He was, so people said, a headline waiting to be a written. What the neighbors called bad news - the teachers referred to as troubled and at risk - and what the police labeled a repeat offender with gang affiliations. Worse, he lived two doors down and by virtue of an alphabetical seating chart, sat directly in front of me in homeroom.
James George Gordon - nee Giordano, street name "Jimmie G" - was a knee capper, a gambler, and a heroin dealer, all by the age of sixteen. He ran a small gang from his daddy's sandwich shop on Massachusetts Avenue, just a block from the library, a collection of young thugs and undesirables who idolized him and never questioned his orders. By the time he was permanently expelled from school, he had so routinely terrorized and beaten up anyone who opposed him that he was widely considered the single most dangerous juvenile delinquent the town had ever seen. It was 1964, a decade after "The Blackboard Jungle" had made its way into the lives of ordinary people, but we were a small and modest town, hardly Glenn Ford's inner city nightmare, and until Jimmie G took over the rival gangs from Somerville and Cambridge and even Revere, we thought we were insulated, that this bloodied up, motorcycle riding would be gangster was a fluke, a bad seed. The town did the reasonable, expedient and worst possible thing - we dismissed him.
In my third year of high school, the violence escalated and spread. A shop teacher was assaulted between classes in a school corridor, there was an explosion in the science lab, a fire set in the auditorium. A young transfer student was dragged from his homeroom and beaten unconscious when he reported another student smoking in the gym. There was theft, vandalism, an attempted rape and by late September, we had gone to split sessions with freshmen and sophomores in class from 8 til 12 and juniors and seniors from 2 to 6 - the entire school was locked down from 12 to 2 and armed security guards patrolled the classrooms and hallways. Jimmie G, by that time, was waiting in the Suffolk County Jail to be tried for his role in the armed robbery of an outlet store in Central Square, a badly planned and poorly executed scheme for which he paid dearly once convicted - five years in Deer Island - but he continued to run things, issue orders and make decisions. Schools were easy targets for a locked up gang leader but by his second year in prison he was restless and anxious to re-take the spotlight so on a foggy, late summer day, he simply walked away from a work detail and disappeared. Soon after, the school violence eased and ceased entirely by the time I'd graduated.
They searched, of course, for several months, but Jimmie G had gone to ground. Leaderless, his small band of followers disbanded and the tightly knit coalition of gangs he had so carefully cultivated fell apart and drifted back to their separate territories. Without Jimmie G, they were small timers, short term thinkers and wannabes, most ended up either in jail or in Boston's slums without a dime or even a reputation to fall back on. They were rapidly and easily forgotten while Jimmie G's clean getaway became a legend. He'll be back, people said, You'll see, his kind doesn't change and he'll be back unless he's dead.
In late '71, there was a string of robberies along Massachusetts Avenue, all committed by a young man in a leather jacket with sunglasses. No one was harmed but shop owners were wary and when a young man who fit the description walked into Giordano's Sandwich Shop, a block from the library, Mr. Giordano reached for the small pistol he'd taken to keeping behind the counter. The young man reached into his pocket and the nervous owner shot twice - Jimmie G was dead before his body hit the worn linoleum floor, seconds before the police arrived with the news that they'd arrested a young man in a leather jacket and sunglasses in the act of robbing the Woolworth's just up the street.
Sal Giordano buried his son, was tried and convicted for manslaughter, spent a year in prison and was released. The sandwich shop was sold and converted to a rare book store which quickly failed, sold again and converted to a frame shop, which just as quickly failed. The government eventually bought the space and turned it into a post office. Sal carried the burden of killing his own son for some ten years before he died from a fall down a flight of stairs in the house two doors down, an accident the papers reported, but those who knew his history were less sure. The best getaways always leave you guessing.
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