Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (14 page)

Tommy’s second, and last, mistake had been getting into the car with Jimmy, Stevie, and Johnny Martorano. That night, Jimmy put Tommy in the passenger seat with Stevie and Johnny in the back seat, and told him that they were looking for someone to kill. That someone, of course, was Tommy. As they were driving around, Tommy banged on his supposedly bulletproof flak jacket and joked, “If we don’t find him, we can try this out.” The minute he finished that joke, Johnny shot him in the head from the back seat. The bullet went right through his head, splattering blood and brains all over the place, but Jimmy just reached over, propped Tommy up, and put a baseball cap on his bloodied head.

A minute later, Johnny said he had to make a phone call and asked Jimmy to pull over by the Dunkin’ Donuts in Quincy. He was gone a few minutes, supposedly to make a bet, then got back in the car and the four of them drove off. Jimmy drove around for a few more minutes and then found a spot at the Neponset River where they buried Tommy. Later that same night, Jimmy killed Buddy Leonard and left him in Tommy’s car right on Pilsudski Way in the Old Colony projects to confuse the authorities.

Tommy, a raw-boned, six-four rough guy, had been a perfect example of a loose cannon. Jimmy knew that Tommy was someone who couldn’t be controlled, so he might as well kill him and get it over with. Although Jimmy always said, “Act in haste, repent at leisure,” once his mind was made up, that was it. There was no sense in trying to get him to change his mind.

As it turned out, the night King and Leonard were killed there was supposed to be a third victim, Billy Gallant, but he didn’t show up. I’m not sure exactly why Jimmy intended to kill Gallant. I think he just didn’t like him. A few years after that night, Jimmy and I were driving up Dorchester Avenue when we saw Billy walking alone. It was raining out, so Jimmy pulled over and said, “Billy, come in. I’ll give you a ride.”

I hopped into the back, but Billy just leaned into the passenger door and said, “Whitey, no offense, but people get in that car and they never get out. Thanks anyhow, but I’d rather walk.”

Jimmy nodded, I jumped back into the front seat, and we drove away. Jimmy started laughing, looked at me, and said, “Smart guy.” There was no doubt he would have killed Billy that night. As it turned out, Billy died of pneumonia a few years later. Maybe he got a cold that rainy night.

It didn’t take me long to learn how to grasp Jimmy’s reaction to people by his facial expressions. Even though he wore sunglasses a lot, when I could see his eyes, I read them perfectly. And who was going to stop him then? Nobody. I certainly wasn’t going to put myself between him and some asshole who deserved what he was going to get. It was rarely necessary for Jimmy to tell me to hit someone who was bothering him. I could just see that he was getting madder. Then someone would say something smart and I would just crack him.

There were times, of course, when Jimmy would get mad at me. Sometimes he’d yell. Or be cold. Those times, I’d give him his time and when he was ready, usually a few hours later, he’d come looking for me and we’d talk about what had gotten him upset. One thing that did bother him was if I was out drinking, which I didn’t do very often. He always worried that when we drank in local bars, I might get into a fight there, and if I did, the outcome would never be good. “You’re not being fair,” he always told me. “If someone has a fight with you and you beat him up, you could do serious damage, even kill the person. Yet if by some chance he beats you, he thinks it’s over, but it’s not the end of it. You’re not through. You’re going to want go back and kill him.”

And he was right. When I was younger, it had been different. I could have survived losing a fight. But as I got older, I couldn’t live with the idea of someone walking the streets saying they beat me. I’d just have to kill him. At the very least, I’d have to hurt them badly to make an example. I could never afford to let them win. I was never the toughest guy out there, but I was of a different mind-set than other guys. I couldn’t handle not beating them. I certainly wasn’t worried about someone coming after me after I beat him. I knew I could handle myself no matter what came my way. But if someone beat me, I would bide my time. Whether it took six months or a year, I would wait for the talk to die down and the person to think he didn’t have a problem, and then I would go after him.

And Jimmy was just like me. He, too, couldn’t live with being beat. If someone ever did anything to him, we’d be out every day and every night hunting him down. Neither one of us could afford to be beaten. We made a living being feared. If one person beat us, then he would have made it easier for the next person to come after us. So we’d take care of the person any way we could.

I did have guys shoot at me, but I always carried a pistol, for which I had a permit, and quickly shot back. And the time when Chucka Devins’s brother Franny got hurt and some kid pulled a knife on me—to be truthful, I hadn’t been thinking about trying not to kill that kid. I hadn’t cared one way or the other. To me, it was just a fight.

There was no doubt I hurt a lot of people. But when you’re hurting people that often, it doesn’t affect you. You don’t enjoy it. You just get immune to it. I figure I must have had over 500 fights in my lifetime. Just working at Triple O’s four nights a week with at least one fight a night, over a period of a year, I’d easily have 200 fights. I had too many fights, but with each one, I always wanted to hit hard and get it over with as soon as possible. The last thing I wanted was to end up wrestling in the street and looking bad.

Still, I always believed that when it came to a street or bar fight, there was no such thing as a winner. We were all losers. Even if someone wins the fight and is a winner in the eyes of others, he still pays a price, both physically as well as mentally. In nine out of ten of my fights, the person I fought was hurt badly. And when it was over, I was always mad at him, thinking,
You made me do this to you.
In professional sports, like with boxing, the fighters aren’t mad at one another. It’s a professional fight. But in street fights, even when you win, a little bit of you is hurt. And chances are you’ve made an enemy as well.

Despite Jimmy’s concern about how hard I hit, we went to whatever clubs we wanted. We never expected a problem. We never looked for a problem, but we never walked away from a problem. And if it wasn’t handled that night, it would be handled later, but on our terms. The outcome was never good for the other person. Neither Jimmy nor I drank much, but there were times when I might drink a bit more than he thought safe. And even if he wasn’t with me when that happened, somehow he managed to keep tabs on me. One afternoon, I was with a friend, Brian Lee, having a good time in a Faneuil Hall bar owned by Sean Driscoll. Around nine that night, Sean came over to tell me that I had a phone call and I could take it in his office.

It was Jimmy on the phone. “What are you doing?” he asked me. I could tell he was upset.

“Having a few beers,” I told him.

“Meet me in fifteen minutes,” he told me, and that was the end of my drinking. I left right away and drove over to South Boston, grateful that I wasn’t drunk. I have no idea how he found out where I was. Maybe one of the owners wanted to get me out of the place before anything happened.

One thing Jimmy did not tolerate was drug use among his associates. It made them too unpredictable. Nicky Femia, who was hooked on cocaine, was an example of what happened when that rule was ignored. After Jimmy pushed Femia out of the business, Femia got killed trying to shake down a kid, robbing him of his coke.

After I’d been with him a year or so, Jimmy told me that I was the smartest guy he’d ever met. I think he meant that I considered everything carefully, thinking over all aspects of a situation before I acted. Not that he had any fools around him, but what he did have around him were a lot of tough guys. But he wasn’t interested in just tough guys; he wanted smart tough guys. Over and over, he explained to me how we were all hostage to one another, how everything one of us did reflected on everyone else. I understood exactly what he was saying. And I knew that whatever he asked me to do, I would do. If we killed somebody and the police came upon us, we were prepared to handle the situation. We would have shot it out with them. I wouldn’t say that we were armed to the teeth, but we always had arms available—assault rifles, hand grenades, whatever we might possibly need, more arms that we could possibly use in a lifetime. Some we’d bought in New York and some Jimmy had that went back to the 1960s.

Unlike me, most of the people around Jimmy went back years and years. But like me, most of these men were extremely violent men. I thought of the people surrounding Jimmy as being in three tiers. In the inner core were Jimmy, Stevie, myself, and two other people who were out on the streets at the time, both of whom will remain unnamed, who went back to the 1960s with Jimmy. The second group was composed of men, also violent, close friends of ours and involved with us, but not around us all the time. And the third tier included men who were not violent but were moneymakers who worked for us, like the bookmakers, drug dealers, and people involved in illegal activities, like card games or Vegas nights. Jimmy paid special attention to this important third group. If any of them were out drinking and had a problem that night, it quickly became our problem; to be specific, a problem in our pockets. The fact that these guys were paying us money, monthly or weekly, meant that we would have to go out collectively and straighten out their problem—another reason why Jimmy never liked people with bad habits to work for him.

But Jimmy also kept an eye on what was going around in the neighborhood, even on people who had nothing to do with us. One summer night, while the two of us were driving on East Eighth Street and Covington, by the old German Club, we saw two Southie brothers, Frankie and Kevin MacDonald, fighting, really going at it. Jimmy got out of the car and told Frankie’s three friends who were watching the fistfight—Ricky Marinick, Paul Moore, and another guy named Kevin MacDonald who we called “Andre the Giant”—to break it up. “Don’t let them fight,” he told the guys. “They’re brothers.”

After Frankie’s friends grabbed the two guys and broke up the fight, Jimmy ordered Kevin into the car while Frankie took off with his three friends. Kevin, seven years younger than me, was a nice kid I’d known for a long time, while Frankie, who was a few years older than Kevin, was a talented boxer and a tough kid. His body was like that of a Greek god, in tremendous shape from always working out hard.

Jimmy and I drove around with Kevin for a while. “He’s your brother,” Jimmy said to Kevin as we drove off. “It doesn’t look good for people to see you like that.” But Kevin told us Frankie was going on a score the next day and he didn’t want him to go, that he had a bad feeling about the score.

We dropped Kevin off at his house and sure enough, the next day Frankie got shot during a Wells Fargo armored car robbery in Medford. The bullet went under his arm where there was no cover from the bulletproof vest he was wearing, traveling through his lungs and ripping his aorta. Because he was in such tremendous shape, Frankie was able to run to the getaway car with a bag of money before collapsing in the back seat. Afterward, some people accused his friends of leaving him on the score, but the truth was he bled to death in a matter of minutes. Even if they had gotten him to the hospital, there was no way they could have stopped the bleeding. Frankie died on July 17, 1984, at age twenty-five. It was a terrible shame.

I went to the wake, which was painfully sad. Jimmy didn’t believe in wakes and didn’t attend. His feeling was that if a person died, that was it and there was no reason to have a wake or a funeral. When Jimmy’s mother died on January 1, 1980, Jimmy didn’t go to the funeral, knowing it would bring a lot of publicity to the family, especially to Billy. But he did go to the funeral home after it had closed so he could see her when no one was there.

But riding around with Jimmy at night, I never knew what could happen from one moment to the next. One particular night, Jimmy and I were in his Ford LTD when another car began to jockey for position with us on Morrissey Boulevard. It went on for a few minutes until we stopped at a set of lights. The other car pulled up beside us and the two guys in the car gave Jimmy and me the finger and began swearing at us. Jimmy started to get out of the car, but I jumped out first, went to the passenger window where the guy was still giving me the finger, and put my fist through the window. After I hit the guy in the face, I got back in our car and Jimmy drove off.

My hand was bleeding, and when I went to wipe off the blood, I noticed that a little piece of the three-carat diamond ring I wore on my pinky finger had sheared off. I wasn’t sure if the diamond had a flaw or what, but one of the corners of the ring was gone. Jimmy took a look at it when we pulled up to Theresa’s house, and then I drove the car back to my house. A couple of hours later, after dinner, when I came back to Theresa’s to pick up Jimmy for the evening, he handed me a new ring. “Here you go,” he said as he gave me a solitaire five-carat diamond pinky ring.

“Thanks,” I said and removed the old ring and put the new one on. It was the only time he had ever given me jewelry, and it was a beautiful ring, worth, I was certain, over $100,000.

I knew that Jimmy bought most of his jewelry from a particular jeweler in the Jewelers Building on Washington Street in Boston, and that he also bought hot stuff. On his own hand, he wore a five-carat solitaire pinky ring. Around his neck, he wore a gold Christ’s head medallion on a chain, and on his wrist was a gold Patek Phillippe watch given to him by the guys at Winter Hill. In addition, on his left pinky he wore a four-carat Irish claddagh ring, with two hands holding a heart, a ring he’d had made after he’d seen my three-carat claddagh ring.

Jimmy had great taste in jewelry and was generous with gifts to the women in his life, buying diamond earrings and diamond cocktail rings and watches for Theresa and Cathy, and expensive pieces of jewelry for the other girls he dated, as well as cars and condos for many of them.