Just published in the February 2024 issue of Boston Magazine: The first installment in a twisted tale of power, money, politics, corruption, cover-up, and murder. We begin with the story of a 45-year-old cold-case homicide. The 1976 murder of 33-year-old rising-star entrepreneur George Hamilton is officially still an open case—but that doesn’t mean it’s unsolved, exactly. The answer to the question of who killed Hamilton has been laying in an FBI file cabinet for 40 years—until we pulled it out. The bigger question is: How was his killer never brought to justice? Why did the District Attorney tell Hamilton’s family he was killed by someone else? How did the men who profited from Hamilton’s killing escape justice?

READ: The George Hamilton Case: How To Get Away with Murder (Boston Magazine)

But that’s just the beginning. In order to report this story, we had to venture back into Boston’s sordid history of corruption, collaboration, and complicity between law enforcement and the city’s bloody underworld. And once we began turning over stones, the slime came slithering out. The rest of the story? You can’t read it anywhere else except here at Murder Media.

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Did a Massachusetts district attorney hire an off-the-books goon squad to kidnap and rough up criminal suspects to make them sing? The FBI thought so, and the U.S. Attorney’s office convened a grand jury to investigate the allegations. We’ll tell you how the FBI’s protection of James “Whitey” Bulger led to a blood feud between state, local, and federal law enforcement — and how the FBI’s dirty-tricks campaign accidentally solved the Hamilton murder.

The Boston-based bank that financed George Hamilton’s company — and which received a portion of the insurance money from his murder — had a rough reputation. Other bankers whispered that the bank was mobbed up. Right around the time the bank went into business with Hamilton, one of the bank’s VPs — a member of the family that founded the bank in 1895 —  was forced to resign after making a series of odd loans to “persons who police have ties to organized crime,” one newspaper reported. A few months later, that VP was the victim of a gangland-style execution that remains unsolved—though years later, police admitted they believed he’d been killed while trying to collect one of those shady, mob-connected loans. Was George Hamilton’s killing a one-off . . . or was he connected to a larger string of crimes?

And what about Billy Kelley — the low-level Winter Hill enforcer who mysteriously became a suspect in the Hamilton killing, years after the fact? Kelley had never spoken about the case until I reached him in a Florida prison, where he’s now the second-oldest inmate on Death Row. Although he was sentenced to death in a sensational 1967 murder-for-hire case, the state has never attempted to execute him. Kelley has always maintained his innocence in the Florida case. And his defenders include several powerful attorneys—including arguably the country’s most prominent constitutional scholar, Lawrence Tribe, who quietly directed Kelley’s appeals for decades, and who today says that he still believes Kelley is innocent. But Tribe isn’t Billy Kelley’s most persuasive defender. That honor belongs to someone else—the daughter of the man Kelley is accused of murdering. You’ll hear that incredible story—directly from the woman who lived it.

All of these and much, much more . . . this year in How To Get Away with Murder.

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