This is John McCormack’s brother, Edward (Knocko) McCormack, barroom owner and reportedly the biggest bookie in South Boston.  Owned a barroom, the Wave Cottage, in Andrew Square. His 19-year-old daughter died in the Coconut Grove fire in 1942. Many blamed Mayor Maurice Tobin for the loss of 400-plus lives, because of the supposed payoffs his administration took to overlook fire-code violations in the Bay Village club. When Tobin appeared at the wake of Knocko’s daughter, Knocko was so angry that he ran up to Hizzoner and punched him, knocking him to the ground. Or so goes the legend. Knocko’s son, Eddie McCormack, became the state’s attorney general and ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1962 against Ted Kennedy.

 

Here he is talking to reporters with then-House Speaker Sam Rayburn (in the hat). In 1952, when Whitey was about to be court-martialed by the Air Force, he dropped McCormack’s name. While Whitey was in federal prison from 1956 until 1965, it was McCormack who watched out for him and kept Whitey’s family apprised of the situation. When Rayburn died in 1961, he became Speaker of the House. After JFK’s assassination in November 1963, and until January 1965, McCormack was second in line to the presidency, behind Lyndon Johnson.
In 1968, his career winding down, Speaker McCormack did one final favor for the Mob. He wrote to his good friend J. Edgar Hoover, asking him to hire Zip Connolly as an FBI agent. The rest is history – the history of organized crime in Boston, and Miami, where Zip, a gangster who infiltrated the FBI, is currently awaiting trial on murder charges in connection with the murder of a Boston businessman in 1982.