Boston Irish gang wars
The Morning Glory Cafe, in Boston’s then very gritty Charlestown neighborhood, was the scene of an infamous and very public mob hit on Oct. 31, 1961.
Excerpted and slightly copyedited from an article on the Web site of the New England Historical Society.
When a group of hoodlums decided to rent a cottage on Salisbury Beach (Mass.) for a Labor Day party in 1961, they set in motion a chain of events that left dozens of corpses strewn around eastern New England. The Boston Irish gang wars lasted for seven years, until the Italian godfather in Providence helped put an end to them.
The gang wars allowed corrupt FBI agents to recruit informers in a drama that would play out into the next century. The Feds’ most famous snitch, Whitey Bulger, spent most of the Boston Irish gang wars in prison and the rest on the sidelines. The gang wars, however, laid the groundwork for his rise to power. They also launched a movie career that began, fittingly, with a role in The Godfather.