Animal by Casey Sherman Read Free Book Online Page B

in the direction of the sound. Wallace was struck once in the heart, causing him to stagger into a nearby law office where he collapsed on a chair and died. Lombardo’s men chased Barney Walsh down to the second floor landing while shooting in midstride. Their bullets hit their mark, and Walsh crumbled to the floor, his lifeless face pressed against the worn tile. Timothy Coffey, the third member of the Gustin Gang, escaped to an office down the hall, where he hid quivering until police arrived.
    Joe Lombardo went on the lam for over a week before turning himself in at Boston police headquarters on New Year’s Eve. He respectfully declined to discuss his whereabouts on the day of the shootings and was held on probable cause along with two other men, Salvatore Congemi and Frank Cucchiara, both of the North End. The charges were quickly dropped, however, after Timothy Coffey refused to testify before a grand jury.
    The explosively bold ambush elevated Lombardo’s reputation in the Boston underworld, which was largely fractionalized at the time. The Gustins had been top dog up until that point, but their position had been precarious at best. The Mafia had accumulated power in the North End, and that power began slowly to grow. Lombardo may have been second in command to the older Buccola in the eyes of local cops and the public, but he was certainly the power behind the throne. Lombardo was the fist inside Buccola’s velvet glove.
    Felippo “Phil” Buccola had immigrated to the United States from Palermo, Sicily, in 1920. He was an unlikely Mafia don from the very beginning. Born into a respected, wealthy family, Buccola was a highly educated world traveler. He attended school in Switzerland and the Universita degli Studi in his home city of Palermo before he was ordered by the Sicilian Mafia to Boston to organize underworld activities in the North End.Buccola was no Edward G. Robinson, and he certainly did not look the part of mob boss. With his bow ties and rimless glasses, Buccola dressed and carried himself like something of a college professor. He was a self-described “sportsman” who managed a stable of hungry prize fighters in and around the city. Buccola had also been anointed as leader of the New England Mafia in 1932 by Charles “Lucky” Luciano’s mob commission in New York.
    With the Gustin Gang no longer a threat, Buccola and Lombardo set their sights on another local mob rival, Charles “King” Solomon, a Jewish gangster, bootlegger, and narcotics trafficker who, like Buccola, also managed local boxers. Solomon was the Boston equivalent to Dutch Schultz. Like the Dutchman, “King” Solomon was brash and flashy. He was one of the most powerful Jewish mobsters in the country and arguably the most important bootlegger in Boston. Solomon was also an original member of the Seven Group, a precursor to Luciano’s Commission. The Seven Group, which included Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Frank Costello, gathered in Atlantic City in May of 1929 to add organizational structure to crime syndicates around the U.S. “King” Solomon literally helped organize organized crime. He was head of the dope racket and also ruled the Boston nightclub scene, where he operated several of his own including the Coconut Grove, scene of one of the deadliest fires in American history where, in 1942, 492 people were killed and hundreds more were injured. Solomon’s own demise had come nine years earlier inside another one of his nightclubs, the Cotton Club in the South End. The year was 1933 and Solomon had recently been indicted with three others on bootlegging charges. Running dope and pimping girls turned a nice profit, but booze smuggling was far and away the biggest cash cow during Prohibition. Authorities estimated that at least five thousand bootleggers operated in the Boston area alone, servicing about four thousand speakeasies. The annual spend for bootleg booze in Massachusetts was said to be a whopping $60 million per