Somewhere over the last three and a half decades Edmund H. Mahony of the Hartford Courant developed a specialty in the coverage of the New England mob. It was probably some random assignment on a Wednesday afternoon that landed him in a federal courthouse and sent him down the path.
So it was with much anticipation that we waited this week for Mahony’s look into the death of former Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger. Thursday morning, Mahony did not disappoint, delivering a classically spare tale describing the main suspect in Bulger’s prison murder, a brief history of the mob in New England and a few short but ironic sentences sprinkled throughout that tie it all together. Especially the last sentence.
Mahony has an obvious affinity for the cinematic nicknames of organized crime figures. One imagines that there may be a chart above his desk in the Courant newsroom on which each Sonny “The Lion” or Mickey “The Greek” is catalogued.
Every once in a while The Laurel points out the value of a reporter with institutional memory in a specific subject area who enhances the daily output of a Connecticut news organization. This then is one of those times. We present to you Eddie “The Pen” Mahony.
