Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (31 page)

Even though Carr is a maggot and a piece of shit, if we had killed him, it would have been like Alan Berg, the Denver radio talk show host assassinated by a white supremacist with a Mac-10 as he got into his VW. Law enforcement would never have stopped until they tracked down Carr’s killer, just the way they did with Berg’s. His murder would have been an attack on the system, like attacking freedom of the press, the fabric of the American way of life, and they would have spared no expense to solve the crime. But in the long run, Jimmy and I got sidetracked and the maggot lived. Still, I wish we’d killed him. No question about it.

In November 1999, Howie came to my arraignment. When I was walking by him, he said, “Do you have anything to say?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Howie, be fucking nice.”

In his column the next day, he wrote that I said, “Howie, be nice.” He couldn’t even get those four words right.

I was later informed they would be calling Howie Carr as a witness at my bail hearing. However, he didn’t get the chance to offer his thoughts about how dangerous I might be to him, since I didn’t go for a bail hearing.

Another reporter who earned Jimmy’s wrath was Paul Corsetti, also from the
Boston Herald
. Disgusted with the articles Corsetti was writing about him, Jimmy found out where Corsetti hung out and drank. One night in the early 1980s, dressed in a suit, Jimmy had me drop him off at the Dockside, a restaurant bar at Faneuil Hall. While I stayed outside in the car, Jimmy went in to find the
Herald
reporter.

When he saw Corsetti sitting at the bar, Jimmy went over and said, “Do you know who I am?”

Corsetti said, “No.”

“I’m Jim Bulger,” Jimmy told him. “And if you continue to write shit about me, I’m going to blow your fucking head off.”

The next day, Corsetti reported the meeting to the Boston police. He was issued a pistol permit within twenty-four hours. The cop who gave him the permit told him, “I’m glad my last name is not Corsetti.” A couple of days later, Jimmy found out about the scene with the cop and was glad to hear how uncomfortable he had made Corsetti.

But Corsetti was just one more example of
Herald
reporters who report stories that are inaccurate. These reporters are not the only members of the media who are careful never to allow the truth to get in the way of a good story. The story about state trooper Billy Johnson was another perfect example of that tactic.

That story began in September 1987, when Jimmy had me pick up him and Theresa to take them to the airport. They were planning to fly to Montreal to visit Theresa’s daughter Karen, who was married to hockey star Chris Nilan. It was around five in the afternoon, but by the time we got to the airport, Jimmy was already in a bad mood. We’d been halfway there when Theresa had realized she’d forgotten her license and birth certificate, so we had to go back for them. He’d started screaming and yelling and was plenty aggravated when we finally arrived at Logan.

Once we got inside the terminal, I walked him down to the check-in counter. While we’re in line, he put his bag on the conveyor to the X-ray machine. A security woman saw the bag, grabbed it, and said, “You have a large amount of money here. I’ll have to take a look.”

Immediately Jimmy grabbed the bag out of her hand and said, “Fuck this shit. I’m not going anywhere.” She promptly called security, and when a security guard arrived, he started to go after Jimmy. Walking a good way behind Jimmy, I banged into the security guy and knocked him over the counter. At that moment, Jimmy was trying to take off his money belt. But he had a knot in it, and as he was trying to pull the belt off, the knot kept getting tighter around his waist. Calling out, “Kevin,” Jimmy finally snapped the money belt off and handed it to me. That was the only the mistake he made. Actually, in all the years we were together, that was the only mistake I ever saw him make. But his calling out “Kevin” gave the authorities my identity. Knowing who Jimmy was, they could easily figure out by my physical description that he was calling Kevin Weeks, not Kevin O’Neil.

When I headed out of the airport, one of the security guards tried to follow me through the revolving doors. As I stepped out, Jimmy stuck his foot into the door, trapping the guard inside the middle door. Walking across the street, I saw two state troopers who had parked their car in front of mine. “Beautiful night, isn’t it?” I said calmly to them.

“Yeah, it is,” one of the troopers answered. Then I got into the black Chevy and drove away. As I pulled out of the airport, I put on the police scanner and drove back to the variety store. There was nothing on the scanner about the Logan incident.

Back at the airport, the officials found that both Jimmy and Theresa had less than $10,000, the specified amount a passenger is allowed to carry. “You can’t fucking hold me,” Jimmy told them. “You got nothing on me.” As it turned out, even though the officials could have made up any charge they wanted, said he assaulted a guard or charged him with disorderly conduct and made him go to court, they didn’t charge him with anything.

A couple of hours after I left, after a lot more swearing from Jimmy, the officials released the two of them. When I met Jimmy down at the variety store later that night, I gave him back the $80,000 in the money belt.

But the media screwed up the simple facts of that case. Both Howie Carr and Peter Gelzinis reported that Jimmy had a suitcase filled with $500,000 that he was trying to bring into Montreal. But the inaccurate facts didn’t stop there. On September 25, 1998, William Johnson, the state trooper who had initially detained Jimmy and Theresa, committed suicide in a New Hampshire field. The media tried to blame the trooper’s death on Jimmy, insisting that Billy Bulger, who was president of the Massachusetts State Senate, had taken revenge on Johnson by demoting him. But that simply wasn’t true. Other troopers told me the guy had mental health issues. Even though the trooper had plenty of problems before he met Jimmy, it made a much better story to link his suicide to the scene at Logan eleven years earlier.

Most of the time, the
Boston Globe
wasn’t as inaccurate as the
Herald.
They just knocked the people from Southie during busing. They also liked to describe me in all their stories as “Whitey’s surrogate son,” another example of the media putting labels on people they wrote about. Jimmy and I were friends, not like father and son. Even though he was the boss, he always treated me equally, like an associate, not a son. The reporter who seemed to do the most research and put real effort into getting the true story without having been there was Shelley Murphy, who had been at the
Herald
for ten years when she went to work for the
Globe
in 1993. But Jimmy and I usually just ended up laughing at most of the news stories, as time and time again the media had it wrong, over and over holding to their pledge to never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

When Jimmy and I, along with two of our friends, won the lottery, the press had another field day. The truth of the story is that in December 1990, Jimmy and I walked into the liquor store and saw a friend of ours, Pat Linskey, buying Mass Millions season tickets. When Jimmy asked him what he was doing, Patty said he was buying tickets as extra Christmas gifts in case he forgot friends and people who worked down at the store. Jimmy and I offered to help him pay for the tickets, but he said, “No, I have it.”

During that week, the three of us gave out the tickets to friends and relatives as last-minute gifts, telling everyone, in a more or less joking manner, “If you win, we’re partners.” But no one ever expected to win.

Almost eight months later, on July 26, I was up in New Hampshire with family playing golf for the week. When I got back to the liquor store that weekend, I got a call from Pat saying that his brother Michael had hit the lottery for $14.3 million. That night, Patty and I met Michael, who said to Patty, “We’re partners.” Patty told Michael he was partners with me and Jimmy, and Michael said, “I don’t care what you do with your 50 percent. I know what I’m doing with mine.” So Michael got 50 percent, and Pat, Jimmy, and I shared the other 50 percent, with the three of us receiving $119,000 apiece before taxes for twenty years.

At that time, there was no love between Jimmy and Joe Malone, the state treasurer. Actually, if Danny Aiello and Jerry Cooney, a one-time heavyweight contender, mated, their son would look just like Joe Malone. Joe had the machine at the liquor store taken out. At the lottery headquarters, they checked their machine, and all the balls that were used to draw numbers were weighed to see if we had somehow rigged it. It was a waste of time. The drawing was legit.

At a press conference, Joe said that the only winner who could have caused him more trouble would have been his mother. The press was certain that somehow Billy had put the fix in for his brother and that it was all part of an after-the-win scheme to launder dirty money. Again, they were wrong. But the truth also was that it caused us more heat than it was worth.

The media also worked hard trying to make up stories about Jimmy’s sexual orientation. But there wasn’t any truth to any of those stories. One photo of Jimmy that often appears in the press shows him bare-chested except for a vest, wearing a cowboy hat and holding a gun. It’s supposed to equate him with the Village People, when he really was with a woman. The photo was taken when he and Theresa were on vacation and they went into a vintage costume place where you put on old-fashioned garb and have your photo taken. They never show the part of the photo where Theresa is dressed as a saloon girl. It’s just easier for the press to take Jimmy’s part of the picture out of context and leave Theresa out of it. Actually, Theresa has the complete photo and won’t release it. She’s saving it for when she writes
her
book.

Despite their continuous attempt to grab pictures of us, Jimmy and I were pretty alert and managed to avoid nearly every photographer who hounded us. There is one photo of the two of us, however, that continually accompanies articles about either one of us, and is usually shown on the Whitey Bulger episodes of
America’s Most Wanted.
This one was taken by a
Globe
reporter who happened to stumble across the two of us one summer day when Jimmy and I were walking around Castle Island. I was wearing a white T-shirt with
FILA
across its front and Jimmy had on a Boston Red Sox cap. The minute we spotted the photographer, with his footlong telescopic lens stretched across the roof of his car, Jimmy and I both gave him dirty looks. Then, as I started running toward him, the photographer jumped into his car and took off. For all the years the photographers hounded us, that was one of only two photographs they ever got of the two of us together.

There was one incident, however, in which Jimmy and I managed to use the media to further our own interests. In 1990, we were interested in the race for governor of Massachusetts and were anxious to do whatever we could to hurt the campaign of lieutenant governor Francis X. Bellotti. Jimmy had never liked Bellotti and particularly blamed him for the failed investigation into the fire that took place at the Hotel Vendome on June 17, 1972. During the fire, nine firemen lost their lives when the southeast section of the hotel collapsed. Jimmy always believed that the investigation was whitewashed because Franchi Construction, which was doing the renovation of the hotel, was a political contributor to Bellotti. It had been reported that some of the support beams were illegally taken out and should never have been removed during the renovation. Jimmy and I were told by firefighters who went into the hotel the night of the fire that the building wasn’t structurally sound to begin with.

Bellotti had always been after Jimmy, making it a personal matter, trying to embarrass Billy’s political career through his brother. So Jimmy was determined to do whatever he could to make sure that Bellotti didn’t get his party’s nomination in the race for governor. During the campaign, Jimmy and I used to go around town and along the expressway at night spreading our particular message of “Remember John Coady” on sidewalks. Late at night, I hung over the overpasses or climbed the walls, spray-painting in fluorescent orange and black the places where the cars went by with the words “Remember John Coady,” while Jimmy waited in the car.

John Coady had been the deputy revenue department commissioner in 1982 when Bellotti’s office probed the Revenue Department. During Bellotti’s investigation, a state tax examiner, Stanley Barczak, made allegations against Coady. Seven weeks after Barczak’s testimony, on July 30, 1982, Coady committed suicide in his North Andover home. Many people believed Coady had done nothing wrong and that Bellotti’s relentless pursuit had made an innocent man commit suicide.

Our campaign to discredit Bellotti may well have ended up costing him votes. A week before the election, people started to talk about John Coady, and the
Globe
wrote stories about the graffiti appearing all over town. It was enough to stimulate the media’s interest in John Coady, even though they had no idea that Jimmy and I were behind the whole scene.

But for the most part, the media devoted far too much space to printing lies about Jimmy and me. I assume that most people would prefer to stay private, rather than have their names in the newspaper. We were no different.

TWELVE

IN THE WIND

1994–1996

I was standing by the end of the counter next to the lottery machine at Rotary Liquors at 295 Old Colony Avenue, the store we’d bought from Stippo ten years earlier, when John Connolly walked in. It was around three in the afternoon on Tuesday, December 23, 1994. Connolly, who modeled his appearance after John Gotti, was wearing an expensive suit and tie, his hair carefully coiffed, dressed as sharply as when he’d been an FBI agent. He’d retired from the FBI in 1990 and was now working as head of corporate security at Boston Edison, a nice benefit from his years at the FBI. Although I’d see him riding around South Boston, he rarely came into the variety store next door, where I usually worked. If he was looking for Jimmy, he’d go to the liquor store, but most of the time he’d be talking to Kevin O’Neil. “Is the other guy around?” he asked this time, referring, of course, to Jimmy.