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Don’t forget to hit me up on Vemno at ganglandwire and buy me a cup of coffee to help with expenses. This is a republished story from November 2018 to finish out our month on the New England Organized Crime scene. Boston Globe Reporter Emily Sweeney has covered it all as a reporter and blogger. In her spare time, she has written two books on the history of organized crime in the Boston area. Emily covers local news and writes the âBlotter Talesâ column for the Globe. A native of the area, she was born in Dorchester, graduated from Northeastern University and played on NUâs championship-winning womenâs ice hockey team. Emily has been on the Boston Globe staff since 2001. She currently serves on the board of directors for the New England First Amendment Coalition (NEFAC) and the New England Society of News Editors (NESNE).
Emily’s first book is titled Boston Organized Crime and contains many rare photographs from Boston organized crime history. Learn about all the bookies and loan sharks, gangsters and wiseguys, hoodlums and hitmen from New England. Emily’s book documents famous Boston crimes and criminals from the Great Brink’s Robbery, Charlie “King” Solomon and his death inside the Cotton Club in Roxbury and Blackfriars Massacre, where authorities found five gangsters men dead, slumped a card game in a cramped basement office. In Boston Organized Crime, true crime author and reporter Emily Sweeney takes the reader on a dark path looking at Boston’s famous crimes and criminals. using her exclusive access to a rare collection of crime scene photographs, mug shots, and police documents. This book reveals the places and people who set the scene for the modern rise of Whitey Bulger.
Emily’s second book, Gangland Boston chronicles Boston’s organized crime from the La Cosa Nostra and prohibition-era Irish gangs to the rise of Whitey Bulger. Boston gangsters have played a major role in shaping the area’s history. Gangland Boston is packed with photos and Sweeney reveals the hidden history of the time when the North End was wrought with gun violence and Hanover Street was a virtual shooting gallery. A time when Mickey the Wiseguy ruled the underworld. Sweeney writes how gang violence unfolded during Prohibition and the Italian mafia rise to power. She documents the development of the major Irish gang, the Gustin Gang and the reader learns the little known fact that the leader of the Gustin Gang was an Olympic athlete?
As a bonus for Boston residents or mob fans that may visit Boston, Sweeney’s book contains the exact addresses where mobsters lived, worked, and played around Greater Boston
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