THE PHANTOM PIRATE

This is a story about the islands of Boston Harbor, whose history is filled with legends about pirates and plunder, smuggling and buried treasure, forts and dungeons — and treachery and murder. It is also the story about a modern-day pirate, the most ruthless gangster and feared crime boss to ever come off the streets of Boston.

Some readers would no doubt recognize this man and many of the people in his world; so the names of the characters in this story have been changed to protect the dead and those who could become the dead. These characters — gang members, co-conspirators, fellow mobsters, lawmen, harbor denizens, victims, and seanchies (Irish storytellers) — each spin their tale about him in the pages of this book.

For twenty-five years, a man named James Freney ruled the Boston underworld, controlling illegal gambling, loan-sharking, and drug dealing in Boston, up and down the East Coast from Maine to Rhode Island. He was the Don of Boston’s Irish Mafia. They say that he even sat at the table with the Five Families of New York when La Cosa Nostra was big. The FBI credits him with murdering twenty-two people, but who knows how many more bodies he’s dumped into Boston Harbor?

Freney went on the lam in 1995 when he found out that he was going to be indicted for racketeering and murder, and the FBI, along with every other law enforcement agency across the country, is still looking for him. The FBI has put Freney on its Ten Most Wanted List, right behind Osama Bin Laden, and posted a $1 million reward for his capture.

Although his story has been reported for years by newspapers and television in Boston and across the nation, providing many facts about his life, little is certain about the myth and mystery that shroud him. We are not even sure whether he is still alive. But dead or alive, his ghost haunts the present, and is doomed to haunt the future. Time, in the end, is the best storyteller.

The setting — the Boston Harbor Islands — is real. The intersection where characters and setting meet is imaginary. But it could have happened this way.