stevie, who loved sleeping over at his apartment, and bragging to their friends the next day about how much weight their boxing hero could bench press, or what he ate for breakfast. Frank told Ma about his plans to take the little kids to Disney World, a dream most of us growing up had never even bothered fantasizing about when we saw the ads on TV. One day Frankie took Ma to Mary Kelly’s house in the suburbs. Ma loved showing off her greatest joy, her son the champion boxer, handsome, built, and driving a Lincoln Continental. Sitting at the picnic table in our cousins’ yard, Frank drifted away from the sisters’ conversation, and came back saying, “Hey Ma, wouldn’t it be nice to have a place like this some day, once I get some money? A house with a yard?” Ma just brushed the comment off, saying in front of her sister that Old Colony Project was the best place in the world, with the beach nearby, and parks, and plenty of things for the kids to do.

It was driving back from that trip that Frankie told Ma he’d had a dream. They both thought they were psychic, and Ma paid close attention to dreams. Frankie said he’d dreamed of the whole family at the cemetery for another burial. Ma told Frankie then that just a week earlier, a crow had come through our window, and had flown through the house before crashing into Ma’s head and flying back out the same window. “I’ll tell you, it knocked me for a loop,” Ma said. She said she lay down then and slept for hours. The Irish have this thing about birds inside houses; when I was little I couldn’t bring in even a picture of one. Once I gave Ma a glass bird to hang on our silver disco Christmas tree, and she threw it into the trash, saying it was bad luck. Ma thought for sure after the big black bird invaded our home, that someone would die, and in the car that day she and Frankie both hoped that it would be Grandpa. “That old bastard has lived a good long life now,” Ma said. “Christ, I hope I don’t live to be as old as that.” They both laughed and drove down Broadway as Frank waved to more admiring eyes.

July 17th was Ma’s birthday, which she never wanted us to celebrate because she hated to think she was getting older. She was turning fifty in 1984, but she still told everyone that she was having a hard time turning forty. She put out the TV after watching the eleven o’clock news report of an armored car heist in Medford that had left one dead. The robber was unidentified. He had burned off his fingerprints with acid prior to the robbery, to prevent identification.

The next day Mary came over with Seamus and Steven after keeping them overnight to play with her own two kids. She had already told them the news, and they were both crying. Now Mary had to tell Ma. Ma saw the little kids crying and just looked at Mary. “It’s Frankie,” Mary said. “He was killed yesterday.” Ma collapsed on the floor. Frankie was twenty-four years old.

The lines went around the block and up the hill, to Jackie O’Brien’s Funeral Parlor. Of all Southie’s wakes, this was the most people I’d ever seen come to pay respects, and I was proud to be from a neighborhood that cared so much about my brother. But I still wasn’t going to believe Frankie was in that casket until I saw him, even though his body had been identified, and even though I’d seen Kevin at the house with baby Katie since the death. At first I was sure that it must have been Kevin who’d been killed robbing the Wells Fargo armored car. Frankie? Robbing a bank truck? Kevin maybe, but not Frank. I didn’t want Kevin to have been the one shot down in the afternoon ambush; I just wanted to know the truth. Now I knew Kevin was alive, but I still wanted to see if it was Frankie in the casket. I know Ma was thinking the same thing, and that’s why she fell apart when she finally saw her favorite son, the shell of her favorite son, laid out with his huge boxing fists folded and wrapped in Rosary beads. Ma knocked over the people in her way to climb on top of the casket, and she put her arms around Frankie’s neck, pulling him up and out of the box. It took Johnnie and four muscled gangsters to tear Ma away from her Frankie. The casket wheeled a few feet, with the strength of Ma’s grip. The O’Briens had to send everyone into the other room so that they could reassemble Frank’s limbs and straighten out the purple satin robe he was being buried in.

Before the wake, Kevin had run around making the arrangements for Frankie, and everyone agreed that he should be buried in his Golden Gloves championship robe. The rest was the usual for Southie’s buried children: Rosary beads, Irish flags, and shamrock trinkets collected from the annual St. Paddy’s Day parade. But Frankie’s purple robe made him look like royalty. Grandpa didn’t get it, though. In a room packed to capacity with people telling stories about Frankie’s boxing matches, and reenacting them with slow motion blows to the air, Grandpa walked up to Frankie’s body and held his hand. The room got quieter. Grandpa turned around and said to himself, in the loudest of Irish whispers, “That’s an awful fuckin’ shame! A handsome man like that being buried in an old bathrobe.” Ma cracked up laughing then. The whole family did. Later that night Grandpa said to Ma, “I only wish I’d known him better.”

All types streamed in to pay their respects: young kids; local priests we’d never seen in the neighborhood before; all of Old Colony; Jimmy Kelly, who was now city councilor of South Boston; teenagers Frank had trained in the ring, like Joey Degrandis and “Little Red” Shea; and the gangsters. Then there were a few suspicious-looking characters, definitely outsiders, who Ma later said introduced themselves as detectives.

It was a good thing we had the breakthrough apartment, with the two joined living rooms, because after the wake the house turned into a full-on disco. It was our Old Colony version of a real Irish wake. “A good send-off” is what they called it that night. People danced in one living room, then went into the other living room where Frank’s corner men had laid out mountains of free cocaine, then they went back to the other living room to dance some more. Then the trips back to the coke table got more frequent, and soon some of the neighbors weren’t leaving the table at all, and were looking at that cocaine as if the mountain was going to disappear. The house was packed. Ma came out of the back room where she’d been hiding out for a while. She was all smiles but looked a little dizzy. Tommy Cronin said, “Try some—c’mon, Helen, it’ll make you feel better.” Ma replied, “Well, I’m willing to try anything at this point.” Ma did a line and then she was dancing too. Kevin made sure I knew I was welcome to the coke. I’d tried it a few times before, but I didn’t like the feeling it gave me of being out of control, desperate for more. And I especially couldn’t imagine doing drugs with my family. Ma got me out of it saying, “Mike’s never touched drugs, he’s too quiet, he thinks too much. I never had to worry about that one,” she added. I didn’t pass judgment on anyone else taking coke that night, though, and was even willing to let Ma try it if that might numb a pain I couldn’t even begin to imagine. I chose to get shitfaced drunk for the heavy weight of sadness I was feeling, sneaking to my stash of whiskey in the back room.

Joe was doing a line and offered the rolled-up hundred-dollar bill to Mrs. O’Connor, Okie’s mother. She looked at Joe, then right in front of the boys she said, “That’s the shit that killed my son.” Mrs. O’Connor had had a couple of years to figure that one out; but we hadn’t started to make the connection between Frank’s death and the mountains of white powder that Whitey was bringing into the neighborhood from his Colombian connections in Florida.

I don’t know how we made it to the funeral in the morning, after about an hour of sleep. My head was pounding as I sat in an aisle next to Frankie’s casket. I thought we might have to catch Ma as she walked slowly up to the altar, holding onto any church fixtures she could grab. Ma had written a song that she wanted to read. I knew it was important to her to show she could still “hold her head high” in front of everyone:

You’ve broken down my prison walls,

You’ve melted the bars,

You’ve raised up my soul,

So that I could see your stars.

My honky-tonk ways are past

and now gone,

And my cold heart now has hope,

With each dawn.…

“That’s a shameful poem altogether,” Grandpa muttered as Ma continued reading slowly, “some kind of country-and-western song about prison.” But we found out later that Grandpa actually kept the poem, scrawled onto wrinkled notebook paper, in his top drawer along with his precious novenas to saints, and letters to him from his own mother from when he’d left Ireland, never to see her again. Although it broke my heart to see our fun-loving hell-raising mother all dressed in black and reading about her dead son, I don’t remember much about that funeral. But I do remember that Frankie’s casket weighed an awful lot. Frankie was like a rock. My head was pounding, and I couldn’t believe that he was really lying there inside the Irish flag-draped box, never again to play with Seamus and Stevie, never again to drive Ma to breakfast or to the cemetery, never again to be seen by any of us.

That night Ma was standing in the kitchen, looking out the back window. She usually looked out the front window, but I figured she probably didn’t want to do that now, and see Frankie’s empty-looking apartment across the street. “Frick … ah … frack … n … pfft.” Ma looked fine—she was smiling—but she was talking gibberish. She forced some real words out of her mouth slowly, but said she couldn’t feel her left arm. I told her to lie on the couch and I called Mary, who said Ma was probably having a stroke. Ma insisted she was just tired and refused to go to the hospital that night, no matter how much I begged. I was relieved to see her awake later that night. She got up around midnight, flicked on the kitchen light, and started pummeling the ground with her bare hands, killing cockroaches with a vengeance.

The next morning, with the funeral over, and Frankie buried, and the crowds gone, I opened my eyes and looked up from my mattress on the parlor floor to find Ma crying and clawing at the curtains, trying to tear them down to get a better view of Frankie’s apartment. We’d always been able to see him in his kitchen window, cooking or shadow boxing, and Ma was looking for him once more. But he wasn’t there. His kitchen light bulb was still on, shining dimly onto yellow cement walls and open cabinets. Ma saw that I was awake but just fell to her knees at the window, looking for Frankie, and saying over and over, “He was such a beautiful kid, he was such a beautiful fuckin’ kid.” Her wailing went right through me. I cried inside, but Ma couldn’t hold her pain in any longer. It all spilled out that morning, and I could hardly bear to see it.

Kevin started coming around the house with Laura and Katie, getting closer to Ma after Frankie died. That’s when Ma began to get some of the answers she was desperately looking for about Frankie’s death. Kevin blamed himself. “It should’ve been me,” he said. He’d been part of the planning for the job, and then when he went straight, just like Frankie had always wanted him to, he wanted nothing to do with it. But he didn’t know how to get out of it. In the end, Kevin was replaced by Frankie, who wanted nothing more than to get the family out of the projects, and saw before him what was supposed to be a simple job. And the more coke Frankie was doing, the more simple the job must have looked, and the more invincible Frankie must have felt. Because Frankie had gotten heavy into coke in the last months of his life. After his death we heard about the all-night parties in his apartment with all the boys around and mountains of cocaine on the tables, and all kinds of plans being laid out for that simple job. Frankie went in on it with his friend Ricky, the former state trooper from the Rat, and some nineteen-year-old named Chico we’d never heard of, from the D Street Project.

The rest of the story Ma got from the detectives who’d started coming around, telling Ma everything while I listened from the back room. Frankie’s job was to get the loot, to jump into the Wells Fargo truck while one of the guys put a gun to the back of a security guard, and the other guy sat in the car with shotgun aimed. Frankie got shot by the Wells Fargo driver when he jumped out of the back of the truck, taking a bullet in his upper back. Frankie ran and made it all the way to the getaway car, along with a bag of loot, in the middle of a wild shoot-out. The worst thing for us was that it was a minor wound. Frankie could have lived for hours, and likely survived, if there’d been any attempt to save his life. Even if they’d dumped him off on a highway where he might have been picked up, he could have lived. But of course if he had, there was a chance the bandits and the entire ring would have been caught. Frankie might have talked. So his friends had stuffed his head in trash bags and pushed him under the seat to keep him hidden and quiet, before fleeing with $100,000 to the second getaway car waiting for them. But the real story Ma found out from the coroner: Frankie had a veil of blood in his face and hand marks on his neck. Someone had strangled him.

That’s when Ma went after the whole criminal ring. She may have been taking Valium for the pain she was feeling, and walking around in slow motion, but she was determined nonetheless. There was no time for tears. Ma never let me in on her investigations, but I overheard her conversations with Joe, who was driving Ma around in Frankie’s Lincoln to track down some of the boys in the streets. But in Southie, it was hard to tell just how extensive any criminal ring was, and who exactly was involved in the various stages of planning and dividing the money. In Southie, for all the clean appearances of the boys who ran the town, nothing was ever what it seemed. Ma walked up to Whitey Bulger, who had nothing but kind words for her, politely calling her Mrs. MacDonald and saying Frankie was “a stand-up guy, God rest his soul.” Ma asked him to his face if he’d had anything to do with the Wells Fargo robbery, and he said he hadn’t. Whitey’s hands were always clean, though. Just like he had nothing to do with all the cocaine flooding the neighborhood, destroying kids like Frankie who had everything going for them except that they lived in the project next to his headquarters with its proud green shamrock painted outside.

Soon after talking to Whitey, Ma was invited by the detectives into a back room of a restaurant in Medford to meet with the FBI. They asked Ma what she knew about this one and that one. Most of them, Ma had never heard of. But when they asked over and over about John Doherty, Ma knew what direction to take her own investigation. She’d been going to hairdressing school, and she carried her sharpest pair of scissors with her into Doherty’s house. I’d never heard of John Doherty, but as it turned out, he was the brother of “Lorraine the Lesbian,” a neighbor from Jamaica Plain who’d tried to recruit me into the Ku Klux Klan when I was six. Everyone told Ma that no bank robbery happened from Southie that John Doherty didn’t stake out ahead of time, and supply the guns for. “What a strange bastard he is,” Ma said to Nellie on the phone. Ma said she thought he might be a pedophile, with all the half-naked teenage boxers running around his house. She said she walked into his den, which was dark except for candles all around and big red velvet couches. Ma pulled out her scissors and politely asked the gangster in his silk smoking jacket if he needed a little trim. Then she motioned across her throat with the scissors, to tell him what she really had in mind. Ma said that in the end Doherty convinced her that he’d had no part in the robbery. He said he’d been cut out of the deal after he’d done all the staking out. “If I was involved, Frankie would’ve been wearing a bulletproof vest,” he said.

Then one night I came out of the back room and found Ma and some detectives peeking out the front window onto Patterson Way from behind the curtains. Ma was pointing out a neighbor who lived across the street with his wife and two children, and who Ma said had another seven kids in Jamaica Plain. Ma said she had information that he was involved in the bank job, supplying the guns after Doherty had been cut out. I never would’ve suspected the likes of him. He was one of the few fathers in the neighborhood and weighed about three hundred pounds. I’d never seen him get up off the front stoop to go to a job and had always wondered what his scam was. Now I knew. But nothing ever came of Ma’s tip-off, and within weeks the whole neighborhood was excited about the new “Clam Shack” the guy opened up on Dorchester Street, purchased with Frankie’s blood.

Everyone knew Ma was on a mission. That was why, when the gangsters finally came forward with some money for Frankie’s funeral expenses, they avoided dealing with her directly at all. One night Red Shea came by looking for Johnnie, still home on leave from the Seals. I told him Johnnie was at Grandpa’s in City Point. Red went there, rang Grandpa’s doorbell, and waited for Johnnie out on Kelly’s Landing. Grandpa saw what was happening from his window and came downstairs in his long underwear ready to save Johnnie from trouble. Red handed Johnnie ten thousand in cash from the boys, and Johnnie screamed at Grandpa to get the fuck inside. Red took off, and left Johnnie crying at Kelly’s Landing with the bundle of blood money in his hand. Johnnie could throw, and he hurled the wad of bills off the landing about twenty-five yards, where it sank into the ocean. The FBI told Ma they’d watched the whole transaction, but that they weren’t going to take Johnnie in because he didn’t keep the money. The story got around town, and the next day Red and some kids from Old Colony were at Kelly’s Landing scouring the ocean floor for all that loot.

After a few weeks Ma had started to look less determined, and her mouth was settling into a permanent downturn. Kathy was able to live independently now, and she’d gotten a subsidized apartment in Manchester, New Hampshire. On the day we took Kathy up to her new home, Ma, Joe, and I sat in Frank’s Lincoln in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot on the way back to Southie. Joe talked about Frankie and told funny stories about the two of them cruising for girls in the pimpin’ Lincoln Continental whenever Joe was on leave from the service. Ma just listened with downturned mouth and stared straight ahead at the rain on the windshield. It was a blow to see someone the likes of Ma look at us and say, “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to smile again.”

“I miss that kid so fuckin’ much,” Kevin told Ma, looking out our front window at Frankie’s old apartment. Kevin didn’t have Laura and Katie with him. He was starting to come back to the neighborhood to hang out with all the people he and Frank had in common, sharing stories about Frankie in the ring, while drinking and doing lines. Kevin said Whitey wanted to open a bar and have him run the place. Ma told him to get out of Southie. But Kevin kept coming around, and whenever he came up the house he’d start crying about Frankie, especially when he was high.

That September I got out of Southie for a month to stay with friends in Los Angeles. But I couldn’t relax. I kept calling home to find out if everyone was alive. Ma told me everything was fine and to stop being such a worrywart.

But then I called my Aunt Leena, and she told me Kevin was all over the papers, that he’d gotten involved in a jewelry store heist with his friend Flabbo from D Street Project, and that the jewelry store owner had been shot and was paralyzed. She said the Stardust Jewelry Store in Framingham was surrounded, but that Kevin got away from the police even after getting shot in the leg. The papers said Kevin ran into a suburban neighborhood and pretended to be a jogger. He rang a couple’s bell and said he was really thirsty and needed a glass of water. They gave him water, and then Kevin called a taxi back to Boston. Kevin ran on the taxi driver after jumping out at Newbury Street, where Laura and Katie were. Then he went to hide out at Mary’s apartment in Old Harbor Project. The couple and the taxi driver called the cops—they’d seen Kevin’s bloody leg—and the paper said the police knew exactly who it was because they knew Kevin had moved to Newbury Street, and they’d been keeping an eye on him to find out more about the Wells Fargo robbery. That night, police special forces had Mary’s apartment surrounded, and when Kevin told Mary he would surrender, Mary’s husband Jimmy opened the door to five shotguns pointed at his nose. He later said he never came so close to shitting himself as that night.

When I got home from L.A., the detectives were in the parlor again with Ma. They wanted Ma to help them get Kevin to talk about who else was involved in Frankie’s hold-up, and about the whole organization in Southie. They told her they had a videotape of Kevin and Flabbo robbing the store. They said the tape showed Flabbo shooting the owner after the man locked them in the store and pressed the button to alert the police. They said it also showed Kevin attacking Flabbo, trying to stop the shooting. From what I’d always heard, Kevin believed in the “nobody gets hurt” rule. The detectives said it was simple: If Kevin talked, they’d show the tape in court and Kevin would get a light sentence; if he didn’t talk, no one would ever see or hear of the tape again.

A few months later my Aunt Leena was visiting with me and Ma. Ma showed Leena the black dress she’d just bought at the thrift shop. “Jesus, that’s an awful depressing-looking color,” Leena said. In absolute defeat, Ma replied that she’d need it for Kevin’s funeral. Leena panicked and Ma explained that she’d had a dream, more like a vision she said, of Kevin hanging. She was just accepting that he was next. I walked into my bedroom and locked the door. I begged and pleaded on my knees, to God, to every saint I’d ever seen hanging on Grandpa and Nana’s walls, to everyone in my family who was dead: to Davey, Frankie, and Patrick, to Nana who’d always been so close to me. I begged for Kevin’s life. I knew Ma’s premonition was real by the look on her face, and I didn’t like her resignation, even though she’d suffered enough to rip every shred of hope from the strongest heart. I prayed that somehow Ma wouldn’t have to suffer more, that Kevin would be filled with a white light, and be changed, that he’d be able to return to Laura and Katie. I remember feeling only the December winds whipping through my bedroom window, sending my tears onto the cement walls around me.

When Christmas came, I was looking at the cards we’d received, mostly religious ones with notes of sympathy for the loss of Frankie. One of the religious cards was from Kevin at Bridgewater State Hospital. I hadn’t known Kevin was at the prison for the criminally insane. When he was younger he’d fake like he was crazy whenever he was arrested, to beat the rap, and sometimes he’d be sent there for observation. But now he was there, I had to assume, for real. And I hadn’t known Kevin was so spiritual, with all his talk about God and hope and about his heart being changed. “Ma didn’t tell you?” Mary said to me. She told me that Kevin had tried to hang himself in jail, but that the sheet broke and he’d crashed to the floor. “He said he was filled with a white light or some crazy shit, and he hasn’t been the same since.” They transferred him to Bridgewater because of the suicide attempt. She showed me the letters to Ma they’d found in his cell after he tried to kill himself.

Ma, I guess this is the end of the line for me. I am about to end my life in a few minutes. I miss Frankie so much. It hurts so much. That kid was everything to me we had so much fun together. I had a dream last night that me and him were riding around together picking up girls. He was so funny then I woke up and started crying and shaking just like I’m doing right now. I want to be with him and Okie. I love them both. Make sure Laura lets you see my wittle wittle moskito.

Ma don’t go blaming yourself or nothing. Thinking you were a bad mother or some shit like that. You were the best mother anyone could have ever had you were so much fun. I never wanted to be a criminal it just came so easy and nothing else ever came my way. Tell Joey Earner he can have my clothes. Tell Mr and Mrs O’Conner that I will slap Okie for them when I see him.

Ma I hope there’s no such a thing as hell, but all I know is if there is it cant be anything worse than what I’m feeling right now. Tell the kids not to cry. Love Kevin.

But now in his Christmas card, Kevin was talking about coming to terms with Frankie’s death, and with his own life. Maybe there was hope. There was a rumor on the streets, though, passed around by Flabbo’s family, that Kevin was a snitch. People knew Kevin had been getting worked by detectives, and they figured he might talk, about everything, all the way up to Whitey’s organization. And everyone knew that Kevin knew a lot.

So in spite of everything hopeful in that Christmas card, in March Kevin was found hanging from a bed sheet at Bridgewater. He was dead. The detectives who’d become friendly with Ma told her that the last person to visit Kevin, according to the sign-in book, was Detective Walter Kirby, known to be a good friend to the boys and to Whitey himself. They thought it was very unusual that anyone would be let in to visit at eleven-thirty at night. Kevin was found hanging in the bathroom outside his cell not long after midnight.

I was staying with an artist friend in New York City when Kevin was found. I’d been trying to reach Ma, only to get a busy signal. The operator told me she couldn’t break through because the telephone was off the hook. I knew then that someone was dead. I had no doubts because I wasn’t panicking. I accepted the fact almost calmly. I walked all the way to 42nd Street to get on the bus back to Boston, and as I entered the Port Authority a homeless man stood in my path, shook his finger at me, and laughed, “ ’Til we meet again!” Those were the very words Ma had always put in gold letters on a bright green ribbon across the caskets of the children she’d seen lowered into the ground.

When I got back to our apartment, it was three in the morning, and I burst through the door to find out who had died. All the lights were out and everyone was in bed. I was looking for sympathy cards in the dark room, and I saw the silhouette of a card standing upright on top of the TV. I turned on the lights and was pissed that someone had turned them off in the first place, letting the cockroaches take over. They were running in all directions now to get away from the light. I grabbed the card: “Happy St. Patrick’s Day.” But under it was the Boston Herald with a picture of Ma and Seamus with sad faces and the headline: “Mom Loses Third Son to Violent Death.”

“Who’s dead? Who’s fucking dead!” I went screaming through the house and into Ma’s bedroom. “What are you talking about?” Ma said. “Go to bed, for Chrissake, you’re waking up the little kids.” Steven wasn’t in the Herald picture, so I thought it might be him. But because Ma was saying “the little kids,” I knew it wasn’t. “No one died; get some sleep for yourself.” Ma sounded almost believable, not as if she’d just lost a third son to a violent death. I told her I’d seen the Herald headline. Then she gave in and told me, “It’s Kevin,” and her voice broke when she added, “You better get a good night sleep—we have a lot of work to do in the morning.” She spoke from the darkness of her room, and her voice became a muffled cry as she buried her face into the mattress.

I went to bed numb. I wasn’t going to feel this one. We’d buried Frankie only eight months earlier, and I never wanted to feel again. I chased away any memories of Kevin that popped up, of us taking baths together as toddlers, of him stealing prizes for me at the Irish Field Day, of him beating up anyone who ever messed with me, and of our walks through Southie on his first paper route. I stayed awake all night, and I remember wondering without feeling how many times tragedy could pound Ma’s already shattered heart.