The Mountfort Street Gang

2015 view of Montfort Street, with Fenway Park in the background. (Courtesy of Bill Nowlin)

 

For those who have followed the Whitey Bulger saga and the Winter Hill Gang, thrilled to Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, read Dennis Lehane’s novels such as Mystic River, feared the Boston Strangler, were appalled by the murders at Sammy White’s Brighton Bowl, or even remember the Great Brinks Robbery, the activities of the Mountfort Street Gang may seem a bit pale by comparison.

Advocates of the “broken windows” theory of policing, however, believe in zero tolerance and would spare no one. They believe that failure to prosecute “quality of life” crimes such as public drinking, littering, and the breaking of windows leads good citizens to retreat to their homes and abandons public spaces to the miscreants.

The men in the Mountfort Street Gang who committed a crime in Boston back in 1953 stayed out of the public eye until 1988 — some 35 years later. Two or three may still be hiding out, in fear of the long arm of the law.

What was this crime in Boston and who committed it?

Mountfort Street runs from Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, across from the BU bridge, more or less parallel to and to the south of the Mass Pike, eventually connecting to Beacon Street, just a large parking lot away from Fenway Park. Before the Mass Pike sliced through Boston in the mid- to late 1950s, the street was lined on both sides with three-story stone tenement houses — triple-deckers — and was a fairly quiet residential street in the Back Bay. In a sense, it ran more or less between Boston’s two major-league ballparks: Braves Field and Fenway Park. When the turnpike construction began, one entire side of the street was torn down. Gone forever.

When the Braves announced in early 1953 that the franchise had been moved, more or less in the dark of night, to Milwaukee, Braves fandom was stunned. True, the Red Sox almost always outdrew the Braves, but the Tribe had its loyal followers. Many were bereft. Others were aggrieved. Some, even into the twenty-first century, decline to patronize the Red Sox.

A handful of young teenagers from Mountfort Street — three or four of them, 13-14 years old — took a measure of action on a March night in 1953. They couldn’t stay out late, but it’s still sufficiently dark in March that they could have the protection of darkness. One has since come forth to confess.

They went to Braves Field. There were no cops in sight. “It was in the evening, later on, probably about 7 or 8. The left-field wall, over on the side of the tracks, was only about eight feet [high],” recalled Arthur Haley, born in 1939 and the only member of the gang known to us today.1 “Everybody gives 10 fingers and props people up and over. It was an adventure.”

They were in. There was no one around. They stole home plate.

Why home plate? “Once you — so to speak — break into a joint, what else are you going up there for? Let’s see what we can get.”

It wasn’t easy work. “Yeah, but we were industrious. It’s not as though we had shovels. It was mounted on 2-by-3’s underneath. It wasn’t just sitting there by itself.” They dug it out of the clay with their bare hands. They lugged home plate back home to Mountfort Street, then hid it in the cellar of one of the boys’ homes. Adrenaline was pumping; had they been caught, the punishment could have been severe. “If our fathers found out, they would have booted us in the can, and taken us down to the police station.”

With the purloined plate in the basement, gang members were getting a little worried. “We actually passed it around for a week at a time. We didn’t know if we were going to get arrested.”2

But no one ratted. No one turned state’s evidence. No one went into witness protection. Things settled down and the “hot goods” settled into Haley’s care. Within a couple of years, his family moved to Framingham and the plate went with him. He graduated from high school, then spent three years with the Air Force in Germany. Little did the Air Force know it had unwittingly enabled a lawbreaker to leave the country.

Haley’s father was a salesman for Sunshine Biscuit, but Haley had no doubt he himself would have been hauled down to the station had his father known. Arthur had grown up in Boston and played ball over at the Fens; he played CYO ball for St. Cecilia’s. “We used to walk by Fenway Park from Mountfort Street. The lights from Fenway Park would light up our street.”

Haley himself worked as a radar operator for the Air Force at the airport in Munich, then got a job for 30 years taking x-rays for Arnold Greene Testing Laboratories in Natick, eventually becoming general manager. They would x-ray paintings for authenticity but also aircraft engine parts and nuclear submarine component castings. At present, in 2015, he is manager at Thielsch Engineering of Cranston, Rhode Island. Quite coincidentally, his oldest son married Julie Bresciani, niece of the late Red Sox executive Dick Bresciani.

In 1988 Haley read in the Boston Herald that Dick Johnson of the Sports Museum of New England was looking for memorabilia to help mark the 35th anniversary of the closing of Braves Field. Haley knew he had home plate and called the Sports Museum. He brought it in and left it with them … but Museum staff was not certain they could accept stolen property. Counsel advised that the statute of limitations had long since passed.

It was safe to see it all as a bit of “light-hearted larceny.”3 Haley was invited to formally present the plate at a banquet held on August 5, 1988, at the Prudential Center in Boston. Some of the Boston Braves were there, as was Billy Sullivan, former publicity director for the Braves, and even a couple of members of the Perini family, who would have had a claim of ownership had the event not happened so long in the past. A Perini publication dubbed Haley the “kingpin” of the gang.4

Whether any of the gang members went on to a hardened life of crime is not known. Word has it that a Jimmy Jango might have been another member of the Mountfort Street Gang but we were unable to locate Mr. Jango. Haley may be protecting his partners in crime, or he may simply not remember their names, but the others who helped with the heist are names at present lost to history. Rather than simple vandalism or juvenile delinquency, gang members had preserved an artifact that might itself otherwise have become lost to history.

BILL NOWLIN has been vice president of SABR since 2004. Most of his nearly 50 books have been Red Sox-related, though he’s also written about musical and political history. He was a co-founder of Rounder Records and lives across the Charles River but really not all that far from Fenway Park, where the Boston Braves played home games in the 1914 World Series. Sadly, he never saw a game at Braves Field.

 

Notes

1 After reading Bob Brady’s article, “The Last Steal,” the idea of tracking down a gang member was too appealing to pass up. All quotations are from an interview with Arthur Haley on December 31, 2014. Haley did say the gang had never snuck into either ballpark to catch a game. A Doctor Manfredi lived on Mountfort Street (Haley noted that the doctor’s son was not part of the gang that night in 1953) and he had four season tickets to both Braves Field and Fenway Park. Whenever he wasn’t using them, they were available to his son and his friends.

2 The Mountfort Street Gang wasn’t the only small group to visit Braves Field after the mid-March announcement that the Braves were decamping for Milwaukee. The March 19, 1953 Boston Daily Record reported that four teenage boys had scaled the wall the night before and smashed 10 windows in concession and telephone booths with long sticks they poked through the windows, “apparently in retaliation for the Braves’ moving out of Boston.” They were “working their way along the booths to the main office of owner Louis Perini” when the vandals were interrupted by caretaker Jerry Palazoo who gave chase until they escaped over a wall.

3 Daphne Hurford, “Yet Another Game for a Boston Hero,” Sports Illustrated, December 10, 1990.

4 Perini News, September-October 1988.