Finnagains (@Finnagains)

#Massachusetts: Boston Harbor Mystery - Dan was sitting in his car in front of the house one Saturday morning when Johnny came down with a travel mug of coffee in his hand. “Where to?” Johnny asked. “To Quincy, to the shores of the Atlantic ocean and tales of the sea,” Dan replied, “From our old friend Don Bradbury.” “But,” Johnny protested. “He is so hard to believe, half of what he says doesn’t ring true.” “True enough.” Down Pope’s Hill, across the Neponset River, and into the wilds of Quincy they went. Don Bradbury was a retired ‘fisherman’ who had not caught a fish in eighty-three days. “Bradbury doesn’t even eat fish himself,” Dan explained, “He just catches them and feeds them to his cat. Well, sometimes, he hasn’t caught a fish in so long. The cat gets fish from a can. Don Bradbury had been a longshoreman working on the docks in Boston loading war material for the Korean War in the early 1950’s. “I worked with gangster Whitey Bulger’s father, who was a longshoreman, too,” Bradbury had explained. “Then a cable snapped, and he lost his arm, and he was no longer able to work the docks. The union helped him get in to the elevator operator union, and Bulger was soon the union leader.” The blue salty water splashed against the gunwales as they headed out into the harbor and towards Thimble Island. The small island had been reduced to a glorified marker in the harbor, although it had once been big enough to have sheep brought by boat from another island in the harbor to graze on the grasses there. But that was long ago. No one is raising sheep on Boston Harbor islands now-a-days. Through accidents of fate, or simply accidents, Bulger met in the Elevator Operator’s Union another one armed man who had experienced an industrial accident at Quincy Shipyard and taken up the ‘elevator operator’ trade. The other Southie one armed man was a Lithuanian whose parents had immigrated from the old Tsarist Russian controlled Lithuania and had connections and ideas from the old country. When Trotsky was in Mexico some US Communists and their handlers afar wanted to get assets close to Trotsky’s home in Coyocan. So they brought in Soviet money, some in Soviet bills, some in Soviet gold coins. When Trotsky was assassinated by a Stalinist agent the project was put on hold. The agent who came to deliver the funds mistakenly gave the funds to the wrong ‘one armed’ elevator operator labor union officer sitting in the South Boston office. So Bulger and his son Whitey took the funds and stashed them on Thimble Island. In the military Whitey met some ‘in you face’ Communists who talked tough and told stories of fighting on picket lines to stop trucks from crossing into a business that the labor union was organizing. “Strike as fast as you can, don’t give them time to come up with a boxing plan.” But in the military Whitey was a shirker and malcontent and had trouble just listening to a superior telling him what to do. Whitey got kicked out. “Maybe those commies are right, the bosses are evil crooks and we should steal back what they stole from us.”