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Speaker 5: You are now listening to True Murder The Most Shocking
Speaker 5: Killers in True crime History and the authors that have
Speaker 5: written about them, Gaesy Bundy Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every
Speaker 5: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 5: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 5: host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 4: Good Evening. At the end of the nineteen seventy six
Speaker 4: football season, more than forty Harvard athletes went to Boston's
Speaker 4: Combat Zone to celebrate. In the city's adult entertainment district,
Speaker 4: drugs and prostitution ran rampant, violent crime was commonplace, and
Speaker 4: corrupt police turned the other At the end of the night,
Speaker 4: Italian American star athlete Andy Popolo, raised in the city's
Speaker 4: North End, was murdered in a stabbing. Three African American
Speaker 4: men were accused of the crime. His murder made national
Speaker 4: news and led to the eventual demise of the city's
Speaker 4: Red Light District. Starting with this brutal murder, The Combat
Speaker 4: Zone tells the story of the Popolos families struggle with
Speaker 4: both a devastating loss and a criminal justice system that
Speaker 4: produced two trials with opposing verdicts, all within the context
Speaker 4: of a racially divided Boston. Brogan traces the contentious relationships
Speaker 4: between boston segregated neighborhoods during the bussing crisis, shines a
Speaker 4: light on a court system that allowed lawyers to strike
Speaker 4: potential jurors based purely on the racial or ethnic identity,
Speaker 4: and lays bare the deep seated corruption within the police
Speaker 4: department and throughout the Combat Zone. What emerges is a
Speaker 4: fascinating snapshot of the city at a transitional moment in
Speaker 4: its recent past. The book that we're featuring this evening
Speaker 4: is The Combat Zone, Murder Race and Boston's Struggle for Justice,
Speaker 4: with my special guest, journalist and author Jan Brogan. Welcome
Speaker 4: to the program, and thank you very much for this interview.
Speaker 4: Jan Brogan, Dan.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for inviting me. It's a pleasure
Speaker 3: to be here.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much, and congratulations on this very, very
Speaker 4: fascinating book.
Speaker 3: Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 4: You wrote that this book is a product of more
Speaker 4: than ten years work. Tell us about the genesis of
Speaker 4: this book project, where it came from.
Speaker 3: I had written four murder mysteries before I turned to
Speaker 3: this book, and when I was done with the last
Speaker 3: murder mystery, I kept saying I knew at that point
Speaker 3: I could write a murder mystery and I wanted to
Speaker 3: do something else, and I felt like I could make
Speaker 3: any book work, and I kept saying, I want to
Speaker 3: find a story that really needs to be told. And
Speaker 3: I said that enough times and enough cocktail parties in
Speaker 3: Westwood where I was living where I read my kid
Speaker 3: at the time, and a friend of mine I was
Speaker 3: in Costco, said, jam, he writes screenplays, and I said, well,
Speaker 3: I have written screenplays, but I've never written a successful screenplay.
Speaker 3: And by that I meant not that he even got
Speaker 3: made into film, even that I thought it should have
Speaker 3: been made into a film. It was good, I said, whine.
Speaker 3: He said, because Danny Poppolo needs a screenwriter. And I said,
Speaker 3: why on earth does Danny Popolo need a screenwriter? Because
Speaker 3: I knew him. He and my husband played basketball together
Speaker 3: and we had oldest daughters were the same age. And
Speaker 3: he said, because you remember that Harvard football player who
Speaker 3: got murdered in the combat zone years ago, And I
Speaker 3: was like, yeah, I did remember that. So I said
Speaker 3: that was his older brother. So I went back and
Speaker 3: I googled a trial and I saw there were two trials,
Speaker 3: and I met with Danny and Francis Terrella, who's called
Speaker 3: Dash and they had a director, like they had a
Speaker 3: pretty successful director who had done Spen City and Home
Speaker 3: Improvement anddy Cadiff, and they needed a screenwriter to do
Speaker 3: the Obviously, they didn't have money for the screenwriter, so
Speaker 3: I said, I will write it on spec if I have.
Speaker 3: But I knew that I knew that most screenplays do
Speaker 3: not get made into films, so I said, you know,
Speaker 3: it's just a real uphill battle, so I said, but
Speaker 3: I felt like I could sell it as a book,
Speaker 3: So I said, I'll do it on so back, which
Speaker 3: means you only get paid if it gets made into
Speaker 3: the movie, which means pretty much you never get paid.
Speaker 3: If I could write a book, and since I'm a journalist,
Speaker 3: I have to have leeway to you know, the screenplay,
Speaker 3: I'll do your way, but the book has to be
Speaker 3: I'm a journalist, so it has to be the way
Speaker 3: I see things. So we agread to that. We had
Speaker 3: an agreement on that, and I wrote the screenplay and
Speaker 3: I worked with Anddykative, who was the director, who was
Speaker 3: really it was really even though I never got paid,
Speaker 3: it was really a very valuable experience that I enjoyed.
Speaker 3: And he never could sell the greenplay. You never could
Speaker 3: get it made right. He couldn't raise the funding. He
Speaker 3: wanted to be the director and the producer, I think.
Speaker 3: So I started on the book, and so that was
Speaker 3: like in two thousand and seven, I think, And I started.
Speaker 3: Took me about a year to write the screenplay, and
Speaker 3: then it took me another year and a half to
Speaker 3: write the book proposal. And then my agent could sell it,
Speaker 3: except he had one one publisher who was interested, and
Speaker 3: that was University Press of New England. And they said, well,
Speaker 3: we are interested. We can't give you an advance, but
Speaker 3: we'd like you to write it on spec. And I said, no,
Speaker 3: I'm not going to do that because that is just
Speaker 3: an unbelievable amount of work. And even then I did
Speaker 3: not know how much work it was when I said that,
Speaker 3: because it was way or more than I thought. So
Speaker 3: I put down the project for a couple of years
Speaker 3: and I took a job at UMass and I was
Speaker 3: working for the President's office in communications, writing speeches and
Speaker 3: press press releases. And then I got an email like
Speaker 3: years later from the University Press, New England. I said,
Speaker 3: we want to go forward with this project. At this time,
Speaker 3: they're willing to give you an advance that just like
Speaker 3: what I emailed him, and he said, there was just
Speaker 3: one marketing guy didn't want to do it. He's gone.
Speaker 3: Now we wanted to do it, so they gave me
Speaker 3: an advance. They wanted it in a year, and I
Speaker 3: said okay, because I thought I'd done all the research.
Speaker 3: It took me a year and a half, so I
Speaker 3: got it. And then when they as soon as I
Speaker 3: delivered it at the new deadline, which was a year
Speaker 3: and a half April first, twenty eighteen, three weeks later
Speaker 3: they voted to go out of business and I had
Speaker 3: to find a new publisher. So it took me another
Speaker 3: couple of years to find you Mass, And then they
Speaker 3: wanted They said, we really love this because but this
Speaker 3: is narrative. This is narrative nonfiction. And the publisher or
Speaker 3: the editor University Press, had been a fan of my mystery,
Speaker 3: so he wanted me to use a lot of those techniques.
Speaker 3: So I said, well, I'm happy to write it a
Speaker 3: straight journalism because it really didn't require that many changes.
Speaker 3: But I put in those changes and then finally it
Speaker 3: got published. So the whole thing start to finish was
Speaker 3: about ten years.
Speaker 4: Almost tell us about Danny and Andy and Fran tell
Speaker 4: us about the Popolo family before we talk about how
Speaker 4: Andy came to be in the combat zone. November nineteen
Speaker 4: seventy six.
Speaker 3: Okay, so they were raised pretty much in the North End.
Speaker 3: They're Italian. There are both sets of Italian grandparents, and
Speaker 3: all their cousins and aunts and uncles lived there. And
Speaker 3: if you if you google the name Popolo in Boston,
Speaker 3: you'll get like three Danny Popolo's. You know, they're a big,
Speaker 3: big family, and they owned the grandfather one of the
Speaker 3: grandfathers owned a business. The grandmother's family owned a business
Speaker 3: provisioning with Italian provisions, provisioning restaurants. But they grew up
Speaker 3: in a very small two bedroom apartment with the boys
Speaker 3: in one bedroom, the parents another, and the fran had
Speaker 3: to sleep on a pull out couch in a living room.
Speaker 3: And they considered themselves incredibly, incredibly privileged because they had
Speaker 3: their own bathroom, where the city was so poor at
Speaker 3: that time in the North End, a lot of times
Speaker 3: you get in an apartment, you had to share a
Speaker 3: bathroom in the hallway with the other apartments and take
Speaker 3: your you went to the public's baths. You know, it
Speaker 3: was just a different era of the sixties and seventies.
Speaker 3: Boston was a lot poorer than people can many people remember,
Speaker 3: and so by the time Fran was like sixteen, the
Speaker 3: father said, the parents said, all right, she can't sleep,
Speaker 3: but she needed her own room. So they they finally
Speaker 3: found a house, you know, they could ford in Jamaica Plane,
Speaker 3: which is another neighborhood of Boston, more mixed. It has
Speaker 3: Irish and Italian and eleven eight. You know, it's just
Speaker 3: a more mixed community. So the boys were probably maybe
Speaker 3: twelve and fourteen or eleven and thirteen at that time,
Speaker 3: and then they moved to Jamaica Plain, which is not
Speaker 3: that far from the North End. But they all the
Speaker 3: father worked in the restaurant. The kids would work there
Speaker 3: in the summertimes, bottling olive oil. They would you know,
Speaker 3: they went there to play sports all the time. So
Speaker 3: they were very, very very proud of their North End
Speaker 3: roots and really related to the North End.
Speaker 4: You talk about the work, the work instinct that was
Speaker 4: instilled by the father Andrew Sr. But also that despite
Speaker 4: this the poverty that they encountered growing up, Andy had
Speaker 4: always wanted to be a doctor, and so he had
Speaker 4: made it to Harvard and so tell us about his
Speaker 4: achievements and his athletic achievements as well.
Speaker 3: Okay, so Andy and Danny so Franta is the oldest.
Speaker 3: Danny and Andy are only less than two years apart,
Speaker 3: but a little less than two years apart, and they
Speaker 3: always shared a room and they're always very close. And
Speaker 3: even when they moved to Jamaica plane, even when Framm
Speaker 3: moved out, they elected to stay in the same room.
Speaker 3: They were very close. Andy, as the oldest son, was
Speaker 3: just an overachiever from day one. He would just work
Speaker 3: harder than anybody else to be the best. He was
Speaker 3: also very skilled athletically, as was Danny. Really, Danny was
Speaker 3: an easy going one and he was happy to just
Speaker 3: adore his older brother. And they weren't competitive as brothers
Speaker 3: can be. It was more like Andy was always trying
Speaker 3: to boost Danny up and Danny was just happy to
Speaker 3: admire his brother. They both were the parents. You know,
Speaker 3: they're in the North End and which at that time
Speaker 3: as the headquarters for the Massachusetts Mom and father had
Speaker 3: gone to school with some of the Andreulo brothers. Andreulou
Speaker 3: is the family that run the mob in the North End.
Speaker 3: And you know, he came back for a marine. He
Speaker 3: was offered a corner, you know, and he had very
Speaker 3: respectively decline because he had really other ideas for his family.
Speaker 3: One thing, he was a very religious man. The family
Speaker 3: was very religious still is very very Catholic, very religious.
Speaker 3: And he made sure his boys weren't going to be
Speaker 3: drawn into those corners. So he had them in sports,
Speaker 3: very busy all the time. They focused on education. Both
Speaker 3: boys got into Boston Latin, which is a public school,
Speaker 3: but it's like a private school historically. You know, Benjamin
Speaker 3: Franklin went there, a lot of I think jan John
Speaker 3: Hancock might have gone there. It's a theater to Harvard.
Speaker 3: If you've got good grades in Boston Latin, which was
Speaker 3: a very classically you got you got classical training and
Speaker 3: you had a good shot of getting to Harvard if
Speaker 3: you were near the top of your class. So that's
Speaker 3: what Andy did. He was a three seasoned varsity athlete.
Speaker 3: He got into Harvard and he and he just worked
Speaker 3: harder than anybody else to excel. Like they said in
Speaker 3: what he said, Boston Latin, he was in the basketball
Speaker 3: court basketball team. He would he would run nine miles.
Speaker 3: I mean, he would just run like crazy. Beforehand just
Speaker 3: to be warmed up. You know. He just worked harder
Speaker 3: than anybody else. He overstudied, he over exercised. He was
Speaker 3: just the kind of kid who was like, I am
Speaker 3: going to succeed for my family. My family's made sacrifices
Speaker 3: for me, and I'm going to repay them. He was
Speaker 3: very into his family, even when it was Harvard. He
Speaker 3: would come home every weekend to spend with his younger
Speaker 3: brother and maybe it was sure there are a few
Speaker 3: weekends he missed, but he really loved. They were very,
Speaker 3: very tight Italian family.
Speaker 4: Now it's November nineteen seventy six and the varsity football team,
Speaker 4: according to tradition tradition, go to the combat zone to a
Speaker 4: strip club for a drink. So tell us about this
Speaker 4: tradition and tell us about their travel into the combat
Speaker 4: zone that night.
Speaker 3: So this is the are they called the breakup party.
Speaker 3: It's the You know that they had just lost to
Speaker 3: Yale in the final game where Andy had gotten a
Speaker 3: mild concussion, so he was told not to drink, and
Speaker 3: he was not much of a drinker by all accounts.
Speaker 3: He wasn't much of a drinker anyway. But Harvard had
Speaker 3: a tradition they went from the Harvard Club, this very tony,
Speaker 3: classy place on Commab. At the time, they had this
Speaker 3: beautiful breakup dinner. Ethel Kennedy is there to give a
Speaker 3: special award, trophies are given, speeches, lectures, they have but
Speaker 3: you know, the drinking age at that time is eighteen,
Speaker 3: so they have you know, a little cocktail hour, and
Speaker 3: then during dinner they don't drink anything. Afterwards they have
Speaker 3: their beer and they look at the reels and then
Speaker 3: the final thing is they all the football players all
Speaker 3: go to the combat zone or at last drink together
Speaker 3: as a team. And this had been done, This has
Speaker 3: been done for years. And one of the kids, one
Speaker 3: of the football players, cousin or something, was a manager
Speaker 3: at the Naked Eye, so he arranged for them to
Speaker 3: have a private room in back in the back, in
Speaker 3: the back bar, and the forty of them go down
Speaker 3: to the combat zone and some of them go down
Speaker 3: in a Harvard equipment fan and the equipment manager goes
Speaker 3: as well. So this is something that you know, you're
Speaker 3: supposed to do it your last night together as a team.
Speaker 3: And it was crazy timing because the combat Zone had
Speaker 3: just been in the news for all its crime I
Speaker 3: mean it was crime ridden anyway, and that was kind
Speaker 3: of allure of it in the seventies. It was exciting.
Speaker 3: You never knew what was going to happen. It was dangerous,
Speaker 3: it was wild. It was and it wasn't just Harvard
Speaker 3: who did this. I have a friend who went played
Speaker 3: the Boston college football team and he told me they
Speaker 3: did it too. A lot of the colleges did it.
Speaker 3: It was like, you know, we're going to go down
Speaker 3: in the team as a team, so we're safe because
Speaker 3: safety and numbers. And that's what they did. They went
Speaker 3: to the combat zone and they had they watched the show.
Speaker 3: They some of them got up at the stage and
Speaker 3: danced with the stripper, in which case the bouncer came
Speaker 3: out and said, okay, it's time to leave, boys, because
Speaker 3: it was a closing time anyway, And forty or so
Speaker 3: football players spill onto the street and the combat zone.
Speaker 4: Now, just before we talk about the events that lead
Speaker 4: to Andy Popolo being stabbed, we've got to talk about
Speaker 4: the combat zone. In an episode that people might not
Speaker 4: have listened to. About three weeks ago, the book talked
Speaker 4: about Boston's the combat Zone. So briefly, tell us about
Speaker 4: this experiment by Boston's social leaders to create this red
Speaker 4: light district that was coined the Combat Zone.
Speaker 3: And why so, Boston had had another red light district
Speaker 3: called Scully Square, and they tried to get rid of it.
Speaker 3: They used an urban renewal money to bulldoze it and
Speaker 3: put the city Hall there. But when they did that,
Speaker 3: those businesses that whole market need just moved down Washington
Speaker 3: Street was called Lower Washington, where there were already some
Speaker 3: theaters and some bars. There was already crime ridden in
Speaker 3: the sixties, there had been a murder there. At one
Speaker 3: point had been you know, family entertainment but was poor.
Speaker 3: And that's where the navyman used to go to drink
Speaker 3: when there was a navy yard in Charlestown's where all
Speaker 3: the military went. And that's what and they used to
Speaker 3: get into fights, and that's why it was called the
Speaker 3: combat Zone in the sixties. Even before this, even before
Speaker 3: it's an official red light district. So by the early
Speaker 3: seventies there were thirty five sex related establishments there, adult entertainment,
Speaker 3: and so there had also been a couple of there's
Speaker 3: been a Supreme Court, a US Supreme Court decision, and
Speaker 3: a state High Court decision, which made it very hard
Speaker 3: to establish something as steen and made it hard for
Speaker 3: cities to legislate against these businesses. You couldn't just kick
Speaker 3: them out. So Boston came up with the idea. One
Speaker 3: of the assistants said, well, what you do is you
Speaker 3: can you can't keep it out, but you can restrict
Speaker 3: it to an area. So they vote it to restrict
Speaker 3: it to a four block area in Lower Washington which
Speaker 3: is kind of bounded by the downtown and Chinatown, and
Speaker 3: it's at the kind of the far edge of the
Speaker 3: common and in this four block area were going to
Speaker 3: allow it. And then they also and it was also
Speaker 3: contiguous to Park Square, and that they grandfathered it. I
Speaker 3: think there was a Playboy bunny club there and they said,
Speaker 3: if you're there already, you can continue, but no new businesses.
Speaker 3: So this created the combat zone, and all sorts of
Speaker 3: promises were made. They were going to clean it up,
Speaker 3: they were going to police it really well, they were
Speaker 3: going to add new lights, and they did do a
Speaker 3: couple of things. They tried to improve the signing. They
Speaker 3: tried to work with the businesses to improve the signing,
Speaker 3: but the businesses did not want to spend the money
Speaker 3: on improvement, and the city didn't have much money, and
Speaker 3: they just they were neglecting all the neighborhoods pretty much,
Speaker 3: but they really neglected this one. And there's another factor.
Speaker 3: At the time, the mob is big. This is like
Speaker 3: the heyday of the Mob, and this is not far
Speaker 3: from the North End, and pretty soon the mob moves
Speaker 3: in and it's crime quadruples from the sixties to seventies,
Speaker 3: and it's an area when you think about it, the
Speaker 3: city is really poor at this time. Unemployment is fifteen
Speaker 3: percent in the white neighborhoods and twenty percent in the
Speaker 3: black neighborhoods. There's really two black neighborhoods, but it's very poor.
Speaker 3: And the combat zone is a place where people you're
Speaker 3: either there to go to a strip club, bisex, or
Speaker 3: buy drugs. So everybody's carrying cash because these are it's
Speaker 3: pretty much a cash It's more of a cash society
Speaker 3: back then anyway. So pickpocketing and muggings are big, car
Speaker 3: thefts are big. It's and the police are utterly corrupt.
Speaker 3: And this is discovered only two weeks before these events.
Speaker 3: The police commissioner himself, who had been brought in to
Speaker 3: clean up corruption. Was very frustrated by the power of
Speaker 3: the union and the agreements that were already in place,
Speaker 3: and he tried various things to clean up the area.
Speaker 3: And one of one of the big problems was that
Speaker 3: the clubs had been allowed to hire or encourage to
Speaker 3: hire cops for detail, for special detail. So you had
Speaker 3: a lot of cops. You had cops sitting in bars
Speaker 3: getting to know the owners and drinking for free, whether
Speaker 3: they were on a rough duty. And this meant for
Speaker 3: a lot of a lot of eye averting to crime
Speaker 3: that was going on. One of the clubs, it would
Speaker 3: later come out, was actually had found a way to
Speaker 3: let their customers charge for blowjobs on their credit card.
Speaker 3: And there was just there was there was sex going on,
Speaker 3: not all, but in some of the clubs in alleys,
Speaker 3: in you know, parking lots that there would be on
Speaker 3: Saturday night there would be sixty prostitutes standing outside Charlie's
Speaker 3: two o'clock lounge and there would be it was a
Speaker 3: four block area and the people called it the the
Speaker 3: drive through, where the car would just drive around in
Speaker 3: a block and they would be in gridlock because there
Speaker 3: was solicitation. They would stop, you know, the windows open.
Speaker 3: Women would solicit through the open windows, drugs were exchanged.
Speaker 3: It was just a mess.
Speaker 4: Let's get to the situation, you say, just before this,
Speaker 4: there is all this focus on the combat zone and
Speaker 4: the corruption there and the crime that's there. So the
Speaker 4: end the practice of police being able to work those
Speaker 4: details to make extra money, and they want the police
Speaker 4: available for the crimes that they say are rampant in
Speaker 4: the combat zone. So let's talk about one of the
Speaker 4: things that people had heard before, that about a ripoff
Speaker 4: in this crime ridden zone involving prostitutes and pimps. Let's
Speaker 4: just briefly mention this little scam before we talk about
Speaker 4: the events where Andy comes to the aid of his friends.
Speaker 4: Tell us about the scam that came to the attention
Speaker 4: of the district attorney that was going on in the
Speaker 4: combat zone.
Speaker 3: Okay, so before, let me just back up just a
Speaker 3: little bit and say that the police commissioner had had
Speaker 3: secret investigation into his own police force to detail the
Speaker 3: many all this corruption. There was a huge report that
Speaker 3: had just been released detailing a lot of scams, and
Speaker 3: one of those scams was and people knew about it already,
Speaker 3: but it was called They called it not a very
Speaker 3: nice name. They called it the robber horror scheme. And
Speaker 3: what it was was prostitutes and you know prostitutes or
Speaker 3: women dressed up like prostitutes. Because some of the real
Speaker 3: prostitutes complained about this, and this was a scam. Women
Speaker 3: would dress up as prostitutes. They were outside the hang
Speaker 3: outside the bars, and as the men spilled into the
Speaker 3: street drunk, they would fondle them and act like they
Speaker 3: were soliciting to them, and they would steal their wallets.
Speaker 3: And one of the new wrinkles of this was, and
Speaker 3: this was revealed in the report, was that now they
Speaker 3: had mail protectors, so there were men who would, for
Speaker 3: a percentage of the wallet, would protect these women in
Speaker 3: case one of the marks of the guys realized wallet
Speaker 3: was being stolen and went after the prostitute. The police commissioner,
Speaker 3: who I was lucky to interview just about a year
Speaker 3: before he died, told me that even some of the
Speaker 3: cops were on the take. Some of the even the
Speaker 3: cops would take protection money on this wallet theft. And
Speaker 3: so this was very much in the news two weeks
Speaker 3: before this happened. So then when the Harvard boys spilled
Speaker 3: onto the Street. Seven of them, who were walking past
Speaker 3: the carnival lounge got waylaid by two prostitutes who came
Speaker 3: up and started soliciting them. This led to one of
Speaker 3: them losing their wallet and they went back to the
Speaker 3: Harvard van. So that's where the wallet and not all
Speaker 3: of the seven. Some of them were saying, don't, don't
Speaker 3: do this, this is you know, this is a scam.
Speaker 3: Don't do that, don't don't talk to these women. But
Speaker 3: you know, they were drunk. Some of them were drunk,
Speaker 3: and they were young. They're like twenty one, twenty and
Speaker 3: one of the women they're very young, they're like sixteen.
Speaker 3: One of them is sixteen. The one who stole the
Speaker 3: wallet was sixteen years old and twenty one. And they
Speaker 3: stealed them all and they were the way and the
Speaker 3: three of the boys and the like I said, it's
Speaker 3: two of the three boys and the equip manager chase
Speaker 3: them and there's a This leads to a larger chase
Speaker 3: that has you know, something like seven or eight football
Speaker 3: players race running down Boyleston Street. All they're all white
Speaker 3: and big after a black prostitute, tiny black prostitute. And
Speaker 3: I just want to point out that Andy Popolo is
Speaker 3: not anywhere near this when this is happening. He's not
Speaker 3: one of the seven. He wasn't one. He's in a
Speaker 3: completely different car. He's in the back of another car.
Speaker 3: He went home with a different group and was about
Speaker 3: to leave when this all broke out.
Speaker 4: So tell us how he becomes involved then, why?
Speaker 3: So what happens is this fight? So that as I
Speaker 3: chase them down Boylston Street, they eventually and three black
Speaker 3: men come out of the carnival lounge and they race
Speaker 3: up to it. One of them kicks down one of
Speaker 3: the Harvard football players and he gets himself up and
Speaker 3: they end up in front of the T station at
Speaker 3: the edge of the Common, and it's eight by then
Speaker 3: football players surrounding one black guy, Edward Sores, and he's
Speaker 3: doing all sorts of karate kicks, and there are by
Speaker 3: all accounts, no blows exchange. They're asking him about the wallet,
Speaker 3: and he's saying he doesn't know what they're talking about
Speaker 3: with a wallet, and one of them says he doesn't
Speaker 3: have the wallet. Actually, Tom Lincoln says he doesn't have
Speaker 3: the wallet. Let's go. Just after he says that Leon
Speaker 3: Easterling jumped and he's another black, and he jumps into
Speaker 3: the fray and he stebs Tom Lincoln in the guy
Speaker 3: and they say in the abdomen, and the equipment manager says,
Speaker 3: they have knives. Let's get out of here. They all run,
Speaker 3: even Tom Lincoln who's in shock, and they run down
Speaker 3: Boylston Street back the way they came. They all get
Speaker 3: into the Harvard van except for one guy, Charlie, and
Speaker 3: Charlie is he's the drunkest of them all. It's his
Speaker 3: wallet that was stolen. And Andy by this time, when
Speaker 3: he sees his teammates coming like pouring past him on
Speaker 3: the street, he gets out to see what happens, and
Speaker 3: he walks down and he sees when he gets to
Speaker 3: the alley where the van is parked, the Harvard Man
Speaker 3: is parked. He sees at that moment he sees Charlie,
Speaker 3: his teammate. This other guy is one the man in
Speaker 3: the Cranberry jacket, who they've never been able to find
Speaker 3: or clearly identify his race, but he's friendly with the
Speaker 3: other three black guys who will eventually be charged. He
Speaker 3: is beating him against the van. The whole van is shaking,
Speaker 3: and Andy jumps in to help him by the time
Speaker 3: he gets to him, Tom Lincoln has actually got the
Speaker 3: one been stabbed, gotten out and gotten Charlie into the
Speaker 3: into the van and it's just Andy Poppolo and Edward
Speaker 3: Sores and they get into a fistfight and they're fighting around.
Speaker 3: They kind of all accounts, all of this takes about
Speaker 3: five minutes. They're fighting around the van. A couple of
Speaker 3: the football players get out to try to help and
Speaker 3: they're held at nine point by Leon Easterlank, who then
Speaker 3: jumps over over Edward Soares's back and stabs Andy in
Speaker 3: the gut. Another football player, Scott Coolidge, who was not
Speaker 3: a part of the original group, comes in. He sees Andy,
Speaker 3: he picks him up and he says, are you all right?
Speaker 3: He says yes, he said, let's get out of here,
Speaker 3: and he's pulling him away when Leon Easterling and Aaron
Speaker 3: retreat comes and stabs Aty another time. This time he
Speaker 3: thrust the knife into his gut and up into his heart.
Speaker 3: So the three defendants are Edward Sarez, who is involved
Speaker 3: in the fist fight, Leon Easterling, who does the stabbing,
Speaker 3: and then Richard Allen, who really, by all accounts, never
Speaker 3: touches anybody, but he was involved. He wasn't involved. He's
Speaker 3: a bouncer from the carnival lounge. He's also Leon easter
Speaker 3: Ling's half brother and was at both locations and he
Speaker 3: came down from the MTA to the area, or at
Speaker 3: least that's the story, so the three of them, because
Speaker 3: there had been so much about the combat zone because
Speaker 3: of that report, the actually the area was being better
Speaker 3: leased than it usually was and cops are there within instance,
Speaker 3: like they are there. They realized there's no time for
Speaker 3: an ambulance. They take Andy to Tufts, which is like
Speaker 3: around the block, and they get him there in under
Speaker 3: four minutes. He is led out and is technically dead
Speaker 3: on arrival when he arrives, but they're able to restart
Speaker 3: his heart and work on him all night in surgery.
Speaker 3: Leek Tom Lincoln has taken to a different hospital because
Speaker 3: they realize they can wait for an ambulance for him.
Speaker 3: And three men are arrested at the scene. Leon Easterling
Speaker 3: who actually did the stabbing, Edward Soarrows who started the
Speaker 3: fight and was involved in a fist fight, and Richard Allen,
Speaker 3: who is there and you know he was a hustler
Speaker 3: in the combat zone, and according to my sources, he
Speaker 3: really did work for those prostitutes, but he didn't do
Speaker 3: anything in that fight. So they're arrested and they're taken immediately.
Speaker 3: They're charged with attempted murder, and then Andy is in
Speaker 3: a coma. At first it looks like he's going to survive,
Speaker 3: so that these police who are smart enough not to
Speaker 3: wait for the ambulance, these District one A police who
Speaker 3: had just been reviled for their corruption because they are
Speaker 3: considered the most corrupt in the city. Now they're heroes.
Speaker 3: And there's press conferences to that effect of the next
Speaker 3: morning and when it looks like Andy's going to live,
Speaker 3: but then he starts having seizures and it becomes clear
Speaker 3: he's never going to wake up. But it takes a month.
Speaker 3: It's a month of NonStop headlines about first the miracle
Speaker 3: and then his medical condition is monitored. When Danny and
Speaker 3: the family go that night to the hospital, when they
Speaker 3: leave in the morning, there were already television trucks in
Speaker 3: the street that the press is surrounding them. This is
Speaker 3: a big story. Three hundred newspapers across more than three
Speaker 3: hundred newspapers across the nation. We'll cover it and will
Speaker 3: follow it. There's TV and press. It's a big deal
Speaker 3: for a couple of reasons. A big story for a
Speaker 3: couple reasons. One of the reasons is it's Harvard about
Speaker 3: Harvard gets news. And when Boston dropt this, this social
Speaker 3: experiment of the combat zone, it was very much to
Speaker 3: the rest of the nation. It would seemed crazy because
Speaker 3: Boston was the puritanical city known for up until that point,
Speaker 3: for banning everything from Walt Whitman's Leave of Grass to
Speaker 3: I Am Curious level yellow and then there this is
Speaker 3: their solution to almost legislate it. So the rest of
Speaker 3: the nation is very interested in because they are a
Speaker 3: lot of cities are dealing with this problem, and it's like, see,
Speaker 3: we told you this was the wrong way to go.
Speaker 3: This is a big mistake. So it's a big story
Speaker 3: and it's covered. And there's a third reason. Boston is
Speaker 3: also in the press for it's busting. This is nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy six. The photo of the Charlestown kids stabbing a
Speaker 3: black businessman or appears to be, but they're not really
Speaker 3: photo with a flag with the US flag had gone
Speaker 3: around the world. I think eventually, I think you want
Speaker 3: to pull it through that year. It's called the soiling
Speaker 3: of Old Glory. Boston at this point is in the
Speaker 3: the middle of pretty much almost a race war going
Speaker 3: on about bussing. I mean, the National Guard is involved,
Speaker 3: stools are shot, there's violence in the street. Boston's very
Speaker 3: much in the news.
Speaker 4: Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
Speaker 4: from these messages.
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Speaker 4: You talked about the charges that were stemming from the
Speaker 4: stabbing of Andy, and now because of his deteriorated status
Speaker 4: in the hospital, he was on life support and they
Speaker 4: did a brain analysis of brain scan and it was
Speaker 4: a flat so Andrews was reluctant to take him off.
Speaker 4: He thought prayers might work to save his son, but
Speaker 4: needless to say, it didn't, and he died. And so
Speaker 4: the narrative and the tone and the stories change in
Speaker 4: the media, don't they.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, the stories. So the story is very much
Speaker 3: about the combat zone, right, So, right after he gets attacked,
Speaker 3: they flood the city. It's like it's like a it's
Speaker 3: a tipping point. The combat zone has been a problem
Speaker 3: for years. It's controversial in the nation, it's controversial in Boston.
Speaker 3: Crime has quadrupled when this happens. And remember Boston is
Speaker 3: a college town and this is the baby boom. So
Speaker 3: a lot of families relate to this story. Their kids
Speaker 3: go down the combat zone and they get the kids
Speaker 3: get stabbed and murdered. You know, the combat zone. Raymond Flynn,
Speaker 3: the former ambassador, and you'll be Boston's next mayor. The
Speaker 3: day after he was also had one been a professional
Speaker 3: basketball player, and he had coached young kids, and he
Speaker 3: had coached Andy. The day after this happens, he is
Speaker 3: in the combat zone taking petitions to close it down entirely.
Speaker 3: So it's flooded with the globe is doing stories. Flooded
Speaker 3: with so many police, the prostitutes have to are moving
Speaker 3: out there into other neighborhoods. This is causing problems. There's
Speaker 3: actually a prostitute's union which is saying, we don't condone this.
Speaker 3: You know, these are ripoffs, artists. There's press and then
Speaker 3: at the same time the district attorney and the chief
Speaker 3: of police come out and say the combat Zone is
Speaker 3: a failed experiment. We have to shut it down. They
Speaker 3: start prosecuting the clubs for all sorts of violations. There
Speaker 3: had been a secret investigation out of the District Attorney's
Speaker 3: office into the corruption, and they start revealing their results.
Speaker 3: So every day there are headlines about another club being
Speaker 3: closed for violations, about what was being new to fix
Speaker 3: and shut down the combat Zone. So the trial is
Speaker 3: very much about the The first trial is very much
Speaker 3: about the combat Zone and what a failure it was.
Speaker 3: And you know, this is what happens when you let
Speaker 3: things get out of hand. Three black men, you know,
Speaker 3: gang up and stab a white Harvard player and Andy
Speaker 3: Popolo and very sympathetic victim. He's you know, he's worked
Speaker 3: hard to get where he was. He was beloved by
Speaker 3: all and interestingly in this era of intense racism. He
Speaker 3: has known both at Boston Latin Is High School and
Speaker 3: at Harvard for being the one white kid who on
Speaker 3: the team, who makes friends with all the black kids
Speaker 3: he's got. He's got a lot of black friends, which
Speaker 3: was unusual in this era. And the father is very sympathetic.
Speaker 3: He's a classy guy, he's a kind man, and this
Speaker 3: shows and all the city sympathy is with the Popolo
Speaker 3: family who have endured this terrible tragedy, which is a
Speaker 3: terrible tragedy.
Speaker 4: Let's get to something that ends up being vitally important,
Speaker 4: and that is the district attorney talks about charging all
Speaker 4: of these three defendants with the same murder. Tell us
Speaker 4: about this concept of joint enterprise and the idea that
Speaker 4: Leon Easterling was far more culpable. But despite that, and
Speaker 4: despite the evidence of that, the district attorney still decided
Speaker 4: to proceed with first degree murder chargers against all three.
Speaker 4: In this theory of joint enterprise, can you explain, Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, joint enterprise or sometime as they call it, joint
Speaker 3: venture is like the felony murder rule. It's the basic
Speaker 3: concept is the guy who drives the getaway car for
Speaker 3: the bank robbery. If the other guy goes in during
Speaker 3: the stick up and kills somebody, he's equally responsible for
Speaker 3: the murder. So that's the basic theory that they're all
Speaker 3: in this together. So and then the prosecutor is using
Speaker 3: joint venture in two ways. He's saying, they were all
Speaker 3: up at that MTA station and they saw that Leon
Speaker 3: Easterling wielded his knife, right, he stabbed somebody. He had
Speaker 3: a knife. He basically brought a knife to a fist fight,
Speaker 3: and he had it and he proved he would use it.
Speaker 3: Once those Harvard football players turned around and ran away
Speaker 3: in retreat and Leon Easterling followed and the other two
Speaker 3: came with him, they became conspirators or in this theory, right,
Speaker 3: So that's one way he was using. He's also saying
Speaker 3: there's a bigger conspiracy here because all three men were working.
Speaker 3: They came out to protect that prostitute because they were
Speaker 3: going to get a cut of the wallet. So this
Speaker 3: is their gig. They're doing it, they committed murder in it.
Speaker 3: They're all in it together. That was the basic concept. Now,
Speaker 3: the sense attorneys say this is crazy because this is
Speaker 3: basically a street fight. But these are the two different
Speaker 3: ways of looking at the same thing. And the prosecutor,
Speaker 3: I think the prosecutor had to be under incredible pressure
Speaker 3: because his boss here Burne, hated the combat zone. He
Speaker 3: had wanted. He's a very uptight guy and he hated
Speaker 3: the combat zone for years. He knew and he knew
Speaker 3: more about the combat zone than anybody else because he
Speaker 3: had his lawyer's working on a secret investigation into the
Speaker 3: mob infiltration of it. So I think the prosecutor, Tom
Speaker 3: Munday had to be under pressure to basically over prosecute
Speaker 3: is I think.
Speaker 4: The issue at this trial as well, because it doesn't
Speaker 4: become evident, but also they have to see the jury
Speaker 4: and so there are at that time peremptory challenges allowed.
Speaker 4: The judge can make some jury peremptory challenges, but also
Speaker 4: the attorneys had sixteen peremptory challenges themselves. Not to go
Speaker 4: back into what happened in that jury selection, but tell
Speaker 4: us a little bit about the peremptory challenges and what
Speaker 4: some people legal experts thought this as a problematic issue.
Speaker 3: So when when you're seeing a jury, Nicole Wader, the
Speaker 3: judge will ask a bunch of questions saying, you know,
Speaker 3: how much in this case, it was very much. How
Speaker 3: much publicity have you read because there was so much publicity,
Speaker 3: is that going to you're going to be able to
Speaker 3: judge fairly? Or have you ready formed an opinion? And
Speaker 3: also how in because Boston was so racially contentious at
Speaker 3: the time, how do you feel about black defendants? Can
Speaker 3: you be fair to them issue of race aside? And
Speaker 3: interestingly enough, a lot of people said no, I really can't.
Speaker 3: They would just own up to their racism or they
Speaker 3: wanted to get out of jury duty. Either way. So
Speaker 3: the jury is pulled from Everett and Chelsea, which are
Speaker 3: small little suburbs, but mostly from the very neighborhoods in
Speaker 3: Boston which were being at that time feeling like their
Speaker 3: rights were violated by ordered force buzzing. So as Henry Owen,
Speaker 3: the attorney for Richard Allen, said, they were in no
Speaker 3: mood to consider the rights of black defendants. They were
Speaker 3: very much feeling put upon by this force bussing plan,
Speaker 3: which was the judge Garritty had to do it because
Speaker 3: the Boston School Committee had blown him off for so long.
Speaker 3: But it was very punitive, It was really hard. It
Speaker 3: was thinking about sending your five year old off to
Speaker 3: a completely different neighborhood that you think is crime instead
Speaker 3: of your own neighborhood. I mean, people were angry, and
Speaker 3: this is the environment in which the jury is being selected.
Speaker 3: And at that time, the way it worked was when
Speaker 3: you surf for a jury, you had to surf for
Speaker 3: a month you got called. And so what happened was
Speaker 3: basically gave you an exemption from that if you made
Speaker 3: a lot of money, or you were a teacher or
Speaker 3: you know, they gave exemptions. And the only people who
Speaker 3: weren't exempt were well union people because their contracts paid
Speaker 3: them for jury duty, very old who weren't working, and
Speaker 3: the very young who hadn't started working yet. So the
Speaker 3: jury selection was tough, tough. It was not the best
Speaker 3: pool jury pool to start off with. And then the
Speaker 3: judge can get rid of people. And then but once
Speaker 3: a judge clears the juror, both sides have an opportunity
Speaker 3: to get rid of a juror without saying why, using
Speaker 3: a peremptory challenge. Now that those peremptory challenges still exists today,
Speaker 3: and the worse the crime, the more both sides get.
Speaker 3: So in this instance, I think each the defense had
Speaker 3: sixteen each because there were three different attorneys, and then
Speaker 3: the prosecutor had a multiple that they had three times that,
Speaker 3: and they don't have to give a reason. They could
Speaker 3: just say no, I don't like it. And so the
Speaker 3: way it worked in the nation, Boston is not alone
Speaker 3: in this everywhere you know, Like so Bandy is an
Speaker 3: Italian victim, so the defense uses their prosecution to get
Speaker 3: rid of everybody with an Italian last name. If it
Speaker 3: was a woman on who was a man charged with rape,
Speaker 3: they would use him to get rid of every woman
Speaker 3: on the juror in this And routinely this prosecutor, it's
Speaker 3: on Monday, if there are three black defendants and a
Speaker 3: white victim, he would get rid of all as many
Speaker 3: black potential jurors as he wanted without having to say why.
Speaker 3: This is the way business was done in Boston and
Speaker 3: across the nation.
Speaker 4: Let's get back to the trial, and again we see
Speaker 4: that the jury is seated and despite that, obviously the
Speaker 4: complexion of that jury is mostly white.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the prosecutor uses his premptory challenges to get
Speaker 3: rid of I think it was eleven out of twelve
Speaker 3: potential black so the jury pool, there are many blacks
Speaker 3: in the jury pool to start off with, and so
Speaker 3: I think it's eleven out of twelve or twelve out
Speaker 3: of thirteen potential black jurors. He strikes them without giving
Speaker 3: a reason.
Speaker 4: To be fair though the judge, and this is tourney.
Speaker 4: Henry Owens complains later and obviously during the trial as well,
Speaker 4: that Judge Roy is dismissing many of the objections and
Speaker 4: his initial motion to separate the trial. He doesn't think
Speaker 4: much of Judge Roy, and he thinks he's a racist.
Speaker 3: Yes, he's known as the hanging judge as well, very
Speaker 3: hard on crime.
Speaker 4: At the same time, this trial prosecutor Mundy says he
Speaker 4: has while he does have six eyewitnesses, there are some
Speaker 4: inconsistencies in some of their testimony, but he has six
Speaker 4: eyewitnesses that back up the story that these three men
Speaker 4: were involved. And that's what he has to prove that
Speaker 4: these three men were involved in the same commission of
Speaker 4: this crime which led to the stabbing, and all three
Speaker 4: are the same culpability and they're all guilty. What happens
Speaker 4: at the verdict of these three men.
Speaker 3: So this is normally god be a it's a very
Speaker 3: complex case because there's multiple charges and the concept of
Speaker 3: joint venture and joint enterprise is you know, it's normally
Speaker 3: hard and if they're convicted, the punishment is prison in
Speaker 3: life with no possibility of parole. So this is, you know,
Speaker 3: it's a complex case, and the jury, the jury deliberates.
Speaker 3: But Monday had a very strong case. He had more
Speaker 3: than he had six from Harvard, but he had people
Speaker 3: who weren't related to Harvard on the street who were
Speaker 3: also testifying eyewitnesses to at least part of it. And
Speaker 3: he also had the medical evidence. The medical evidence was
Speaker 3: very damning. So he had very strong evidence and it
Speaker 3: was a complex case. But the jury is so it's
Speaker 3: like a Thursday, and they're dismissed at I think twelve
Speaker 3: for launching, begin deliberating at one. There's a questered. They
Speaker 3: deliberate till like five or six o'clock the next morning.
Speaker 3: They deliberate twenty minutes and they have a verdict, and
Speaker 3: the verdict is guilty on all counts, all three men, and.
Speaker 4: You have that two of them are also Leon Easterling
Speaker 4: and Edward Sores are also convicted of eight to ten
Speaker 4: years for assault and battery. Consecutive to be running consecutively.
Speaker 3: Yes, and there's two stabbings. Remember there's one murder, but
Speaker 3: they are also prosecutor for stabbing Tom Lincoln. Yes, and
Speaker 3: there was a little scuffle. There's like a little fight
Speaker 3: before him where I think Edward Sores kicks one of them,
Speaker 3: and he also gets charged with a sultan battery with
Speaker 3: a shod foot. I mean, there are a lot of
Speaker 3: charges and they all get convicted on all of them.
Speaker 4: Let's talk about the media response, but also that Wallace
Speaker 4: Sherwood attorney and Henry Owens file their appeals immediately. What
Speaker 4: is the tone? What is the tone of the media
Speaker 4: in its coverage of the verdict of the trial.
Speaker 3: So up until this point, the media coverage of the
Speaker 3: Popolo family is very sympathetic. It's very sympathetic to the
Speaker 3: Popolo family. The moment this verdant comes out, it's called
Speaker 3: harsh justice and it all becomes about the city's racism
Speaker 3: and the racism of the harshness of this to three blackmans. Oh,
Speaker 3: there's also a trial shortly after, like two months after,
Speaker 3: there's another murder trial in the state of a black man,
Speaker 3: Young Black team Brian Nelson eighteen years old, and there's
Speaker 3: a there's a fight that breaks out with storing the snowstorm,
Speaker 3: eight white guys in a van and Brian and two
Speaker 3: of his black friends, and then the cars spin out
Speaker 3: and they get fist fight, and Brian Nelson gets wound up,
Speaker 3: murdered with a beat by a tire and iron and
Speaker 3: stabbed with a broken bottle and they arrest. When they
Speaker 3: do the arrest, there is no joint venture, just one
Speaker 3: a former marine, a nineteen year old is charged. He's
Speaker 3: only charged with manslaughter, and then the jury quits him.
Speaker 3: So this is a very sharp contrast. When the victim
Speaker 3: is black and the assailants are white, look what happens.
Speaker 3: When the victim is white and the assailants are black,
Speaker 3: Look what happens. So there are a couple of cases
Speaker 3: like this which and you know, the family, the Pabolo
Speaker 3: family had nothing to do with any of this, right right,
Speaker 3: And all of a sudden, Andy's name gets associated with racism.
Speaker 3: And so Henry Allens, who is the attorney for Richard Allen,
Speaker 3: is city's most prominent black attorney and will be for
Speaker 3: many years. And he has watched for years, he watched
Speaker 3: Tom Mundy strike all the black jurors when they're from
Speaker 3: the from the jury pool, and he was ready for him,
Speaker 3: and he starts in the selection of this jury. He
Speaker 3: is on the record for objecting almost every time Tom
Speaker 3: Munday strikes a juror, so he is setting up a
Speaker 3: record for an appeal. They also appeal, you know, saying that, look,
Speaker 3: there's not enough evidence to prove joint venture. This is crazy,
Speaker 3: and so that's the appeal. And a lot of famous
Speaker 3: defense attorneys in Boston will say, will say this is crazy.
Speaker 3: You know, this is a spot taneous street brawl. You
Speaker 3: can't use joint venture in a spontaneous street raw. And
Speaker 3: the prosecutors you say, well you can when you have
Speaker 3: all sorts of documents that suggest that Richard Allen is
Speaker 3: a propared protector in the combat zone. His brother Leon,
Speaker 3: you know, works for him with him on this, and
Speaker 3: Leon Easterling is a friend of theirs. So that's those
Speaker 3: are basically the two camps.
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Speaker 4: Now you say that Danny, we haven't talked about. But
Speaker 4: Danny so close to his brother Andy. There are incidents.
Speaker 4: There is an incident in court where he he challenges
Speaker 4: the defendants in court and says some disparaging things. He's
Speaker 4: hauled out of court, but in his mind he's suffering
Speaker 4: from a sort of post traumatic stress disorder in terms
Speaker 4: of he thinks that he should have done something. He
Speaker 4: has some guilt that he wasn't there that night because
Speaker 4: he was invited to join his brother that night, but
Speaker 4: he didn't want to go along. He thought maybe his
Speaker 4: brother would just like the private time without taking care
Speaker 4: of his younger brother, which was Danny. So Danny had
Speaker 4: these feelings of duty and also maybe the idea of
Speaker 4: the Italian vendetta concept. But with the trial and with
Speaker 4: the verdicts, some of these feelings had subsided, and Danny
Speaker 4: was a little bit better, I guess with the verdicts. However,
Speaker 4: one day you chronicle that the family is sitting around
Speaker 4: in Jamaica plane and it's nineteen seventy nine in March,
Speaker 4: and their television set is on and there's a familiar
Speaker 4: sound on that broadcast that includes their name, and they
Speaker 4: pay attention. Tell us about this incredible moment where they
Speaker 4: catch this landmark decision on television.
Speaker 3: Well, I think, to back up, I think any family,
Speaker 3: you know, any family of a murder victim, all they
Speaker 3: want is the maximum justice for their loved one, which
Speaker 3: says they shouldn't this murder never should have happened. And
Speaker 3: if there had been capital punishment in Massachusetts, I'm sure
Speaker 3: they would have wanted capital punishment. The prosecutor tells them
Speaker 3: for justice to be served, all three of these defendants
Speaker 3: have to go away for life. So this to them
Speaker 3: becomes the justice their son deserves. When it's appealed, they're worried,
Speaker 3: right they had gotten justice, will it be taken away
Speaker 3: from them? And one day there just Dani and his
Speaker 3: mother and the listening to the TV and they hear
Speaker 3: it's been reversed that the High Courts actually says. And
Speaker 3: this is what makes it even harder. The decision by
Speaker 3: the High Court says, there's enough proof, there is proof
Speaker 3: here that they were working together in joint venture to
Speaker 3: go for murder, to be put away from murder in
Speaker 3: the first degree. But because of the way the jury
Speaker 3: was selected, we're going to overturn this and it has
Speaker 3: to be retried. And to the family that sounds like
Speaker 3: they know he's guilty. It's getting off on a technicality.
Speaker 3: That's a very hard decision for a family to summach
Speaker 3: because it is so painful to go through. You know,
Speaker 3: it's so painful for the family to go through a
Speaker 3: murder trial, to hear all the different things, all the
Speaker 3: violence that was done to their loved one, all the
Speaker 3: points where maybe you know, things had gone differently, wouldn't
Speaker 3: have happened. It's just extremely painful. And there's this theory
Speaker 3: that you're going to have to go through it all
Speaker 3: over again.
Speaker 4: And the thing is too with these peremptory challenges and
Speaker 4: talking now the story is framed as you couldn't get
Speaker 4: a proper conviction with this all white jury in these
Speaker 4: cases where with black defendants. So it talks about the
Speaker 4: composition changing that these peremptory challenges and having a jury
Speaker 4: more representative of the defendants. But it had nothing to
Speaker 4: do with Andy, Andy's attitude towards race or anything else
Speaker 4: that had to do with the racial divide in Boston,
Speaker 4: and his story becomes he becomes a symbol of this
Speaker 4: racial divide, whereas it was a simple case of Andy
Speaker 4: trying to help out his friends in a situation that
Speaker 4: he deemed quickly for them to need his assistance. It
Speaker 4: was as simple as that.
Speaker 3: Right, It was as simple as that. And you know,
Speaker 3: the combat zone was funny because where the whole city
Speaker 3: was divided, and they were divided not just by race,
Speaker 3: like there was an Italian section and Irish neighborhoods, and
Speaker 3: you know, nobody mingled. And then one place where people mingled,
Speaker 3: where blacks would sit whites at the bar, was the
Speaker 3: combat zone where a black couple could live in one
Speaker 3: of the apartments overhead and not get rocks through the window.
Speaker 3: So this had nothing to do with the neighborhoods, had
Speaker 3: nothing to do with bussing, But it had a little
Speaker 3: to do with the city's racism in that the way,
Speaker 3: you know, the way jury, the jury was selected, and
Speaker 3: the concept that three black men had to go to
Speaker 3: jail for the rest of their lives. So Henry Owen,
Speaker 3: the prosecutor with the defense attorney who represented Richard Allen,
Speaker 3: said the way it should have gone down was Leon
Speaker 3: Easterly should have been murdered, should have been convicted murdered
Speaker 3: the first degree. Edward soars maybe you could get him
Speaker 3: for an assault, battery or assisting, and his client, Richard Allen,
Speaker 3: should have gone off got free because he wasn't involved
Speaker 3: really except for mostly mostly the quotes with him is
Speaker 3: him telling the Harvard football players to go home. They're
Speaker 3: out of their league. Just get in the car and
Speaker 3: go home. You don't know what you're doing now.
Speaker 4: The idea that Henry Owens expresses that this is what
Speaker 4: should happen, and I have to tend to agree, not
Speaker 4: necessarily being an attorney, and who cares what my opinion is,
Speaker 4: But it looks like to me that it was an
Speaker 4: overreach in trying to tri all these people for the
Speaker 4: same crime. But that's not what the court said. They
Speaker 4: gave him a new trial because of these challenges. Now,
Speaker 4: I guess even the family, Danny and his mother, the
Speaker 4: entire family, believes that justice still will be done with
Speaker 4: this new trial.
Speaker 3: Right because there's enough evidence to convict him a second time.
Speaker 3: That's what the prosecutor thinks, and that's what they believe.
Speaker 3: I do want to point out that this trial is
Speaker 3: the case that changes all that. The appeal changes the
Speaker 3: way juris are chosen in Massachusetts. There is a similar
Speaker 3: case in California about a month before that made the
Speaker 3: same conclusion. It will take eight years for the rest
Speaker 3: of the nation to catch up and change the way
Speaker 3: juries are chosen. But this is the case that really,
Speaker 3: this is the case that's used by the Supreme Court,
Speaker 3: they call it the Sores decision, that will be used
Speaker 3: to try to make jury selection fairer.
Speaker 4: Now, this seeming resolution of the job that they say
Speaker 4: that occurred because of the jury selection and composition, and
Speaker 4: you say that they've changed those laws regarding those challenges
Speaker 4: as a result of this appeal. But to the horror
Speaker 4: of the Popolo family, what happens in this court case.
Speaker 3: So it's seventy seven, so it's two and a half
Speaker 3: years later, where you know, it's difficult. You know, many
Speaker 3: people believe that the defense has an advantage in the
Speaker 3: second trial anyway, because they've gone through all the transcripts.
Speaker 3: They look for every little inconsistency. Also that two and
Speaker 3: a half year period, things have changed in Boston. For
Speaker 3: one thing, bussing is a lot of the violence is
Speaker 3: out of the schools. It's in the neighborhoods, but it's
Speaker 3: out of the schools, so it's out of the national headlines.
Speaker 3: Some of the city has become sick of it. The
Speaker 3: rest of the residents have become sick of it, so
Speaker 3: they voted out the anti bussing city councilors. And there
Speaker 3: been a bunch of like the Globe does a study
Speaker 3: that shows that systematically get harsher criminals and the worst
Speaker 3: facilities for the same crime. There's a couple of cases
Speaker 3: that come out where really heinous crimes against blacks have gone,
Speaker 3: you know, juries have acquitted the whites. And then three
Speaker 3: three weeks I think it's two or three weeks before
Speaker 3: the second trial, there is another murder of a Darryl Williams,
Speaker 3: a fifteen year old black kid who's playing football on
Speaker 3: the Charlestown Field and Charleston is a white Irish neighborhood.
Speaker 3: It gets shot through the back of his neck by
Speaker 3: three white kids on a rooftop. Later they'll say it
Speaker 3: was an accident. There's some debate whether they could actually
Speaker 3: hit their targets that they wanted to with a twenty one.
Speaker 3: But when the trial goes on, this is the moment
Speaker 3: in Boston where violence against blacks has finally gone too far.
Speaker 3: Even the whites in Charlestown and White and Charleston's a
Speaker 3: very tight neighborhood, helped the cops round up the suspects,
Speaker 3: which is unheard of in the Loyalty department. This is
Speaker 3: it comes. It happens right before the Pope is visiting Boston.
Speaker 3: So there's placards everywhere. It's a huge racist stain on
Speaker 3: the city of the city. And it happens. It's like
Speaker 3: whites have really like it's everybody's appalled. And so this
Speaker 3: is very much in the news and very much an
Speaker 3: influence in the second trial for the family. It means
Speaker 3: they have got to they've got to go through this
Speaker 3: all over again, and they worry, particularly not so much Andrew,
Speaker 3: but but Danny and his mother are really worried that
Speaker 3: they're not going to get justice. But they worry. They're
Speaker 3: just worried that, you know, maybe not all of them
Speaker 3: will get murder in the first degree. That's as far
Speaker 3: as they think it's to be the worst. That's their
Speaker 3: worst case scenario. But this trial is the first time
Speaker 3: the new rules for jury selection thesra's decision will be implemented.
Speaker 3: And now what happens is both sides of both the
Speaker 3: defense and the attorney, every time they strike somebody, it's
Speaker 3: a number thing. So if you strike one black juror okay,
Speaker 3: if you strike two, well why are you striking him?
Speaker 3: You start to see a pattern. Other side takes note
Speaker 3: of that and they submit it to the judge and
Speaker 3: that's rounds for an appeal. So this jury will end
Speaker 3: up being I think three blacks on it, three blacks
Speaker 3: out of twelve, and so it's where the first jury
Speaker 3: was one. It's not that the first jury does have
Speaker 3: one black on the juror. It's not all white. There
Speaker 3: is a black man and he's a foreman. And the
Speaker 3: first the second jury has i think three blacks and
Speaker 3: one one of the alternates is blacks as well, and
Speaker 3: they will come to a very different decision.
Speaker 4: Yes, they do come to a very different decision. But
Speaker 4: also that defense has a distinct advantage from having gone
Speaker 4: through that first trial, and at least that's some observers believe.
Speaker 3: Well, also they have much better representation. You know, this
Speaker 3: has been in the news. They've gotten They've gotten Norman Zalkhin,
Speaker 3: who is really quite a star defense attorney. They have
Speaker 3: Henry Owens again, and Andrew Good who is a young
Speaker 3: attorney who had worked White attorney, worked for people go
Speaker 3: on to make a big name for himself. But you know,
Speaker 3: he said, he said he spent a year from the
Speaker 3: moment he knew he had a chance, he spent a
Speaker 3: year preparing for this case. The second case, the first
Speaker 3: trial was tried in March, like, less than three months
Speaker 3: after he died, so the defense really had no time
Speaker 3: to prepare.
Speaker 4: Yes, now this verdict is, as you alluded to, very
Speaker 4: very very different, and instead of first degree murder for
Speaker 4: all three, it's manslaughter for Leon Easterling. But the judge
Speaker 4: says he's going to give him the max, and he
Speaker 4: was given eighteen to twenty. In reality, he was able
Speaker 4: to apply for parole in twelve years.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, he gets off and eat already served
Speaker 3: three because he's waiting for the trial and the appeal,
Speaker 3: so he's only going to serve eight years.
Speaker 4: Devastating and for the Papolo family with this decision, they.
Speaker 3: Are absolutely devastated and it has a terrible impact on Danny.
Speaker 3: So Danny, you have to remember is eighteen nineteen when
Speaker 3: this happens, when this first happens. And I've learned a
Speaker 3: lot about murder of murder victim families and the impact
Speaker 3: on a teenage brain of knowing someone or witnessing a murder.
Speaker 3: It's almost impossible not to have PTSD, which is explains
Speaker 3: inner city violence, Why the gangs, why there's that cycle
Speaker 3: of violence, because these kids in the inner city see
Speaker 3: their friends murdered on the street, and very natural responses
Speaker 3: is to want revenge, is to just obsess over the
Speaker 3: idea of revenge.
Speaker 4: Yes, you're right that things had changed in Boston, of
Speaker 4: things that change in Boston because of this trial, but
Speaker 4: things that changed in Boston because they had to change,
Speaker 4: and so so many events created this a Boston that
Speaker 4: wanted the citizenry demanded changes.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, Well, in terms of criminal justice, yes, there
Speaker 3: were several trials which criminal justice, you know, criminal justice
Speaker 3: in the nation was not great for any kind of
Speaker 3: minority with these these peremptory challenges, and Boston have most
Speaker 3: of you have a community where which is mostly white.
Speaker 3: When the jury pool comes down, it's going to be
Speaker 3: mostly white. So it's going to be hard to and
Speaker 3: it's going to be hard to get representation of a
Speaker 3: minority anyway, even before they start using the peremptory challenges.
Speaker 3: So they did change the way jury pools are assembled
Speaker 3: because they were very white, because they were based on
Speaker 3: voter registration at that point, Blacks did not register to
Speaker 3: vote in the same numbers as whites. And so after
Speaker 3: they changed the way jury pools are selected and Sora's decision,
Speaker 3: and then there were a couple of decisions so in
Speaker 3: Massachusetts which despite the city's representations for being racist, Massachusetts
Speaker 3: in California were considered by the rest of the nation
Speaker 3: as activist courts because they were the most forward thinking
Speaker 3: and the most progressive. So Massachusetts really for other they
Speaker 3: kept refining the Sora's decision. So it doesn't guarantee that
Speaker 3: you know, no black is ever struck just because he's black,
Speaker 3: but it makes it a lot harder for each side
Speaker 3: to get way with that, and so this will lead
Speaker 3: to the nationwide bats And decision. The Supreme Court in
Speaker 3: eight years later will say, yeah, we can't do this nationally,
Speaker 3: and so they will issue the bats And Decision, which
Speaker 3: makes the rest of the nation have to fall into line.
Speaker 3: But it's not implemented or refined the same way the
Speaker 3: Sora's decision is so that prosecutors find ways around it.
Speaker 3: People still find way Well, there are more loopholes in
Speaker 3: that than there are in the Sora's decision. Has just
Speaker 3: done a little bit better.
Speaker 4: Before I let you go and we wrap up, I
Speaker 4: wanted to talk about some of the things that were
Speaker 4: done to honor Andy's memory. There was a couple of
Speaker 4: tournaments in his name, but more importantly a part that
Speaker 4: was renamed after Andy.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So between the first and the second trial, the
Speaker 3: community there were scholarships and honors at Harvard and at
Speaker 3: Boston Latin. But the Italian community gets together and they
Speaker 3: form a petition to rename the playground where he grew
Speaker 3: up doing sports, which is beautiful park right on the
Speaker 3: waterfront of the North End. And if you and if
Speaker 3: your listeners visit. You should check it out. It's on
Speaker 3: Commercial Street. It's a beautiful park and you'll find a
Speaker 3: bronze memorial to Andy Poppolo and a beautiful poem that
Speaker 3: was written about him that's in his name. So that
Speaker 3: is the lasting recognition of this young life that really
Speaker 3: should not you know, it was snuffed out way too early.
Speaker 4: Yes, I want to thank you very much Jan Brogan
Speaker 4: for coming on and talking about the combat Zone, murder Race,
Speaker 4: and Boston Struggle for Justice for those that might want
Speaker 4: to take a look at your work. Do you have
Speaker 4: a website or do any social media tell us about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I do so Wwwjambrogan dot com. I am that.
Speaker 3: I think Jan underscore jambrogen O seven on Facebook and
Speaker 3: I also Twitter jam Brogan, but I'm most active I
Speaker 3: think on Facebook and Instagram. Yeah. The book is available
Speaker 3: at most you know, most independent bookstores and Amazon and
Speaker 3: directly from the publisher UMAs Press. That's great and I
Speaker 3: want to thank you for inviting me on letting me
Speaker 3: talk about my favorite topic this book.
Speaker 4: Thank you very much for coming on and talking about
Speaker 4: the Combat Zone, murder Race, and Boston Struggle for Justice
Speaker 4: with Jan Brogan. Thank you so much Jan for this
Speaker 4: interview and you have a great evening
Speaker 3: You too, dan Hie, and good night.