One of the two most famous incidents...
in the old zone was a murder...this is from a post I made a while ago:
[i]"The beginning of the end came when the Harvard football player, Andy Puopolo, was killed in a scuffle with a pimp. The pimp's hooker had relieved Puopolo of his wallet with the old 70's trick of putting one hand in a guy's crotch and the other in his pocket. At the end of his chase to retrieve the wallet, the pimp used a knife to end the scuffle - Puopolo was killed, and a friend wounded.
Kevin White, then the mayor of Boston, had declared the zone an adult entertainment area, and instructed his police commissioner, DeGrazia, to take a laissez-faire stance on the area. As a result the place was full of roving, young hookers who doubled as pickpockets. The real streetwalkers and bar-girls who worked Good Time Charlie's and The 663 hated the hordes of street thieves...club owners talked about banding together to do something about the problem, but could not agree on just what they could do.
Shortly after the Puopolo incident, DeGrazia left Boston and a new commissioner was installed, with instructions to clean things up. It didn't take long for the streets to get pretty barren. That lasted for a while, until the early 80's, when things began to get somewhat back to the original state - but never back to the craziness that marked the early and mid-seventies."[/i]
The second major incident was the murder of Robin Benedict. She was a dancer/provider who worked in the zone, mostly at Good Time Charlie's. She hooked a professor from Tufts who became obsessed to the extent that he put her on his payroll, giving her tens of thousands of dollars of his grant money. It was a rocky relationship and he got caught embezzelling. When he finally realized that he'd been taken all along and he snapped, killing her in his home. He got rid of her corpse and did so well enough that it was never found...but there was sufficient physical evidence to convict him and put him away. He's out of the slammer now, as is the pimp who did Andy Puopolo.
It was the most fun, and dangerous....
[QUOTE=MeatMan]Despite all the stuff we read and hear - during it's heyday, the Combat Zone was no more dangerous than it is now. [/QUOTE]
...back when it was just beginning to take hold, in the early sixties. Back then there was still a major military presence in Boston, at the Charlestown Navy Yard and the Boston Army base. Every night there were loads of servicemen in town, and three or four Shore Patrol or MP paddy wagons. It was during this period that it won the name "Combat Zone" as servicemen experienced brawls in various establishments. Your greatest risk was to get caught up in a big beef. Other than that, MM is correct. The zone was always actually the safest place in the city.
The first joint I ever walked into in the zone was a place called, if my memory serves, "The Palace Bar." Located on the corner of Beach and Washington, before Charlie S's Pussycat Lounge occupied that spot, it was known far and wide as a real bucket of blood type place. I was only 19, but looked older...but the bartender who came up to me as I bellied up to his bar looked me up and down and said "You ain't 21. Lemme see some ID." As I groped for my fake ID, he said, "Aw, fuck it. If you've got the balls to come in here, you've got enough balls to get a beer. What'll you have?"
My next stop was Izzy Ort's Golden Nugget - now [b]that[/b] was quite the place - a combination hooker bar and soul music joint. I happened to walk in on a night that had a performance by a guy who perfectly mimicked James Brown...can't remember his name - it was "Little Somethingorother" - great performance, and he had a sax player working with him who was incredible. It was here that I made my first connection with a lady of the night.
By the way, in an earlier post, which for some reason the edit option is no longer available, I refferred to Johnny M's bar as the 666 - that was a typographical error...it was the 663 Lounge. I spent many joyous hours there, until Johnny got set up by a vice cop who lied his ass off to give him a violation that eventually cost him the license...but that's another story.