Jan Brogan’s new book on Murder, Race, and Boston’s Struggle for Justice

Walking today on Washington Street, south of Boston’s Downtown Crossing, between Boylston Street and Kneeland Street, one passes along the edge of Chinatown. The roughly two-block stretch includes a wine bar, a sushi lounge, two luxury apartment buildings, and various Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants. In the mid-1970s, the area looked radically different.

What some refer to as lower Washington Street and its side streets were Boston’s “adult entertainment district” or, as The Wall Street Journal characterized it, a “sexual Disneyland.” Popularly known as the Combat Zone, it was home to more than 35 sex entertainment businesses concentrated in a small, gritty area.

As Jan Brogan writes in her compelling new book, The Combat Zone: Murder, Race, and Boston’s Struggle for Justice, it was an area “not devoid of social value.” Indeed, the Zone was “a refuge for the offbeat, artistic, and liberal minded.” It was one of the rare places in Boston in the 1970s “where gays were accepted, where Blacks and whites drank at the same bar, and where an interracial couple could share an apartment without rocks coming through the window.” It was also an area, beginning in the 1950s, with a strong live-music scene.

But the Combat Zone was often a dangerous place, especially during a time when Boston was far from the affluent city that we know today. The officially designated district was plagued by high levels of crime—street crime, Mafia activity (many of the establishments were mob-owned), and official wrongdoing. Robert diGrazia, the city’s reform-minded police commissioner at the time—he had arrived from San Francisco in 1972 with the charge of cleaning up the Boston Police Department—was convinced that the city’s police force was the most corrupt in the United States. District One, which was responsible for policing the Zone, was Boston’s most crooked; the commissioner estimated that about half of its cops were on the take.

Brogan powerfully brings to life this reality by centering her book around the aftermath of a celebration of about 50 Harvard University football players at one of the Combat Zone’s best-known strip clubs, the Naked-i. At around 2am on November 16, 1976, the large group of student athletes stumbled out of the club, after a raucous night of alcohol-fueled partying.

There is disagreement about what transpired in the next fifteen or so minutes. What is certain is that some of the men encountered and engaged two young women, both Black, who worked the Combat Zone’s streets. One of the football players ended up losing his wallet; he and some of his teammates, suspecting one of the women, gave chase. This soon led to a confrontation with three Black men, who worked in the Zone and later claimed to be defending a pair of women of color under threat from a gang of white men. In the fracas, one of them stabbed Andrew Puopolo, 21, in the chest. A month later, Puopolo, comatose, died at Tufts-New England Medical Center in Chinatown.

The incident and the death of the Boston-born and –raised Puopolo—a Harvard senior from a working-class, immigrant family who was heading to medical school—received intense and extensive media coverage. For many, the killing personified all that was wrong the Combat Zone—and with Boston more broadly.

Within hours of Puopolo’s death, Suffolk County indicted Richard Allen, Leon Easterling, and Edward Soares for first-degree murder. While only one person (Easterling) had wielded the knife that killed Puopolo, the district-attorney charged all three defendants with the same crime under the logic of “joint enterprise.” As Brogan explains, “it stipulates that anyone who assists, is available to assist, or encourages the commission of a crime is as guilty as the instigator.”

A great strength of Brogan’s book is the broad context that she provides—one of overlapping divisions of race, class, and geography—to make sense of how the legal proceedings unfolded. It was a time when racial tensions in Boston, associated with the conflict over efforts to desegregate the city’s public school system, were at a boiling point. “The city’s white working-class neighborhoods, from which the majority of the jury would be pulled, were in a furor over busing,” she writes. “Whites were in no mood to consider the constitutional rights of three Black defendants.” For Brogan, this mood goes a long way to explaining the jury’s decision to find all three defendants guilty of first-degree murder.

But the larger context was hardly stagnant. While racial violence continued to plague the Boston area (Brogan does a good job providing an overview of some of the worst incidents), many “white voters were growing weary of the anger and bitterness.” That November, Bostonians rejected the re-election of the two most strident, anti-busing members of the City Council, Louise Day Hicks and John Kerrigan, and of Pixie Palladino, a champion of white grievance politics, to the School Committee. Meanwhile, they elected John O’Bryant, the first successful Black school committee candidate in the city’s history.

And two years after the first trial, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned the guilty verdicts due to the systematic exclusion of would-be Black jurors. (The prosecution had rejected 12 of the 13 Black potential jurors. The court also found that the defense attorneys had systematically excluded potential jurors with Italian surnames.) The court’s decision affected the jury’s composition for the second trial. What happened only days before jury selection began impacted the trial even more.

On September 28, 1979, Jamaica Plain High School’s football team played at Charlestown High School. On the field for Jamaica Plain was 15-year-old Darryl Williams of Roxbury. During halftime, a single shot from a .22 caliber rifle struck the Black teenager in the neck, paralyzing him for life. (Police charged three white teenagers with the shooting. The teens claimed they were shooting at pigeons from the roof of a public housing project across the street when a bullet went astray and struck Williams from 301 feet away.)

In the days leading up to, and throughout the trial, “news coverage of Darryl Williams’s medical condition and the lifelong struggles he would face as a quadriplegic ran almost daily,” according to Brogan. In her estimation, outrage at the shooting—and a heightened sensitivity among Bostonians to the pervasive nature of racial injustice more broadly—played a large role in the new jury’s verdict. In late November, jurors found Easterling guilty of a lesser charge, manslaughter, and found Allen and Soares, not guilty.

Brogan writes with empathy for all involved in the events she so capably explores surrounding Puopolo’s death. In doing so, she considers matters of trauma and justice as well as the rights of victims and those of the accused. She also highlights how much Boston has changed in the almost five decades since, while taking pains to emphasize its unjust continuities.

Standing today in the gentrified area that was the Combat Zone, it’s hard to imagine the landscape of libertine encounter, exploitation, and violence that once was, and the larger social fabric of which it was part. Jan Brogan’s Combat Zone deftly illuminates this past. It is a book that deserves a wide audience.

Joseph Nevins teaches geography at Vassar College. Along with Suren Moodliar and Eleni Macrakis, he is the co-author of A People’s Guide to Greater Boston (University of California Press).