Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (10 page)

Jimmy, John, and I got into our separate cars and headed to the Mullins Club at O and Third. Even though it was officially called the CPAA, or City Point Athletic Association, most people knew it as the Mullins Club, which was also the place where the Mullins gang hung. Jimmy was driving his green Olds Delta 88 and I was in my green Thunderbird. Jimmy walked into the Mullins Club to see if anyone else was around to help him. When he didn’t find anyone, he told me to leave my car there and drive him over to Theresa Stanley’s house on Silver Street in South Boston. When I dropped him off, he said I should head back to the Mullins Club. By then it was about four-thirty in the afternoon. I had no idea exactly what was going to happen, but I could tell that there was an urgency to whatever it was. I drove back down to the club where, fifteen minutes later, Jimmy pulled up, wearing a light brown wig, floppy mustache, and dark clothes, driving the Tow Truck.

The Tow Truck was basically a hit car, a modified high-performance blue 1975 Malibu. We had nicknamed it the Tow Truck so if anyone ever picked us up talking about it on the radio, they would think we were talking about some tow truck. When Jimmy had bought it a year or so earlier, it was a two-toned blue, but he had it painted a dark green. Jimmy had a master mechanic work on it according to his own specifications, and garaged it on K Street. It was a beauty, its engine all souped up, with over 900 horsepower. Jimmy’s mechanic had gone over it from head to toe: shocks, springs, the transmission, the whole suspension system, the motor, the driveshaft, the rear end. Every part of the car was high-performance. From the motor to the rear suspension, everything had been replaced because with so much power, the weakest link would break under full acceleration. You could turn each light on or off with the flick of a switch. If you got in a chase, all the lights but the headlights could go off so it would be hard for anyone to follow you. Jimmy had a smokescreen put in it where enough thick fog would come out the tailpipe to shut down an entire street. The mechanic had added an extra oil well that was filled with Marvel Mystery Oil, which fed into the exhaust manifold. The heat from the exhaust manifold produced smoke that seeped out of the tailpipes and created a heavy fog. You hit a button and oil would be pumped into the exhaust manifold and the red-hot pipes would steam up. We tested it late one night and watched as it fogged out all of First Street.

There were also little nozzles on a pipe underneath the rear bumper that were pressurized so oil would shoot out of them. If you were getting chased, as you went into a turn, you’d lay down an oil slick. You could make the turn, but the cars behind you would be spinning out of control. It was like James Bond’s Aston Martin, without the ejector seat. You couldn’t look at that car and not hear the roar of the engine. It literally growled. When you’d step on the accelerator, the car would stand up on its four wheels. The driveshaft, the whole engine would try to twist inside the car. I’d never seen such a phenomenal car. It looked like an ordinary Chevy Malibu, but only until you stepped on the gas. It was a beast.

I had my own set of keys and would take it out at night once a week and make sure everything worked. I’d be out on the Southeast Expressway or the Mass Turnpike, going 90 mph, and I’d step on the gas and the car would leave rubber. If a cop ever went after me for speeding, I wasn’t stopping. One night, when I had the car out on the Turnpike, a Porsche Targa 911 and a Corvette blew by me, so I stepped on the gas. The car took off like a rocket and I shot by the two of them. The needle on the speedometer was buried at 160 and the car was still accelerating. Jimmy hardly ever drove it, but he would have been bullshit if he ever saw me racing down the Turnpike that night.

The Tow Truck was just another example of how far ahead Jimmy thought. There wasn’t one tiny detail that wasn’t perfect on that car as an escape vehicle. It showed how 98 percent of his life was business, with maybe 2 percent pleasure. While other guys might be out drinking, he’d be thinking. While other people would be going to sleep at night, he’d be up planning. He was disciplined and lived and breathed the life of crime, which explains why he is still out there today, rather than in a jail cell.

Even though we’d tested the Tow Truck’s different features together and I’d taken it out many times, seeing Jimmy pull up with the wig and mustache was the first time I’d ever seen him use it for real. And in broad daylight.

But the minute I saw him, I thought,
This ain’t good
. Actually, he looked just like Jimmy Flynn, an old-time Winter Hill associate. Flynn and Jimmy Mantville, who had been part of the original Mullins gang on the other side from Jimmy when the gang wars broke out in Southie in the late 1960s and early 1970s, had allegedly made two prior attempts on Halloran. The story that was circulating was that both Flynn and Mantville had attempted to get Halloran because he was talking on them about a bank or armored car robbery they were allegedly involved in. One attempt had been at Halloran’s house, and the second at a teachers’ union hall parking lot. Both times he got shot at, but they missed and he’d escaped uninjured.

This time, I was sitting in my car, staring at Jimmy in the Tow Truck, thinking there would be no escape for Halloran. I wasn’t upset or nervous or scared. It was a whole different feeling, with all my senses heightened and the adrenaline starting to flow big-time. I’d only seen Halloran twice in my life, both times at the Black Rose in Faneuil Hall, but I knew time was running out for him. And I knew I was a part of that fact. But, as I had learned earlier in life, the human mind can justify anything, and I was having no problem justifying my role here. After all, once Jimmy made his mind up that Halloran had to go, it was gonna happen. With or without me. Jimmy was tapping me for the job, and there would be no way I could walk away.

Not that I’d want to. I was working for the top gangster in the city, a cold-blooded murderer, and I’d always known that if he asked me to kill someone, I would do it. It didn’t bother me to live like this. I knew a lot of people couldn’t handle what was about to happen. They’d become nervous wrecks, but it didn’t faze me in the least. I had come to accept the fact that someday, sooner or later, I’d be involved in a murder. We were, I understood, brutal people. We hurt a lot of people. I wasn’t hanging around with Boy Scouts.

The truth was that I genuinely liked Jimmy; to me, he was a great guy. We shared a lot of laughs and I always saw the good side of him. Sure, I’d seen his temper, but it had never been directed at me. The two of us worked well together. I had a reputation for fighting with my hands, so moving from boxing to bouncing to working for Jimmy was a natural progression for me. And it carried a lot of prestige. My father was pleased with my working for the top gangster in the city, someone most people in Southie respected for helping people in need, and used to say to me, “Listen and learn.” He would talk about me at family gatherings, telling more stories about me than any of his other five kids. It was as if I was doing what he wanted to do in life. When you consider the odds, it makes some sort of sense that out of his six kids one would turn out to be a criminal. It was the same thing in Jimmy’s family. He’d been a criminal since he was a kid, the only one like that in the Bulger family. His brother Billy was president of the Massachusetts State Senate for sixteen years and later became president of the University of Massachusetts, while another brother, Jackie, was a clerk magistrate in the Boston Juvenile Court. His sisters were all housewives and professionals of one type or another.

Until I got married and moved out of the house, when I came home at night and my clothes were bloody, from stabbing or fights or bouncing, my father wouldn’t ask me what happened. All he’d say was, “You all right?” and when I’d answer, “Yeah,” he’d say, “Give me your clothes,” and he’d throw them in the washing machine. He’d give them back to me when they were done and nothing else was said.

I still kept all kinds of weapons in my parents’ house—pistols, silencers, machine guns with silencers, assault rifles, hand grenades. Over the years, Jimmy had acquired a lot of weaponry, and I had also picked up a lot from the streets. People who had stolen guns were always looking to sell them. Jimmy also traveled to New York to buy some. My weapons were locked in the foot locker in my bedroom. When I told my father I’d move them out of the house, he shook his head. “If the cops come here looking for them, I’ll say they belong to me,” he said. “What are they going to do to me? Put me in jail?”

But seven years before that, there I was, sitting behind the wheel of Jimmy’s Delta 88 at the Mullins Club, staring at Jimmy in his Tow Truck and wig and mustache. This time, he told me to meet him down at Jimmy’s Harborside restaurant, and to be sure to back the car into the parking lot. I’d been at the Harborside no more than fifteen minutes when Jimmy pulled the Tow Truck in nose-first so our driver’s sides were facing, and handed me a walkie-talkie and binoculars. The Olds already had a police scanner. He told me that Halloran was sitting in the window of the Pier restaurant, about 400 yards away from where I was parked, so I’d need to get a little closer. When I was settled, I was to keep an eye on the restaurant and let him know when Balloonhead got up from his seat.

There was no doubt Halloran fit his code name perfectly, with his round, melon-shaped head that looked like it had been filled with a blast of helium. At six-four, he was powerfully built and barrel-chested, a big guy. If you ever see the movie
The Brink’s Job
with Peter Falk, made in the late 1970s, you might see Brian Halloran. I have no idea how Halloran got the role. Maybe from the Teamsters’ local? When Specs O’Keefe is in a jail scene, Halloran plays the prison guard who hits him from behind; the perfect role for this bully.

Before Jimmy took off, I noticed a man in the back seat of the Tow Truck, his face hidden behind a dark blue ski mask. He raised himself up and waved at me. I waved back with no idea who he was. Then I drove a short distance to Anthony’s Pier Four parking lot and backed in so I could see the whole front of the Pier restaurant across the street. By then it was five or five-thirty.

I sat in the car, the windows open, trying to look inconspicuous as I moved the binoculars from my lap to my eyes and stared into the window of the restaurant. I kept an earplug in my ear so I could listen to the police scanner without anyone hearing the chatter of the scanner through my open window. I kept wishing I had a hat to change my appearance so no one would be able to recognize me. Unfortunately, there were no hats in Jimmy’s Olds. From that day on, no matter what car I was driving, I made sure that I had a few hats available to put on at a moment’s notice.

That early in the evening, there was nothing particularly interesting coming through the scanner, just the typical domestic violence stuff and a few minor incidents. It’s funny, but an ordinary person might not pay much attention to a guy sitting in his car, staring at a restaurant through a set of binoculars. But a criminal would. I’d want to get his plate and find out who he was and why he was staked out there. But that spring evening, none of the people walking up and down the waterfront seemed interested in me or what I was doing. And I was grateful that I didn’t see anybody I knew.

So I kept sitting there, staring straight ahead, through the binoculars at the 100 feet separating me from Balloonhead. As I looked at Halloran at a table of four having a few beers, I was glad it was him and not me having his last beers. Even though I was carrying a gun at my waist, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be using it. My role was basically the lookout, to call the hit in. Not that it made a difference who pulled the trigger. Everyone played a part to make it happen, and I was playing mine. Jimmy had often used the analogy of a finely oiled machine or a watch when discussing jobs. Everyone had to do his part for everything to go smoothly. All the little cogs in the watch had to move perfectly. If one wheel stopped or broke, then the watch would stop working. More important than committing the crime was getting away with it. And in order for that to happen, everything had to go just right. It didn’t matter who pulled the trigger. The person who called in the hit or drove the crash car or listened to the scanner was equally as important. There were times when we would stop before the crime was committed, like with a shakedown, because one of us didn’t think everything would work perfectly. That afternoon, if I wasn’t there to call in the hit, Halloran would have gotten away. My role, I understood from the beginning, was no different than Jimmy’s. Just like him, I was committing the murder.

I wasn’t there more than ten minutes when Halloran got up, and the other three guys he was with followed suit. I figured they were all leaving, so I called out on the walkie-talkie, “The balloon is rising.” A minute later, Halloran came walking out the front door of the Pier with one other guy in front of him. That guy, who I didn’t recognize, was six feet tall and heavyset. When he got into a car in the parking lot, I realized that Halloran had probably come with him. For a minute I wondered if this might mean Jimmy would call off the hit. If Halloran had been with a small child, the hit wouldn’t have happened, since Jimmy would never have taken the risk of hitting a kid. But I was pretty certain he wouldn’t let this one detail of another guy in the car stand in his way of getting the job done.

This time I gave Jimmy the message, “The balloon is in the air,” knowing he’d understand that meant Halloran was now outside. A minute later, a four-door blue Datsun pulled up, Halloran got into the passenger seat, and I repeated two or three more times, “The balloon is in the air.” I knew from the minute I spoke those words that my life, along with Halloran’s, had forever changed.

And faster than either of us could ever imagine. Halloran was barely seated in the car when, suddenly, across the street, Jimmy whipped the Tow Truck next to the Datsun. Halloran was in the passenger seat, facing out to the streets, and the Tow Truck was facing the opposite direction, the two cars passenger window to passenger window. It was a beautiful Tuesday night in May and all kinds of people were still walking around the waterfront, dressed in business suits and casual wear, looking to enjoy the night.