I’m trying to figure out why there is so much dislike among some in Boston for the Irish. It’s not that we are some homogeneous group always sticking together and fighting off others. We may actually be the worst group for that. Didn’t that book about Gypo Nolan take place in Ireland?

I never had many talks with my grandfather, James Connolly, who immigrated from Ireland. I sometimes think it was because he was like the old lady who lived in the shoe. He had so many grandchildren he didn’t know what to do. Or, was it just that he was a taciturn man having come from a land of story tellers that required there be some listeners.

One day I recall suggesting to him that the Irish never got a break in Boston because of the Yankees. He said to me: “From what I could see the worst people to the Irish were the Irish.” The only other words I remember from him was when I visited him a short time before his death. He said, “I wish to live to see one more St. Patrick’s Day.”  Unfortunately the good Lord called him home before that time.

The caption for the photograph that appeared in the Boston Globe read in part:

“IN HIS HOME SURROUNDINGS — Tommy Sullivan meets Red Priest at the Garden Tuesday. Here he is shown, . . . at the South Boston Boys’s Club giving some pointers, etc., to Kenney Healy, Cornelius Lynch, William Kilroy, Matthew Connolly and Jim Concannon, while Patrick O’Toole and Roger Concannon demonstrate.

This was taken at the local Boy’s Club down on West 6th St. It still is there.

Roger Concannon my first cousin is show in the photograph of December 15, 1946, with the gloves on the right with a smile on his face. He’d grow up to become a good fighter but not necessary in the ring. He is missed. I’m still wearing glasses which I had thought I no longer needed at that time. My cousin Jimmy stands to my left.

That photo at the Boy’s Club brought back lots of good memories. It was the first time I had a card that let me into some place. I still remember that it was very smooth about the size of a credit card but thicker and made of a hard cardboard substance that could not be bent.

I spent many years in a district attorneys office as the deputy district attorney. I was involved in hundreds of cases by myself and with others that resulted in indictments and arrest warrants.  One of my main functions was overseeing electronic surveillance operations into organized crime and illegal drug activities which usually ended up in raids and indictments. My philosophy,  that of my fellow assistant district attorneys, the state police officers assigned to our office, and the local police officers we worked with was that our job was to investigate crimes and then prosecute them. We were to do it in a professional manner considering the rights of all the citizens of Massachusetts including those we arrested.

We did not believe our job was to punish the person who committed the crime other than making a recommendation to a judge as to what we believed the judge should impose as an appropriate punishment in either plea negotiations or after the trial. The punishment was to be left up to the judges. We did not harass or beat people. When we executed search warrants we analyzed the threat to the police officers who would execute the search and used as much force as we thought necessary for their protection. In the hundreds of raids conducted by detectives assisted by uniform police the normal side arm carried everyday by the men or women was the weapon used. Fortunately in my more than twenty years doing this no law enforcement officer was injured and the raid was carried off successfully and cleanly. By cleanly I meant we left the premises pretty much the way we found it.

You have to understand certain things before deciding whether Whitey was an informant or not. One of those is the information that has come from convicted former FBI agent Robert Fitzpatrick. He was convicted of six counts of perjury based upon his testimony at the Whitey Bulger trial for the defense team. Two of his them were that he urged his superiors to drop Bulger as an informant and that Bugler personally told him he was not an informant.

Fitzpatrick  also wrote a book which had parts that mirrored some of his testimony. So perhaps what he said can be taken with a grain of salt but as we’ve seen throughout the Bulger saga the prosecutors offered one witness after another with sordid criminal backgrounds who we were supposed to believe. When it comes down to it I’d accept the word of a convicted FBI agent over any of them. But really, what you have to look for in making those decisions is corroboration.

Fitzpatrick in my opinion engaged in high hyperbole rather than perjury. There does not seem to be a red line where the former trips over into the latter. Much depends on the animus of a prosecutor.

In writing my book about James “Whitey” Bulger I knew that he lived in Old Harbor Village during the time that I live there. He arrived there when I did sometime in late 1938 or 1939. What I did not know was how the project happened to arrive there. I did some research to discover this.

It’s existence is due to the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who as New York governor was concerned about the housing situation of the poor people in his state He carried that interest over to his presidency.

President Roosevelt spoke often of the housing problem in America. In his 1937 State of the Union address he noted: “There are far-reaching problems still with us for which democracy must find solutions. For example, many millions of Americans still live in habitations which not only fail to provide the physical benefits of modern civilization but breed disease and impair the health of future generations.” A couple of week later in his Second Inaugural Address on January 20 he said, “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill- nourished. But it is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope . . . [W]e will never regard any faithful law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” In his 1944 State of the Union Address as World War II was continuing he asked for a “second Bill of Rights” that would include “the right of every family to a decent home.” (my emphasis)

Today [January 5, 2019] the Ukrainian church gained independence. The event is a step forward in Ukraine’s ability to defend itself from Russian aggression.

Religion is a major component of cultural identity in Eastern Europe, and central to the designs of Russia on Ukraine.

For decades there has been an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Ukraine, but it was considered non-canonical and out of communion with the rest of the Orthodox world. The Russian Orthodox Church (via its quasi-autonomous “Ukrainian” sub-church) was the only canonical church in Ukraine.

Today that changed.

You hear sometimes that there are 150 million Russian Orthodox, which is goofy as there are only 144 million Russians. Even if the number includes the Orthodox in former states of the Soviet Union (many of which states are Muslim with a Russian minority), still, not everyone is Orthodox. A more realistic study puts the number at 59 million — 41% of the population of Russia. (This number does not include the small Russian populations of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and the other Turkic, Muslim states.)

One of the nicest guys I knew growing up was Danny Sullivan who was born four months to the day after me. He lived around the corner in a three decker. We were friends. One year we played on the same Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) basketball team. We did all right. Both Danny and I played under the basket at both ends. Our job was to block anyone driving at the basket. Danny was bigger and tougher than the rest of us so he did much better at intimidating the opposing players especially since fouls were rarely called. He would go on to play college football at Boston College and professional football as a lineman in the NFL for several years protecting Johnny Unitas.

There was something different about Danny. He had a last name that was Irish, like many of us, but it was rumored that he wasn’t completely Irish. That was not unusual because there were many mixed marriages in our neighborhood between Irish and Italian. Irish and Polish, etc. What was different about Danny was that rumor had it that he was White Russian which was something that intrigued us.  We knew no others of that background. I’d learn many years later when I met a cousin of his at a Ukrainian event that Danny was in fact half Ukrainian.