Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (23 page)

As soon as we started noticing the extra surveillance, I made several trips to a specialty store at 633 Third Avenue in New York to buy some new bug-sweeping equipment. Once I got the new equipment, I used it frequently to sweep both Jimmy’s car and his condo at Louisburg Square in Quincy. In both places, I kept getting high readings. In his condo, the readings were by the bow window, yet we couldn’t pinpoint the spots. Jimmy thought the law was aiming a laser at the windows to pick up sounds inside, but we couldn’t find anything to indicate that that might be the case.

In February 1985, at around four o’clock in the morning, Jimmy and Cathy came out of his condo to go for a walk. They frequently went for walks at that hour. The first thing Jimmy saw as he started to walk out of his front door were two guys in overalls coming around the corner. Immediately, Jimmy ran back into the condo and grabbed his car keys and he and Cathy drove off after the guys. One of the men took off, running into the unit at Louisburg Square that overlooked Jimmy’s unit. The other one jumped into a car and bent down under the seat, but his foot hit the brake light. Jimmy pulled up next to the car but couldn’t get a look at the guy’s face. That was a big tipoff that something was going on concerning his house and car.

A week or so later, I was scheduled for surgery to remove a broken disc in my neck. Over the years, from sports and boxing, the disc in my neck had been deteriorating. Finally, it had broken off and was cutting into my spinal cord, causing me a lot of discomfort and making my left arm go numb. The day before I went into the hospital, I swept the car and got an especially high reading. When I got out of the hospital, I swept the car again and got another high reading. Certain something was going on with Jimmy’s Chevy, I took it down to the mechanic on a Friday and showed him where the reading was coming from. After he checked things over, he said the high reading was caused by the car’s computer brain, which was sending out a signal that we were picking up.

Monday, I met Jimmy and told him, “I don’t like it. There is something in this car. I’m sure of it.” This time, when we went back to the mechanic’s garage, we were able to figure out that the high reading was coming from the passenger door. After closer inspection, I discovered a small wire hanging down from the lining on the door. When I pulled the lining away from the door, a microphone fell down. Then I saw that the microphone was attached to a piece of a coat hanger that was bent so it could hook onto a bar inside the car door to hold it in place.

Jimmy picked up the microphone and said, “One, two, three testing,” and with that about four cars rolled into the garage and agents jumped out with their guns drawn. One of the agents was Steve Boeri, another was Al Reilly, and two others were New York DEA agents. When the agents appeared with drawn guns, I was standing by the car. “Kevin, get away from the car,” one of the agents kept insisting. But I wouldn’t move because I was holding the piece of equipment I’d used to find the bug and I didn’t want the agent to see exactly what equipment I had. “Take your hand out of your pocket,” the agent kept telling me, and I kept telling him to go fuck himself.

Finally, after a few more minutes of the agent trying to get me to take my hand out of my pocket, I asked, “Am I under arrest?”

When he said no, I told him, “Go fuck yourself.” His next move was to walk up to me, stick a .357 Magnum in my chest, and shove me in the shoulder in an attempt to push me away from the car. Immediately, I shoved him back, and then everybody in the garage became tense, certain there was going to be a problem.

Finally, Boeri turned to Jimmy and said, “Ask Kevin to come over here.”

“Kevin, come on over here,” Jimmy said.

“Okay,” I said, and walked over there while the other agent stood there silently, bullshit because I wasn’t intimidated by him and his gun, and because Jimmy had spoken a few words and I had done what he had said.

A couple of other agents went into Jimmy’s car and pulled out their transmitter and battery pack. “We know what you’re doing,” one agent told Jimmy.

“You know nothing,” Jimmy told him.

“We know what we know,” the agent said.

“You don’t got a thing,” Jimmy said. With that, all four agents took off. As soon as they were gone, Jimmy and I hopped into the car and shot over to Louisburg Square. When we got to Jimmy’s condo, which was three levels, we could see that the plywood beneath the bow window on the first floor had been pulled down. It was obvious that the agents had originally drilled through the side of the window and inserted the microphone from the outside, managing to place their transmitter and battery pack underneath the bow window. But now the transmitter was gone. They had retrieved all their equipment.

Unfortunately, however, an innocent bystander suffered because of the garage scene. The elderly father-in-law of the owner of the garage, who was in his late eighties or early nineties, was there when the agents ran in with their guns drawn. Immediately, they stuck a gun on the owner of the garage, as well as on Jimmy and me, and also shoved the barrel of a gun under the armpit of this old man.

“Leave the old man alone,” Jimmy told the agents. “He has nothing to do with anything.” But they kept the gun on him. Badly shaken up, as soon as the agents left, the old man went into the hospital, where he suffered a heart attack. Two or three days later, he died. There was no doubt, for his family or for Jimmy and me, that this old man, no physical threat to anyone, had died because of the shock of someone shoving the barrel of a gun up his armpit.

The day after the incident, Jimmy and I were still trying to figure out how anyone had gotten into his car. We knew there were three alarms in the car, one of them a pressure sensor, so that if anyone got in the car, the weight alarm would go off. There was also another pressure sensor under the mats, and the windows and doors were protected with a regular car alarm. Yet, somehow, someone had bypassed all three alarms and never set one of them off. How had they been able to put that bug in the car?

Suddenly, as I was looking at the outside panel on the passenger side, I thought that maybe it looked a bit off-center. When I pulled it off the bottom of the passenger door, I studied the 8-inch-wide molding that ran around the side. I took it off and, sure enough, there was a hole gaping through the door. The door panel had been wired with copper wiring, which they had obviously used for their antenna. They must have used a hand drill to cut a hole into the outside of the door and then inserted tin snips to make the hole big enough to hold their equipment. That night in February when Jimmy had caught them coming from his car, they must have been trying to change the batteries in their equipment. Since it was so cold out, it would have been necessary to change the batteries every twelve to twenty-four hours.

After all this happened and they removed their equipment, Boeri and Reilly spoke to Jimmy about the people whose condo at Louisburg Square they had rented in order to insert the bugs. “They didn’t know anything about what we were doing,” the agents told Jimmy. “Please don’t hurt them.”

“I don’t hold them responsible for anything,” Jimmy told the agents. “And, besides, you didn’t get anything.” The agents hung around another two or three weeks and then they left. They knew that we were on our guard and that they weren’t going to get anything from us.

All in all, the agents had spent at least six months observing us and trying to get down our movements and our schedules. But we had seen them from the very beginning of their operation. They had thought they were watching us, but we had been watching them. Inept at covert observation, the DEA agents had stuck out like sore thumbs. Jimmy and I couldn’t help noticing all the cars driving by the variety store or following us wherever we went. When they were in a car that circled around the rotary three or four times, their faces stood out. When they were in the park with binoculars and we were looking back at them with our binoculars, they stood out. Plus, it was obvious to us from the beginning that these people weren’t from the town. Agent Reilly had been the smartest one of all of them, somehow managing not to appear as obvious as the rest. Plus, he had spent time developing an effective plan on how to put the bugs in the car. The problem with his plan was that, unable to use a power source, he’d had to use batteries, which had to be constantly replaced.

But it wouldn’t have mattered what the agents had used. The cold fact was that we never talked in buildings or cars or on phones, so nothing could have come of their efforts. Unlike the way the media reported it, the true story of Operation Beans was not that we had been tipped off about it, but rather that the agents had been obvious and we had been aware. Yes, they had succeeded in bugging the apartment and the car, but we never said a word about business in either of those two places, so the bugs did them no good. Jimmy and I always talked outside, never in any enclosed place. No matter how important something was that we had to tell each other, it could wait until we were able to take a walk or go to a place we considered secure. The agents had taken everything into account, except for the discipline, the one issue about which Jimmy never, ever let up. Not then. And, assuming he’s still out there somewhere, not now.

Still, the law eventually got to a lot of those involved in the drug traffic. As a result, some guys just packed it in, while others went to prison. In August 1990, the Southie drug bust, a joint effort by the DEA and the Boston police that netted fifty-one drug dealers in South Boston, basically stopped Jimmy’s drug business. They got these guys on charges through wiretaps or photographs, along with the confiscation of drugs and records. But this raid and the previous ones did not yield the large-scale information the DEA had hoped for. Everyone had been aware of the ongoing DEA operations for months. We’d watch or hear about the DEA raiding houses, businesses, and garages, trying to build their case, searching for records, products, and anything else they could find. In some instances, they did get records, although never the quantities they expected. One day they even raided the variety store. I was there as they hauled off my computer, where they were certain I kept records of all the drug transactions. But all that was on the computer were records for the videos we rented or sold. Nothing having to do with the drug trafficking business was on that computer or written down anywhere else. That was all in my head.

They tried many more times to bug Jimmy’s car, but, as always, they failed to get what they wanted. Knowing they were always trying to do that, I used to make a tiny cut with a razor on the dashboard and on the sun visor. It would drive Jimmy crazy when I did that, but once I saw the dashboard didn’t have my slash or if I couldn’t see the little white insulation through the blue covering on the visor, I’d know that it had been replaced and had a bug. But I didn’t bother to get rid of it. Like I said, we never talked in the car anyhow.

In January 1990, eight months before the fifty-one arrests and indictments came down, the DEA agents were running around South Boston making drug raids. Jimmy and I were driving in the Ford LTD on West Fourth Street when the agents surrounded our car. “Kevin, Whitey,” they said, as they approached our car. “We have to retrieve some of our equipment.”

I said, “What? The visor?”

They looked at me for a minute and then used a Phillips screwdriver to take the three screws out of the visor and took it with them. Afterward, Jimmy and I drove away and laughed. We knew they got nothing.

But the presence of the law all over the neighborhood and their frequent raids had slowed the business down well before the August 1990 bust. By that time, just about everyone had packed it in and stopped dealing, and drug users were traveling out of town to get their drugs. While there was always someone to pick up the business, it was nowhere near so large a scale as before.

The Southie drug bust itself involved three separate groups: the Paul Moore group, the Red Shea group, and the Hobart Willis group. In 1987, Billy Shea had packed it in, so they didn’t get him. But the DEA made the 1990 raids early one morning and continued into the next day, looking for people. They got the majority of them that first morning, and arrested the rest of the three groups the next day. Jimmy, Stevie, and I were the only ones they didn’t get. Because we knew the raids were coming down, I used to sleep with a police scanner, tuned into my DEA channel, by the side of my bed. A short time earlier, I’d sent away for some books and papers explaining how to get a list of government channels and had figured out how to punch in the numbers from one frequency to the next. Eventually, I’d been able to figure out what channel was the FBI, the DEA, and so on. Then I’d plugged the channels into the scanner and had them available whenever I needed them. Today, with the evolution of cell phones, people talk more on their cell phones than on the scanner, but at that time, I relied on my scanner.

And sure enough, the day of the raid, at 4:00
A.M
., I was woken up by the words, “Good morning, gentlemen. It is now our turn.” I could hear the team they had assembled for the raid talking to one another. I jumped out of bed, got dressed, and called Jimmy. A few minutes later, he picked me up and we drove over to the Boston Common. Here we sat on a park bench, listening to the radio and how all the raids and arrests went down, looking over at the bridge where the water is, at the spot where they’d later film a scene from
Good Will Hunting.
At noon, Jimmy made a call and we got word they weren’t looking for us, so we went back home.

We didn’t know 80 percent of the people who were arrested, for most of them didn’t work for us, but rather for the people who were paying us. Some of the dealers were held in jail, while others were released on bail, or got time or probation or house confinement. Hobart Willis got seventeen years. Paul Moore got nine. Jackie Cherry originally got nine years, but they brought him up in front of a grand jury and gave him immunity. When he refused to testify, they gave him an additional eighteen months dead time for contempt. Red Shea ended up with eleven years. But they couldn’t get to Jimmy. He was too well-insulated.