Electronic Kill Machine

Norton

The neighborhood in which Jim Morel and his buddies, Lally, Weir and Anthony "Ant" Calabro grew up, forty miles south of Boston, in Norton, was not so much rough as it was working class. Norton, Brockton, Foxboro (home of the New England Patriots, an NFL football team), and Canton, are suburbs: towns outside the confines of places like Quincy, Brookline, Chelsea, where it was a little more hardscrabble and rough.

Map with Norton, MA Locator

Still, for Jim and his friends, living amid white picket fences and lawn mowers and cul-de-sacs didn't change things at home.

"We all kind of came from broken homes," Jim said. "We all kind of, like, moved in together and became each other's families."

It was 2001. Summer. Ant was eighteen. Lally was twenty-one. Weir, like Jim, was one of the youngest at seventeen. Jason was talented, Jim said. A solid drummer. Lally just hung around with the band. And Ant was the band's so-called, self-proclaimed manager.

That summer, Ant started living with his great aunt, 84-year-old Marina Calabro, who owned a triplex, a large three-story house in Quincy. She and Ant lived on the third floor. Weir and Lally soon moved in when they left home and had nowhere to go. Ant loved his great aunt. Jim said he talked about her a lot. How kind and gentle she was. How outgoing, even for her age.

Map with Quincy, MA Locator

She agreed they could live there, too.

What a lady.

Oh, yeah, and Marina was rich, too. She just happened to have a lot of money stowed away.

"Whatever Ant needed, she bought it for him," Jim said.

Ant crashed a car up. Marina stepped in and bought him another one. Paid for his insurance, too.

"I don't ever remember Ant ever having to work. Most of us had jobs. He didn't. She just paid for everything."

Marina adored Ant to the point where she had told him that her entire estate—everything she owned, upwards, reports indicate, of 1.2 million dollars—was all going to be his one day when she passed. Ant was sitting on a hefty inheritance. He was young. What was ten years. She'd be 94. What was ten more. If she made it.

He'd still be in his thirties—and very rich.