History as Inheritance
Boston history is in my blood. One side of my family made its start in the city a century ago and settled on Zeigler Street in Roxbury. The other half began in South Boston around the same time. They were all Irish immigrants, and they lived through the political power shift led by figures from James Michael Curley to John B. Hynes and finally Raymond Flynn. It brought the Irish from underdogs to top dogs at the local and state level.
I inherited that legacy, both the good and the bad. My own generation lived through the last of those years as the city continued to evolve with new cultural shifts and more immigrants from different parts of the world.
Our Common Ground: The T
One thing familiar to anyone who’s lived in the city over the last 100 years is the T—the network of trains, trolleys and bus lines connecting the different neighborhoods. It spreads like a system of veins and arteries that flow underground, overhead and beneath Boston Harbor. It’s also been described as a hub with spokes. The different routes are color-coded in red, blue, green and orange.
The T was used by my grandparents and parents to commute every day to work, and to visit relatives and friends. When I was a teenager, I rode the Red Line from Ashmont Station in Dorchester to Boston Latin five days a week. After school, it was the Green Line that delivered me to a part-time job in Alston and to baseball practice near Cleveland Circle. In fall, the Orange Line took me to cross-country practice at Franklin Park.
Another thread running through the fabric of Boston history and my family history is sports. My dad played in an amateur baseball league until he was twenty. In one early-spring game he played at Fields Corner, he was jogging across the infield when he spotted Babe Ruth sitting in the stands. The retired Sultan of Swat was wearing his trademark raccoon coat.
Sports in Boston History
While my dad took the Red Line to work at 6:30 every morning, and I boarded a half hour later for school, we’d sometimes travel the T together to baseball games at Fenway, hockey games at the old Boston Arena, the Boston Garden and BC’s McHugh Forum. The first time we rode it to BU’s brand new Walter Brown Arena, he pointed to a football field across the street where Boston Latin played Boston English every November in the traditional Thanksgiving Day game. “That’s used to be a baseball field where I watched the Boston Braves play.”
Every neighborhood of the city had its own character. That’s what I learned after I finished college and moved out of Dorchester. Over the course of my twenties, I shared apartments in the Back Bay, Roslindale, Somerville and Brighton. To pay the rent, I waited tables at a Northern Avenue restaurant called Jimbos, worked at a downtown company called Pilot Executive Software, and memorized the tangled layout of Boston streets while driving a taxi.
The Many Takes From Street Level
When you work as a cabdriver in a city, you know more than what the best routes are to the airport during rush hour. You become aware of everything going on in the different neighborhoods, even down to specific streets. You become a scholar of the whole culture and its many subcultures.
Waiting at a cab stand for my next fare, I liked to scan that day’s Boston Globe, reading about the latest political drama playing out on Beacon Hill or at City Hall. Billy Bulger was often the main character in those stories. His brother Whitey would sometimes compete for the same space on page one with his latest underworld schemes. The media liked to refer to Whitey as the head of the Irish Mafia. It was maybe too grand of a title, but he certainly was a major player in the New England drug trade and other illegal rackets.
Through the Lens of a Writer
That was around the same time I began to consider a future as a writer. Not that my writing consisted of much more than some journaling and a few attempts at short stories. But I could imagine a grand storytelling canvas on which Boston’s local dramas could play out.
I continued to follow the lives of the Bulger brothers when I moved to Seattle in the 90s, and when I returned east to attend the MFA program at Columbia University in New York City. In my thesis workshop, I sketched a narrative landscape that would become my first novel—The Chieftains of South Boston.
Pulling From Many Sources of Boston History
After coming up with a general plot structure, I began the heavy research. Next to the building that housed Columbia’s Graduate School of the Arts was the School of Journalism. My ID gave me access to their library and its LexisNexis research system. I dug up every detail I could about Whitey and Billy. I printed stacks of pages, then highlighted, hole-punched and organized them into 3-ring binders.
I did the same with newspaper stories available on microfilm at the New York Public Library in Midtown Manhattan, and later at the State House Library in Boston.
In addition, I pored over several books, including:
Common Ground
The Boston Irish: A Political History
The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley
South Boston: My Home Town
Black Mass
All Souls: A Family Story From Southie
Valhalla’s Wake
The Brothers Bulger
While the Music Lasts: My Life in Politics
The Bulger Mystique
How the Irish Became White
The Bulger Brothers as Inspiration
I pulled every relevant piece of Boston history I could into the narrative, and every major Boston player. Beyond the Bulger brothers, there were leading figures across the city—the Angiulos (who ran the Italian Mafia out of the North End), John Connolly (Whitey’s childhood friend and handler at the Boston FBI field office), and politicians like Ray Flynn (mayor of Boston, and Billy Bulger’s sometimes ally, sometimes opponent in the struggle to be South Boston’s most influential politician).
Certain historical events were easily adapted to fit the Jimmy Mahoney character, like Billy Bulger’s unexpected rise to Senate president, his press-conference-turned-debate with Mayor Raymond Flynn in front of the State House, and the way Bulger twisted the arm of Governor Dukakis, who was running for the White House, to end Boston’s garbage disposal crisis on terms favorable to Bulger.
I did the same when building the character of Francis Mahoney. I pulled in all kinds of details and plot lines from the world of Whitey: the triangle trade with drug dealing and the shipping of arms to the IRA, the various murders attributed to Whitey, his complicated relationships with the Italian Mafia and the FBI, and the destruction of lives in South Boston when Whitey unleashed a flood of drugs into the neighborhood, all the while pretending to be its protector.
My Personal Boston History
My first-hand experiences enter into the story in different places, like witnessing the chaos and racial strife of school desegregation, and attending games and concerts at Boston Garden. There’s also the character Buzzy Driscoll, who earns a living as a Boston cab driver. Those details are drawn directly from my time behind the wheel.
Then there were occasional visits to South Boston itself. In one scene, Matthew Mahoney recalls watching the Saint Patrick’s Day parade from the roof of Flanagan’s grocery store on Broadway. That was what I did at the age of fourteen with a handful of buddies after we shimmied up a pole at the back of the building, then watched the parade from our comfortable perch.
There are plenty of other places in the novel where my memories inform the book—too many to list, really. Overlaying those details is my intimate knowledge of the Irish American working class culture in that particular place, during that particular time.
I finished The Chieftains of South Boston fifteen years ago. When I look back at the details of the story now, it’s not always easy for me to distinguish between the actual history of the place and my fictional rendering of it.