According to the FBI, morebank and armored-car robbers have come out of Charlestown, Massachusetts, thanany other one-square-mile area in the world. With these robberies also camegangland violence and corruption. Fictionalized in the movie The Town featuringBen Affleck and Jeremy Renner, this is the true story of Charlestown andthe thieves and gangsters who terrorized the community for decades. On October 31, 1961,Bernie McLaughlin got shot dead in broad daylight in front of a hundredwitnesses in the City Square section of Charlestown. Because of the ironclad code of silence in the Irish stronghold known as the “Green SquareMile,” no witnesses came forward. The murder ignited a bloody war between theMcLaughlin Gang and Buddy McClean’s Winter Hill Gang that left more than sixty mendead. Three decades later, asnarcotics invaded Charlestown, and a concurrent Mob war raged between J. R. Russo’s North End crew and that of Patriarca-family boss “Cadillac Frank” Salemme,five thieves called the “No Name Gang” committed over a hundred heists acrossNew England that cemented the enclave’s infamy. Grippingly cinematic and raw, Thievesof Charlestown delivers an unprecedented look at the real criminals who ruledthe streets of “The Town.”
