Buddy Cianci. That happened when we were here.
Boston isn't exactly known for always being on the up-and-up. Most every big city had some sort of Mafia connection, or some other corrupt group influencing city activities. Boston had Billy Bulger. Now there's the big overtime scandal with the Highway Patrol. Chicago had Richard Daley. Cleveland sent Jimmy Demora off to jail since we moved here. Decades before that,
Eliot Ness came in to clean up the city of corruption. It didn't last long...
Back when I was young, pre-teen age I think, we went over to a distant relative's home for a family dinner. Or it could have been a "family" dinner.
My Dad's sister had married a man whose sister was married to a man who was the *ahem* accountant for...the Cleveland Syndicate.
After Himself and I bought our first home, a nice couple was building on the adjacent lot. They were engaged to be married, but had started building so that it was ready after their wedding. It was a very nice house, rather upscale compared to the rest of our homes. She worked as a file clerk for the FBI, he was a car salesman for a dealer in Independence, OH. One day when I get home from work, my neighbor on the other side calls me to ask me if I had seen the news about our neighbors being taken into custody.
What? While talking to her, I could hear playback of our conversation in my ear, so I told her I had to go. Called Himself at work right away, he said he was coming right home. We deduced that there had to be some sort of tap or recording on our phone line. The next day I call the FBI and ask "who do you think you are and why do you have a wiretap on my phone?" and was put on hold...only to have someone come back shortly and ask if they could come to my office to speak with me.
A couple of days later, I had three FBI detectives all over my phone connection at the street box, at the back of our home, and in the basement where the line came in. They asked me "have you ever heard the name Marconi?". Sure, he invented the teletype, right? Nope, the Marconi they were talking about was Carmen, the mob's wire man.
Turned out the the wire tap was probably someone from the news media trying to find out if we knew anything, but for a while we were the most interesting people on our block.
We watched a movie a few years back called "
Kill the Irishman" about the Cleveland mob and the killing of Danny Green. Very good movie - or at least we thought so since we noticed some area landmarks while watching it.