Overkill in Boston

"You'll find a body on Boston Avenue," said the anonymous caller. Sure enough, police in Medford, Mass., discovered the corpse in the trunk of a gold-colored Mustang. The authorities were neither surprised nor especially agitated. For the state police, it was another entry on the lengthening chart of fratricide among racketeers in Greater Boston. Since Labor Day 1961, when a blood feud started between the McLaughlin brothers and Buddy McLean, 43 victims have accumulated. The original chiefs have long since been killed or incarcerated. Still the bodies fall, much the way the buddies of Jimmy C. and Eddie G. were dispatched in those splendid old movies.

The punk in the trunk was Andrew von Etter, 26, a smalltime chiseler under indictment for fraud and suspected of being a loan shark. A onetime associate of the late Punchy McLaughlin, he died of a crushed skull and, for good measure, garroting. Whether they choose firearms, rope, blunt instruments, knives or a combination of weapons, the Boston badmen almost invariably indulge in overkill.

Though police trace the mayhem back to the McLaughlin-McLean contretemps--a falling-out romantically attributed to a slur on one mug's moll--they theorize that other motives have since arisen. Many of the victims made their living as loan sharks. This is big, if disorganized, business in Boston's lower crust. The "vigorish," or profit, is estimated at $1,000,000 a week. With that kind of take, the competition for trade is bound to be keen. As might be expected, the surplus of bodies has been accompanied by a dearth of witnesses and evidence. Just five of the 43 killings have been solved. Bay Staters who derive comfort from the gradual depopulation of the underworld may be deceiving themselves. On at least one occasion, an uninvolved citizen was shot dead for standing too close to the mark.

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