Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (4 page)

But back when I was still in school, boxing was sometimes even connected to my schoolwork. My favorite teacher was Vincent Borelli, who taught seventh-grade math. He was from the North End and came from a family of boxers. A bunch of us would stay after class to fight with him. I was thirteen and he was twenty-four at the time. A good-sized guy, he didn’t try to hurt us, and we all had fun fighting him. He also ran a boxing program three times a week, which I joined. He finished his career as a vice principal at the Grover Cleveland Middle School in Dorchester and today we are still friends.

I went to Boston College High for the ninth grade, but left at the end of that year to go to South Boston High, where I graduated on June 12, 1974. It was a great place to go to school. Until busing entered the picture in September 1974, South Boston High was all white. Billy and Johnny both attended Boston Latin High and English High before getting full academic scholarships to Harvard. Johnny actually got a perfect 800 on his math SATs.

Maybe things would have been different for me if I had followed in their footsteps and stayed at Boston College High. Not that staying there was my choice. With less than two weeks left in my freshman year there, I ran into a little problem. After parents’ night at the school, McDevitt, a kid from Dorchester, said, “Hey, I saw your mother, Peg Leg,” referring to the fact that my mother had a brace on her leg. I cracked him and he went down. When I jumped on top of him, the seminarian who taught the class turned the ring on his finger around and cuffed me on the back of the head with the ring. I couldn’t see who had hit me, but figured it was another kid. I swung around and punched the teacher in the face. He went down against a desk, and the next thing I knew it had become a big thing. The faculty had a meeting to consider the fact that I had hit a seminarian.

Mr. Swain, my guidance teacher, came to my aid. “The kid is from South Boston,” he said. “He turned around to protect himself.” But I had to leave school for the last week and never went back. My parents told me I was thrown out.

Twenty-five years later, when my older son, Kevin Barry, got accepted into BC High, I went over to tell my mother the news. “Oh, you could have graduated from there,” she told me.

“Ma, I got thrown out,” I reminded her.

“Oh, that’s not exactly right,” she said. “We never told you the truth. We decided you should go to Southie and save the eight hundred dollars tuition.” Maybe that $800 was the crossroads or turning point in my life. Or maybe nothing would have been any different. But Kevin Barry graduated from BC High four years after I told my mother about his acceptance, and I had no trouble paying the $6,500-a-year tuition. And he turned out great.

When I was in high school, I never pushed myself and coasted by easily with B’s. Some of my friends went off to college and became professionals, like lawyers, while others went into construction or became policemen or firemen. By the time I was in high school, my brothers were long gone from the house. They lived at Harvard while they were students there. When Billy had gotten an appointment to Annapolis, my father had wanted him to go there, but Billy decided to go to Harvard instead. My father was so mad he didn’t speak to Billy for a year. In 1972, during the Vietnam War, Johnny’s student deferment ended at the end of his freshman year at Harvard. He got drafted and spent two years as an MP guarding a nuclear facility in Sandy Hook, New Jersey, which has since closed. After that, he went back and graduated from Harvard.

On June 10, 1974, just before my graduation from South Boston High, I met a beautiful dark-haired girl named Pam Cavaleri, who was a junior in high school. That day, she was standing across the street from the L Street Bathhouse with her friends when I walked by with a friend of mine who was dating her girlfriend. Right away, I noticed Pam’s long dark hair, which fell down below her waist, and her beautiful brown eyes, great smile, and terrific laugh. She was about five-six and had an unbelievable figure. I started talking to her and invited her to the graduation party that my friends and I were having on June 12 at the three-decker house four of us guys were living in for the summer. She came, as did about 300 other kids, and it wasn’t long before Pam and I were boyfriend and girlfriend. We married six years later. She was, and still is, the love of my life.

After I graduated from South Boston High, I got a couple of jobs. During the summer, I drove a day care bus. I always liked kids and enjoyed driving them to the D Street day camp and from the park to the beach. I was out of the house then, living in the apartment in Southie with my friends.

I started working at South Boston High as a security aide in September 1974, which coincided with the start of busing. I liked the job, being with my friends and in the place where I had always been comfortable. But thanks to Judge Arthur Garrity, whose legal decision ordered 17,000 Boston schoolchildren to be bused to integrate the Boston schools, South Boston High became a far different place from the one I had just graduated from.

Because the quality of education in the black schools in Boston was deemed inferior to what the white kids received in their schools, the decision was made to integrate the schools. Rather than simply take whatever steps were necessary to improve the black schools with better-quality teachers and enhanced classrooms, students from South Boston and black students from other parts of Boston would now ride buses to the other side of the city to attend elementary, junior high, and high school at least forty-five minutes away from their neighborhood schools. Judge Garrity, who lived out in Wellesley, a wealthy suburb of Boston, came up with this program. But the program didn’t integrate anything. Instead, the city became a battlefield. Busing tore Boston apart, pitting parents against administrators and students against students. The media loved to portray the situation as racial: whites from South Boston against blacks from the rest of the city. But it wasn’t that way at all. It was about ripping kids out of their neighborhoods and sending them halfway across the city, when their schools were only two blocks away from their houses. But Judge Garrity knew what was best for South Boston from his Wellesley home. All the women of Southie, especially Boston City Council member Louise Day Hicks, stood their ground, forming an anti-busing group called ROAR, Restore Our Alienated Rights. Every politician in Southie was against busing.

The saddest part is that there is a generation of Boston kids walking around today who basically have no high school education, who were condemned to not even mediocre jobs because of one man’s decision. These kids couldn’t get a decent education because Arthur Garrity took that opportunity away from them. A grand experiment, at the expense of the children of Boston, ultimately failed.

But not before blood was shed at South Boston High. We now had black students in the school who were often twenty-one or twenty-two, older than the typical eighteen-year-old South Boston senior. You could feel the hatred in the corridors. Just a year earlier, there had been a great atmosphere in those same classrooms, where learning was taking place. Students looked forward to going to school, to their classes, to sports, and to just being around one another. But one year later, it was like Beirut. You were just waiting for the next fight to erupt. Kids from South Boston weren’t running scared, though. South Boston High was their home, and no one was going to come in and take their home from them.

It was horrible for the black kids, but just as horrible for the poor white kids, too. Both groups of kids had to walk the corridors, which were now lined with the Tactical Patrol Force in full riot gear. These guys were a goon squad, seeming more like vicious rejects from the Boston police force. They acted unprofessionally, attacking both blacks and whites, whacking everyone with their fists and their clubs. They seemed to forget that these kids were still minors, and added to the chaos, antagonizing all the students and the teachers rather than making anybody feel safe.

A year later, when the TPF was disbanded, the state police came in and were more professional. They would break up the fights and separate everybody. Some fights would start in the cafeteria, where the kids all sat in their own groups. They would begin as food fights and the next thing you knew there were fistfights everywhere, despite the high concentration of police there. Most fights, however, began on the second floor, at a crisscrossing point outside the auditorium.

One fight involved Mikey Faith, a good friend of mine. In December 1974, he was walking out the door of the school library when a black kid used a buck knife with a black handle to stab him in the stomach. They must have had words before or else the black kid had the wrong person. But while Mikey held his stomach and went down outside the library, his assailant ran toward the stairway between the second and third floors. I heard the screaming and came running up. When I saw the kid with the knife running, I ran after him. A cop and I grabbed him at the same time and I sucker-punched the kid. Mikey recovered, but he was in the hospital for a week or so. His attacker got probation or some bullshit thing.

That afternoon, things got pretty rough. A mob of angry parents formed outside so the black kids couldn’t leave the building and go to their buses. It was more of a safety issue and a fear of retaliation that made the police keep the black students inside the building until the mob dissolved. During the melee, a bunch of kids overturned a police car. In the newspaper the next day, there was a picture of the overturned car, with me standing next to it. That was typical of the media, to grab a picture of the Southie kids wreaking havoc. As bad as things really were, the
Globe
and the
Boston Herald American
(in 1973, the
Record American/Herald Traveler
became known as the
Boston Herald American
; in 1982, the name was changed to the
Boston Herald
) were portraying it as a black-and-white issue. But that was not the way it was at all. All the people in South Boston wanted was for their kids to go to their neighborhood schools.

Another fight I got involved in began when a bunch of black girls went into the girls’ lavatory on the second floor and held the door shut. Then they jumped the two white girls who were already in there. One of those two girls was my Pam. When Ricky Calnan—a friend of mine who grew up in the Mary Ellen McCormack projects and was working as an aide with me—and I heard the yelling, we came charging into the bathroom and found a fight going on. When I went to break it up, this black girl named Gracie Richards, a little stocky thing, scratched my face bad. I gave her a right hand and knocked her out. Pam and the other white girl, Ronnie Barrett, were okay. The scratches on my face were pretty deep from where Gracie’s fingernails had gone in and I needed a tetanus shot. We carried Gracie down to the nurse’s office, where she came to.

Another fight took place outside the office of the principal, Dr. Reid. I jumped in to break it up and ended up wrestling with a black kid who was swinging and punching. When Dr. Reid opened the door to try and get the kid into his office, I ended up throwing the kid through the window next to the door. The window smashed, sending glass everywhere. The kid wasn’t badly hurt. And all I was doing was defending myself.

One black kid, whose name was actually Sigfried Goldstein, would walk around with a Communist flag on his jacket. Older and bigger than the rest of the kids, around six-three and 265 pounds, he was always picking fights. Unlike most of the kids, who had no other place to go and who were trying to get an education—which was nearly impossible in that atmosphere—this kid wasn’t there for education.

Finally, one day, Billy Allen, whose family was friends with mine, decided he’d had enough of Sigfried beating up on the smaller white kids. A fairly quiet, strong kid who never bothered anyone, Billy was pretty big himself, about six-five and 280 pounds. Billy came up to me on the second floor where I happened to be stationed and told me, “I’m going to get Sigfried when he comes to his locker.”

“Do whatever you have to do,” I told him.

That afternoon when Sigfried went to his locker, Billy was waiting for him. He walked up to him and asked, “Why don’t you pick on me?”

Goldstein looked at him and said, “You ain’t shit.”

At that, Billy Allen knocked him out. When a few of the black students tried to jump on Billy, I jumped on them and a big brawl broke out. When it had been broken up and everything had cleared, the authorities asked me what happened. “Sigfried suckered Billy,” I told them, and they put Sigfried in a holding room, where you went when you got into a fight. Nothing happened to Billy, but Sigfried got real quiet after that and stayed away from Billy and the smaller kids. A few years later, I heard that he got pinched for murder. Didn’t surprise me.

One time a lady from the neighborhood came to me and told me that a black aide who was working there was giving her son a hard time. When she asked me to take care of the problem, I said, “Sure.”

The aide was stationed in the stairwell in back of the auditorium, the spot where a lot of fights took place. Since I knew what time he went to lunch, one day I walked down the back of the auditorium as he was coming up the stairs and told him to leave the kid alone and quit bothering him.

“Fuck you,” he told me. “You’re bothering all the black kids.” With that I suckered him and he fell down the stairs. When he went down, I started banging him. Then I turned around and walked back up the stairs and out. The aide, who ended up with a cut over his eye and all lumped up, went to the office and reported me. No one saw the incident, so I had my friends, who were also working there as aides, say I was with them, and nothing ever came of it. The aide was a good-sized guy, eight or nine years older than me, but I was boxing at the time and in great shape. After that day, he was scared of me and wanted no problem with me or any of the kids.

That first year, lots of teachers transferred. Joe Foley was a phys ed teacher who I knew from the Boys Club. He used to call me the Avenger, because I always got everybody back who did anything to me. But he was a great guy and a terrific teacher. He ended up getting transferred during busing, which was a real shame because he loved South Boston High and South Boston. Some other teachers left because they wanted to, some because they spoke out. The mess finally ended more than twenty years later when busing was declared a failure. But even then, Judge Garrity would not admit that. The day he died was one of the best days in South Boston history.