THE COMBAT ZONE-Jan Brogan

men were accused of the crime. His murder made national news and led to the eventual demise of the city's Red Light District. Starting with this brutal murder, The Combat Zone tells the story of the Popolos families struggle with both a devastating loss and a criminal justice system that produced two trials with opposing verdicts, all within the context

of a racially divided Boston. Brogan traces the contentious relationships between boston segregated neighborhoods during the bussing crisis, shines a light on a court system that allowed lawyers to strike potential jurors based purely on the racial or ethnic identity, and lays bare the deep seated corruption within the police department and throughout the Combat Zone. What emerges is a fascinating snapshot of the city at a transitional moment in

its recent past. The book that we're featuring this evening is The Combat Zone, Murder Race and Boston's Struggle for Justice, with my special guest, journalist and author Jan Brogan. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Jan Brogan, Dan.

find a story that really needs to be told. And I said that enough times and enough cocktail parties in Westwood where I was living where I read my kid at the time, and a friend of mine I was in Costco, said, jam, he writes screenplays, and I said, well, I have written screenplays, but I've never written a successful screenplay. And by that I meant not that he even got made into film, even that I thought it should have been made into a film. It was good, I said, whine.

He said, because Danny Poppolo needs a screenwriter. And I said, why on earth does Danny Popolo need a screenwriter? Because I knew him. He and my husband played basketball together and we had oldest daughters were the same age. And he said, because you remember that Harvard football player who got murdered in the combat zone years ago, And I was like, yeah, I did remember that. So I said

that was his older brother. So I went back and I googled a trial and I saw there were two trials, and I met with Danny and Francis Terrella, who's called Dash and they had a director, like they had a pretty successful director who had done Spen City and Home Improvement anddy Cadiff, and they needed a screenwriter to do the Obviously, they didn't have money for the screenwriter, so I said, I will write it on spec if I have.

But I knew that I knew that most screenplays do not get made into films, so I said, you know, it's just a real uphill battle, so I said, but I felt like I could sell it as a book, So I said, I'll do it on so back, which means you only get paid if it gets made into the movie, which means pretty much you never get paid.

If I could write a book, and since I'm a journalist, I have to have leeway to you know, the screenplay, I'll do your way, but the book has to be I'm a journalist, so it has to be the way I see things. So we agread to that. We had an agreement on that, and I wrote the screenplay and I worked with Anddykative, who was the director, who was really it was really even though I never got paid, it was really a very valuable experience that I enjoyed.

And he never could sell the greenplay. You never could get it made right. He couldn't raise the funding. He wanted to be the director and the producer, I think. So I started on the book, and so that was like in two thousand and seven, I think, And I started. Took me about a year to write the screenplay, and then it took me another year and a half to write the book proposal. And then my agent could sell it, except he had one one publisher who was interested, and

that was University Press of New England. And they said, well, we are interested. We can't give you an advance, but we'd like you to write it on spec. And I said, no, I'm not going to do that because that is just an unbelievable amount of work. And even then I did not know how much work it was when I said that,

because it was way or more than I thought. So I put down the project for a couple of years and I took a job at UMass and I was working for the President's office in communications, writing speeches and press press releases. And then I got an email like years later from the University Press, New England. I said, we want to go forward with this project. At this time, they're willing to give you an advance that just like what I emailed him, and he said, there was just

one marketing guy didn't want to do it. He's gone. Now we wanted to do it, so they gave me an advance. They wanted it in a year, and I said okay, because I thought I'd done all the research. It took me a year and a half, so I got it. And then when they as soon as I delivered it at the new deadline, which was a year and a half April first, twenty eighteen, three weeks later they voted to go out of business and I had

to find a new publisher. So it took me another couple of years to find you Mass, And then they wanted They said, we really love this because but this is narrative. This is narrative nonfiction. And the publisher or the editor University Press, had been a fan of my mystery, so he wanted me to use a lot of those techniques. So I said, well, I'm happy to write it a straight journalism because it really didn't require that many changes. But I put in those changes and then finally it

got published. So the whole thing start to finish was about ten years.

provisioning with Italian provisions, provisioning restaurants. But they grew up in a very small two bedroom apartment with the boys in one bedroom, the parents another, and the fran had to sleep on a pull out couch in a living room.

And they considered themselves incredibly, incredibly privileged because they had their own bathroom, where the city was so poor at that time in the North End, a lot of times you get in an apartment, you had to share a bathroom in the hallway with the other apartments and take your you went to the public's baths. You know, it was just a different era of the sixties and seventies.

Boston was a lot poorer than people can many people remember, and so by the time Fran was like sixteen, the father said, the parents said, all right, she can't sleep, but she needed her own room. So they they finally found a house, you know, they could ford in Jamaica Plane, which is another neighborhood of Boston, more mixed. It has Irish and Italian and eleven eight. You know, it's just

a more mixed community. So the boys were probably maybe twelve and fourteen or eleven and thirteen at that time, and then they moved to Jamaica Plain, which is not that far from the North End. But they all the father worked in the restaurant. The kids would work there in the summertimes, bottling olive oil. They would you know, they went there to play sports all the time. So they were very, very very proud of their North End roots and really related to the North End.

also very skilled athletically, as was Danny. Really, Danny was an easy going one and he was happy to just adore his older brother. And they weren't competitive as brothers can be. It was more like Andy was always trying to boost Danny up and Danny was just happy to admire his brother. They both were the parents. You know, they're in the North End and which at that time as the headquarters for the Massachusetts Mom and father had

gone to school with some of the Andreulo brothers. Andreulou is the family that run the mob in the North End. And you know, he came back for a marine. He was offered a corner, you know, and he had very respectively decline because he had really other ideas for his family. One thing, he was a very religious man. The family was very religious still is very very Catholic, very religious. And he made sure his boys weren't going to be drawn into those corners. So he had them in sports,

very busy all the time. They focused on education. Both boys got into Boston Latin, which is a public school, but it's like a private school historically. You know, Benjamin Franklin went there, a lot of I think jan John Hancock might have gone there. It's a theater to Harvard. If you've got good grades in Boston Latin, which was a very classically you got you got classical training and you had a good shot of getting to Harvard if you were near the top of your class. So that's

what Andy did. He was a three seasoned varsity athlete. He got into Harvard and he and he just worked harder than anybody else to excel. Like they said in what he said, Boston Latin, he was in the basketball court basketball team. He would he would run nine miles. I mean, he would just run like crazy. Beforehand just to be warmed up. You know. He just worked harder than anybody else. He overstudied, he over exercised. He was just the kind of kid who was like, I am

going to succeed for my family. My family's made sacrifices for me, and I'm going to repay them. He was very into his family, even when it was Harvard. He would come home every weekend to spend with his younger brother and maybe it was sure there are a few weekends he missed, but he really loved. They were very, very tight Italian family.

beautiful breakup dinner. Ethel Kennedy is there to give a special award, trophies are given, speeches, lectures, they have but you know, the drinking age at that time is eighteen, so they have you know, a little cocktail hour, and then during dinner they don't drink anything. Afterwards they have their beer and they look at the reels and then the final thing is they all the football players all go to the combat zone or at last drink together as a team. And this had been done, This has

been done for years. And one of the kids, one of the football players, cousin or something, was a manager at the Naked Eye, so he arranged for them to have a private room in back in the back, in the back bar, and the forty of them go down to the combat zone and some of them go down in a Harvard equipment fan and the equipment manager goes as well. So this is something that you know, you're supposed to do it your last night together as a team.

And it was crazy timing because the combat Zone had just been in the news for all its crime I mean it was crime ridden anyway, and that was kind of allure of it in the seventies. It was exciting. You never knew what was going to happen. It was dangerous, it was wild. It was and it wasn't just Harvard who did this. I have a friend who went played the Boston college football team and he told me they did it too. A lot of the colleges did it.

It was like, you know, we're going to go down in the team as a team, so we're safe because safety and numbers. And that's what they did. They went to the combat zone and they had they watched the show. They some of them got up at the stage and danced with the stripper, in which case the bouncer came out and said, okay, it's time to leave, boys, because it was a closing time anyway, And forty or so football players spill onto the street and the combat zone.

the sixties, there had been a murder there. At one point had been you know, family entertainment but was poor. And that's where the navyman used to go to drink when there was a navy yard in Charlestown's where all the military went. And that's what and they used to get into fights, and that's why it was called the combat Zone in the sixties. Even before this, even before

it's an official red light district. So by the early seventies there were thirty five sex related establishments there, adult entertainment, and so there had also been a couple of there's been a Supreme Court, a US Supreme Court decision, and a state High Court decision, which made it very hard to establish something as steen and made it hard for cities to legislate against these businesses. You couldn't just kick

them out. So Boston came up with the idea. One of the assistants said, well, what you do is you can you can't keep it out, but you can restrict it to an area. So they vote it to restrict it to a four block area in Lower Washington which is kind of bounded by the downtown and Chinatown, and it's at the kind of the far edge of the common and in this four block area were going to allow it. And then they also and it was also

contiguous to Park Square, and that they grandfathered it. I think there was a Playboy bunny club there and they said, if you're there already, you can continue, but no new businesses. So this created the combat zone, and all sorts of promises were made. They were going to clean it up, they were going to police it really well, they were going to add new lights, and they did do a

couple of things. They tried to improve the signing. They tried to work with the businesses to improve the signing, but the businesses did not want to spend the money on improvement, and the city didn't have much money, and they just they were neglecting all the neighborhoods pretty much, but they really neglected this one. And there's another factor.

At the time, the mob is big. This is like the heyday of the Mob, and this is not far from the North End, and pretty soon the mob moves in and it's crime quadruples from the sixties to seventies, and it's an area when you think about it, the city is really poor at this time. Unemployment is fifteen percent in the white neighborhoods and twenty percent in the black neighborhoods. There's really two black neighborhoods, but it's very poor.

And the combat zone is a place where people you're either there to go to a strip club, bisex, or buy drugs. So everybody's carrying cash because these are it's pretty much a cash It's more of a cash society back then anyway. So pickpocketing and muggings are big, car thefts are big. It's and the police are utterly corrupt. And this is discovered only two weeks before these events. The police commissioner himself, who had been brought in to

clean up corruption. Was very frustrated by the power of the union and the agreements that were already in place, and he tried various things to clean up the area. And one of one of the big problems was that the clubs had been allowed to hire or encourage to hire cops for detail, for special detail. So you had a lot of cops. You had cops sitting in bars getting to know the owners and drinking for free, whether they were on a rough duty. And this meant for a lot of a lot of eye averting to crime

that was going on. One of the clubs, it would later come out, was actually had found a way to let their customers charge for blowjobs on their credit card.

And there was just there was there was sex going on, not all, but in some of the clubs in alleys, in you know, parking lots that there would be on Saturday night there would be sixty prostitutes standing outside Charlie's two o'clock lounge and there would be it was a four block area and the people called it the the drive through, where the car would just drive around in a block and they would be in gridlock because there was solicitation. They would stop, you know, the windows open.

Women would solicit through the open windows, drugs were exchanged. It was just a mess.

in this crime ridden zone involving prostitutes and pimps. Let's just briefly mention this little scam before we talk about the events where Andy comes to the aid of his friends. Tell us about the scam that came to the attention of the district attorney that was going on in the combat zone.

women dressed up like prostitutes. Because some of the real prostitutes complained about this, and this was a scam. Women would dress up as prostitutes. They were outside the hang outside the bars, and as the men spilled into the street drunk, they would fondle them and act like they were soliciting to them, and they would steal their wallets.

And one of the new wrinkles of this was, and this was revealed in the report, was that now they had mail protectors, so there were men who would, for a percentage of the wallet, would protect these women in case one of the marks of the guys realized wallet was being stolen and went after the prostitute. The police commissioner, who I was lucky to interview just about a year before he died, told me that even some of the cops were on the take. Some of the even the

cops would take protection money on this wallet theft. And so this was very much in the news two weeks before this happened. So then when the Harvard boys spilled onto the Street. Seven of them, who were walking past the carnival lounge got waylaid by two prostitutes who came up and started soliciting them. This led to one of them losing their wallet and they went back to the Harvard van. So that's where the wallet and not all

of the seven. Some of them were saying, don't, don't do this, this is you know, this is a scam. Don't do that, don't don't talk to these women. But you know, they were drunk. Some of them were drunk, and they were young. They're like twenty one, twenty and one of the women they're very young, they're like sixteen. One of them is sixteen. The one who stole the

wallet was sixteen years old and twenty one. And they stealed them all and they were the way and the three of the boys and the like I said, it's two of the three boys and the equip manager chase them and there's a This leads to a larger chase that has you know, something like seven or eight football players race running down Boyleston Street. All they're all white and big after a black prostitute, tiny black prostitute. And I just want to point out that Andy Popolo is

not anywhere near this when this is happening. He's not one of the seven. He wasn't one. He's in a completely different car. He's in the back of another car. He went home with a different group and was about to leave when this all broke out.

all accounts, no blows exchange. They're asking him about the wallet, and he's saying he doesn't know what they're talking about with a wallet, and one of them says he doesn't have the wallet. Actually, Tom Lincoln says he doesn't have the wallet. Let's go. Just after he says that Leon Easterling jumped and he's another black, and he jumps into the fray and he stebs Tom Lincoln in the guy and they say in the abdomen, and the equipment manager says,

they have knives. Let's get out of here. They all run, even Tom Lincoln who's in shock, and they run down Boylston Street back the way they came. They all get into the Harvard van except for one guy, Charlie, and Charlie is he's the drunkest of them all. It's his

wallet that was stolen. And Andy by this time, when he sees his teammates coming like pouring past him on the street, he gets out to see what happens, and he walks down and he sees when he gets to the alley where the van is parked, the Harvard Man is parked. He sees at that moment he sees Charlie, his teammate. This other guy is one the man in the Cranberry jacket, who they've never been able to find or clearly identify his race, but he's friendly with the

other three black guys who will eventually be charged. He is beating him against the van. The whole van is shaking, and Andy jumps in to help him by the time he gets to him, Tom Lincoln has actually got the one been stabbed, gotten out and gotten Charlie into the into the van and it's just Andy Poppolo and Edward Sores and they get into a fistfight and they're fighting around. They kind of all accounts, all of this takes about

five minutes. They're fighting around the van. A couple of the football players get out to try to help and they're held at nine point by Leon Easterlank, who then jumps over over Edward Soares's back and stabs Andy in the gut. Another football player, Scott Coolidge, who was not a part of the original group, comes in. He sees Andy, he picks him up and he says, are you all right? He says yes, he said, let's get out of here, and he's pulling him away when Leon Easterling and Aaron

retreat comes and stabs Aty another time. This time he thrust the knife into his gut and up into his heart. So the three defendants are Edward Sarez, who is involved in the fist fight, Leon Easterling, who does the stabbing, and then Richard Allen, who really, by all accounts, never touches anybody, but he was involved. He wasn't involved. He's

a bouncer from the carnival lounge. He's also Leon easter Ling's half brother and was at both locations and he came down from the MTA to the area, or at least that's the story, so the three of them, because there had been so much about the combat zone because of that report, the actually the area was being better leased than it usually was and cops are there within instance, like they are there. They realized there's no time for

an ambulance. They take Andy to Tufts, which is like around the block, and they get him there in under four minutes. He is led out and is technically dead on arrival when he arrives, but they're able to restart his heart and work on him all night in surgery. Leek Tom Lincoln has taken to a different hospital because they realize they can wait for an ambulance for him.

And three men are arrested at the scene. Leon Easterling who actually did the stabbing, Edward Soarrows who started the fight and was involved in a fist fight, and Richard Allen, who is there and you know he was a hustler in the combat zone, and according to my sources, he really did work for those prostitutes, but he didn't do anything in that fight. So they're arrested and they're taken immediately. They're charged with attempted murder, and then Andy is in

a coma. At first it looks like he's going to survive, so that these police who are smart enough not to wait for the ambulance, these District one A police who had just been reviled for their corruption because they are considered the most corrupt in the city. Now they're heroes. And there's press conferences to that effect of the next morning and when it looks like Andy's going to live, but then he starts having seizures and it becomes clear he's never going to wake up. But it takes a month.

It's a month of NonStop headlines about first the miracle and then his medical condition is monitored. When Danny and the family go that night to the hospital, when they leave in the morning, there were already television trucks in the street that the press is surrounding them. This is a big story. Three hundred newspapers across more than three hundred newspapers across the nation. We'll cover it and will follow it. There's TV and press. It's a big deal

for a couple of reasons. A big story for a couple reasons. One of the reasons is it's Harvard about Harvard gets news. And when Boston dropt this, this social experiment of the combat zone, it was very much to the rest of the nation. It would seemed crazy because Boston was the puritanical city known for up until that point, for banning everything from Walt Whitman's Leave of Grass to I Am Curious level yellow and then there this is

their solution to almost legislate it. So the rest of the nation is very interested in because they are a lot of cities are dealing with this problem, and it's like, see, we told you this was the wrong way to go. This is a big mistake. So it's a big story and it's covered. And there's a third reason. Boston is also in the press for it's busting. This is nineteen

seventy six. The photo of the Charlestown kids stabbing a black businessman or appears to be, but they're not really photo with a flag with the US flag had gone around the world. I think eventually, I think you want to pull it through that year. It's called the soiling of Old Glory. Boston at this point is in the the middle of pretty much almost a race war going on about bussing. I mean, the National Guard is involved,

stools are shot, there's violence in the street. Boston's very much in the news.

get stabbed and murdered. You know, the combat zone. Raymond Flynn, the former ambassador, and you'll be Boston's next mayor. The day after he was also had one been a professional basketball player, and he had coached young kids, and he had coached Andy. The day after this happens, he is in the combat zone taking petitions to close it down entirely. So it's flooded with the globe is doing stories. Flooded with so many police, the prostitutes have to are moving

out there into other neighborhoods. This is causing problems. There's actually a prostitute's union which is saying, we don't condone this. You know, these are ripoffs, artists. There's press and then at the same time the district attorney and the chief of police come out and say the combat Zone is a failed experiment. We have to shut it down. They

start prosecuting the clubs for all sorts of violations. There had been a secret investigation out of the District Attorney's office into the corruption, and they start revealing their results. So every day there are headlines about another club being closed for violations, about what was being new to fix and shut down the combat Zone. So the trial is very much about the The first trial is very much about the combat Zone and what a failure it was. And you know, this is what happens when you let

things get out of hand. Three black men, you know, gang up and stab a white Harvard player and Andy Popolo and very sympathetic victim. He's you know, he's worked hard to get where he was. He was beloved by all and interestingly in this era of intense racism. He has known both at Boston Latin Is High School and at Harvard for being the one white kid who on the team, who makes friends with all the black kids he's got. He's got a lot of black friends, which

was unusual in this era. And the father is very sympathetic. He's a classy guy, he's a kind man, and this shows and all the city sympathy is with the Popolo family who have endured this terrible tragedy, which is a terrible tragedy.

Easterling wielded his knife, right, he stabbed somebody. He had a knife. He basically brought a knife to a fist fight, and he had it and he proved he would use it. Once those Harvard football players turned around and ran away in retreat and Leon Easterling followed and the other two came with him, they became conspirators or in this theory, right, So that's one way he was using. He's also saying there's a bigger conspiracy here because all three men were working.

They came out to protect that prostitute because they were going to get a cut of the wallet. So this is their gig. They're doing it, they committed murder in it. They're all in it together. That was the basic concept. Now, the sense attorneys say this is crazy because this is basically a street fight. But these are the two different ways of looking at the same thing. And the prosecutor, I think the prosecutor had to be under incredible pressure

because his boss here Burne, hated the combat zone. He had wanted. He's a very uptight guy and he hated the combat zone for years. He knew and he knew more about the combat zone than anybody else because he had his lawyer's working on a secret investigation into the mob infiltration of it. So I think the prosecutor, Tom Munday had to be under pressure to basically over prosecute is I think.

you be fair to them issue of race aside? And interestingly enough, a lot of people said no, I really can't. They would just own up to their racism or they wanted to get out of jury duty. Either way. So the jury is pulled from Everett and Chelsea, which are small little suburbs, but mostly from the very neighborhoods in Boston which were being at that time feeling like their rights were violated by ordered force buzzing. So as Henry Owen, the attorney for Richard Allen, said, they were in no

mood to consider the rights of black defendants. They were very much feeling put upon by this force bussing plan, which was the judge Garritty had to do it because the Boston School Committee had blown him off for so long. But it was very punitive, It was really hard. It was thinking about sending your five year old off to a completely different neighborhood that you think is crime instead

of your own neighborhood. I mean, people were angry, and this is the environment in which the jury is being selected. And at that time, the way it worked was when you surf for a jury, you had to surf for a month you got called. And so what happened was basically gave you an exemption from that if you made a lot of money, or you were a teacher or

you know, they gave exemptions. And the only people who weren't exempt were well union people because their contracts paid them for jury duty, very old who weren't working, and the very young who hadn't started working yet. So the jury selection was tough, tough. It was not the best pool jury pool to start off with. And then the judge can get rid of people. And then but once a judge clears the juror, both sides have an opportunity to get rid of a juror without saying why, using

a peremptory challenge. Now that those peremptory challenges still exists today, and the worse the crime, the more both sides get. So in this instance, I think each the defense had sixteen each because there were three different attorneys, and then the prosecutor had a multiple that they had three times that, and they don't have to give a reason. They could

just say no, I don't like it. And so the way it worked in the nation, Boston is not alone in this everywhere you know, Like so Bandy is an Italian victim, so the defense uses their prosecution to get

rid of everybody with an Italian last name. If it was a woman on who was a man charged with rape, they would use him to get rid of every woman on the juror in this And routinely this prosecutor, it's on Monday, if there are three black defendants and a white victim, he would get rid of all as many black potential jurors as he wanted without having to say why. This is the way business was done in Boston and across the nation.

also testifying eyewitnesses to at least part of it. And he also had the medical evidence. The medical evidence was very damning. So he had very strong evidence and it was a complex case. But the jury is so it's like a Thursday, and they're dismissed at I think twelve for launching, begin deliberating at one. There's a questered. They deliberate till like five or six o'clock the next morning.

They deliberate twenty minutes and they have a verdict, and the verdict is guilty on all counts, all three men, and.

and the racism of the harshness of this to three blackmans. Oh, there's also a trial shortly after, like two months after, there's another murder trial in the state of a black man, Young Black team Brian Nelson eighteen years old, and there's a there's a fight that breaks out with storing the snowstorm, eight white guys in a van and Brian and two of his black friends, and then the cars spin out and they get fist fight, and Brian Nelson gets wound up, murdered with a beat by a tire and iron and

stabbed with a broken bottle and they arrest. When they do the arrest, there is no joint venture, just one a former marine, a nineteen year old is charged. He's only charged with manslaughter, and then the jury quits him. So this is a very sharp contrast. When the victim is black and the assailants are white, look what happens. When the victim is white and the assailants are black,

Look what happens. So there are a couple of cases like this which and you know, the family, the Pabolo family had nothing to do with any of this, right right, And all of a sudden, Andy's name gets associated with racism. And so Henry Allens, who is the attorney for Richard Allen, is city's most prominent black attorney and will be for many years. And he has watched for years, he watched Tom Mundy strike all the black jurors when they're from the from the jury pool, and he was ready for him,

and he starts in the selection of this jury. He is on the record for objecting almost every time Tom Munday strikes a juror, so he is setting up a record for an appeal. They also appeal, you know, saying that, look, there's not enough evidence to prove joint venture. This is crazy, and so that's the appeal. And a lot of famous defense attorneys in Boston will say, will say this is crazy. You know, this is a spot taneous street brawl. You

can't use joint venture in a spontaneous street raw. And the prosecutors you say, well you can when you have all sorts of documents that suggest that Richard Allen is a propared protector in the combat zone. His brother Leon, you know, works for him with him on this, and Leon Easterling is a friend of theirs. So that's those are basically the two camps.

he didn't want to go along. He thought maybe his brother would just like the private time without taking care of his younger brother, which was Danny. So Danny had these feelings of duty and also maybe the idea of the Italian vendetta concept. But with the trial and with the verdicts, some of these feelings had subsided, and Danny

was a little bit better, I guess with the verdicts. However, one day you chronicle that the family is sitting around in Jamaica plane and it's nineteen seventy nine in March, and their television set is on and there's a familiar sound on that broadcast that includes their name, and they pay attention. Tell us about this incredible moment where they catch this landmark decision on television.

becomes the justice their son deserves. When it's appealed, they're worried, right they had gotten justice, will it be taken away from them? And one day there just Dani and his mother and the listening to the TV and they hear it's been reversed that the High Courts actually says. And this is what makes it even harder. The decision by the High Court says, there's enough proof, there is proof here that they were working together in joint venture to go for murder, to be put away from murder in

the first degree. But because of the way the jury was selected, we're going to overturn this and it has to be retried. And to the family that sounds like they know he's guilty. It's getting off on a technicality. That's a very hard decision for a family to summach

because it is so painful to go through. You know, it's so painful for the family to go through a murder trial, to hear all the different things, all the violence that was done to their loved one, all the points where maybe you know, things had gone differently, wouldn't have happened. It's just extremely painful. And there's this theory that you're going to have to go through it all over again.

more representative of the defendants. But it had nothing to do with Andy, Andy's attitude towards race or anything else that had to do with the racial divide in Boston, and his story becomes he becomes a symbol of this racial divide, whereas it was a simple case of Andy trying to help out his friends in a situation that he deemed quickly for them to need his assistance. It was as simple as that.

So this had nothing to do with the neighborhoods, had nothing to do with bussing, But it had a little to do with the city's racism in that the way, you know, the way jury, the jury was selected, and the concept that three black men had to go to jail for the rest of their lives. So Henry Owen, the prosecutor with the defense attorney who represented Richard Allen, said the way it should have gone down was Leon Easterly should have been murdered, should have been convicted murdered

the first degree. Edward soars maybe you could get him for an assault, battery or assisting, and his client, Richard Allen, should have gone off got free because he wasn't involved really except for mostly mostly the quotes with him is him telling the Harvard football players to go home. They're out of their league. Just get in the car and go home. You don't know what you're doing now.

juries are chosen. But this is the case that really, this is the case that's used by the Supreme Court, they call it the Sores decision, that will be used to try to make jury selection fairer.

out of the schools. It's in the neighborhoods, but it's out of the schools, so it's out of the national headlines. Some of the city has become sick of it. The rest of the residents have become sick of it, so they voted out the anti bussing city councilors. And there been a bunch of like the Globe does a study that shows that systematically get harsher criminals and the worst

facilities for the same crime. There's a couple of cases that come out where really heinous crimes against blacks have gone, you know, juries have acquitted the whites. And then three three weeks I think it's two or three weeks before the second trial, there is another murder of a Darryl Williams, a fifteen year old black kid who's playing football on the Charlestown Field and Charleston is a white Irish neighborhood. It gets shot through the back of his neck by

three white kids on a rooftop. Later they'll say it was an accident. There's some debate whether they could actually hit their targets that they wanted to with a twenty one. But when the trial goes on, this is the moment in Boston where violence against blacks has finally gone too far. Even the whites in Charlestown and White and Charleston's a very tight neighborhood, helped the cops round up the suspects, which is unheard of in the Loyalty department. This is

it comes. It happens right before the Pope is visiting Boston. So there's placards everywhere. It's a huge racist stain on the city of the city. And it happens. It's like whites have really like it's everybody's appalled. And so this is very much in the news and very much an influence in the second trial for the family. It means they have got to they've got to go through this all over again, and they worry, particularly not so much Andrew, but but Danny and his mother are really worried that

they're not going to get justice. But they worry. They're just worried that, you know, maybe not all of them will get murder in the first degree. That's as far as they think it's to be the worst. That's their worst case scenario. But this trial is the first time the new rules for jury selection thesra's decision will be implemented. And now what happens is both sides of both the defense and the attorney, every time they strike somebody, it's

a number thing. So if you strike one black juror okay, if you strike two, well why are you striking him? You start to see a pattern. Other side takes note of that and they submit it to the judge and that's rounds for an appeal. So this jury will end up being I think three blacks on it, three blacks out of twelve, and so it's where the first jury was one. It's not that the first jury does have one black on the juror. It's not all white. There

is a black man and he's a foreman. And the first the second jury has i think three blacks and one one of the alternates is blacks as well, and they will come to a very different decision.

year preparing for this case. The second case, the first trial was tried in March, like, less than three months after he died, so the defense really had no time to prepare.

It's almost impossible not to have PTSD, which is explains inner city violence, Why the gangs, why there's that cycle of violence, because these kids in the inner city see their friends murdered on the street, and very natural responses is to want revenge, is to just obsess over the idea of revenge.

mostly white. So it's going to be hard to and it's going to be hard to get representation of a minority anyway, even before they start using the peremptory challenges. So they did change the way jury pools are assembled because they were very white, because they were based on voter registration at that point, Blacks did not register to

vote in the same numbers as whites. And so after they changed the way jury pools are selected and Sora's decision, and then there were a couple of decisions so in Massachusetts which despite the city's representations for being racist, Massachusetts in California were considered by the rest of the nation as activist courts because they were the most forward thinking and the most progressive. So Massachusetts really for other they

kept refining the Sora's decision. So it doesn't guarantee that you know, no black is ever struck just because he's black, but it makes it a lot harder for each side to get way with that, and so this will lead to the nationwide bats And decision. The Supreme Court in eight years later will say, yeah, we can't do this nationally, and so they will issue the bats And Decision, which makes the rest of the nation have to fall into line.

But it's not implemented or refined the same way the Sora's decision is so that prosecutors find ways around it. People still find way Well, there are more loopholes in that than there are in the Sora's decision. Has just done a little bit better.

Commercial Street. It's a beautiful park and you'll find a bronze memorial to Andy Poppolo and a beautiful poem that was written about him that's in his name. So that is the lasting recognition of this young life that really should not you know, it was snuffed out way too early.