Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (17 page)

The second murder in that house was John McIntyre’s. He was a thirty-two-year-old drug smuggler and, like many from the Irish communities of South Boston and Charlestown, had a lot of sympathy for the IRA and their cause.

In 1984, Jimmy and I had been involved with an attempt to smuggle seven tons of ammunition and weapons on board the Gloucester-based
Valhalla
. Around nine o’clock on a September night, Jimmy and I arrived in Gloucester in his Malibu to await the arrival of vans carrying the weapons and ammunition that would be loaded on the
Valhalla
and sent to the IRA in Ireland the next morning. The ship was owned by Joe Murray, who used it to run drugs out of South America for his Charlestown drug business. That night, Jimmy and I found a spot with a view of the dock, as well as the road from opposite directions. Dressed in dark clothes, we sat in the car, monitoring the police calls with the scanner.

At one point, I did get out of the car and walked to a spot a little bit higher with an even better view. Things were quiet until, about an hour after we had gotten there, we got the call on our walkie-talkies from one of the drivers of the vans. “We’re on our way,” the driver said, and I answered with one word, “Green,” meaning, “Go. The coast is clear.” Since our job was to provide security, Jimmy and I stayed in the Malibu and watched as five vans pulled up to the dock. Everybody involved in the operation had their job to do, so the drivers had plenty of help on the pier as they emptied the five vans. We remained in our spot as one van after another pulled up, and its crates and duffel bags, filled with pistols and high-powered rifles of all different calibers, bulletproof vests, and various kinds of ammunition and explosives, as well as a variety of parts of weapons and replacement pieces they needed for guns already over there, were passed from person to person. A lot of the stuff had been bought from gun stores and warehouses all over the country and sent to different addresses in Boston. It took around an hour until all the stuff was loaded onto the ship. It would take longer to stash it all away on the ship, but once the transfer was completed and the empty vans left, our job providing security was done. So Jimmy and I called it a night and drove away.

I’d actually been at the Gloucester dock a few days earlier to see how the operation was going. That day, Joe Murray happened to introduce me to McIntyre, who also worked as a mechanic on the ship. Things had seemed to be moving along on schedule, but Joe, Jimmy, and I were not the only ones involved in this operation. Much of the money for the weapons had come from different sources all over the country, from a lot of other people supporting the cause. Jimmy’s and my role was to make sure all the weapons and ammunition got on the
Valhalla
without any problems.

Not that this was my first involvement with the IRA. Jimmy and I had shipped other guns in the past, but nothing as big as this load. During the past couple of years, we’d put the guns together and someone else had shipped them over. We’d also sent guns by other methods to Ireland, once inside a van with a secret hide built into it, other times in hides constructed in pieces of furniture. Jimmy and I had never done it to make money. We did it because we believed in the cause.

After the
Valhalla
had left Gloucester the day after everything had been loaded on it, we didn’t know about any trouble until we heard on the news that the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force had seized a ship off the coast of Ireland. Naturally, Jimmy and I were very upset and waited to hear exactly what had happened. It wasn’t until months later that we learned how it had actually gone down. Apparently, as expected, the
Valhalla
had met the
Marita Ann
in Irish waters, and the weapons and ammunition had been successfully transferred to the second ship. However, during the transfer, as the ships sat side by side, the Royal Air Force had been buzzing around, circling both ships. As the
Marita Ann
was heading back to port in Ireland, the Royal Navy had intercepted the ship. Obviously, they had been tipped off.

We also found out that the
Marita Ann
had been in dry dock for six or seven years on the southern coast of Ireland. It hadn’t been used during those years, but suddenly there had been a spurt of activity getting the ship ready to go back to sea. The IRA operates different cells to keep information separate, so not everybody knows what is going on. However, we were able to learn that Sean O’Callaghan, an Irish nationalist and an informant for the British against the IRA, had gotten involved in the cells. It was he who had given up the
Marita Ann
.

When the
Valhalla
finally came back, having sustained a lot of damage in a big storm—all its windows had been blown out—it docked in South Boston, not Gloucester. It got back to us that two fellows who had been on the boat had gone down to inspect it, and when they were coming off, they had been stopped by U.S. Customs Agents Defago and Grady. The FBI, through John Connolly, told Jimmy that someone who had been grabbed that day coming off the
Valhalla
was cooperating with the law enforcement. This person was giving us up, telling about his own involvement with the
Valhalla
, including Jimmy, Stevie, myself, and a few other people involved with that ship. A short time later, we also learned that John McIntyre, one of those two fellows stopped by the customs agents, had been grabbed for domestic violence. As a result, he had immediately started cooperating with the authorities.

All we knew at first, however, was that one of those two people who had originally been stopped by the customs agents, McIntyre or Anderson, the captain of the ship, was cooperating. It was quickly determined that it would be best for us to grab McIntyre, since Anderson was older and more old-school. Also, since McIntyre was geographically close to us, it would be easy to grab him.

In the meantime, since the
Valhalla
had come back, the
Ramsland
, an old freighter from South America also owned by Joe Murray, was presently in the Chelsea Naval Yard, scheduled to be scrapped. This ship was presently carrying thirty tons of marijuana for Murray’s operation out of Charlestown, with a street value of $30 million minus expenditures. Jimmy and I each had a piece of that. In all, there were six people involved, each with equal shares that came out to about two and a half million to three million apiece after expenses. Although we’d used the
Valhalla
to send guns to Ireland, we had never sent drugs over there. It was fine to send the drugs to the English who were oppressing the Irish, but never to our own people.

But now, all of a sudden, the
Ramsland
, which had been sitting there for a month, got raided. And the customs agents who had boarded the boat knew exactly where to go for the hide. Taking the ballasts off the secret compartment, they had easily found the thirty tons of marijuana. We knew right away that they had been tipped off, and that the same person who was cooperating about the
Valhalla
was also cooperating here. And chances were excellent that that person was McIntyre.

The plan to grab him didn’t take long to arrange. Since McIntyre worked for Joe Murray, we talked to Joe about the situation, although we never needed permission from anyone. We did whatever we wanted to do. First, we discussed the possibility of sending McIntyre to South America where Murray had connections and could kill him or hide him till everything blew over. Then we considered whether we should prep him on what to say to the grand jury. But the plan we decided on was for Murray to tell McIntyre that he could invest in a drug deal with him that would pay ten times the return on his money. We would be dangling a carrot in front of him, playing on his greed. As it turned out, McIntyre went back to the customs agents, who gave him the $20,000 to invest, figuring they could set up a sting operation and nab Murray.

On November 30, 1984, McIntyre met with Murray on the South Boston waterfront, supposedly to give him the $20,000 to invest in the drug deal. On the waterfront, McIntyre got into the car with Murray and another individual. The three of them drove around and then dropped off Joe. When the other guy said he had to drop off some beer for a party on East Third Street, McIntyre went along, thinking he was doing a simple errand with him.

Around noon, the other guy walked into 799 East Third Street with a case of Miller Light and put it on a table. When he went back to the car to get another case, McIntyre, who was six feet tall, around 220 pounds, with brown hair and a light beard, came in, wearing dungarees and a light jacket, thinking he was coming to a party and carrying a case of beer himself. When he walked into the kitchen, he immediately saw me and Stevie and started to turn back. But I grabbed him by the throat and the back of his head and he went down to the floor. At the same time, Jimmy stepped out from behind the refrigerator with a machine pistol, a Mac-10 with a silencer, and said, “Let him up.” When I helped him up, Stevie and Jimmy sat him in a chair where Stevie handcuffed, shackled, and chained him. Leaving the three of them alone in the kitchen, I walked into the adjacent parlor and sat on the couch. For the next five or six hours, McIntyre was never tortured, although he was obviously mentally terrorized.

It took no more than two minutes of interrogation in the kitchen for McIntyre to admit he was the informant. From the parlor, I could hear him say, “I’m sorry. I was weak.”

Jimmy told him to take it easy, to calm down. “Don’t worry,” he told him. “We’re going to send you to South America or tell you what to say in front of the grand jury. You’ll be all right.”

Jimmy came out a minute or so later to tell me what was going on. When Jimmy went back into the kitchen, the three of them continued to talk about Joe Murray and his operation. Jimmy wanted to find out about McIntyre’s involvement in the drug business, who he was working for, how much he was making, how much he was bringing in. He was more interested in that information than in the fact that McIntyre was talking to the law about us.

It didn’t take long for Jimmy to realize that the plan to send McIntyre away or to tell him what to say to the grand jury was not going to work. He understood that eventually McIntyre would talk again. I think it was already predetermined by Jimmy that he was going to kill him. But the conversation lasted a few hours, with no yelling and Jimmy talking to McIntyre in a nice calm manner, getting all the information he needed as McIntyre replied in an equally calm manner.

Around five, Jimmy told me to leave and get something to eat, so I went over to my in-laws’ house and ate there. About an hour later, he beeped me and I came back to the house. McIntyre was still shackled to the chair in the kitchen. Ten minutes later, Jimmy told McIntyre, “Get up out of the chair. We’re going downstairs now.” Without a word, McIntyre stood up, and made it down the stairs with his chains intact, Jimmy and Stevie right behind him and me following the three of them.

In the basement, Jimmy and Stevie sat him back in a chair, but this time Jimmy placed a rope around his neck. Although Jimmy tried hard to strangle him, the rope was too thick to cut off his air supply and merely made him gag and throw up. Finally, after a few minutes of this, Jimmy took the rope off McIntyre’s throat and asked, “Would you like one in the head?”

The guy sat up straight and answered, “Yes, please.” You had to give McIntyre credit. Like Bucky, he had shown tremendous bravery. He knew he was going to die and somehow he came to terms with it. He wasn’t begging for his life. He was just asking politely to get shot in the head. The guy went out like a man, with no pleading or crying.

So Jimmy shot him in the back of the head with a .22-caliber rifle, cut down to a pistol grip with a silencer on it, and the bullet exited underneath his chin. When McIntyre fell to the floor, Stevie went over, propped him up, put his head on McIntyre’s chest, and reported he was still alive. Stevie grabbed him by his hair and shoulder and Jimmy put five or six more into his face. Then Jimmy turned to Stevie and said, “Well, he’s dead now,” and that was it.

When Jimmy went upstairs to take a nap on the couch in the parlor, Stevie and I cleaned everything up. Unlike with Bucky, whose brains and skull were everywhere, there hadn’t been a lot of bleeding with McIntyre. But once again, we got out the basin and filled it with liquid soap and cold water and took care of the remains. After we’d cleaned up the floor, Stevie stripped McIntyre down so the decomposition would take place faster and began using the channel-lock pliers to remove his teeth. I was digging the hole for the grave when Stevie called me over and showed me a piece of McIntyre’s tongue that he’d accidentally caught in the pliers. “Look at this,” he told me. “He won’t be using this no more.” I kind of chuckled, turned away, and returned to the hole I was digging.

A few minutes later, Stevie told me he was thinking of doing an autopsy on the body. Genuinely curious about what was inside, he wanted to cut open the body and check it out. But he changed his mind and helped me put the body in the hole. When I told Jimmy about Stevie’s desire to do an autopsy, he said, “Let’s just get him buried and get out of here.” But then he started laughing and said, “See, I told you Dr. Mengele was crazy.”

As it turned out, the customs agents never got back the $20,000 they had given to McIntyre to invest in the drug deal in their hopes of setting up a sting operation. Jimmy kept the money and gave Murray and Stevie and me each $5,000. Actually, he exchanged it for another $20,000, just to be safe, before he handed money out to us. A week later, we found out the agents were upset because not only had they lost an informant, but they’d also lost $20,000.

But that November night, after Stevie and I had cleaned up the site, Stevie and Jimmy followed me while I drove McIntyre’s dark-colored pickup truck with a standard shift on the column to Neponset Bridge. I parked it next to the Upstairs Downstairs Lounge, wiped it down, and got into Jimmy’s car. Stevie had McIntyre’s clothes and teeth and said he would get rid of them himself.