Don’t Talk About Joe Mac

Forget what you think you know about organized crime in Boston; this, at long last, is the ruthless truth of its underworld and most ominous figure: his tragic origins, unsolved murders, and his daughter who broke the silence around him.

In 2020, author Springs Toledo set out to find a ghost in the Boston underworld whose name can end a conversation-what he found is startling. Don't Talk About Joe Mac is a true crime biography that reads like noir fiction. It is a journey through a shadow society as bizarre as it was impenetrable; an expose that will upend the official narrative animating United States v. James J. Bulger (2013) as it corrects the record and takes the top off a succession of unsolved murders.

Joe McDonald (1917-1997), a World War II veteran and father of five, was the most revered career criminal in the region and its most prolific killer. He founded the Winter Hill Gang in the 1950s, became the bogeyman of the infamous Gangland War of the 1960s, and was among the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives in the 1970s, and yet his name was barely mentioned and his exploits only whispers.

His daughter, whose own unforgettable story is laced within his, brings us uncomfortably close to a personality marred by trauma and motivated by principle. Her approval of the project opened doors long ago locked and bolted; it was the nudge the author needed to access dozens of underworld figures who knew Joe Mac and had not spoken a word about him or their own lives and crimes, until now.

This is the story you were never supposed to know.