Teddy green bank robber3/11/2024 ![]() ![]() Cummings abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison General William Heath, killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill, and for whom Heath Street was named and the inventor of the fountain pen, Lewis Edson Waterman. There are some famous people buried at the Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain including Eugene O’Neill, the famous playwright who wrote The Iceman Cometh poet E.E. I guess there’s a fine line at Egleston Square, some call it Roxbury, but I always considered from Atherton Street up past Forest Hills to be Jamaica Plain. There was also a strip club next to it and upstairs from the theater I’m not sure, but I think McGinnis owned it too. His name was Joe McGinnis and he owned a package goods store (a liquor store if you’re not from Boston), across the street from the Egleston Square Theater and next door to The Plainsman, a bar and grill. Although he didn’t participate in the robbery itself, he had a lot to do with the planning. Back on the subject of robberies, another guy with roots in Jamaica Plain planned the Brinks job. For ten cents you could buy a shopping bag full of day-old bread and cakes, I mean jelly rolls, spice cakes, and chocolate marshmallow rolls that you had to pay 29 or 39 cents for the day before.īut I digress. For us kids there was the White House Baking Company on Parker. I almost forgot the Moxie (that soda that used to taste like rusty water) plant that took up the whole block of Heath, Bickford, and Parker Streets. The House of Murphy and the Napoli were a couple of the best known watering holes at the time, and we mustn’t forget the Cross Roads at Heath and New Heath Streets or MaGee’s Tavern, down the street from The Canada Dry bottling plant at the foot of Walden Street. They used to hang around Jackson Square a lot. Jazz and Anthony Pino (they may have even been godfathers to my friends) were taken in and later released. ![]() A few days after the robbery, the FBI and the Boston cops tore the inside of the club to pieces, but they found nothing. The Centre Club, later known as the Irish Centre Club, on the Corner of Heath and Schilller Streets, was owned by one of the guys, Jazz Maffie. Even then, it still took over seven years to wrap up the case. Later on Specs ratted the others out to the cops. They probably would have gotten away with it if some of them hadn’t short-changed Specs O’Keefe out of his share of the loot. Knowing who the perpetrators were, and then proving it, was difficult. They got over 1.2 million in cash, with over another million in checks and bonds. ![]() At that time it was the biggest heist in the world. 17, 1950, a couple of the kids’ uncles did something that flashed on the news all over the country, if not the world: the Boston Brinks Robbery. He was one of the most infamous bank robbers of the time.Īfter he was caught and did his time, he got a job selling used cars - sort of the same line of work. While my dad had a regular job working at the Navy Yard in South Boston, Toby’s dad made his own hours. One of the girls, Toby, had a father who was kind of famous by any standard. I’m sure some of you that are reading this will remember a few of the Parker Slobs. It was never meant in a derogatory way - the kids even wore the name like it was a badge of honor. The Bromley-Heath housing project gobbled up these streets along with Albert Street when it was built in the late forties and early fifties. Most of them lived on Parker Street and Bromley Park. In the section of Jamaica Plain on the Roxbury line bounded by the train tracks and Centre, Heath and Bickford Streets, lived some of my friends that had fathers and uncles that were a little left of center with the law. ![]()
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