New book gives details, photo history of Boston-area gangsters

A comprehensive chronicle of a century of organized crime in Greater Boston, with stories of the lives and arrests, complete with mug shots, of historic crime figures from Prohibition to present day, is what Boston Globe reporter Emily Sweeney delivers in her new book, Images of America: Boston Organized Crime.The book is a who?s who of gangsters from bit players to mob bosses, including late locally infamous mob underboss Gennaro J. “Jerry” Angiulo and Boston?s most notorious gangster, today in federal custody and facing trial in November, James J. “Whitey” Bulger.Recently released by Arcadia Publishing, Images of America: Boston Organized Crime also details key mob events including the South Boston gang wars of the 1960s, mob hits, heists, hangouts and pivotal moments such as the La Cosa Nostra initiation ceremony of four “made” men in a modest single-family home in Medford in Oct. 29, 1989, a ceremony that was secretly recorded by the FBI.A lifelong Boston resident and Globe reporter since 2001, Sweeney, as described on the book?s back cover, is “an award-winning journalist who researched and wrote Greatest Hits: A Mob Tour of Boston for the Boston Globe and Boston.com. She was also featured as a guest commentator in Stranger Than Fiction: The True Story of Whitey Bulger, Southie and The Departed, a documentary film about organized crime in South Boston.”Sweeney discussed what inspired her to write the book in a recent e-mail response to questions from The Daily Item.?Arcadia Publishing was familiar with my work and approached me a few years ago and asked me to write this book. I?m a huge history buff and I was flattered by their offer,” Sweeney wrote to The Item. “And so I began collecting and scanning photos and documents from different sources? The Brookline Police Department, the FBI, and Massachusetts Department of Correction, the State Police? and the family of Leslie Jones, a very talented newspaper photographer, graciously allowed me to use some of his photographs of crime scenes from the 1930s.”The book is also filled with entertaining profiles.?While researching the book, I came across some crazy stories, like the tale of Romeo Martin, a.k.a. The Home Run Hood,” Sweeney wrote in her email to The Item.As Sweeney describes in the book, Martin was dubbed The Home Run Hood in headlines after he escaped in 1951 from a Washington State Penitentiary after hitting a ball into the woods during a baseball game.?He ran to first base and then ? just kept running. He was eventually caught in his hometown of Boston, six months later.”The Home Run King ran out of steam in July 1965, when he was shot and killed by Joseph “The Animal” Barboza. His body, riddled with five shots to the chest, was found in the front seat of his red convertible in Revere with the motor still running.Sweeney also depicts some celebrities in the book, including 1935 heavyweight champion Jimmy Braddock, whose life was the inspiration for the 2005 Hollywood movie Cinderella Man. Although Braddock himself was not involved with the underworld, he?s pictured with a Boston boxer, Morris “Whitey” Hurwitz, who was, as Sweeney writes, “caught up in the dark side?”Hurwitz was killed outside his Brookline home in 1953.The book also tells the story of the 1933 murder of prominent owner of the former Cocoanut Grove nightclub, Charles “King” Solomon, alleged leader of a multi-million dollar liquor and narcotics bootlegging syndicate, gunned down by gangsters at Boston?s Cotton Club on Jan. 23 of that year.Two pages of the book offer a profile of Angiulo, whom Sweeney notes “rose to power in Boston during the 1960s” and “was described (by) FBI director J. Edgar Hoover as a veteran member of La Cosa Nostra, over-all boss of rackets in the Boston area” and “chief lieutenant of Raymond L.S. Patriarca, notorious Boston hoodlum.”The book gives details of Angiulo?s arrest at a restaurant in Boston?s North End in September of 1983, as he proclaimed while led away in handcuff