Ahead of St. Patrick's Day parade, Southie leaders warn of ‘zero tolerance' for public debauchery
public debauchery sparked a debate about the future of the event, which has a century-plus history in South Boston, harkening back to the days when the neighborhood was known as a working-class enclave of Irish Americans. In recent years, the parade, one of the city's largest celebrations, drew up to a million revelers, according to police estimates.
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On Sunday, every available Boston police officer will be called into work. So-called
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said during an appearance on GBH this week that the parade represents the largest annual event that runs through a residential neighborhood in the city. She added that the event celebrates the city's immigrant heritage and is 'not just a drinking fest.'
'Just remember that's someone's yard, that's someone's house,' she said. 'We just ask that you keep that in mind.'
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Revelers tossed cans of beer down to firefighters from out of town marching in the annual St. Patrick's Day parade in 2024.
Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
A reveler carried an alcoholic mixture in a jug during the annual St. Patrick's Day parade in 2024.
Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox said this week that his department's goal is to cut down on the public drinking and unlawful behavior that was on display last year.
'This parade is welcoming and safe for all attendees and participants and should not compromise the quality of life for the residents of South Boston,' he said at a news conference.
Flynn, a native of the neighborhood, floated the idea of moving the location of the parade if revelers didn't clean up their act. During an interview this week, Flynn said, 'last year ... in my opinion, we had major problems with the public drinking and violence along the parade route.'
Flynn said a task force has held a monthly meeting since last year's parade to discuss what went wrong and how it could be avoided in the future. The parade, he said, has an earlier start time this year: 11:30 a.m., instead of the traditional 1 p.m. kickoff. Flynn hoped that would curb last year's excess. Additionally, marchers this year are required to sign a code-of-conduct, essentially agreeing to act respectfully while they march. He also said restaurant and bar owners have been notified to be on the lookout for men drugging women's drinks.
'It's about treating our veterans community with respect,' said Flynn of the parade. 'It's not about drinking alcohol.'
This year, police and parks department officials will have a presence at places like Medal of Honor Park, the site of the first Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the country, 'where serious incidents of [violence] went viral on social media last year,' according to the letter from officials.
Additionally, fire officials will crack down on roof deck overcrowding, and licensing authorities will work with police 'to ensure underage purchases of alcohol do not take place on Parade Day weekend.'
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Authorities have also modified alcohol service hours for South Boston businesses, with all package stores in the neighborhood to be closed by 4 p.m. Southie bars and restaurants will not admit anyone after 6:30 p.m., alcohol service will cease at 7 p.m., and patrons are expected to be off the premises by 7:30 p.m.
Last year through social media posts and text messages, some residents
shared photos and videos of visibly drunk people and fights during the parade, and expressed concern it has evolved into a 'giant frat party' and outgrown the neighborhood's ability to manage it. There were reports of partiers ripping out street signs and urinating in public. However, some in the neighborhood, particularly some business owners who benefit from the St. Patrick's Day crowds, found the notion of moving the parade nonsensical.
This year's 3-mile parade route will start at the Broadway MBTA station, proceed down West Broadway and onto East Broadway. The route turns right onto P Street, then another right onto East 4th Street. The parade then will move west through the neighborhood, passing by the old South Boston High School before ending in Andrew Square.
The parade will be preceded by the St. Patrick's Day Breakfast, another annual rite in South Boston that typically features politicians ribbing one another with bad jokes. The political brass that are scheduled to attend this year's breakfast at the Ironworker's Union Hall include Governor Maura Healey and Wu. A broadcast of the proceedings is slated to start at 9 a.m.
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'The St. Patrick's Day Breakfast in South Boston is a storied tradition we have celebrated for a century paying homage to Boston's Irish and American heritage,' said Collins, a state senator who represents Southie and the host of the breakfast.
The parade has attracted controversy in the past for reasons beyond drunken foolishness. In 2022, roughly 20 people wearing neo-Nazi insignia lined up along the parade route and unfurled a banner that read, 'Keep Boston Irish.' Parade organizers said that group was neither invited nor welcome. (In recent days, police said they were not aware of any similar threat to this year's parade.)
In 2016, then-Mayor
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the parade was nixed two years in a row.
The South Boston parade was canceled at least twice because of World War I and again in 1920 because of icy street conditions, according to 'South Boston on Parade,' a history of the event.
Globe correspondent Nathan Metcalf contributed to this report.
Danny McDonald can be reached at
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Family members said the two men were quite opposite temperamentally — Leao was a fun-loving Brazilian who came to the United States to play soccer in his 20s; Brady was a buttoned-up engineer who grew up in Somerville and spent his career working on air defense systems for MITRE Corporation. Leao lived in Pepperell, where he raised a son and a daughter; Brady helped raised his son and daughter in Tewksbury, before he and his wife retired to Hampton, N.H. Advertisement Brady had been a diver most of his life, held several advanced certifications, and loved taking on big dives, such as to World War II shipwrecks in Japan. 'He approached them with the meticulousness of a pilot running through a checklist,' his son, Bill, said. Leao, who came from a well-off family in Brazil, worked as a laborer and truck driver in the US, jobs he loved but were frowned upon by his family back home. 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In the New England ocean, it's probably the closest thing you can get to a swimming pool. Advertisement Front Beach in Rockport at low tide. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff At 9:53 a.m. on the timestamped video, you can see them park their trucks back-to-back, just next to the stairs that lead down to the sand. Then they each started the laborious process of layering on all the gear: the thick wetsuits, the weight belts, the masks and snorkels, the buoyancy vests that inflate or deflate to control depth, and the heavy air tanks they will carry on their backs. Richard Brady was ready first, and the video shows him walking down the stairs carrying his fins and his floating dive buoy, which holds the red-and-white-striped flag that signals a diver is swimming below. The video is just far enough away that you can see him, but not really. It's from a perch far on the other side of the cove, behind Brothers' Brew Coffee Shop, and the man is tiny in the distance. Brady entered the ocean right along the rocky point that defines the northern end of the beach. He followed the rock wall out to chest deep water, and at 10:25 a.m. stopped and began to do something. The video is too grainy to say what exactly, but he stayed there for a few minutes, just next to two large rocks. He needed to put on his fins. That's probably what he's doing. He'll be found wearing one. But all you can really see on the video is if he's above the water or below. He disappeared and resurfaced a few times. He could be fiddling with his breathing regulator. He could be peeing. Whatever it is, he's up and down until 10:31 a.m., when he disappeared beneath the water for what would be the final time. Advertisement Up at the trucks, Leao was still struggling to get into his gear. Video clips from a second camera, across the street at The Cove at Rockport hotel, show two passersby helping him. Brady was underwater and out of sight when Leao finally made it to the stairs at 10:39 a.m. As he started down the steps, Fran Auciello and her granddaughter were about to come up. 'I said to my granddaughter, 'Let's let him go down the steps first, he's about to go scuba diving,'' Auciello recalled. His reply still haunts her. 'He said 'We'll see,'' Auciello said. 'He had a smile on his face. He was very pleasant. But I just found it odd and concerning for a couple reasons, partly because he was an older gentleman and I didn't see anyone else with him. I found it really unsettling.' She watched him walk to the water, and noticed he wasn't moving quickly. 'I wouldn't say he was struggling. It's not like he was falling over. But it wasn't a very vigorous walk, which also concerned me.' At 10:40 a.m., nine minutes after Brady disappeared beneath the surface, Leao reached the shoreline, where Brady's dive flag had just washed up. Divers typically hold the line or connect it to a belt. Leao stopped to examine the dive flag for 15 seconds, then continued into the water. That's when the coincidences start piling up. Leao took the exact same route into the ocean as Brady. And at 10:45 a.m., he arrived at the two large boulders in chest-deep water, close enough to shore that it would be where you'd throw a tennis ball for a dog. Advertisement Two large boulders on Front Beach. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff And, like Brady, Leao stopped and did … something. Put his fins on, apparently, but it seems like something more than that. He is there for nine minutes, and like Brady he disappeared beneath the water and then reappeared a few times. At 10:54 a.m., Leao went under for the final time. Eight minutes later, his unconscious body can be seen washing onto the shoreline, directly behind where he last went under. Fran Auciello was the first to spot him in the shallow water, and ran to ask him if he needed help. When he didn't respond, she yelled for her husband. You can see him and others run toward the water to drag Leao onto the sand. Auciello raced to call 911. The official report from the Essex district attorney's office did not arrive until the following May. The 128-page document concluded that the two men had accidentally drowned. This was a non-answer, as far as Brady's son, Bill, was concerned. He was infuriated to read that the lead investigator, a State Police detective working under the district attorney's office, had never sent the tanks to a lab to test the air. This despite the fact that the person who administered the field test, from the state's Joint Hazardous Incident Response Team, wrote in his report that he had 'informed MSP to have the air tested in a lab.' The State Police detective, Trooper Alexander M. Smith, asked the Navy to examine the air tanks, the report shows, but he was turned away because Navy experts wouldn't touch a tank already tested by someone else. When the tanks were returned to the family with the report, Bill Brady paid to send them to a lab in San Diego that specializes in scuba testing. Still, the answer was the same. The air in the tanks was clean. So it had to be something else. How else do you explain that two men went into the same tiny area of ocean, in shallow water near two large rocks, and then just died? Richard Brady, photographed about 15 years ago. Courtesy Brady family Bill Brady obsessed over the video. The first time, it was incredibly hard to watch his father and uncle disappear beneath the surface. But later, it became a puzzle. His office, on the second floor of a converted barn next to his house in Newbury, where he runs his chiropractic practice, is filled with information from the various threads he's run to exhaustion trying to solve the mystery. Among his biggest curiosities is if there was something under the water itself that could have killed them, he said. 'Maybe something that looks interesting and they touched it and zap. ' There's no record of power lines being down there, authorities said, and State Police divers saw nothing. Neither did the Rockport harbormasters when inspecting the area with an underwater camera. Then what about a torpedo ray? That's a type of electric ray that can give you a good jolt, up to 220 volts — enough to disorient a diver and potentially knock them unconscious. Torpedo rays aren't common in Massachusetts, but as fits this story, one of the only reliable places they've been found is along the Cape Ann coast in Rockport and Gloucester, according to Micah Dean, a marine biologist who works for the state Division of Marine Fisheries. In 2011, a lobster diver off the coast of Rockport was Bill Brady continued to look for other potential connections, and became fascinated by this 'bonkers thing,' which was when you looked at the amount of air left in their tanks, each man breathed nearly identical amounts. Bill Brady held one of the wetsuits worn by his father and uncle when they died while scuba diving off Front Beach in 2023. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff Looking at his father's dive computer, a device that records data like depth and dive time, Bill saw that his father had not gone deeper than 6 feet when he was still breathing. Leao did not even go that deep, based on the video. (His computer did not record the dive.) 'If they got into trouble, they could have solved it by simply standing up,' Bill said as he walked through the video one morning at his home. 'Nothing they did put them in mortal danger for a scuba diving accident.' The best-known dangers for divers happen on ascent. If they come up too quickly, they can get decompression sickness, commonly known as 'the bends.' If they hold their breath on the way up, they can get an air embolism. But at their shallow depth, neither of those risks would be on the table, according to Dr. Jim Caruso, a former Navy diver who is Denver's chief medical examiner and a leading expert on diving deaths. Caruso has published extensively on the subject and lectured to other medical examiners all over the world about how to study a diving death. Among the points he repeats is that it's almost never bad air and that it's not enough to say the person drowned. That's like saying a person in a plane crash died from impact. You need to figure out why they drowned, and if there's no obvious answer then the most likely scenario is a sudden cardiac incident, potentially an arrhythmia that knocks you unconscious but does not show up directly on an autopsy. 'So this could just be two old men who have a cardiac event, but that still feels a bit hmmm,' Caruso said. 'In medicine, we try not to rely on coincidences.' Alan Leao with four of his grandchildren, about a year before he died. Courtesy Leao family Caruso reviewed the medical examiner's reports for Brady and Leao, which were provided by their families. He saw two old men with enough developing heart issues that if they'd been found dead on their couches, he said, 'they'd be signed out as cardiac disease.' But they also had lungs full of fluid. 'Copious,' according to the autopsy reports by Dr. Christina Stanley, the state medical examiner who examined both bodies. So it is not incorrect to say they drowned. And, according to Caruso, you can say they probably each drowned due to an underlying cardiac event. So it's a coincidence. 'Except I don't believe in coincidences,' Scott Story, the Rockport harbormaster, likes to say. It's one of the few things he'll state on the record about Leao and Brady. He didn't believe it was a coincidence on the day they died. And he believed it less when, on a nice October day a year later, he found a third dead diver in the same spot. On Oct. 19, 2024, a 50-year-old man named Malak Hanna went diving at Front Beach. With him was Jorge Schettini, who told Rockport police Hanna had contacted him to learn how to catch lobster. After a pre-dive safety check, Schettini wrote in a statement for police, they headed into the water with full air tanks. Hanna dove well, Schettini wrote, and was able to pick up several crabs, 'but no luck with lobsters.' When Schettini's tank was half empty, he gave Hanna the signal to turn back. On the return to shore, Hanna continued to stop to pick up crabs and to try to catch lobsters, according to the statement. When they were close to shore, Schettini turned back to look for Hanna 'and I didn't see him.' Visibility was only about 4 feet, and Schettini urgently searched for Hanna, surfacing to look for him or his dive flag, before diving back under. 'I was very nervous,' he wrote. He searched until his air ran out, and dropped his weight belt to surface quickly. 'I started swimming to the shore as fast as I can,' he wrote, and hustled to his car to grab his phone and call 911. Story and his co-harbormaster, Rosemary Lesch, rushed to the scene by boat and found Hanna's body in 12 to 14 feet of water at the end of a rock wall — the same wall where Brady and Leao last disappeared under the surface a year earlier. Hanna was originally from Egypt, according to neighbors, and lived with his wife and three children in Shrewsbury . But the family was evicted after Hanna's death, and no one could say where they went. A phone number listed on eviction records is no longer in service. Schettini, whose Framingham address on a police report about the incident is also listed online as a diving instruction business, did not respond to numerous inquiries from the Globe. It would seem the only connection Hanna shares with Leao and Brady is the location. They all died within shouting distance of each other, doing the same activity. But Hanna's death raises other questions. Divers say it's strange that Hanna couldn't have just surfaced if he was running out of air or had another problem. At that depth, there was almost zero chance of embolism or decompression sickness. It would basically be like coming up from the bottom of a swimming pool. When Story and Lesch found Hanna's body underwater, the line connecting him to his dive buoy was wrapped around one leg, but there's no way to know if that happened before or after he died. Hanna's air tank was empty when he was found. His death was determined to be an accidental drowning, like Leao's and Brady's, and police closed the case. A few months later, Story and Lesch took this reporter out on the harbormaster's boat to tour the scene, and as the boat idled slowly across the spot where their sonar picked up Hanna, Story said: 'It's the Bermuda Triangle.' Story doesn't want to say much about the deaths. He's thought about them, but what is there to say, really? Three terrible things happened, all in this one small area, all at this one small beach. He's tried to connect the dots. He studied the video of Leao and Brady. And then they found a third diver in nearly the same spot, in the same month, one year later. On the tour of that small stretch of ocean, he answered nearly every question the same way: with a shrug. They're unrelated. Probably. That's the current consensus. Three separate events. Because there's nothing to overrule coincidence. Or in the case of Leao and Brady, the connection that matters most is the obvious one. They were men in their 70s, each carrying some 50 pounds of scuba gear down to the beach and then wading out, which is significant exertion no matter your age. So independent cardiac events. Bill Brady believes it's the most likely explanation, though it still doesn't click the lock for him. 'The day before he died, my dad and I were removing the docks at our house in Maine. He was 78, but he was fit. For it to happen to both of them is so improbable.' And so it haunts the families. And the investigators. And the harbormasters. And the people who were on the beach that day. And anyone who has come anywhere near this case. It was a struggle to accept that two men died in the same spot doing the same thing, and it's pure coincidence. And then it happened again a year later. Scott Story cannot accept that. And so the harbormaster again repeats what has become his mantra for this puzzle: 'I don't believe in coincidences.' Even if that's all this is. Billy Baker can be reached at
