At End of Day (7 page)

“So, in order to hook him we’ve gotta find people who know what he’s done because they helped him plan it and then helped him do it, or did it for him, on his orders—and convince them to testify for us. The only way I know of doing that that I ever saw work—even it doesn’t, always; some people’re too proud to become finks—is to make them more afraid of what we can and will do to them, if they don’t talk, than they already are of what McKeach can and will do to them if they do.

“Mighty hard to do, and that’s a big advantage for him. Potential witnesses know whatever pain we may inflict on them if they refuse to help us, we won’t maim or kill them—or their loved ones. And, with good reason, they’re
convinced
that if they do help us, McKeach is not only capable of doing such things but absolutely certain to do them. He will kill them himself or have someone else kill them, to prevent them from harming him if he can or to punish them after they’ve harmed him. Even if he has to reach out from prison or the grave to do it—both of which they believe he could do without breaking a sweat.

“When people really do think that, there’s no way we can make them believe that we can protect them. Where McKeach’s concerned there’s no such thing as a Witness Protection Program. They believe he
can
and he
will
find them, get at them from wherever he is—wherever they or their loved ones are—and retaliate against them, if they go up against him. That’s
why we’ve never had any witnesses, simple as that. His henchmen and his lackeys, disgruntled prat-boys and spiteful ex-girlfriends—they won’t
have
that lovely, law-abiding change of heart. No one’ll dare help us. Proof’s in front of your eyes—he’s devoted a mere quarter century or so since he did his last stretch to blatant criminal activities, day after day and night after night, right under our very noses, and we haven’t laid a glove on him.

“It’s an aura that he has. A lot of people who dislike McKeach—and a lot of people who fear him—he’s never done anything to, personally. They’ve just been hearing stuff about him ever since they were young kids—this all-encompassing
power
that he has, to do evil. The people who repeat these stories without having any idea of whether they’re true—they’re doing McKeach’s work for him.

“And there’s a hell of a lot of them. Sometimes it’s like they’re like Seventh Day Adventists or Jehovah’s Witnesses—everywhere you look in Greater Boston, there’s another one. If his name comes up when you’re talking to someone in the main Registry Office, and Rita Gaspari’s within earshot, she’ll drop what she’s doing—come over and tell you what a savage bastard McKeach is. Her sister married Malachy Gallagher.”

“Brian G. was her brother-in-law,” Dowd said.

“You got it,” Naughton said, nodding. “Brian … My father
knew
Brian Gallagher. He had a lot of money that he didn’t get by workin’ hard, but he wasn’t some mystery figure with magical powers that McKeach is now—he wasn’t glamorous. People tended to avoid him unless they did business with him, but they weren’t afraid of him on general principles—the way they are of McKeach or even the black gangbangers you got today in North Dorchester.

“Brian G. was a criminal, sure; he was outside the law. But at the same time, he stood for order. If you as a private citizen figure that there’s bound to be crime, no matter what the cops
do—as most people do, and I’m one of them—then what you want is some assurance that if you tolerate it you won’t get hurt. And that if you
don’t
take part in it, you won’t get hurt by the cops. Brian didn’t pretend to answer officially for the cops—though on behalf of some I think he could’ve ’cause I think they worked for him—but on behalf of the outlaws, Brian G. gave that assurance. And his word was good.

“Brian G. got respect as the head hoodlum. In a rough sense of justice you could say he deserved it. He was good at it and knew it. He kept the peace.

“Before Brian, our guys did it the same way we did things across the water, stealing pigs and poaching pheasants from the Protestant landlords. We were all independent contractors—just went out one night and did it. One guy ran the protection rackets—another one smuggled the Irish Sweeps tickets in; set up his own network to sell them. Prohibition? Bunch of guys got fairly rich bringing the booze in on boats. Haulin’ it up and down the coast, one bunch the bootleggers who owned the boats and trucks, another group that retailed it. There was no structural continuity to it—all freelancers, strictly short term. They made an alliance to do something; lasted ten years? That was unusual. They respected a guy because he had what they needed to do what they wanted to do, sell what they had to sell,
today
. Thirty years later still fly-by-nighters, sellin’ TVs off the backs of trucks when TV was still a novelty, one day, hijacking a load of dry goods in Connecticut the next.

“Brian G. was your solid citizen. He set up and ran a diversified, ongoing business. Knew how a good chief executive hood should act. With dignity. Looked like he was offering pretty much the same goods and services the underworld’d always offered—but his philosophy was different. He
unified
the people who delivered the goods and services in Southie—and later on,
outside of Southie. The law said nobody could deliver that kind of stuff
anywhere
in or outside of the city, but he did it. He did it by consolidating the common interest in doing business without interference. So when he got through it was impossible for anyone from outside to come in and strong-arm him, and it was impossible for anyone inside to rise up and compete with him.

“Before and right after the war if you wanted to play the numbers, according to my father, you saw Toby Hannigan. He was World War One disabled vet, bad left leg. Ran the newsstand, Toby’s Corner, sold the numbers with the papers and cigars and cigarettes on the corner of East Fifth. He probably paid protection to some guy from Dorchester—who didn’t really protect Toby very much but came around faithfully for his cut. Toby had no complaint—the upside was he kept most of the profits. The downside was that he had to keep a certain cash reserve on hand—which obviously made him worth holding up. Therefore Toby kept his nineteen eleven Colt forty-five army combat pistol under the counter—any losses came out of him, so he was willing to take risks to prevent them. So there was that element of danger to it, but basically it was entirely
his
business.

“After nineteen fifty, say, if you went to Toby’s and you bought a paper, you were still buying it from Toby, the person, but if you bought the number, you understood that you were buying it from Brian. Still the same number; found it in the same place—last three digits of the Treasury balance, back page of the
Record
Seven Races. Mathematically, nine ninety-nine to one against you; the payoff if you hit was six hundred to one.

“That aspect of the business Toby now ran for Brian. Brian’s runner picked up the play in the afternoon. Brian’s runner brought back any payoffs the same night. Toby had the same interest in the number you bought as he did the bottle Coke you
got for a nickel out of the machine; he let the Coca-Cola people put it in and keep it filled: he got a commission. Didn’t have to keep the numbers bankroll in the shop anymore—someone hit the number, Brian’s runner brought the payoff around. But now no one in his right mind even
thought
about sticking Toby up—that’d be robbing Brian G., which’d amount to signing your death warrant.

“If you hit a run of bad luck bettin’ on the ponies with Tommy the Book—lost a little more’n you could pay right off and couldn’t borrow it from the credit union—that’d mean you’d have to tell the wife, and she didn’t know you bet? You’d go down Butchie Morgan’s after work on Monday night and borrow it from Jakie Doyle. You probably asked Jake for two hundred—the hundred you’re down with Tom, plus another hundred, planning to get back what you already lost, plus a fat profit from investing on this other horse on Saturday you
know
is a sure thing. This’s called ‘digging your hole a little deeper.’ The second horse turns out to be a dog too, naturally, so on your payday every week after that for forty weeks ’til you got Jakie paid off, you gave him fifteen bucks.

“That didn’t hurt too much and it seemed reasonable enough. Five bucks came off the deuce you borrowed. That went back into Jake’s bankroll. This was Brian’s capital investment in the business, and a very good one, too, as long as there were pigeons like you dumb or desperate enough to pay six bucks to borrow five for a week.

“Ten of your fifteen dollars was the interest, five percent per week of the two-hundred-dollar whole amount, no matter how much you’d already paid back. Jakie put two dollars in his own pocket for his trouble and gave eight bucks to Brian, because the two hundred bucks you got from Jake to pay Tom was Brian’s return on his investment with Jake.

“In the event you didn’t pay Jake, and Jakie couldn’t reason with you, well then, Jakie would tell Brian, and Brian’d send a guy around to see you. He would either make you pay, make you bleed, or make you lame. Sometimes when you couldn’t pay he’d make you choose what you did instead. For some reason this did not make it hurt less. Sometime in the late fifties, early sixties, McKeach became that guy. So, after Brian G. got things organized to his satisfaction, it all still looked the same—you still bought the same things from the same people. But the profits went to Brian.

“McKeach’s nowhere near as smart as Brian was. He was just cute enough to see that Brian had a weakness. Brian drew the line at certain things, such as shooting a cop or ambushing a prosecutor. Double-crossing your godfather or your rabbi or your friend, unless he did something to you first. Deadly force Brian would use only on someone who gave him no choice. A competitor who wouldn’t back off? A friend who decided to go into business for himself on Brian’s turf? He became a competitor. And even then, Brian didn’t like to do it. He would’ve looked at you funny, if you’d asked him why he didn’t want to scrag anyone but a competitor—and that was how he would’ve put it—that he didn’t want to. Not that he
wouldn’t
. ‘Well, if I have to,’ he would’ve said. ‘If the guy gives me no choice. But it’s noisy. Bad for business.’ He was smart enough to know if people thought you’d stop at nothing, do anything, they wouldn’t be as likely to try something out on you you probably wouldn’t like.

“Put that same question to McKeach, you wouldn’t
get
an explanation. McKeach’s never ruled out any tactic absolutely. Brian thought he could rule by being smart. McKeach’s nowhere near as smart, but he spotted something Brian G.’d overlooked. If you would do something to a friend and mentor that your friend’d only do to a mortal enemy, you could take your friend’s
place. And his money. Ruthless beats smart. That’s why we’ve never gotten McKeach.”

The waitress approached with the tray carrying their meals.

Naughton said, “The problem now is that we don’t know the new kids, the blacks anna spics, dealing dope. And we still haven’t nailed the old gunmen.”

T
IM
S
EXTON
’
S
HOUSE
AT
68 C
HICKADEE
Circle was a low-slung lima green vinyl-sided six-room ranch house with an attached two-car garage in a development of thirty-eight low-slung six- and eight-room ranches with attached two-car garages built on one-third-acre plots parceled out of what had been the fourteen-acre Peaceful Breeze Dairy pasture overlooking Route 138 in Canton, first offered for sale at $27,500 and $32,500 in 1958. Sexton was nine and his sister Patricia was seven when their parents, Jay and Lorraine, became the first owners.

Trish relinquished it as her home address in 1972 when she graduated from Simmons with a degree in physical therapy and moved to Burlington, Vermont, for a job in the University of Vermont Athletic Department. Tim, having retained it during his two hitches with the First Cavalry Division, Airmobile, in Vietnam, and his six years of restorative surgery, convalescence, occupational therapy and training in VA hospitals to equip him for life as a paraplegic, in 1976 saw no reason to go elsewhere when he was at last discharged at twenty-seven to begin life on his own.

So on the cold grey March afternoon in 1998 Rascob gloomily pulled the old Lincoln into the driveway in front of the garage
that had become Tim’s broadcast studio and office. It remained the only permanent residential address he had ever had.

“I would’ve had enough on my mind then anyway, finally going out on my own, without trying to do it somewhere else,” a reporter from the
Quincy Patriot Ledger
quoted him as saying in a Veterans Day profile and interview published nine years after he came home. “Dad was 62. He and Mother both wanted early retirement; they could move to Arizona and get started playing golf—while they could still walk the courses. Made a lot of sense for all of us, I took this place off their hands.

“The resettlement lump sum for my disability was supposed to set me up—I could live as much like everybody else as you can when you’ll never walk again. Just about enough for a down payment to take this house off their hands, and get it fixed up the way I needed. And it was a place I
knew
, familiar. If you spend as many years as I did, one strange place after another, you get so that word ‘home’ means an awful lot to you. It gets so just about all you can think about is going back there,
home
, someplace that you know. So that’s what I did. They moved to Arizona. He still hasn’t broken a hundred and five. Every time she comes back here, Mother says she misses the seasons. So I guess I’m the only one who came out of the deal completely satisfied. But I did—I’m real glad of it. It made a real nice fit.

“Probably had a lot to do with the success I’ve had in business, too, my coming home like this. Things’re a lot easier in life, people recognize your name.”

The reporter noted Sexton had been a
Boston Globe
Division Three All Scholastic two years as a running back in football and once in his senior year as a guard in basketball, while his sister had made the Girls’ All Scholastic in girls’ basketball for three years.