Boston, MA
‘I just followed the blood trail’: A look at the grisly market of Boston crime tours – The Boston Globe
“He dragged three individuals in there,” he told the crowd.
Over the course of an hour-and-half tour, Leeman, a retired Boston police lieutenant, narrates a mix of revolutionary history you learn in school with chronicles of the city’s underworld. Think Bunker Hill, Samuel Adams, and the Boston Tea Party combined with the Irish Gang War of the 1960s, the Italian mob’s past presence in the North End, the Boston Strangler murders, and, yes, “Whitey” Bulger.
Leeman — and other Boston crime tour companies — is trying to stake out his own grisly corner of a billion dollar tourism market that, even given a COVID-19 pandemic hangover, is still big business.
Last year, according to state estimates, the city welcomed about 10 million domestic travelers who spent nearly $9.7 billion and generated $600 million in state and local taxes.
To separate himself from the competition, Leeman leans into his own experience working for the police and growing up in Boston.
He is an affable and self-deprecating presence behind the wheel, delivering — in his rapid-fire Charlestown accent, of course — personal vignettes about growing up in the city and working on its police force for a quarter century.
“It was a crazy, crazy time,” he said of his youth growing up halfway up the hill on Auburn Street.
He describes the tour as “60 percent crime, 40 percent history.” He doesn’t want to be “all doom and gloom” even though he acknowledges some customers often lobby for more blood and guts.
“I really enjoy history,” he said. “I just find it so interesting that this country was built right here, right in Boston.”
The seeds of the tour were sown years ago. During a 2004 trip to London to visit one of his sons, he took a Jack the Ripper walking tour and found the experience incredible, he said. And when he was a Boston police officer, local judges would have him take interns on a tour of Boston — specifically, he said, “some gritty places, some tough places.”
“As I’m driving I would be thinking, ‘I could do something like this,’” he said.
Banking on consumer interest in the Boston’s often macabre history is not a new idea.
Tom Collins owns Mobsters and Lobsters, a tour company with a similar schtick that covers some of the same ground: the old North End haunts of the Italian mafia, the infamous Brinks robbery, Whitey, the Boston Strangler. Perhaps the biggest difference, though, is that tour ends with a lobster dinner at Venezia in Dorchester.
Collins’s tour company has been around for about a decade and only does corporate events and pre-booked group outings — no public tours. There are currently two trolleys, and Collins estimates his company does more than 400 tours annually.
Collins, a 56-year-old former movie prop maker, admits to considering a life of crime during his South Boston boyhood. But he was deterred by the fact that he didn’t want to die and didn’t want to go to prison.
“Those are the things that usually happen to gangsters,” he said.
For him, the allure of the grittier chapters of Boston history is simple: Who doesn’t like crime stories?
“It’s fascinating stuff, and it’s history,” he said, adding that many Americans are already familiar with the Revolutionary War aspects of the city’s story.
While growing in popularity, tours like Collins’s and Leeman’s pale in comparison to the likes of a company such as Boston Duck Tours, which was established in 1994 and currently has 28 vehicles. The company estimates that more than 460,000 people took one of its tours last year.
Leeman is starting small. He has one trolley and one employee — himself. He does the driving and the talking. His narration is constant and quick. And he is a fount of information about modern and historical Boston.
There are references to townies and toonies — people who grew up in Charlestown and those who moved there later. He speaks of a time when bank robbers preferred Jeep Cherokees for getaway cars because of the vehicle’s ability to hop curbs. He even plays the 911 call of Charles Stuart, who killed his wife and attempted to pin the blame on an unidentified black gunman, a story many in Boston believed until Stuart jumped to his death off the Tobin Bridge, shortly after his younger brother identified him as the real killer.
There’s the video of Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, talks of Paul Revere’s forensic dentistry abilities, and an explanation of how the deadly 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire changed local fire codes.
He passes a defunct Charlestown tavern that was the backdrop to a fatal shooting decades ago.
“There was 29 people that came out of the bar, they interviewed all 29 people,” he explained. “And all 29 people stated they were in the bathroom at the time of the shooting.”
Then, the punchline: “The only problem was it was a one-stall bathroom.”
In Charlestown, he stops the trolley. He has two fake hips and needs to stretch, he says. He shares a story about tackling a masked bank robber while he was working a detail. He drove up on the sidewalk to apprehend the suspect, while another cop was chasing the suspect at gunpoint.
“My heart was going a mile a minute,” he said.
In the North End, he shows a photo of a man covered in blood. The violence had its genesis in a road rage incident that spiraled out of control. The man in the photo was grazed in the neck by a bullet.
“It was really easy to catch him, because I just followed the blood trail,” he said.
He points to a photo that pops up on the screen.
“That’s me in uniform, 20 pounds lighter,” he said. “Alright 30.”
Danny McDonald can be reached at daniel.mcdonald@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @Danny__McDonald.
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Only hours after Boston’s top prosecutor criticized federal immigration officials on Wednesday as “extraordinarily reckless” for detaining a man mid-trial last week, the U.S. Department of Justice responded in a series of remarkable letters and court filings.
U.S. Attorney of Massachusetts Leah Foley issued a strongly worded letter to a Boston judge who found an immigration agent in contempt of court on Monday.
“While you may disagree with the enforcement of our federal immigration laws, there is simply no legal basis for you to hold federal officers in criminal contempt for carrying out their sworn duties,” Foley wrote. “Any attempt or threat to interfere with the lawful functions of federal government agents will not be tolerated.”
Boston Municipal Court Judge Mark Summerville addresses the court room, while holding an U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in contempt after he detained a suspect while he was on trial, Monday, March 31, 2025, in Boston. (Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe via AP)AP
Foley, whose office operates under the U.S. Justice Department, also said that federal officials moved to vacate the order of contempt entered against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent by the Boston Municipal Court.
Earlier on Wednesday, Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden described the situation as unprecedented when ICE apprehended a man in the middle of a trial on charges of falsifying RMV records.
Hayden said his office was investigating ICE agent Brian Sullivan after Judge Mark Summerville found him in contempt of court for interfering with the trial.
“We have a lot to go over in this case before we can determine exactly how it is we’re going to proceed,” he said.
In a separate letter addressed to Hayden, Foley strongly disagreed and called on him to “cease from entertaining or pursuing any charges” against the ICE officer or any other federal official.
“The fact that you disfavor ICE officers doing their jobs is not a basis for criminal charges,” Foley wrote to the district attorney. She said there is “no legal basis for such charges.”
“Rather than attacking the brave men and women enforcing laws of the United States, I urge you to work with us to identify, prosecute, and remove the criminals who break them,” Foley wrote.
Wilson Martell-Lebron, the 49-year-old man who was detained, had been at the Edward W. Brooke courthouse on Thursday for his first day of trial on falsifying RMV records, when he was taken by plainclothes ICE agents outside the courthouse.
Martell-Lebron is a citizen of the Dominican Republic who entered the country illegally and has no lawful status, according to a court filing by the Department of Homeland Security.
ICE officials first found a basis to remove him in October 2007, the filing states.
Foley said that he is in the country illegally, had prior arrests for serious drug trafficking offenses and was arrested pursuant to a valid federal warrant.
Court filings described how federal agents detained Martell-Lebron on Thursday. Sullivan, the ICE agent, was summonsed for the trial to testify and once the day’s proceedings ended, agents grabbed Martell-Lebron after he left the courthouse through a back exit.
Martell-Lebron “took a couple quick steps in the opposite direction before officers were able to seize him and make the arrest.”
This family photo provided by attorney’s shows Wilson Martell-Lebron. (Family photo/Erkan & Sullivan, PC via AP)AP
Foley said Wednesday that Sullivan and ICE’s actions were carried out lawfully.
“Our motion is clear: the state court lacked authority to issue the unlawful and erroneous order,” Foley wrote.
She cited the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution that immunizes federal officers from state prosecution for actions taken in the course of their official duties.
At the press conference on Wednesday, Hayden criticized ICE’s operations not only with Martell-Lebron, but across the city — and revealed the alarming effect the public’s fear has had on Boston courtrooms.
“ICE routinely claims that their actions are improving public safety in Boston, and I’m here today to tell you and to say that they are doing the exact opposite,” Hayden said.
“We’re now finding witnesses reluctant to cooperate with investigators, due to fear of ICE … We are seeing victims refuse to provide information about crimes against them, due to fear of ICE,” Hayden said.
Summerville, the Boston judge, said he found ICE agent Sullivan in contempt of the court after he committed “intentional and egregious violations of the defendant’s rights” by not allowing due process and a fair trial. Summerville referred the case to the Suffolk County district attorney’s office for an investigation.
On Monday, the judge also dismissed Martell-Lebron’s RMV case due to prosecutorial misconduct.
Multiple people remain in the hospital Wednesday after being hit by a box truck that apparently went out of control in Boston’s Chinatown on Tuesday afternoon.
An investigation is ongoing Wednesday.
The crash happened on the corner of Kneeland Street and Harrison Avenue, with the truck ending up wedged between Tora Ramen and a telephone pole.
Six people were injured, and four were transported to the hospital — including the driver of the Penske truck that lost control and crashed.
One of those patients is in critical condition at last check.
Four people, including the driver, were hospitalized after a crash in Chinatown.
Investigators tell us they’re looking into the possibility that the driver may have had a medical issue, as they believe he had a previously diagnosed medical condition.
Surveillance video shows the truck — that was rented out to a commercial trucking company – heading westbound on Kneeland Street moments before the accident.
Witnesses say they tried to help the driver who was trapped in the truck, and the others who were injured, as soon as they heard the crash.
“Preliminary investigation seems to indicate that this seems to be more of a tragic accident,” Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox said.
Building inspectors are expected to check on the structural integrity of the building that was hit.
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