[IMR 4350]

A friend of mine grandfather was a union boss in Mass.

He was a member of the “family” and knew Joe Kennedy from the old days.

Contrary to popular belief, the Kennedys weren’t trying to take down the “family” they were trying to get complete control of the “family”.

[Wallace T.]

I am not totally familiar with the details of organized crime in New England, but in the decades after John and Robert Kennedy died, there appears to have been a war between Italian-American organized crime and the Irish-American gangsters, notably Whitey Bulger. The Irish faction became dominant in Boston with the 1980s era FBI aligning with the Bulger gang at the expense of the Mafia. I don't know what motivated the FBI to align with the Irish gang, but with the Godfather movies, Goodfellas, and the like, last names ending in vowels would have brought greater headlines than Gaelic surnames.

Could a Kennedy attempt to dominate organized crime, as you state, be fitted into a context of ethnic warfare in organized crimes? Not all gangsters are Italian-American; the big cities had plenty of Irish and Jewish "wiseguys", not to mention blacks, Poles, Germans, Greeks, etc. In the South and Southwest, the gangsters were mostly of British Protestant background, e. g., Benny Binion and H.K. Beebe.