***A Word -Pinky Foley And The Early Boston Corner Boys

 

From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin 

Paul Kiley walked the refresher streets of North Adamsville, his 1960s working- class neighborhood growing up streets, on a whim, well, maybe not a whim so much as a chance to reflect on the vagaries of corner boy existence after reading a story in his local newspaper, The Daily News, about the unheralded and un-mourned death of the famous Boston corner boy leader, Pinky Foley, in prison. Pinky Foley had been for Markin’s corner boy generation in dinky North Adamsville something of a hero, a model to be emulated, from the tough coming out of the Great Depression corner boy world existence the generation before his against the cops, the church, and society at large and anybody else who wanted to cramp his style. Pinky’s organization, based on hanging around some Dorchester Avenue store fronts, a variety store here, a pizza parlor there, had run every kind of racket from book, drugs, extortion, and women, to strong arm, and, in the end, hired guns all the while giving the finger to the world, the non-Pinky Foley world. They had finally caught with him in some flea-bitten entrapment operation involving moving a whole ship load of cocaine from down Mexico way to Boston and he and his boys had been in a shoot-out where a cop or two got killed. They threw the book at Pinky (and a couple of other of his corner boy survivors) and while he would later be occasionally mentioned in some newspaper article which wanted to scare children away from a life of corner boy crime that was about all Paul had heard about Pinky for years until he read of his death

When Paul heard that news he reflected that a quarter turn the other way might very well have led him to his own Pinky Foley fate, it certainly was a close thing, and hence the need for a reflective walk down the old neighborhood streets. First stop as always was the corner of Sagamore and Young Streets where he was to first become enthralled to the corner boy life by the denizens in front of Harry’s Variety Store, now long gone, enthralled by leader Red Riley’s corner boy lifestyle. Of course then, as Paul chuckled to himself as he walked across the street to the ball field bleachers that had been there since  he was a kid to have a good think, he had been only something of a mascot, being only about twelve- years old, to the older, harder boys like his two older brothers, Prescott and Kenny, who were Red’s major accomplices, his lieutenants, in his midnight creeps around the neighborhood houses, his stolen car ring, his extortion ring, and later the graduation to the armed robberies that eventually did all three in.

Funny at the time, that early time, Red was nothing but a hero to Paul, bigger than life, even when, or especially when, one night he witnessed Red chain whip a corner boy from another corner just because he was from another corner and left him in a bloody pile for the ambulance and just walked away. Yes, Red was tough, but Paul remembered him more kindly as the guy who would give him his left-over free games on the Madame LaRue pinball machine that Harry had in the back of his store. Yes too, Red’s fate was none too noteworthy since he was shot down one night in a police shoot-out after he had robbed a White Hen convenience store down south trying to get dough to keep himself and some wayward honey from the cold.        

That Harry’s recollection too got him to thinking about his two older brothers and how they tried to “wise him up” about the world and thought like their leader Red, take what you could when you could, and don’t look back. They had been four and five years older than Paul and so, for a while, they held sway over him, a big sway, as he mulled over his options in the world. See the way Prescott and Kenny looked at it they had come up dirt poor, had somehow gotten the short end of the stick in the getting of life’s goods and unlike their father who did not bust out against his fate they were not going to wind up like him, a broken man with nothing to show for his life except nothing. Yes, the world owed the Kiley boys a living, an easy street living and they lived for that expectation. And the older boys were broken by it.          

Paul remembered the day Kenny went down. This was after Prescott and Kenny had broken off with Red, or maybe Red had decided to head south and try his luck elsewhere or something and they decided not to go. Such details were always a little murky in the telling. In any case they started free-lancing on their own. A midnight heist here, a dope deal there, maybe the old stand-by extortion someplace, the small beer of the world. Then one day they ran into some guy who needed some heavy muscle for a big heist over in Brookline, a heist of an estate with paintings, jewelry, silverware, the works. And the plan seemed sound when Paul heard the details later, on paper it seemed solid anyway. In the execution less so since either Kenny or another guy had forgotten some detail and set off the alarm system. A couple of minutes later the place was swarming with cops as they tried to make their getaway. The inevitable shoot-out occurred and Kenny was laid low in the cross fire. Before he died he told Prescott to tell Paul “not to forget that the world was a tough place and that he had better take what he could when he could.”

And Kenny probably got the better of the deal, an early death and some martyr’s halo in some secret corner boy world. That busted heist though started Prescott on his almost endless incarcerations, first a dime (two off for good behavior) for the Brookline caper, and then a series of other shorter sentences for low-rent armed robberies, and assorted other acts of mayhem. Until Prescott turned into an old man, into at the end an old con, an old con who was afraid of the shadows of the real world when he got out the last time, the time that he finally figured out that he couldn’t do any more time having been a virtual ward of the state since he was about twenty-two. It was then that he took a lonely room over in some run-down rooming house in the South End of Boston for drifters, grifters and ne’er-do-wells trying to figure the next dollar and reduced his world even further be sticking there as a recluse of sorts, until the end. The end came one morning when they found him on his bed with a needle in his arm and more junk in him that any normal human could take. Yes, in the end the fix was in, but a very different fix from what Prescott figured out was due him those many years before when the world was fresh and everything was possible. Somehow to get through the jail time, and apparently later that lonely freedom time out on the mean streets he had picked up that smack habit, a habit that would have required some serious dough to keep maintained and he finally played the percentages his way. When Paul eventually found out about Prescott’s fate he had already been buried in some lonesome potter’s field over in Long Island. He decided to leave his brother buried there as a fitting and proper resting place for a friendless and broken man after all his lifetime of woes.                    

Those brotherly recollections disturbed Paul and he had to move on from those desolate bleachers for he had already come to believe long before that there was nothing he could have done, or could do now to change the Mandela of his brothers’ lives. So he walked a few blocks over to Doc’s Drugstore, over on the corner of Norfolk and Newbury Streets, the place where he came of his own corner boy age. The place where he would begin to take that first turn in the path that his brothers had set for him. By that time Red and his brothers had moved on and so Harry’s was kind of passé (except as the be-bop place to play those pinball wizard games with the now ageing Madame LaRue staring you in the face urging you on, urging you on to win to free games.) The action for the younger brothers of  those of Red’s generation was at Doc’s (and also the place where, unlike Harry’s, there was a jukebox to while away the time and to go through the whole girl-boy thing but that was a separate story because this one is about corner boy fates, not about honeys and that love travails stuff).

It was here that he first met Frankie Riley, Frankie the king hell king of the early 1960s corner boy night. Frankie was the guy who first showed Paul the “clip (how to heist from stores everything from records under your shirt to rings, tons of rings for quick and easy resale),” first showed him how to jimmy a door (and left no telltale marks), first showed him how to get do some dope (harmless grass, weed, you know, marijuana, but in those days a very wicked and evil thing, devil-like), and to sell it. Sell it to kids eager to try something to break out from the jail of early 1960s cold war red scare working- class life, to get some kicks in life before the world blew up in their faces. Yes, Paul was on his way, on his way to the easy street life. That was the time when he became familiar with the exploits of the late Pinky Foley (although he had heard the name before at Harry’s kind of whispered in hushed reverence by the corner boys there he didn’t connect with his exploits then). He figured he was just smart enough to pull it off, working with Frankie and a couple of other guys. Break out of that small time stuff and work North Adamsville like Pinky worked Boston.      

Of course sixteen year old boys, or maybe any year old teenage boys, wise beyond their years or not, were not going to make a splash in the corner boy world at that age, just hanging around some two- bit drugstore listening to Elvis or Buddy Holly on some jammed up jukebox. So as Paul got older he moved onto the orbit of Billy Bradley (Frankie did too, once he also saw the writing on the wall that selling joints and small time clipped hot stuff was not going to be the road to easy street) and his corner boy hang-out at Balducci’s Pizza Parlor at the corner of Main and First Street. That was where the action was, that is where Paul (and Frankie) spent their high school apprenticeship years under the tutelage of Billy Bradley, a fellow classmate and well known throughout the town with those who counted, high school boys and girls, as the king hell king of the corner boy night now that Red had moved on.

It wasn’t so much, like with Red, that Billy was tough although he was tough enough, but Billy had great plans, great ideas of how to make that one big score that would put him, and his confederates, on easy street. Of course dope, coke, bennies, marijuana was part of it but that was mostly to raise seed money. And that old stand-by for every corner boy, extortion, was always in play. A little jack-rolling too. But the big thing was to move cars, cars that guys were crazy to buy (or have their fathers buy ) to be ‘cool” cool for the honeys Saturday night, And for a couple of years, maybe Paul’s senior year in high school and the year after that,  they were rolling in dough, had more orders than they could fill. All boss cars too.            

And then it stopped. No, not the various illegal operations but Paul's desire to find the easy street ways, the corner boy way.  Did Red Riley’s untimely demise which occurred around that time have anything to do with it? Perhaps. Did he fear for his brothers fast and un-thought out ways have anything to do with it (this before that busted heist that got Kenny killed and Prescott hard time). Sure, although they had already drawn their lines in the sand. But that was just stuff he thought about afterwards, stuff that might have contributed to his decision. Mainly thought it was because he had in those heady times seen what was happening to Billy (and Frankie too who he was personally closer to) as they got wilder and wilder in their easy street plotting. Paul still thought, and would for a long time think, that the world owed him a living, his brothers after all did hold a heavy sway, but he sensed somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind that this was not his way. Eventually Frankie too slipped away from the life. Unfortunately Billy, Billy of the big score dreams, never made the turn, and wound up a few years later face down in some Sonora, Mexico, dusty back street with two bullets in his head after some drug deal with awry on him.  

As Paul walked away from the last corner boy memory station of the cross he thought about the picture of Pinky Foley that accompanied his obituary, taken in the old days in front of a drugstore on Dorchester Avenue showing him and a couple of his corner boys smiling some devilish hell-raising smile. More importantly, if one looked closely at that picture it could have been a picture of Paul, his corner boy pal Billy Bradley and his other corner boy pal Frankie Riley growing up.

Fortunately for him and Frankie (although it was a close thing in both cases) they followed the line from the Bruce Springsteen Jersey Girl lyrics- "ain't got no time for the corner boys down in the streets making all that noise." Billy (and his two brothers), unfortunately, didn't listen so well.