Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (50 page)

One legendary battle took place in the summer of 1960, when a gang known as the Saints from the lower end of South Boston strutted onto the beach at Castle Island. Pat Nee, Mikey Ward, and a small group of fellow Mullin Gang members were drinking beer and lounging in the sun with their shirts off. The number of Saints who arrived at Castle Island outnumbered the Mullin Gang nearly two-to-one, and there was no time to call for reinforcements. “We only got one chance here,” said Mikey Ward, the oldest of the group. “Let’s charge and break ’em up. They won’t expect it.” Pat Nee recalls

So we all grabbed bottles and charged. Some of them scattered, and we started picking them off one by one. They fought back pretty good. I got sliced down to the bone on my left hand. They had knives, we didn’t. But we were tougher that day. We gave them a brutal, brutal beating. I remember one kid’s face; it looked like we fuckin’ skinned him he got kicked so often. Others had jumped or got thrown in the water to get away from us. They dog paddled over to a big wooden raft, but we had a guy on the raft with a two-by-four. He was hitting them in the head and kicking them, trying to beat them back into the water. That was one of the roughest gang battles I ever saw. We all had cuts, concussions, broken noses. But they got the worst of it.

By the early 1960s, the Mullins were the dominant gang in the neighborhood, having supplanted the Saints, the Red Wings, the Shamrocks, and other gangs, some with roots going all the way back to the 1920s. The Mullin Gang was sprawling and haphazard, with no real hierarchy. And their activities weren’t related to any organized form of racketeering—not yet, anyway. The various gang wars that took place revolved mostly around issues of friendship and loyalty. When your friends were in trouble, you could help in any number of ways. You could be an observer, a gatherer of information, or you could be a fighter, which was a primary way of distinguishing yourself within the gang.

Gang battles and acts of loyalty were one thing, but the primary reason Pat Nee had become a Mullin was to become a professional crook. By the age of seventeen, he was ready for the big time. For his first significant act of pilferage, he chose a location he knew would not only net a decent score but also attract maximum attention from the neighborhood’s criminal elite: the Lighthouse Tavern.

Nee and two accomplices broke into the venerable gangster hangout through a bathroom window. They fleeced the cigarette machines, stole cases of booze, and cleaned out the money drawer beneath the bar. Afterward, when it became known around Southie that Pat Nee and a crew of young Mullins had the balls to rob the Lighthouse, they became famous in the neighborhood. Spurred on by the notoriety, the Mullins grew in stature; they were well on their way to becoming one of the most impressive collection of thieves, stick-up artists, B & E men, bank robbers, safe-crackers, and hijackers the city of Boston would ever know. According to Pat Nee

We got to be very good at what we did. One of our better thieves was Paulie McGonigle; he was great at tailgaiting and hitting the docks. Jimmy Lydon was good, especially with B & Es. Paulie and them had their own crew. They were doing drug stores all over Boston. Pharmaceuticals. They would hit those places and sell the drugs. Plus there were safes with money in there. Back then the safes were fairly simple. You could crack them open with a pinch bar, a good hammer and chisel. We had crow bars we stole from the fire department that gave you the leverage you needed to pry open the safe. Paulie and his crew got caught one night in Newton. That was big. Paulie got away, I believe, but the others went to jail. A guy in that crew turned informer, which was highly unusual back then. We knew who it was, but we didn’t bother the guy. He was young, and he’d been beaten very badly by the Newton cops. They broke his jaw, his nose, and kept on beating. Back then the cops were allowed to beat you—and they would. None of us ever thought of pressing brutality charges. You were just happy to get out of there alive.

Getting caught or bloodied by cops did not slow down the Mullin Gang. They became especially notorious along the Boston waterfront, where they raided the commercial piers on almost a weekly basis. “We stole any place we could steal and sold it to whoever could afford it,” said Nee. Shipments of TVs, stereos, and clothing were good, but foodstuff like hams, crabmeat, and tuna were even better. The Mullin gang shipped their stolen merchandise to a professional fence either in Boston, Providence, or New York City. “The people we dealt with were solid, honorable professionals,” remembers Nee. “We rarely had problems—unless we screwed up ourselves.” One time the Mullin Gang did mess up when they set out to boost a coveted shipment of crabmeat and tuna and wound up instead with a truckload of women’s cosmetics. Not having any concept of the resale value of women’s cosmetics, the gang drove the shipment to a housing project in Southie and told the women to help themselves. Nee called his contact in New York and told him, “We grabbed the wrong truck. We got nothing but broad’s cosmetics.”

“What did you do with them?” asked the guy.

“We gave them away.”

“Are you nuts!? Do you have any idea how much that stuff is worth? Its worth more than the stuff you were going to take. Get that truck back. Get that stuff over here.”

It was too late. The women of South Boston had cleaned out the truck, and the Mullin Gang had lost a valuable shipment.

Mostly, the gang got the job done, even if individual gang members did get pinched on a regular basis, in which case they reached out to Dudda Flaherty, the neighborhood bail bondsman. Flaherty had them back on the street in no time, and they were soon planning their next act of professional pilferage. They moved on from the piers in Southie to the docks downtown, which were bigger, with more valuable cargo and better security. But no waterfront operation was safe from the thieving ways of the Mullin Gang.

A business owner whose warehouse was located on a prominent downtown pier once told Pat Nee and his fellow gangsters, “I know you water rats been robbing these piers blind, but you’ll never get my place. The security is too good.” The Mullin Gang took this as a challenge. They began to case the man’s place of business, Federal Liquor Distilleries, a huge brick warehouse sandwiched between a fish company and another warehouse. They determined that the doors and windows were all wired with alarms. The building’s ceiling was not wired, but the roof was exposed to a roadway overpass, so that anyone trying to break in from there would be spotted by cars driving by. The only possibility was to go in through the loading dock of the fish company next door. You could back a truck up all the way to the wall and break through the brick without being seen or tripping any alarms.

And so they did. A six-man crew, led by Pat Nee, hit Federal Liquor Distilleries at three o’clock in the morning. Dressed in black with black ski masks, they backed a large produce truck flat against the building’s wall. They rolled up the truck’s back gate and—from inside, undetected by night watchmen or other passersby—hammered away at the building’s brick wall with crow bars and sledge hammers. A sheet of plywood was laid down to catch falling rubble. If debris did fall to the pavement, someone hopped down and swept it up, so there would be no visible remnants of the wall being taken apart.

A member of the robbery crew was stationed high on a nearby billboard, with a commanding view of all roadways. Using binoculars, he surveyed the surrounding area. If cops or detectives approached, he notified the break-in crew over a walkie-talkie. “Little Red” was the code for a patrol car, “Big Red” for a detective unit. If the message “Big Red is coming” came over the walkie-talkie, the break-in crew pulled in the plywood, closed up the truck, and everyone froze in their positions. A patrol unit might pull right into the parking lot and see the truck alongside other trucks and vehicles that were parked overnight; unless they examined the truck closely, looking through the tight six-inch space between the back of the truck and the wall, there was no way they could see the gaping hole in the side of the building. “All clear,” the lookout whispered into the walkie-talkie once the unsuspecting cops drove off. The crew resumed banging away at the wall.

It took forty minutes to break through the wall and into the warehouse. From there, it was a piece of cake; working from a list, the thieves began carting crates of booze through the wall into the back of the truck. Canadian Mist, Seagram’s Seven, Old Thompson’s. Common bar booze was more popular than top-shelf liquor because it was easier to unload on the Black Market. It took less than an hour to grab nearly every case of booze in the warehouse. Before they left, the crew broke into the office of the owner—the very man who had challenged the Mullin Gang by saying that they would never be able to penetrate his security system. One of the crew opened the owner’s desk drawer and defecated inside, leaving behind a card that read: “Having a great time, wish you were here. Yours truly, the Mullin Gang.”

Explained Pat Nee, “He’d shown his contempt for us, so we had to show our contempt for him.”

The robbery at Federal Liquor Distilleries was a good clean score. Afterward, the owner never said a peep to the Mullin Gang.

There were other robberies, well-thought out, professionally executed, with financial returns that usually made them well-worth the risk. Various Mullin crews distinguished themselves at different aspects of the craft: some were good with safes, some talented second-story men, some cat burglars par excellence. The gang conducted robberies far from their original Southie territory without any problems, until one day in early 1961, when they hit a prominent trucking company based on a dock in the heart of downtown Boston. Following that robbery, Nee and a few leading members of the gang were summoned to appear in Somerville, a district just north of the Boston city line that was the home base of a well-known racketeer named Howard Winter.

“We knew who Howie Winter was,” said Nee. “We knew him by reputation. He was a more established criminal than we were, more connected. So we went out there to see what he had to say.” Nee and the Mullins met Winter at a garage in a section of Somerville known as Winter Hill.

Howie Winter was in his mid-thirties, slight of build, with curly, brown hair and beady eyes. Despite the fact that his birthday was on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, Winter was not Irish; he was Italian and German. Although he was known primarily as a racketeer and businessman and not a man of violence, Winter was affiliated with some of the toughest criminals in the Boston area, including the city’s main Mafia organization based in the North End, adjacent to Somerville.

“That trucking company you hit downtown?” Winter said to the assembled Mullin gangsters at his garage headquarters.

“Yeah?” said Pat Nee.

“They’re with me.”

A moment of tension passed between the men before Nee finally spoke. “Okay, Howie, no problem. From now on, we’ll stay away from your interests.”

“Good,” said Winter, adding quickly, “Now those other companies down there, that’s a horse of a different color…” Howie suggested that whenever the Mullin Gang hit other trucking companies and warehouses anywhere in town, they should “come over to Winter Hill, and we’ll help you move product. How’s that sound?”

Pat Nee saw the possibilities immediately. Howie Winter was an underworld mover and shaker, tied in with a much higher level of criminal activity than the Mullin Gang. Specifically, Winter had a major interest in gambling rackets all over the Boston area. The dogs, the ponies, and policy were the big moneymakers in the underworld, low risk and high gain. Howie had a piece of it all, and he was offering to cut the Mullin Gang in on his action if they dealt exclusively with him and his people.

“You got a deal,” Nee told Howie Winter.

The alliance between the Mullin Gang and the Winter Hill operation represented a seismic shift in the Boston underworld, one that would not be fully understood for years to come. The immediate result was that Pat Nee and his crew found themselves spending a lot less time thieving and more time involved in high-end rackets and union-related activities. Many of the Mullin gang were already card-carrying members of the Teamsters and longshoremen’s unions, so they were naturally put to work as labor agitators. During one especially violent Teamster strike in early 1962, Nee and a handful of Mullins were used as head bangers. They mixed in with union picket lines; when a truck operated by a scab driver approached, they hopped up on the truck and cracked the driver over the head with a blackjack, then faded back into the crowd or down an alleyway.

“We got a good day’s pay for that,” remembers Nee.

The relationship with Winter Hill paid financial dividends for the Mullins and vice versa, but that was not the reason Howie Winter had been so eager to bring the notorious Southie gang into the fold. While Winter and Pat Nee were making kissy-face, the Boston underworld was in the beginning stages of a major war. Much of this conflict would take place in the city’s northern provinces—Somerville, Charlestown, East Boston, and the North End. Already there had been a number of gangland killings. Pat Nee and the Southie crowd were only vaguely aware of what was going on at the time. Before it was over, they would be major players in the most sustained period of underworld violence the city of Boston had ever known.

Boston Gang Wars, Part I

It all started back in 1961, on Labor Day, when two gangsters affiliated with the Winter Hill Gang rented a cottage on Salisbury Beach with their two girlfriends and an old pal named George McLaughlin. McLaughlin was a member of a notorious crew of crooks and contract killers who were friendly with Winter Hill and based in the neighborhood of Charlestown.

Located at the northern edge of Boston on a peninsula between the Mystic and Charles rivers, Charlestown was, like Southie, separated from the rest of the city by bridges and water. The origins of Charlestown are steeped in revolutionary history; the area was the site of the Battle of Bunker Hill, one of the earliest and most significant battles in the Revolutionary War. Nearly a century after the United States gained its independence, the peninsula of Charlestown was annexed to Boston and became a center of the city’s maritime industry. The neighborhood became a classic longshoreman’s enclave, with successive generations of Irish immigrant families working the docks. Georgie McLaughlin came from a dock worker family and had himself apprenticed as a longshoreman until he fell in with a tough crowd from nearby Winter Hill and became more of a hoodlum than a laborer.