Gone, and forgotten
It wouldn’t have bothered Matty Ryan in the least that his passing didn’t even merit a mention by the Boston papers or TV stations. Matty personified Western Massachusetts: He thought of Boston, 90 miles to the east, as some far-flung, exotic outpost, where people spoke with funny accents and cared way too much about the Red Sox. In Matty’s world, Boston might as well be the moon.
Matthew J. Ryan Jr. was district attorney in Hampden County for 32 years. He was DA longer than anyone in any county ever was and probably ever will be. They don’t make DAs like Matty Ryan anymore. Then again, the world he occupied simply doesn’t exist anymore.
He was more powerful than any mayor, any congressman, anybody in all of Western Massachusetts He was like a sheriff in the Wild West. Over a huge swath of land, on either side of the Connecticut River, the only law was Matty Ryan’s law. There was a lot of good in that, and there was some bad.
When it came to light that Matty’s regular racquetball partner at the Springfield YMCA was Adolfo “Big Al’’ Bruno, Matty couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.
Now, it’s true that Big Al was the undisputed leader of that fine fraternal organization known as La Cosa Nostra, but that was exactly the point. In Matty’s world, you kept your friends close, and your enemies closer. In Matty’s world, he and Big Al shared a mutual interest in keeping things on the down-low. Gunplay was frowned upon. In Matty’s world, it was bad for his constituents. In Big Al’s world, it was bad for business.
But, in the end, guys like Matty Ryan and Al Bruno occupy very different worlds, and it all came apart at the seams. Matty started cutting slack to Big Al’s boys. The lines between good and evil got blurred. Matty’s chief investigator was a corrupt state cop named John Mace who stabbed and nearly killed Joe Quinlan, one of the many young prosecutors who Matty Ryan mentored, after Quinlan caught Mace stealing money from the evidence locker.
Everything was upside down. The top cop in the county was trying to kill a prosecutor and the top prosecutor in the county was playing footsie, not to mention racquetball, with the mob.
Nineteen years ago, after this newspaper ran an expose on Matty’s peculiarly beneficent view of Big Al’s minions, Matty decided to step down. Matty insisted it had nothing to do with the scandal, and maybe he believed that, and maybe it was true.
Big Al died six years ago in the parking lot of the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Society, of what the Mafia considers natural causes. That is to say, they thought he was a rat, so, naturally, they killed him.
It didn’t help that the FBI had written a report quoting one of its agents explaining how Big Al had helpfully explained to them who was and who wasn’t a made guy in Springfield. It really didn’t help that that report found its way into the hands of someone who told the wiseguys.
Funny. The wiseguys had no problem with the idea that Big Al was lacing up his sneakers at the Y every week with Matty Ryan. But once they found out Big Al had been talking to the feds, he was a dead man walking.
Matty Ryan died six weeks ago, at age 91, surrounded by his family. It was a great irony that one of the reasons Matty Ryan’s death passed unnoticed in and around Boston is that he died around the same time as Ted Kennedy. Matty delivered Western Massachusetts for Jack Kennedy. He did the same for Bobby and Teddy. Matty Ryan was delivered to Sacred Heart Church in Springfield for his funeral Mass on the same day that everybody found out Ted Kennedy had died.
Matty Ryan forgot more than the rest of us will ever know.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com. 
