'Sopranos' pales next to reality
Forget "The Sopranos." Boston has its own Irish tenor, and we get to watch him sing for free.
The scriptwriters of the soap opera/cult phenomenon on Home Box Office picked the wrong week to have their lead character dismiss Boston as "Scranton, with clams." Nothing that has happened yet on HBO's hot series about the New York-New Jersey Mafia can compete with recent developments in our own fair mob backwater.
Where else but in Boston could the discovery of a mob burial ground only steps from a favorite police watering hole feature a collection of colorful characters with ties to the FBI, the president of the state university system, and the Irish Republican Army?
Press accounts of cops unearthing the skeletons of what are thought to be three victims of the Winter Hill Gang across from Florian Hall read less like news reports than a Hollywood movie treatment.
The scene: a yellow striped party tent erected above a wind-swept Dorchester burial site; an excavation hampered by weather that went from springlike to frostbite almost overnight, making the frozen ground far less willing to yield the mob's secrets than Kevin Weeks, the Winter Hill lieutenant who reportedly has taken up singing to save his own neck.
The suspected victims: one of the architects of a 20-year-old $1.5 million bank heist in Medford; one of the crew members of a North Shore fishing boat that once crossed the Atlantic on an ill-fated mission to deliver guns to the IRA; and a beautiful young blonde whose reputed lover, Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi, ran the Winter Hill Gang with James "Whitey" Bulger. Bulger, of course, is the South Boston crime boss who has spent the last five years on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List, while his brother William graduated from president of the Massachusetts Senate to president of the University of Massachusetts.
It's a uniquely Boston story, all right.
It might be a new century and a new millennium. But how new is the "new" Boston? We can redevelop the South Boston waterfront. We can price the locals out of City Point. But Boston, it seems, is forever in the grip of skeletons from the past.
Who more than John Connolly, the retired, recently indicted FBI man, personifies the way in which the past steals the future in Boston?
How often has Connolly recounted the story of Whitey Bulger buying him an ice cream cone when he was an impressionable young boy in South Boston?
Connolly did not choose Whitey's path. Instead, he chose one of two professions most revered by his Irish clan. He didn't become a priest; he did the next best thing. He became a cop. How could he have known in those heady days at Boston College that the future would take him back to Whitey?
He stands indicted now with Whitey and Flemmi on racketeering charges, accused of helping the two mobsters, both of them his FBI informants, continue their illegal activities under his protection.
The question now is whether that alleged protection extended to murder.
Will Weeks implicate Connolly in the violence represented by the bones in that frozen Dorchester grave? Will Connolly sing, too? If he does, who could he implicate? The mob bosses or his own at the FBI?
Television critics contend that the appeal of "The Sopranos" is less the writers' depiction of the Mafia than their ability to capture the ordinary venality of the human beings at the center of a mythic criminal enterprise.
The bones pulled from that weed-choked lot along the Southeast Expressway are no fiction. John McIntyre, Arthur "Bucky" Barrett, and Deborah Hussey - however ordinary, however venal - were once made of flesh and blood. They left behind real people who mourn them still.
The unearthing of their skeletons should put an end to the Bulger legend, the myth that Whitey was no more than a Boston Irish rogue.
There is no romance in murder, no heroics in flight from the law, no honor in betrayal, even among thieves. On television, a good scriptwriter can make the members of a Mafia family seem like a modern-day Partridge Family.
What we have seen on the nightly news in the last few days are the literal skeletons of a city's past. There is nothing entertaining about it. 