“Mother of God, if you didn’t stand your ground against them Irish from the day you was born, you’re a goner. …So you gotta prove your point fast, see what I mean?” –Boston thief Tony Pino

 It was December 22, 1931, and the temperature in Boston was unseasonably warm, hovering around 60 degrees. Rain poured down steadily, washing away the season’s already accumulated snow. There would be no sleigh rides this holiday week, and the city wasn’t due for a White Christmas, either. The Athens of America’s official criminal day commenced when two sisters returned to their Brookline home after a weekend absence. They discovered thieves had struck—hard—and even lifted the Christmas gifts. Then, elsewhere, two well-dressed young men held up three chain stores, whose rows of registers were stuffed with holiday season dollars. In minutes, they liberated $123 from Roxbury and Brighton establishments and drove off in an automobile stolen from nearby Chelsea. Over in East Boston, there were better pickings for the thief that robbed two poker games and netted $875. It was a good take—if he lived to spend it.

With the Christmas deadline looming, thousands of last minute shoppers crowded Washington Street: There, beckoning to shoppers, were enormous department stores such as Woolworths, Filene’s, and Jordan Marsh. Managers already were preparing for the final customer onslaught by reinforcing their register lines with extra clerks. Grocery stores also were doing brisk business.

That morning, Boston Police officer Patrick McCoole picked his way through the crowds, selling police ball tickets. The Irishman even made his rounds in the crowded, filthy and bustling Italian ghetto of the North End. At nearly 10 a.m., McCoole entered the door of 317 Hanover Street. Called the Testa building, it mostly housed offices; the third floor was the domain of the C&F Importing Company; a hallway separated it from the offices of the law firm of Julius Wolfson.

McCoole arrived at the door of C & F Importing, whose offices were neither plush nor clean. In the dusty film covering the outside door’s glass panel, someone had written “Merry Xmas” in a child-like scrawl. Past the door, McCoole found a swarthy middle-aged man seated at a flat desk. His name was Joseph Lombardo, and he looked at McCoole with his close-set maroon eyes.

“Do you want to buy a ticket?” McCoole asked. Lombardo, as head of the “Italian lottery,” might have asked McCoole the same question.

“I already bought some,” replied Lombardo, a man soft-spoken, even when angry.

McCoole agreed, but said “I thought I might sell some more.” No sale: The policeman turned to leave and canvas the city’s market district, but as he reached the filthy door, another man, Salvatore Congemi, a known felon, entered the office. On McCoole’s way out, another thug, short and squat, passed him—the high-profile Henry Selvitella. Everyone called him “Henry Noyes”—one of his dozen aliases. Noyes also headed towards Lombardo’s office. More men left the Christmas rush outside and joined Lombardo, until, according to local folklore, seven associates were gathered in C&F Importing. Like the shoppers scrambling outside, they faced a looming deadline that day.

A Man Of Honor    

Giuseppe “Joe” Lombardo was a unique man who’d risen high in his various professions, legal and otherwise. He’d been running C&F for eight years—and was an import himself, from Salemi, Sicily. Born in1895, 11 year later he’d migrated to New York and worked as a “cloak maker.” He dropped out of school in the fifth grade, and started a clothing business, and presumably, began his criminal career. He racked up arrests for vagrancy, drunkenness and disorderly conduct, and assault with intent to murder.

Lombardo had also imported some of his perennially troubled island’s darker customs. He kept rough associates in Brooklyn, and apparently knew Al Capone and Charles Luciano. About 1925, possibly under orders from New York or beyond, Lombardo headed North with a few other Sicilians. A friend of his, Frank “Chi-Chi” Cucchiara, had already established himself in Boston. (Lombardo had befriended Chi-Chi, after the latter had, in the Sicilian fashion of gesture and language, steered Lombardo away from a fixed card game in a Brooklyn Italian social club.) Together, they formed a group tougher and more disciplined than any other that had appeared in the North End to date. Lombardo took over the existing Italian lottery, whose tickets were sold through barber and grocery shops (the winning number was announced over a wireless each week).

Contrary to motion picture depictions of professional gangsters, Lombardo was average looking, five feet nine inches, and weighing 160 pounds. He dressed like a banker in sober clothes, and was always “clean smelling,” as his nephew noted. Yet, he didn’t live like a banker. But other hoodlums feared Lombardo’s Mafia family, and their severe methods. Both Chi-Chi and Lombardo were arrested with dynamite and morphine. In 1927, Lombardo was caught with a fully loaded revolver under his car seat. By now, the North End locals knew Lombardo had ascended to the top rung of the local liquor distribution racket. Once, two men, ignorant of Lombardo’s identity, attacked him in a speakeasy. One tough, named Dominic “Sandy” Teresa, feeling the fight unfair, intervened. He saved Lombardo’s life, and was ever afterwards called “Scarface.” The two assailants were later murdered, while Lombardo, seeing the value of Sandy Teresa, made him a bodyguard and driver.

In 1932, bootlegging proved a $1 billion-a-year business. “For the first time in the history of the world, crime is adequately financed,” as one lawyer noted. With those dollars came stiff competition–and recent murders in the North End had earned it the nickname of the “shooting gallery.” On January 1, 1931, Carmello “Goofy Campbell” Guiffre was killed just feet from the Testa Building; someone also put felon Guy Morgan “on the spot” in the same place. Businessmen complained the street was lethal.        The prior July, the police had discovered the body of Lombardo’s friend, “Good Morning” Joe Buongiorno, in Revere. In 1931, police had charged Lombardo for the attempted murder of Guy “Kid Morgan” Perelli, not far from the C& F office. However, the would-be assassin had missed Perelli and hit a bystander, instead.

Although Lombardo was a quiet but real power in the North End, that meant less than nothing to the most famous and powerful gangster in Boston, Frankie “Gustin” Wallace. His Irish Gustin Gang, had cowed all rivals. For years, the Gustins had hijacked Lombardo’s liquor–it wasn’t as if Lombardo could go to the police about it. Seething with resentment over the Irish dictatorship, Lombardo had warned Frankie to “lay off.”  Now the underworld was abuzz that someone had already issued a “ticket,” but that hadn’t spooked the Gustins, now holding a Mafia liquor still for a $500 ransom. Possibly, Lombardo could redeem it in time for Christmas. One of Frankie’s associates had called him early on December 22 and said a certain prominent North End man wanted to “talk business.” Presumably, that meant redeeming the still from the Gustins. Frankie’s brother, Steve “Gustin” Wallace, no pacifist, warned him to avoid the North End. Frankie went, anyway.

Appointment Of Gustins With Destiny  

Although this visit to Lombardo was unwise, Frankie and his Gustins had never counted on subtlety. That noon on the 22, , Frankie Wallace, with fellow Gustins Barney “Dodo” Walsh and Timothy Coffey, visited an injured gang brother in Boston City Hospital. With two other Gustins following in another car, Frankie drove to the North End, and parked near Parmenter Street. The Gustins exited their cars, headed down Hanover Street, and entered the Testa building. Clearly, there were enough of them to make a point stick. Frankie and Walsh led their colleagues up to the third floor, while Coffey stayed in the rear with the two other men.

Frankie arrived at the C&F door with “Merry Xmas” scrawled on it, opened it and entered. Inside the Wolfson law office, a young secretary named Elizabeth Franklin had just returned from a “shopping tour.” She hadn’t even removed her hat as she sat down to sign Christmas cards. Just then, she heard loud crashes from across the hallway, as if chairs and desks were being overturned. Then there was one gunshot, followed by a barrage, and shouts, screams, and curses. Upstairs, a group of American Legionnaires preparing Christmas baskets heard the ruckus; a woman humming a Christmas carol stopped and stood still. Downstairs, Miss Franklin heard bullets flying outside her door, and “it seemed as if the whole building was about to come down.”

Then the Wolfson office door swung open, and Frankie Gustin staggered in, holding a warm gun he’d just emptied of bullets. A bullet had caught him at the armpit level on his right side, and penetrated the aorta, which started gushing. He dropped his weapon at the doorway, made his way through the room and collapsed into a chair. He leaned over on his left side uncertainly, his head resting between his legs on the floor. In that “grotesque” position he died—something he might avoided if he’d conducted his business with the Italians over the phone that day.

Seeing the blood-covered Frankie, the secretary jumped up and screamed. Another Gustin came in behind Frankie, picked up the gun and threw it past Franklin and out the plate glass window facing Hanover Street. The weapon left a large hole in the window and plummeted to the street, just missing a pedestrian as it landed in the gutter. The Gustin then shot at the open door, and Franklin fainted. On reviving, she found herself lying next to Frankie’s corpse. Unharmed, Coffey cringed behind a screen, holding a chair protectively in front of himself. The third Gustin brandished a Luger with one hand and dialed the telephone with the other.

“Give me the police!” he shouted before giving up disgustedly, and hiding the gun in the drawer. Franklin crawled under her desk and wept. The shooter, noticing the quiet, went to the door, called the police again, asking Miss Franklin, still under the desk, for the address. Then he left.

Shift Of Gangsters Power In Boston

With the same abruptness as it had started, the fight ended. The noise stopped, the smoke cleared, and both the gangs in and around the C&F office scattered. Some men fled through the corridor and out the building; others ran through the dance hall to a rear staircase, leaving the door open behind. Rushing downstairs to the first floor, these men entered the poolroom, stopped to straighten out their clothes, and then exited quickly. One of them carried a bloodstained gray hat.

The shootings quickly rocked the North End—never a quiet place, anyway—like no other event in years. A crowd of 2,000 turned Hanover Street into an ocean of bobbing fedoras and other headgear. In ten minutes, the police descended on the Testa building, calling in reserves from the Hanover Street and other stations nearby to manage the mob. Officers by the wagonload poured into the Testa building as Boston Police Superintendent Michael Crowley arrived to take personal command. A special investigator found Frankie’s pistol on Hanover Street, retrieved it, and walked to the third floor and entered Room 3. He found Frankie’s corpse laying face-down across the chair; Miss Franklin continued to weep under her desk.

“What’s wrong?” the investigator asked the secretary. He then saw Coffey on the floor, reached for his weapon, knocked down the screen, and lifted the gangster to his feet. He then “fanned” (frisked) him.

One officer coming up the stairs discovered Frankie wasn’t the only victim. A bullet had caught Dodo Walsh in the upper right side of his chest, and passed through each lung and his heart. Rapidly dying, he fell down to the second floor landing, near the automatic elevator. There he lay, his body stretched out and face down. A 32-caliber Remington automatic, fully loaded and unfired, lay a few inches from his head. The officer then saw an old man on the staircase, about six feet above him, a revolver as at his feet. As the officer approached, the old man immediately put his hands up. Through an interpreter, he claimed to be a 60-year-old retired Italian garage owner. He admitted he’d been on an errand inside the Testa, when, as he put it, “I heard boom boom.” The police arrested him and several other witnesses and suspects.

At 1 p.m., patrolman McCoole returned to a Testa building now awash in blue. Stepping over Walsh’s body on his way to the third floor, he re-entered the C&F office, noting the chair Lombardo had been sitting in earlier was overturned. Checking the desk, he found in the locked top drawer an unloaded and unfired Belgian automatic .38 caliber. The office also contained Lombardo’s coat and hat, a smashed chair, and windows ventilated with neat bullet holes. Bullets had creased C&F’s walls and furniture, proving it hadn’t been a completely one-way fight. The furniture in the Wolfson office was turned “topsy turvy”; someone had thrown a chair in the adjoining hall (devoted to the Mutual Benefit Society of the Town of Canasa Di Puglia), and a bullet had marked a table there.

The police surrounded the building, took stations by the stairways, padlocked the rear door, and roped it off to prevent any unsanctioned exits. Investigators lifted fingerprints and retrieved the bullets embedded in the door and walls. Others snapped photographs by the hundred, from every angle, concentrating on the bullet holes and furniture to reconstruct the event. After obtaining a warrant to search the C&F office, police also confiscated hundreds of slips of paper—evidence of Lombardo’s thriving lottery business. Police recovered seven guns, including the one flung out the window, and the two found in Lombardo’s and Wolfson’s desks. Two other weapons were downstairs in the cellar, in a bag of sawdust in a receptacle; another duo lay in the hallway; and another was behind the Testa. There were also the living human clues to examine, and officers sent Miss Franklin and Coffey down to headquarters for interrogation. A miserable-looking Coffey remained mute except to ask for his lawyer. After an eyewitness recognized some mug shots, the state had the beginning of a case.

Problematically, the police didn’t recognize the victims. To be fair, death didn’t suit Frankie—his features were so distorted, not even his own brother could identify him at the mortuary. Between the abruptness of the shooting, the anonymity of the corpses, and the locals’ predictable silence, the police were baffled. However, officers immediately sent Teletype orders to arrest Lombardo and Frankie as suspects. At 2 p.m., the medical examiner arrived to look at the bodies, which were then carried out for transportation to the city’s North Mortuary on North Street. The spectators watched the removal of the bloody corpses, and the children in the crowd could recall the sight for years later. While Frankie’s body headed to the mortuary, investigators were simultaneously scouring the city looking for him. Although the medical examiner had forbidden it, 10 hours after the shooting, an investigator lifted the corpses’ fingerprints, anyway. Frankie Wallace had found an unbeatable “rap”; as one gleeful patrolman observed: “They got the baby of them all on Hanover Street this afternoon.”

A reporter visited the Walsh family store in South Boston, and there found Dodo’s 19-year-old brother behind the register. The journalist bluntly informed the teenager of the murder. “This will kill my mother,” the youth said, and despite his tears, remained at his clerk’s outpost. He didn’t know anything of his brother’s gangster life, he said.

The murders’ brazenness caused a predictable public outcry, with a half dozen papers, in edition after edition, morning, noon, and evening, trumpeting the saga on the front page. For answers, police grilled two suspects all night at headquarters, but neither broke.

Mysteries abounded—and abound. Confusingly, at midnight along the beach in Revere, someone found an abandoned car lacking a license plate. Inside was an unloaded revolver; on the side someone had written in the dust on the car the name “Wallace.” Police cast out a broader net to trap the desired fish. Superintendent Crowley ordered police to look not just in the usual Gustin haunts, but also in hospitals and doctors’ offices for the injured, realizing “gangdom licks its own wounds.”As was obvious, however, the police needed Lombardo, whom they suspected may have been far away on the Atlantic Ocean on a rum-running vessel. Taking no chances, the authorities printed and distributed circulars in the North End, and officers stood guard at train stations and the steam ship terminal in Boston to watch for him. Police also sought Cucchiara, Noyes, Congemi, and another associate, Tony “The Canadian” Sandrelli.

But as formidable as the Lombardo gang was, in the Gustin gang, it faced a larger, by volume at least, society of criminals. The laws of physics applying to revenge, everyone expected an equal and Irish counter reaction. Currently, Steve Wallace was showing uncommon caution by hiding, and a man called “Spike” was the new Gustin chieftain. However, with no tangible opponents on the battlefield, the fight stopped being a matter of physics and gunpowder, but of threat, counter threat, and rumor.

The police and the press fanned this fire, reporters even quoted a Gustin openly boasting he would “chop up” Lombardo so that the police wouldn’t recognize him. The exuberant and blossoming Gustin bad will didn’t just extend to Lombardo: members also wondered about Coffey’s sad performance on the day of the fight. For its part, the North End gang was ready to give Spike and the whole gang “the works.”