Confessions of a Loan Shark

One of the last survivors of Boston’s Gangland War of the 1960s opens up about his notorious past.

City Journal: How’d you find me?” It was Ash Wednesday when I cold-called John “Maxie” Shackelford’s house in Manchester, New Hampshire. It’d been 56 years since he left Boston, the city of his birth, and he hadn’t left for the reason most do—to save that buck Taxachusetts takes out of your pocket whenever you go to a bakery. Maxie left under duress. He was handcuffed in the backseat of an unmarked car with an FBI agent sitting beside him and a police escort, blue lights flashing.

When he crossed the northern border on I-95, a sign whizzed past the window. It didn’t say “Live free or die” in 1965. It said, “Welcome to New Hampshire.”

Maxie never looked back.

Boston police said he was marked for death. He was caught up in a gangland quarrel that quickly degenerated into a war, pitting the McLaughlin brothers of Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood against Buddy McLean and his friends from the neighboring city of Somerville. Each side was trying to eradicate the other, and by the time Maxie was transported north, they were well on their way to doing exactly that. Bodies were left slumped in cars, dumped in Boston Harbor, sprawled on the street, and left in patches of woods for critters to eat. Number of cases solved? Zero.

Maxie was one of the reasons why. Questioned by police as a matter of routine in those days, his answer was always the same—“I have no idea.” Maxie, those guns we know you got, where are they? “What guns? I have no idea.” Who was with you in the car that got shot up? “What car? I have no idea.” Gangsters dying like dogs in the street after an ambush were more likely to spit in the eye of their interrogator than spill the beans, even as God’s judgment barreled toward them. more