Way Back, Mount St. Charles Football Featured Future Mob Hitman, 60 Minutes Star, and Top Banker

Thursday, May 13, 2021

GoLocalProv News Team

In the mid-1950s the Mount Saint Charles Academy football team featured a group of young men who would go on to a range of careers.

One became one of the most notorious organized crime killers.  Another of the boys became one of America’s most successful bankers. One of the players went on to one of the most storied careers as a journalist.

And the best athlete of all — he went on to realize maybe the most interesting career and worked around the world.

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It was at a time before the then-all boys Catholic school was known nationally for hockey greatness. While Mount was wildly successful in the 1940s in hockey with a group of Canadian imports — the flood of championship banners and first-round NHL draft picks would come later.

And, in the 1950s the biggest sport and its biggest game of the year was a football game played on Armistice Day against Woonsocket High School before tens of thousands.

 

 

The four young men were not all at Mount at the same time but there was plenty of overlap over a six-year period — those four went on to have some of the most intriguing careers of former Mount students. 

 

"Gap Year" Working in a Mill

Terry Murray, a Woonsocket native, attended Mount from his freshman year through his part of his junior year. “My father pulled me out for being a wise guy and made me get a job in a mill -- Bonin Spinning Mill. I worked there for most of the next year from 11 PM until 7 AM," Murray told GoLocal. 

After sitting out a year from school -- not exactly a "gap year," said Murray -- went on to Providence Country Day and then to Harvard University.

Murray later went on to build a small Rhode Island bank, and through organic growth and a series of mergers, turned it into a national powerhouse. Ultimately, Fleet Bank became the ninth-largest bank in the U.S. and merged with Bank of America in 2003.

While at Mount, Murray played baseball, basketball, and football. According to Bob Cote, a star at Mount in the 1950s in football who then played minor league baseball for the Dodgers organization and today still holds Mount's basketball scoring record in a game with 44-points said, “Murray was a good athlete. He played everything and he started on football as a sophomore.”

 

 

Cote's Athletic Stardom

Cote was the best of the athletes and in a group of young men who went on to forge unforgettable lives, he was not as high profile, but nonetheless amazingly accomplished in professional baseball, as an investigator for a select investigative unit in the U.S. Air Force, and then in a 20-year career in the oil industry in Saudi Arabia for the petroleum giant Aramco. Depending on the day Aramco or Apple is the most valuable company in the world.

In his senior year at Mount, Cote helped led the Mount football team to a victory against Woonsocket High School at Barry Field on Armistice Day, a game that was played before tens of thousands of spectators. Cote said it was the first Mount win over Woonsocket in 15 years.

Cote was enshrined in the Mount Hall of Fame in 2018. 

 

Ed Bradley - "Pinky" or "Big Ed"

At Mount, Cote played with the late Ed Bradley, 60 Minutes investigative journalist.

"He was a sophomore when I was a senior. We called Ed 'Pinky' and I am not sure why. He was a chubby guy back then and grew into a tall lanky guy," Cote remembered about Bradley.  

Bradley, who won 19 Emmy Awards and numerous other journalism accolades, played football at Mount with one of America's most nefarious criminals -- the hitman for Whitey Bulger and the Winter Hill Gang.

Johnny Martorano, also known as "Vincent Joseph Rancourt," "Richard Aucoin," "Nick," "The Cook", "The Executioner," and "The Basin Street Butcher" has admitted to killing 20 individuals.

According to one book, Martorano committed his first murder at 24, when he allegedly killed Patriarca crime family made man Robert S. Palladino.

“Palladino was an ex-con stick-up artist and friend of Johnny Martorano’s. But he’d been in Luigi’s, the Martorano family bar in the Combat Zone, the night a waitress was murdered. Supposedly he was to appear before a grand jury investigating the slaying. Martorano picked Palladino up in an after-hours joint on Blue Hill Avenue, shot him in the head and dumped the body at North Station. It was Martorano’s first murder; 19 more would follow,” according to the Boston Herald story in 2011.

Before Bradley died he had initiated a conversation with his former teammate Martorano. However, in November of 2006, Bradley died of lymphocytic leukemia at the age of 65 -- 50 years after he entered Mount.

In 2008, Martorano conducted the interview with Bradley's colleague Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes. Martorano discussed the murders he committed and reminisced about his friendship with Bradley at Mount whom he called 'Big Ed."

See 60 Minutes Interview Below

Mount football was canceled for decades and only returned three years ago as a co-op team with North Smithfield. In 2019, the combined team beat Tiverton for the 2019 Super Bowl Championship.

In the end, only Cote graduated from Mount. Martorano transferred to Thayer Academy, Murray finished at PCD, and Bradley returned his hometown of Philadelphia to Saint Thomas More Catholic Boys High School and then attended historically black school, Cheyney State College for college.

EDITOR'S NOTE:

Thank you to the editor of the Woonsocket Call, Seth Bromley, who extended the courtesy of allowing GoLocal the use the amazing coin-flip photo at the beginning of the Mount and Woonsocket game in 1956.

The portion of the stands that are viewable in the background shows how large the crowd was for the high school football rivalry game.

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