Boca Knights

by Steven M. Forman

  “Thank you for coming to my rescue,” she said after I had demolished the bully.

  “No one makes fun of my girl,” I told her.

  She laughed. I had her attention, and she had Mr. Johnson’s attention. In fact, Mr. Johnson and I thought about Patty McGee every night. I knew I would marry Patty someday, just like I knew I would be a cop.

  The school population at BHS was comprised primarily of the descendants of Eastern European Jews, with the Irish Catholics a distant second. There was a smattering of Italians and Greeks, and one black kid named Houston Brown. There were identical twin Chinese girls in the class of 62; their last name was Chin. Naturally the kids called them the Double Chins. They seemed nice enough, but we never spoke to each other. Their intelligence intimidated me, and I must have scared the shit out of them with the bumps and bruises on my face after weekend boxing matches.

  There was a three-strata structure in every class in just about every public high school in America, and Brookline High was no exception. In the top third were the serious students, who were destined to become doctors, scientists, and lawyers. At Brookline High, most of the top third were Jewish, except for the Double Chins, Houston, and some superstar Christians. I was strictly a middle-third guy. Kids in the middle third were average in just about everything. We didn’t have long-term plans. We didn’t have any plans, actually. We floated precariously above the bottom third, aware that the slightest misstep could plunge us headfirst into the abyss.

  I didn’t want any part of the lower third. They were in school only because the law said they had to be there. The boys in the lower third were destined to be the manual laborers of their generation. The girls in the lower third were destined to marry the guys in the lower third and have lower-third children. It all seemed predestined to me. Some losers did become winners, and some winners unexpectedly became losers. For the most part, however, kids didn’t seem to change that much when they grew up. I did my best to stay right in the middle where I thought I belonged. Surprisingly, I had few fights at the high school because the ones I had early on were so one-sided that they discouraged further challenges. That was fine with me.

  I graduated high school in 1962 when I was seventeen years old. My parents never talked to me about going to college, and it never entered my mind either, which was strange for a Jewish family. I worked odd jobs for a few years after high school, mostly in the wholesale meat business where my father had become well established. While the top third of my high school class matriculated into the halls of higher learning and the bottom third went directly to the bottom, I unloaded trucks and carried sides of beef in Haymarket Square, America’s oldest wholesale meat market. The work was hard, the hours were long, and the pay was minimal, but I didn’t care. I was just biding my time until I was twenty-one, old enough to enter the police academy. I kept myself in good physical condition by taking judo and karate lessons, and became pretty good at both.

  In 1966, I entered the police academy. I asked Patty if she would marry me when I graduated. She said yes. I excelled at everything at the academy and finished in the top ten percent of my class. I was amazed. My parents were amazed. Patty was amazed. For the first time in my life I realized, if I was motivated, I had top-third potential. When I received my badge, I felt like I had everything. I had a woman I loved and the career I wanted. I was young and healthy, and all things seemed possible.

  My first assignment on the force was to Precinct One, located at the south entrance of the Sumner Tunnel in the North End. It was directly across the street from Haymarket Square where I had hauled sides of beef the year before. I loved the North End. I rented a one-bedroom apartment in a third-floor walk-up on Hanover Street for fifty-five dollars a month. There were apartments available for twenty-five bucks a month, but I wanted heat and my own bathroom. Patty and I married one year after I joined the force, and she moved into my apartment. We never moved again.

  The first day on my beat I met a short, wiry guy standing in front of 98 Prince Street, where a sign identified the storefront as Huntington Realty. He smiled a crooked smile and held out his hand. He told me his name was Nunzio Nardelli.

  “I wish you good luck, Officer Perlmutter,” he said pleasantly. “But this neighborhood don’t need guys like you.”

  “Why’s that, Mr. Nardelli?”

  “Because they got guys like me.”

  He was the local Mafia boss. He answered only to Raymond “Shady” Vali, of Providence, Rhode Island, the Boss of Bosses. The North End was safe because of violent men like Nardelli, just as he claimed. Many criminals lived in the North End, but they committed their crimes elsewhere. It was an amazing culture, and it worked.

  Originally known as the Island of North Boston, the area was home to America’s first grammar school, America’s first playground, and Boston’s first windmill. The North End was an Irish neighborhood before it was a Jewish neighborhood and was a Jewish neighborhood before it was an Italian neighborhood. The Irish left for the South End in the mid-1800s. Between 1870 and 1900, the Jews took over Salem Street with their pushcarts and traditions. By the time I started my beat in 1966, the North End was the Little Italy of Boston. It was a neighborhood of Madonna Della Cava and St. Agrippina di Mineo parades. It was a place where families and the Family coexisted in a wary truce. The Mafia had been in the North End since 1916 when Gaspare Messina imported the Family to Boston from Sicily. The small neighborhood of narrow streets and Catholic churches was home to a lot of good guys and a lot of mobsters known as wiseguys.

  I got my badge shortly after Albert DeSalvo, the Boston

  Strangler, was sentenced to life imprisonment in Walpole State Prison, but there were still plenty of crimes and criminals to keep me busy. Boston had it all. Murderers like Daddy Doe, Wimpy Bennett, and Chico Amico eventually became murder victims themselves. The Irish Mafia known as The Wayos - led by Walter “Whacko” Wallace, Red Ryder, and Steve “The Cannon” Carlino - terrorized South Boston for years and fought in the Irish gang wars of the 1960s. Only Red Ryder seemed to have survived.

  In 1983 Nunzio Nardelli was arrested, tried, and sent away forever. He had been done in by a hidden microphone in his office and by his own big mouth. The North End changed after that. It became a more dangerous place. Red Ryder and Steve “The Cannon” Carlino tried to take over where Nardelli left off. Carlino’s older brother, Vinnie “The Brute” Carlino, served as his brother’s enforcer.

  I got to know a lot of interesting characters over the years and to appreciate the importance of the choices we make in life. There was a good-looking kid named Johnny “Handsome” Marcazi, who was a local high school football hero. Marcazi was a smart kid and received many scholarship offers to play college football. Instead he chose the higher education of the streets of Boston. Eventually, Marcazi would plead guilty to twenty murders committed in less than twenty years. Bad choice.

  Angel DiNiro was a low-level thug from the area who I never got to meet but wish I had. Angel was not really cut out for a life of crime and fled the Boston crime scene for California in 1963. In Hollywood, Angel lost a lot of weight and got a part in the 1972 movie The Godfather. I saw the movie and thought Angel was pretty good. Usually, there was only one way out of the mob, but the wise-guys liked The Godfather movie so much they didn’t go after Angel the Actor. Good choice.

  Someone was always killing, maiming, robbing, raping, or defrauding someone else in the city, and Precinct One had all the business it could handle.

  In those days if you were a kid growing up in the North End it was hard not to want to be one of the wiseguys. They had fancy cars, custom-made suits, flashy girls, and large bankrolls. Many of them were dangerous sociopaths, but they looked cool to the rest of us who didn’t have their flash. A lot of kids in the North End talked, dressed, and walked like the wiseguys, but it was usually harmless playacting. Every once in a while a good kid would cross over to the bad side, and the only way he would come back was dead.

 
; There were a few kids in the neighborhood that kept their distance from the criminal element. They didn’t imitate the wiseguys and had no ambitions to be wiseguys. Most of these kids hung out at the North End Association (NEA) located at the North Bennett Street Industrial School. A North End resident named Frankie Basilio was the antithesis of the wiseguys and was instrumental in the formation of the NEA to keep the neighborhood kids out of trouble. During my first year on the force Frankie convinced me to give boxing lessons to the boys at the NEA. I got to know some great kids during my years as a boxing instructor.

  My favorite kid at the NEA was a gangly, seventeen-year-old boy named Togo Amato. His name was Robert Amato, but everyone called him Togo because of his love for Togo Palazzi, the Italian, two-time all-American basketball player from Holy Cross College who was also a member of the Boston Celtics National Basketball Association championship team of 1957. His mother, Anna Maria, called him Robert. His father, Gianni, and his brother, Rocco, called him Bobby. To everyone else he was Togo. I called him “kid” sometimes even though he was only four years younger than me. I tried to teach Togo how to box, but he could care less. He was strictly a basketball player; he once apologized to me for his lack of interest in boxing. Togo was such a good kid that even the wiseguys liked him. He knew who they were, and they knew who he was, but they never bothered each other. Right after high school Togo got a civil-service job with the city. “I got no time for college, Eddie,” he told me. “I gotta make money to help my family.” I agreed with him. I hadn’t gone to college, either. While I was chasing big- and small-time criminals, Togo was working his way up the civil-service ladder. He was a witness at the small wedding Patty and I had at city hall in front of a justice of the peace. Neither Patty’s parents nor my parents attended the ceremony because of the Jewish-Catholic thing.

  The wiseguys joked with Togo and me in the streets of the North End, and I normally joked back. It was my nature. Togo was more reserved with the wiseguys, because he knew them better than I did.

  “Hey, Togo, I got a parking ticket. Help me out.” “Sorry, no can do.”

  “Hey, Perlmutter, you got influence on the force. Gimme a break.”

  “I haven’t arrested you in three weeks,” I would joke.

  I shared a few laughs with the wiseguys. I thought it helped keep the peace, but I was never sure. We got along fine, even though we didn’t trust each other.

  About the time that Red and Carlino killed Donnie Killeen of the Mullins Gang and took over their territory, I had worked my way up to detective. I was always in the thick of things, taking chances maybe I shouldn’t have been taking. I shot some people, and some people shot me. I was wounded twice. I received four medals for valor, several merit awards, promotions, and a lot of public recognition. I was one of the most decorated cops in Boston from the late sixties to the late eighties. The local newspaper reporters who covered the police beat described me as fearless, and I guess I was. I don’t know why but I never worried about myself. The first time I was shot, I remember lying on the street worrying about what would happen to Patty if I died.

  I was a Boston cop for thirty-four years until I was forced to retire toward the end of 2000 for medical reasons. I was still in good physical shape but had developed traumatic arthritis in my hands and my knees. Twenty-one Golden Gloves bouts had made my hands brittle, and time had done the rest of the damage. My aching knees were the result of a small-time drug dealer hitting me with a Louisville Slugger in 1986. I had caught the son of a bitch in a sting operation in the snow-covered parking lot of Jimmy’s Harborside Restaurant. He pulled the bat out of his trunk as soon as he realized I was a cop.

  “What’s with the bat, asshole?” I asked him. “You think you’re Big League Lowenstein?”

  “Who the fuck is Big League Lowenstein?”

  Who the fuck is Big League Lowenstein? How could anyone not know him? Then I remembered that Big League had been serving a double life sentence since 1970 for a wiseguy-sanctioned double murder in 1968. This druggie with the bat was probably in diapers at the time. Big League was one of Shady Vali’s most deadly assassins in those days, and his trademark was killing people with a baseball bat to the forehead. He was called “Big League” for his hitting prowess in baseball. Lowenstein had a shot at the major leagues at one time. When he didn’t make the grade, he hung up his spikes and glove forever but never really put down his bat. Big League was over six feet tall with a great head of black hair. He was a handsome, quiet, likeable guy with an athletic body. He also, allegedly, killed people for a living. I was glad I helped put him away, but I always had a problem with the contradictions in Big League Lowenstein’s character.

  “Just put the fuckin’ bat down, numb nuts,” I said to the druggie.

  “Fuck you.”

  Bing! Exploding red spots were everywhere. Fuckin’ drug-dealing, drug-using, useless son of a bitch! CHARGE! The idiot slipped on the snow trying to back away from me and went down on one knee. I hadn’t expected that. I saw the guy swing the bat at my kneecaps from his kneeling position. Going, going, gone! He got up as I went down. He raised the bat over his head preparing to knock my head off. Instinctively I attacked. I launched a semiprofessional uppercut into his balls and did my best to drive them up into his mouth. I heard him scream in pain before he collapsed to his knees in front of me. We knelt there in the snow, staring at each other in mutual agony. Finally, I mustered the strength to push him onto his back and crawled onto his chest.

  “You stupid bastard,” I groaned, barely able to see through the red explosions.

  In the process of knocking this senseless asshole more senseless, I rebroke two knuckles in each hand. I got a medal of merit for the arrest. My knees and my hands were rewarded with fractures and ruptures followed by crippling arthritis.

  The Celtics captured their sixteenth NBA championship that same year, winning forty games at Boston Garden and losing only one. About a month before the kneecap thing, I attended one of those forty victories with a ticket that Togo gave me. I don’t remember much about the game, but I do remember a middle-aged white guy slumped forlornly in the seat next to me in loge section eleven. He was a friendly drunk at first, but by the second quarter he seemed to be getting a little surly despite a large Celtic lead.

  “Ain’t like it used to be,” he muttered several times before passing gas. He was annoying everyone in the section, and I did my best to ignore him. Before halftime he made his third trip to the beer stand. When he returned to his seat with a beer in each hand, he observed loudly and proudly, “Look!!! The fuckin’ Celtics are the only team in the NBA that can still play five white guys at the same time and win.” He farted again for emphasis. I held my breath and checked out his theory. Sure enough Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Bill Walton, Jerry Sichting, and Scott Wedman were all white and all on the court for the Celtics. “Take a good look, my friend.” The drunk pointed at the court as he nudged me with his elbow. “‘Cause you ain’t never gonna see a sight like this again.” He sounded prophetic but another fart made him pathetic and then he messed himself.

  Over the years the details of that game faded. But I’ll never forget that sad little man who was so worried about his inability to stop the world from changing that he shit his pants and didn’t even know it.

  My physical condition and the physical condition of the Boston Celtics deteriorated badly after that championship season. We gradually went into a downward spiral that could not be stopped. With no more glory years on the horizon, Larry Bird and the other fading idols reluctantly retired. I retired at the same time but received far less fanfare.

  I had become a limping liability to the Boston police department by the time I retired in 2000 on an annual pension of $65,000. I was a fifty-five-year-old unemployed widower with the long-term prospects of a moth around a bright light.

  My wife, Patty, had died of a brain aneurysm when we were both forty-two years old. She woke up in the middle of the night complaining of a hea
dache. She turned on the lamp, got out of bed, put her hands on either side of her head, and with a look of surprise said, “Oh, Eddie.” The doctors said she was dead before she hit the floor. One moment Patty was the light of my life. The next moment her light went out. I was devastated. The happiest days of my life were when I was with Patty. We couldn’t have children, but having each other had been enough. We just didn’t have enough time together.

  My parents never accepted Patty because she was Catholic. Her parents never accepted me because I was Jewish. Her parents didn’t like my parents, and my parents couldn’t stand her parents. Neither family practiced organized religion. They practiced disorganized religious intolerance instead. Over endless beers and gin martinis, our parents wasted their time hating each other until they ran out of time.

  I mourned for two years after Patty died and didn’t see much of Mr. Johnson. One morning he popped up unexpectedly.

  Hey, I loved her too, boss, but life goes on.

  Patty was the only woman we ever knew.

  It’s time we moved on, buddy, he told me. But I can’t do it without you.

  Hey, it’s not like we’re attached at the hip, I said.

  Close enough, he said.

  All right, I’ll give it a try but my heart’s not in it.

  We don’t need your heart. Just get me in and we’ll be fine, he promised. I gradually started dating other women. Patty and I had a good sex life together, but it was seldom spontaneous or experimental. I never thought anything was missing until I began seeing other women after she was gone. Making love with Patty had been warm and comforting. Fucking was different. Fucking was hot and exciting, and Mr. Johnson went crazy. For the first time in my life, I realized I could love someone besides Patty and something besides the police force. I loved sex, and I loved women. I loved reckless women. I loved reserved women. I loved black women. I loved white women. I loved the way women looked, and I loved the way they smelled. I loved the lustful impulses I felt when I was attracted to someone new. I even loved the mating games and the hunt. I was not tall, dark, and handsome, but there was no shortage of women who seemed to find me attractive. I was small in stature, but I was physically fit, and I knew I wasn’t a bad-looking man. I had a certain degree of notoriety because of the way I did my job, and I think the danger of my profession was attractive to some women. I also had Mr. Johnson, who was a pretty big guy to be hanging out with a squirt like me, and he was always ready to stand up for me.