Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (11 page)

Jimmy had the passenger window of the Tow Truck down, and he slid over and yelled, “Brian!” Halloran turned his giant head and the shooting began.

“Shit,” I said to myself, “here it comes.” Through the binoculars, I had a clear look at Jimmy’s face, and when he opened his mouth to yell Brian’s name, I could see that he was gritting his teeth. Hard. I also knew that he was using a .30-caliber carbine with a selector switch so it could fire fully or semiautomatic. As it turned out, although Jimmy thought it was on full, he had forgotten to switch the selector, so he was actually on semiautomatic. Later on, he said it was better that way because he could place his shots easier. The shooter in the Tow Truck’s back seat popped up and started firing, too, using a fully automatic Mac-10 with a silencer. Jimmy had no silencer. The autopsy report would say Halloran was hit twenty-one times, his driver, multiple times. All that made sense, since Jimmy emptied a thirty-round clip that afternoon.

Once the shooting started, Halloran’s car began drifting across the street and I could tell the driver, whoever he had been, was gone. The area was still filled with people, lots of them standing in front of another lobster place across from the Pier, most of them panicking, screaming, running, and ducking behind cars. A few, I noticed, seemed paralyzed by the shooting and just stood there, transfixed by the scene around them, staring and not moving, maybe not even realizing that bullets were flying around their heads.

Jimmy then made a U-turn out of the parking lot, pulled up near Halloran’s car, which was in the middle of the street now, and shot out the open driver’s window. I couldn’t believe it when Halloran stumbled out of his car, walking, stunned and dazed, toward the rear of his car, straight into the path of the shots coming at him. He’d been hit everywhere except his head, which later turned out to be a stroke of good luck for Jimmy.

At that point, a van drove up and blocked my view, so I pulled out onto the edge of the parking lot into the street to see what was going on. Halloran didn’t look good. There was a lot of blood coming out of his body. He’d taken a hell of a lot of punishment and staggered for yet another few seconds before he finally went down. I could see the shots still going into him while his body bounced on the ground, twitching every time he got hit. Some of the bystanders were crying, probably not about the body, but about being in the line of fire, while others looked terrified as they realized what had just gone down.

As a kid, I’d seen people being stabbed in bars, lots of fighting, and more than one violent death. But what I was witnessing now was a scene from a Sam Peckinpah movie, only in slow motion. It was surreal, and I felt the adrenaline moving through my veins. I glanced at my watch and was surprised to see that the whole thing had taken maybe ninety seconds.

People were still ducking every which way, yelling, screaming, and hiding behind cars. Jimmy tore away and a police wagon pulled up thirty seconds later. The driver of the Datsun, who we later learned was Michael Donahue, never got out of the car. Later people would say he was an innocent bystander, just some poor jerk who was offering Halloran a ride home. That’s bullshit. Donahue was an unintended, but not innocent, bystander. He was a player who had been involved in the Pappas murder at the Golden Dragon in Chinatown. That night, Halloran had shot Pappas in the head and Donahue had driven him away from the murder. People had a misconception that Donahue, a cop’s son, was a legitimate guy. He wasn’t. But he died instantly that night, with a bullet to his head. When you think about it, Jimmy was a good shot because not one innocent person died that night.

As I drove away, I began to hear the calls coming in on the police scanner about shots being fired on Atlantic Avenue. While I was listening to that and thinking about where I was supposed to go next, I wasn’t sweating or nervous. Even though it always takes a lot to rattle me, I was still surprised at how calm I felt. I had no worries that we might get caught. Rather, I was just glad it was over and was anxious to get back to some kind of normalcy. After all, this Halloran thing had been going on for about six weeks. Not that I ever thought I’d be as involved as I was that day.

I pulled away from the scene, remembering that Jimmy had told me if anything happened I should meet him at Capital Market on Morrissey Boulevard. So I drove over there and waited twenty minutes, but he didn’t show up. I called him on his beeper and punched in the number of a nearby telephone booth that took incoming calls. He called me back and said, “What are you doing?”

“I’m at Capital Market,” I said.

“I’m at Theresa’s, eating,” he told me. “Grab something to eat and I’ll speak to you later.”

So I headed over to my in-laws’ to eat. When I got there, I put on the news at six o’clock and watched it with my wife’s family. It was all over the news. Gangland slaying at the waterfront. Nobody around me was treating it like a big thing, and no one in my wife’s family would ever suspect I had anything to do with it. I was hungry, watching the news, and thinking,
Hey, we got away with it.
I didn’t drink that night, not even a beer. But that wasn’t unusual for me, since I always like to be in control, especially so that night.

Around nine, Jimmy beeped me and told me to bring his car to Theresa’s and pick him up. When I pulled up, he got into the driver’s side and I moved over to the passenger side. As always, we didn’t talk in the car, assuming it was wired. Jimmy was back to his usual self, wearing his regular clothes, no mustache or wig. He drove us to the scene of the crime to look for a hubcap that had fallen off the Tow Truck, taking a right up the viaduct ramp that led to the old World Trade Center and driving right back down to where they had all the police lights set up in the crime scene. We saw the hubcap just where he thought it had landed, right at the corner by the curb, less than a quarter of a mile from where the police had set up the crime scene. Jimmy had to take a series of rights to get on the viaduct but when he got to the spot, I jumped out, grabbed the hubcap, and threw it in the back seat of the Olds. If the police had found it, they could have linked the model of the car and maybe found a print on it. Not that I was worried about that. You just didn’t get worried around Jimmy, maybe because he had plenty of nerve. Too much nerve. Everybody around him absorbed his energy. Since he was fearless, you assumed you were going to get away with it. And we did.

From there, we drove to Stevie Flemmi’s mother’s house, a two-story at 832 East Third Street. Stevie had the whole house done over for his parents and put in a modern kitchen with all up-to-date equipment. It was a good-sized room with a glass-topped kitchen table that seated four people. There was also a parlor with a couch and a TV across from the kitchen, along with a formal dining room and a bedroom with a bathroom on the first floor. On the second floor were two bedrooms and a bathroom. Mary Flemmi, a short, plump lady, probably in her seventies, her black hair in a bun, wearing a simple housedress, was busy moving around the kitchen making dinner. Her husband, John, was already in bed, but she was delighted to feed the three of us. She spoke good English, with a slight Italian accent, a friendly little lady who liked everybody and loved to cook up a big meal. I’d eaten over there before, as had Jimmy. That night Jimmy spoke to Mary for a few minutes, as usual, polite and warm to her.

Stevie and Jimmy stayed in the kitchen, talking about the day’s events, but I went into the parlor, which was right next to the kitchen, to catch the latest news and see what they were saying about the murder. While Jimmy was explaining to Stevie what had happened, I could see Stevie, wearing dungarees and a shirt, punching his hands together. He was bullshit that he hadn’t been there. I didn’t know him that well then, but as I got to know him I understood that Stevie enjoyed a good murder.

In that way, Stevie was just like Jimmy, who killed people every which way there was—stabbing, strangling, shooting, beating them with bats, changing up all the time, with no rhyme or reason, using whatever method he thought was the best way to kill that particular person. To my knowledge, Jimmy killed at least forty people. But that night, I could feel that things were different between the two of us. Jimmy knew it, too. He’d always said that once a murder was committed, we were all hostages to one another. From then on, I was as tied to him as he was to me.

When I went back into the kitchen to eat, Mary was still busy taking stuff off the stove and putting it on the glass table in bowls, making sure we all ate everything. Jimmy kept telling her how delicious the food was and what an excellent cook she was. Not that every visitor to this house on East Third Street got to spend such a pleasant evening at Mary’s house. Certainly not her son’s beautiful, blue-eyed, blonde, twenty-six-year-old girlfriend Debra Davis. Debra had been brought to the house a year earlier because Stevie was worried that she was trying to leave him for some guy she met on a vacation to Mexico. It’s open to debate exactly who strangled Debra that night in Mary’s basement. Stevie said Jimmy did it, but Jimmy told me Stevie kissed her on the forehead and told her she was going to a better place. Where she went was to a grave on the Quincy side of the Neponset Bridge where the train goes over the bridge and where the two of them buried her at low tide.

I never met Debra, but it’s public knowledge that she was knock-dead gorgeous. And seventeen when she started to date the forty-plus Stevie. I blame her mother for Debra’s death. What kind of a mother lets her teenage daughter date a man that age? Especially a man like Stevie. If I had a teenage daughter and a forty-year-old guy showed up at my door, he’d have a problem. He’d be going in the hole.

After Debra got killed, Stevie convinced Jimmy to go on a vacation to Mexico with him. Jimmy told me he didn’t realize till he got there that it wasn’t a vacation. It was a pilgrimage. Stevie only wanted to trace Debra’s footsteps during her trip so he could find the guy she planned to dump him for. And kill him. Jimmy was grateful they never found the guy. I should have been grateful that Jimmy hadn’t involved me in that murder. Guess he felt killing a beautiful girl wasn’t the best way to initiate me into murder. But Halloran’s killing was.

That May night at Stevie’s parents’ house, Jimmy and Stevie were still discussing Halloran’s murder. Stevie was occasionally laughing, and Jimmy was maybe a little more excited than usual, but he was still pretty much his typical calm self. Never mentioning the guy in the back seat of the Tow Truck, Jimmy told Stevie how the gun had stayed on semiautomatic. How much better it was to place the shots that way. How he made the U-turn and fired into the back of the head of the driver. How he didn’t realize who the driver was. How the guy’s head fucking exploded when he shot through the back window. How we had to go back and get the hubcap. All the while we were chowing down spaghetti with eggplant and veal parmesan.

Around ten, the three of us drove over to Castle Island and walked around. It was a beautiful night, but the two of them couldn’t stop talking about the murder. A little before midnight, Jimmy dropped off Stevie and took me back to my car, which was back on Third Street at the Mullins Club, and I drove home.

My wife and I watched some late news, which was the same recap about a gangland slaying. Pam had no idea that I was involved in that murder. She knew I was involved with Jim Bulger, but she knew no particulars about exactly what I did with him. I had no fear of being caught, but I was tired and knew I had to get up to work in the morning. I slept okay and got up early the next morning and went down to a breakfast place on K and Broadway. I got the newspaper, sat down in a booth, and ordered eggs, sunny-side-up, an English muffin to dunk in the yolk, orange juice, and coffee. I was reading the paper and eating when Jimmy Mantville came over to my table. Mantville, who was in his forties, five-nine, around 160 pounds, with curly brown hair and in great shape, sat down, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “We finally got him.”

I just looked at him and smiled, thinking,
I know I was there, but I don’t remember seeing you. Unless you were the one in the ski mask
. He kept talking about Halloran and what a piece of shit he was. How he was a bully who threw his weight around, intimidating people, just taking stuff and never paying for it, pounding on people for no reason. And I listened and continued eating my breakfast.

That night, I was waiting for Jimmy to tell me to get the Tow Truck out of the garage and bring it down to the mechanic so he could fix the odometer. But since I hadn’t heard from Jimmy about the car, I left it there. It came out that evening that Halloran had given a dying declaration that Jimmy Flynn had killed him. It turned out to be lucky for Jimmy that he hadn’t shot Halloran in the head and that he hadn’t died instantly, like Donahue had. “When I think about it, I did look like him,” Jimmy said. But he hadn’t done it on purpose. A few months later, Flynn was in a restaurant when the cops came to arrest him for the murder. He tried to run out but they chased him and took him away. He went to trial but was found not guilty. No surprise there.

On Friday night after the murder, around midnight, Jimmy beeped me and asked, “Did you take care of it?” Of course, he would never have mentioned the word “car.” We never talked about anything specific on the phone.

But I knew what he was talking about and said, “No. I hadn’t heard from you.”

“Come on over,” he said. I drove over to Quincy and he met me outside his condo in Louisburg Square. When he asked me if I moved the car, I said no. “Thank God for Beck’s beer,” he told me. It seems that FBI agent John Morris, who was an incompetent wimp, had dropped by and all Jimmy had in the house to drink was Beck’s. When Morris had a few in him, he blurted out that the hit car was a bore job, meaning the engine was bored out, souped up, worked up. Apparently an FBI agent who had been assigned to Halloran had been down the street at the time of the murder and had watched the whole thing and gotten the plate, which was legally registered but in a fictitious name. As it turned out, that particular agent died of cancer six months later. But now they were just waiting for the car he had seen to surface. And it would have been me driving the car when it did.