Convictions Rattle Code of Silence

For years, ratting on your neighbors was a good way to get killed in the tough, blue-collar section of Boston known as Charlestown. When crimes happened, police ran into a code of silence. That code was broken--some say shattered--when prosecutors won the conviction of five men accused in a series of bank and armored-car robberies around New England. A federal jury in Concord, N.H., delivered guilty verdicts on 54 of 55 counts, including ones charging the five in an Aug. 25, 1994, heist in Hudson, N.H., in which two armored-car guards were shot to death. Murder charges were not filed because witnesses could not identify the masked robbers. Most of the holdups, which began in 1990 and lasted into 1995, took place in Massachusetts.