True Crime

According to the FBI, more bank and armored-car robbers have come out of Charlestown, Massachusetts, than any other one-square-mile area in the world. With these robberies also came gangland violence and corruption. Fictionalized in the movie The Town featuring Ben Affleck and Jeremy Renner, this is the true story of Charlestown and the thieves and gangsters who terrorized the community for decades.

On October 31, 1961, Bernie McLaughlin got shot dead in broad daylight in front of a hundred witnesses in the City Square section of Charlestown. Because of the ironclad code of silence in the Irish stronghold known as the “Green Square Mile,” no witnesses came forward. The murder ignited a bloody war between the McLaughlin Gang and Buddy McClean’s Winter Hill Gang that left more than sixty men dead.

Three decades later, as narcotics invaded Charlestown, and a concurrent Mob war raged between J. R. Russo’s North End crew and that of Patriarca-family boss “Cadillac Frank” Salemme, five thieves called the “No Name Gang” committed over a hundred heists across New England that cemented the enclave’s infamy. Grippingly cinematic and raw, Thieves of Charlestown delivers an unprecedented look at the real criminals who ruled the streets of “The Town.”

"Acevedo is one of the most talented boxing writers working today and this is a book in the lineage—and spirit—of some of the great boxing compendia, McIlvanney on Boxing, or A. J. Liebling’s round-ups."—Electric Literature

Boxing has one of the richest literary traditions in sports. From A. J. Liebling to Donald McRae, the sweet science has consistently inspired great writing. The work of Carlos Acevedo stands firmly in that distinguished tradition.

In this expanded edition of Sporting Blood, Acevedo adds two new masterful essays—one about the murder of Stanley Ketchel, the other about the gangland slaying of Battling Siki—to those that made his debut collection an instant classic. Other highlights include a moving meditation on Muhammad Ali; a penetrating look at the enigmatic Charles “Sonny” Liston; and a vivid profile of Mike Tyson, which brilliantly conjures the Boy King’s late 1980s reign of terror. Acevedo also offers many other unforgettable tales from boxing’s dark side, featuring Jack Johnson, Joe Frazier, Roberto Duran, Aaron Pryor, Jake LaMotta, and more.

Sporting Blood is ultimately a poetic throwback, an uncanny book that evokes journalism’s golden age and places Acevedo not only among the best sportswriters of this generation, but of any other as well.

Contents

Foreword: Thomas Hauser

1: A Ghost Orbiting Forever: Muhammad Ali 1942–2016

2: Fugitive Days: Jack Johnson in Exile

3: The Last Goodbye: Remembering the Rivalry Between Roberto Durán and Esteban De Jesús

4: Right on for the Darkness: On Aaron Pryor 1955–2016

5: The Catastrophist: The Troubled World of Don Jordan

6: Dark Sun: Remembering Joe Frazier

7: Strange Days: The Johnny Saxton Story

8: The Hurting Kind: Wilfredo Gomez vs. Lupe Pintor

9: Yesterday Will Make You Cry: The Short, Tragic Career of Davey Moore

10: Under Saturn: Johnny Tapia 1967–2012

11: Total Everything Now: Mike Tyson, 1988

12: The Windfall Factor: The Night Bert Cooper Almost Beat Evander Holyfield for the Heavyweight Title

13: Red Arrow: The Mysterious Death of Sonny Liston

14: The Dark Corner: The Furious Life of Jake LaMotta

15: A Young Old Man: The Tragic Life of Ad Wolgast

16: The Lightning Within: Tony Ayala, Jr.

17: No Exit: Eddie Machen

18: One Long Season in Hell: On Michael Dokes

19: Lightning Express: The Quick Rise and Even Quicker Fall of Al Singer

20: Live Forward, Learned Backward: Mike Quarry and the “Quarry Curse”

21: Leftover Life to Kill: Who Will Remember Carmelo Negron?

22. The Busy World: The Murder of Stanley Ketchel

23. Too Far from Home: Battling Siki Comes to America

"Tobin astutely looks at the varying possibilities that would have led to Gatti’s death. Such an approach intelligently and respectfully piques interest in a real-life mystery that has left Gatti’s fans and family in need of both solace and satisfactory answers."—Kirkus Reviews

"[Tobin is] an intelligent writer and a thoughtful person, tender even, who writes with authority...I know he’s invited me to a place I’d not have accessed without him."—Bart Barry, 15rounds.com

“Tobin’s purpose is welcomely, deliberately, indefinite. Instead of a Shakespearean tragedy, or yet another bloody chapter of boxing’s wider legacy...Tobin’s document becomes a meditation on the human condition...”—The Sportsman

Arturo "Thunder" Gatti hung up his gloves in 2007, closing the book on a boxing career that bordered on the mythical. At long last, he seemed ready to leave the business of blood behind for a long, happy life outside the ring. His retirement was celebrated—boxing’s modern gladiator had earned his freedom.

Two years later, he was gone—found dead in a hotel in Brazil under mysterious circumstances. He was only thirty-seven years old. Did he commit suicide? Or was he killed by his new wife?

In Killed in Brazil?, Jimmy Tobin recounts the dramatic events surrounding Gatti's tragic demise and shines a light on what may have happened on that fateful night.

Killed in Brazil is the fourth in the Hamilcar Noir series. Hamilcar Noir is "Hard-Hitting True Crime" that blends boxing and true crime, featuring riveting stories captured in high-quality prose, with cover art inspired by classic pulp novels.

Perfect Gift For Boxing and True Crime Fans!

Killed in Brazil?, combined with other books in the Hamilcar Noir series, makes a great gift for fans of stories about the darker side of boxing. Books in the Hamilcar Noir series also make for a great gift idea for true crime fans—whether they are a die-hard boxing fan or not, they will devour these quick reads and ask for more!

"Brings to life the fight world of that era. Mr. Mitchell's account is full of memorably drawn scenes, and the stories we haven't heard before make Jacobs Beach a cigar-chomping read."—Wall Street Journal

"The value of Mitchell’s book lies not only in bringing back to life a lost era. He also shows us how the blood, sweat, and toil of the ring has been distilled into hard-won wisdom passed down through the generations—the connective tissue of the sweet science."—From the Foreword by Mike Stanton, author of the award-winning Unbeaten: Rocky Marciano's Fight for Perfection in a Crooked World

Gangsters have always infected fight game. At the end of the First World War, through Prohibition, and into the 1930s, the Mob emerged as a poisonous force, threatening to ravage the sport. But it was only when cutthroat Madison Square Garden promoter Mike Jacobs, chieftain of a notorious patch of Manhattan pavement called Jacobs Beach, stepped aside that the real devil appeared former Murder, Inc. killer and underworld power broker Frankie Carbo, a man known to many simply as Mr. Gray.

And Carbo wasn't alone. Along with a crooked cast of characters that included a rich playboy and an urbane lawyer, he controlled boxing through most of the 1950s, with the help of a diabolical deputy, Francis Blinky Palermo, who did much of Mr. Gray's dirty work, reportedly drugging fighters and robbing them blind. Not until 1961, when Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy shipped Carbo and Palermo to jail for twenty-five years, did it all come crashing down.

Enriched by the recollections of some of the men who were there, Kevin Mitchell's Jacobs Beach offers a gripping, noirish look at boxing and organized crime in postwar New York City and reveals the fading glamour of both.