Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (22 page)

Marijuana was still a lucrative business, as dealers continued to pay us hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions. I picked up money from the people who were paying us, either midlevel drug dealers or large-scale importers, depending on how big their business was. Some I went to. Others came to me. I always knew who was supposed to pay me and saw them once a month to get the money off them. If they didn’t pay, they were out of business. But that never happened. No one refused to pay us. Once we got it, Jimmy, Stevie, and I chopped up the money.

The marijuana was sold in many other towns across the state. Joe Murray was the big Charlestown dealer. Mike Caruana, a North Shore dealer from the early 1980s, made so much money off marijuana that he bought gold and was considering minting gold coins with his own likeness on them. One day, however, he turned up missing and was never found. I don’t know what happened to him, but he was involved with the Mafia, as well as with Jimmy and Stevie. Only the people who were involved in his disappearance know what happened. Another big-time marijuana dealer was Frank Lepere, from Marshfield, who was paying us millions. And making still more. Some dealers sold both cocaine and marijuana, while others just handled one or the other.

Understandably, collecting involved shakedowns, some of which began in the least likely places. One day Jimmy and I were heading into the Best Chevrolet dealership on Commonwealth Avenue when Mickey G. walked out of a bar across the street. Mickey was a sort of rogue on the fringe of things whom Jimmy had known years earlier. Mickey asked Jimmy what was up and then mentioned that he was heading to get 35 pounds of pot from a high school teacher. In a few minutes, Jimmy had arranged it so that Mickey would bring the guy down to J. C. Hilary’s, a restaurant in Dedham, the next day.

When Jimmy, Stevie, and I got to the restaurant, the place was packed with the lunch crowd, but Mickey and the teacher were already sitting in a booth. Jimmy sat down next to the teacher, pinning him in the corner so he couldn’t go anywhere. He was wearing glasses and khaki pants and looked like a typical teacher. As I sat down on the opposite side of the table, I opened my coat so the teacher could see the pistol. Jimmy introduced the three of us, and by the time we left the restaurant, the teacher had promised us $100,000. Two hours later, he handed the money to Mickey to give to us. It was a one-shot deal for us. As for the teacher, after that lunch, he got out of the drug business. Real quick.

Another shakedown, in 1988, involved John “Red” Shea (no relation to Billy Shea), who we heard had made a few disparaging remarks about Jimmy and me. When that information got back to us, Jimmy was upset, and since Red was in the drug business, we decided he would have to pay us from then on. We also decided that if he didn’t do what we asked him to do, we were going to kill him.

So we had him come down to 309–325 Old Colony Avenue, the end building near a block of stores. Jimmy and Stevie stayed upstairs while we had Red brought down to the cellar of the building. As soon as Red got into the basement, I pulled a machine gun on him and explained what we wanted. It didn’t take long to figure out an agreement where he would pay us an amount somewhere between $1,500 and $1,800 each month, depending on his business.

Red was an agreeable and pleasant person, especially when he turned out to be a standup kid in 1990, going to jail for eleven years in the raid that netted fifty-one of our drug dealers. Rather than rat us out, he took it on the chin. If he had known the true story about Jimmy and Stevie, I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had given us up then. But he didn’t know a thing about it, even in jail, where he got into a lot of fights defending Jimmy. Of all the drug dealers we dealt with, I liked Red Shea the best. He was a tough kid and very honorable—his word was his bond. Although he was never in the inner circle with Jimmy, Stevie, and me, he was a person I would have trusted. I wouldn’t say that about a lot of people.

Another shakedown involving a likable person took place one afternoon when I was driving down Dorchester Street and had a chance meeting with a kid from South Boston who was selling cocaine. I knew the kid, who was in his mid-twenties and will remain nameless, from around town and when he used to box. That day, I waved him over and we had a five-minute conversation, during which I shook him down for $12,000. An hour later, I had the money and he was allowed to do his own thing. The kid was basically a street dealer, not large-scale, but he’d been in business a long time. We never bothered him again. Normally people would have paid monthly, but because I did like the kid, it was just a one-time thing. I felt bad about shaking him down, but no one could deal without paying.

Not every drug extortion, however, put money in my pocket. Like the one in 1981 involving an antiques dealer, David Lindholm, who was dealing drugs off the islands of the Cape. The guy was smuggling 1,000 pounds of marijuana a month into Nantucket when Jimmy found out about his little business. Jimmy had someone walk Lindholm into the Marconi Club on Shetland Street in Roxbury, where Stevie was based. Jimmy, Stevie, and I were upstairs in the hall when two guys walked Lindholm in. The guy was a yuppie, average-looking, somewhere around thirty-five, medium build, around five-nine, with wire-rimmed glasses and brown hair, wearing corduroy pants and a sweater.

We had Lindholm stand on a chair while I frisked him to make sure he wasn’t wired and didn’t have a gun. The guy was shaking with fear while he stood on the chair and Jimmy introduced all of us to him, asking him if he knew who we were. “Yeah,” he said softly as Jimmy started laying into him for the marijuana business. He was using his regular voice, going over how the guy wasn’t paying anyone and wasn’t with anyone, telling him how he had to be with someone so he should be with us.

The guy somehow mistook Jimmy’s words as a request, so he answered that he was going to continue not to be with anyone. Jimmy’s mood and voice changed real quick. “I’m not asking,” he told Lindholm. “I’m telling you.”

But the guy repeated that he wanted to continue by himself. He had barely finished saying those words when Stevie hit him with a body shot. He doubled over and fell off the chair, but I grabbed him and picked him up before he hit the ground. As I held him up and sat him back in the chair, Jimmy pulled out a pistol with a silencer on it. I was pretty sure we were trying to shake him down for money, so we wouldn’t kill him, and that the pistol was just to emphasize the point that he needed to pay us. The guy perceived no such assurance, so he immediately agreed.

A week later, Jimmy and Stevie told me nothing came out of that extortion, that the law had got wind of it so they had backed away. I had no reason to doubt them, but years later when I got arrested and charged with that particular extortion, I found out that Jimmy and Stevie had actually collected about $1,600,000 from Lindholm in a matter of months. I was a little mad when I found that out and even angrier when I learned that the same thing had happened a few other times. After all, I had put just as much ass on the line as they had and they hadn’t given the money to me. But by then everything had changed between the three of us, so in some small way, we were all even.

The only people we ever put out of business were the heroin dealers. Jimmy didn’t allow heroin in South Boston. It was a dirty drug that users stuck in their arms, making problems with needles and, later on, AIDS. While people can do cocaine socially and still function, once they do heroin, they’re zombies.

From the very beginning, there were serious attempts by law enforcement to get us on drug trafficking charges. One of their biggest efforts had been Operation Beans in 1985. This DEA operation actually began one afternoon in the spring of 1983. That particular day, Jimmy and I had been driving down West Broadway by the D Street projects when a fellow named Ronnie Costello waved us over. Ronnie, who was on the scene and knew a lot of people, happened to be working construction in the D Street projects, putting windows in the buildings and generally refurbishing them. That day, he told Jimmy and me that something big was going on at D and First streets, that all kinds of law enforcement were there. Ronnie got in the back seat of the car, behind me, and the three of us drove down D Street toward First Street, pulling up about a block and half away, where we used binoculars to watch what was going on. All kinds of law, the FBI and DEA, were everywhere, the agents wearing their windbreakers identifying their agencies with big letters across the back. We were there for about five minutes when Jimmy said, “Let’s get out of here before someone spots us and thinks we had something to do with this.”

As it turned out, we later discovered, the marijuana in the warehouse that had attracted the law belonged to Joe Murray, a large-scale Charlestown marijuana dealer. When Jimmy found out that Murray had been storing his marijuana there, he reached out and had someone bring Murray in for a meeting. At the meeting, he fined Murray $90,000 for storing the marijuana in Southie and putting the heat on us. That was our introduction to Joe Murray, with whom we later became involved in the effort to ship arms to Ireland on the
Valhalla
. Our relationship with this particular drug dealer ended years later when he decided to pack it in. When Murray finally chose to go his own way, we shook him down for $500,000. While no one ever volunteered to pay when they were packing it in, we considered that money their severance pay…to us.

Ironically, after he left the business, Joe Murray got killed by his wife, or at least that’s who they say shot him. In September 1992, a week before he was killed, Murray had come to Jimmy, Stevie, and me and asked to meet us at Thomas Park, a spot called the Heights by people in South Boston. Here he offered us money to kill his wife and his brother-in-law. Apparently his wife had found out Joe had been cooperating with law enforcement. He was afraid she was going to tell people and he would be outed as an informant.

Before that happened, he was trying to get her killed. We settled on a price of $1 million dollars, $500,000 up front and $500,000 afterward. But Joe decided the price was too steep, and, a week later he went up to his cottage in Belgrade Lakes, Maine, where his wife was. It was reported that he attacked her with a knife but she shot him, supposedly five times with a .357 Magnum, killing him. Too bad he hadn’t accepted our price. The truth of the matter is, Murray had no one with him. While Jimmy, Stevie, and I had a gang, Murray was alone. All along, he had been paying us to be his protection.

Actually, even if he had given us the $500,000 up front to take care of his wife and brother-in-law, we had already decided we weren’t going to do anything. And there was nothing Murray could have done about that. But if he’d taken our deal, he would have still been alive because he would have thought we were doing something. Then he would have not left for Maine by himself to take care of his wife. He saved the money, but he paid the price.

But that spring afternoon in 1983, while we were turning the car around, Bobby Darling, a detective with the Boston police, drove by and spotted us. We returned to where we had picked up Ronnie, dropped him off, and proceeded up West Broadway, taking a right on D Street away from First Street toward Fourth Street, then taking a left on Fifth Street. As we were heading up Fifth Street, between F and Dorchester, we could see that Bobby Darling was following us. Jimmy stopped the car and pulled over. Bobby Darling pulled up and said to Jimmy, “Whitey, who was in the car with you? Who was the other fellow?”

Jimmy said, “You’re asking me who was in my car with me? Get the fuck out of here.” With that, we drove away.

About a week later, we heard that Darling had filed an FIO, a Field Intelligence Observation report, in which he stated that James “Whitey” Bulger, Stephen “the Rifleman” Flemmi, and Joseph Murray, the drug supplier from Charlestown, were observed together, watching the raid from a safe distance. He had lied. He knew who was in our car that day. He had looked right at me and said hi. He knew it was me and Jimmy, but had lied and put in that Flemmi and Murray were in the car.

One afternoon, two weeks later, Jimmy caught Darling out by his condo in Louisburg Square. Jimmy jumped into his car, chased him down, cut him off, and said, “You dirty dog coward motherfucker. You put in that phony FIO report. You lied. You just stepped over the line. If I ever see you round me again, I’ll cut your fucking head off.”

Darling, who was shaken up, went to Boston Police headquarters and reported the incident. Their reply to him was, “What were you doing over there? That is out of our jurisdiction.” When he repeated Jimmy’s exact words to him, his commander said, “If I were you, I’d stay away from him.” He ended up giving Darling two weeks vacation time.

However, because of that one phony FIO, which was all lies from Darling, who knew exactly who was in the car, a major investigation on us began, an investigation resulting in Operation Beans, which was a play on Boston’s nickname, Beantown. Operation Beans, a DEA plan targeting Jimmy, Stevie, and me in an attempt to accumulate evidence to arrest us for drug trafficking, eventually fell flat on its face.

But it didn’t take Jimmy and me long to realize exactly what was going on. One afternoon, I was looking out of the variety store when I saw a guy standing around the Old Colony projects, smoking a ten-inch-long cigar. Since I grew up in those projects, I basically knew everyone there. And I knew he wasn’t from around there. So I got out the binoculars and studied the guy and another man who was with him. A short time later Jimmy came in, and when I told him what I’d noticed, we both stood there, staring at the guy smoking the cigar and his friend. Over the course of time, we kept seeing the same two people driving by and watching us, along with some additional surveillance on us.

Soon Jimmy started hearing from law enforcement that there was indeed an investigation on us. In the meantime, in the fall of 1984, the
Valhalla
had gotten grabbed, McIntyre had gotten grabbed and disappeared, and the investigations for those events had turned flat. So now the DEA had come in and decided they were going to get us for drug trafficking.