Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (15 page)

He never worried about the price of the clothing he bought for himself. One day when we were shopping on Newbury Street, we went into the El Paso shoe store, where they sold custom-made cowboy boots. He ended up paying $2,500 for black alligator-skin boots, made specifically for his feet. These boots were made by Foley, who made only fifty pairs a year. He also bought a couple of other pairs of boots, somewhere around $1,000 a pair. Another time, we went into that same store, and I bought some beautiful ostrich-skin custom-made cowboy boots, which cost $1,700 and looked nice with a pair of dungarees. The salespeople at El Paso knew who James Bulger was and were unfailingly polite and helpful to him. Why not? He was courteous to all of them and paid cash for everything he bought. The two of us shopped in the finest men’s clothing stores on Newbury Street, like Daniel Rene and Louis, where we each bought custom-tailored suits. I ended up with dozens of Louis suits in my closet, but I hardly wore any of them.

But no matter how much money we made, we were always looking for new ways to make more. So I was pleased one night when the opportunity to make money for myself simply presented itself in front of my eyes. I was in the variety store, standing behind the counter, watching the place for Mark, the guy who owned the ticket concession in the store that sold tickets for concerts and sporting events, when a heavyset customer came in and asked for him. When I said Mark would be back in a while, the customer told me he had to hurry up, because he had to go see some bookmakers. “If you need to place a bet,” he told me slyly, “come see me.”

“You got a lot of guys working for you?” I asked him.

“All over Charlestown, Southie, Dorchester.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s your name?”

“Kevin Hayes. What’s your name?”

“Kevin Weeks.”

“Oh, shit.”

“You never know who you’re talking to. Nice meeting you,” I said, and left it at that. But now I had him on my radar. A short time later, I had a friend who knew Hayes arrange a meeting at the house of another friend, who happened to be in prison. I had Hayes come down to the cellar, where I had stretched out a plastic tarp on the floor. As soon as Hayes walked in, I took out a pistol. “You’re going to pay me one hundred thousand dollars for your football action or I’m going to kill you,” I told him.

He started talking, real crazy stuff that I could hardly understand. All of a sudden he yelled, “Do you think I’m wired?” and pulled off his shorts. The 400-pound gorilla stood there with no underwear, his little dick looking like he had a piece of bubble gum stuck to his bush. The last thing I had thought was that he would be wired, so I had no idea what he was doing.

After some more of his crazy talk, he agreed to pay us $25,000 a few days later and then $5,000 a month till he had paid the whole amount. We had the lunatic get dressed and the person who had brought him drove him away. After a couple of years, he had only paid us $50,000, but he went out of business and got indicted for something he did while working for the Boston Election Commission. In 1999, he gave me up as part of my indictment. Another great standup guy.

But my extortions could never match Jimmy’s, who was Machiavellian in the way that he was able to outthink other people. Eventually everyone he extorted understood that we would either take them down or take their money. In every case, these guys made the decision to part with their money rather than their lives. No one, it seemed, was willing to make an enemy out of us. Sometimes all you had to do was threaten people with a physical beating and they would pay you. But, as with everything Jimmy did, violence was the last resort. Yet no matter what it took, we always managed to get what we wanted.

Still, some people made things difficult for themselves, like this one fellow who owed us fifteen grand. We got him into the car and sat him in the back seat next to me, while Jimmy and Stevie were in the front seat. The guy was complaining, giving Jimmy a tale of woe about how he didn’t have the money to pay, how he had put bets in and lost, how his daughter was getting married and he had no money for the wedding. At first Jimmy and Stevie were talking nice, but when it became obvious the guy thought it was all a game, Jimmy let him know it was for real. “Give me the money or I’ll kill you,” he told him.

Still playing around like we were suckers, the guy said, “You’ll be doing me a favor if you’d kill me.”

With that, I grabbed the guy and put his arms behind his back. Jimmy took out a pistol, leaned over the seat, and put it to his head. Now the guy started screaming, “I’ll get you the money!”

Jimmy said, “When?”

“Let me get into the house,” he said. We were parked in front of his house, so he went in and came out with the fifteen grand in twenty minutes.

When it came to extortion, Jimmy was anything but ordinary, often creating the problem and then solving it. Now, if a guy actually had a legitimate problem, such as someone trying to kill him, we would put ourselves between the two of them and make his problem our problem. Of course, the person in danger would have to pay us to do this.

But many times the problem was not only not legitimate, it wasn’t real. In those cases, we searched out someone we knew had money, created a problem for him, and solved the “problem” for a large sum of money. For example, we would corner the guy coming out of work and inform him that someone had been paid to kill him. We would take turns speaking, but it didn’t matter if it was Jimmy and me or Jimmy, Stevie, and me. The reaction was always the same. The person would be scared to death. But we’d calm him down quickly by telling him that if he paid us somewhere between $50,000 and $500,000, we would back the killer off. Ten out of ten times, the person would pay, always coming to the conclusion that while he could make more money, he couldn’t make another life. And this life was his most valuable commodity. If it was a large payment, we would put him on a payment plan with a certain amount of time to pay. And if we liked him, at the end, we might even tell him to forget about the final payments. But if we didn’t like him, we’d make it clear that this wasn’t a bank where you have lots of different payment plans. Here there was only one payment plan: We wanted our money now.

One night Jimmy and I went to the home of a drug dealer, rang his bell, and shook him down, telling him we had been paid to kill him. “You sold drugs to a guy’s grandchild,” we said. “And this guy offered us fifty thousand dollars to kill you. Now, you have the chance to pay us the same amount and we’ll back this person off so he won’t bother you.” That dealer ended up paying us $25,000 right away and then paid us the balance monthly. And ended up working for us from then on.

There were, of course, times when some people really did offer us money to kill someone. Then we would go to the potential victim and tell him we were being offered money to kill him. Every time that person paid us. Who wouldn’t?

Another example of creating a problem and charging to solve it involved a man who owned a bar in Dorchester. We heard he was having trouble with a guy around thirty who kept coming into his bar. One night, Jimmy, Stevie, and I drove by the owner’s house with a couple of other guys and shot it up while he was standing by the window. We didn’t try to kill him. We just wanted to scare him. In a few minutes, we blew out all the windows and the doors. The next day, when the owner of the bar reached out to us, Jimmy and Stevie told him that the guy who was giving him trouble in the bar had tried to kill him, but we would straighten it out. Without hesitation, the bar owner handed us $25,000 to make the problem go away. In this case, the problem was us, not some customer at the bar, but the bar owner never saw that.

Ray Slinger’s extortion turned out to be a perfect example of the media publicizing a story that was totally different than the event I personally witnessed. Ray was a real estate and insurance agent in South Boston who had done business with Kevin O’Neil. One day around noon in 1986, Jimmy and I were upstairs in Triple O’s, eating the egg sandwiches and frappes we had just gotten from the deli next door. Fitzie, the bartender, called up to tell Kevin that Ray Slinger was downstairs. Even though Ray was in a legitimate business, he didn’t have a sterling business reputation. Unbeknownst to me, Stevie and Jimmy had already talked to Ray and told him they wanted to talk to him. When Jimmy heard Fitzie’s message, he looked at Kevin O’Neil and said, “What’s up with him?”

“I want to talk to him about an insurance bill,” Kevin said. “I gave him the money but he kept it and didn’t pay the bill.”

Jimmy said, “Tell him to come up.” When Fitzie then reported that Ray was with a woman, Jimmy told him to tell Ray to come up by himself.

A few minutes later, Ray, who was in his fifties, heavyset, around six-one and with thin silver hair, walked into our room, wearing a long tan trench coat, white shirt, black dress pants, and dark shoes. When he saw the three of us sitting at a table, he began to shake visibly. As he stood off to the side, his coat separated and I noticed a pistol tucked into his pants. Without a word, I jumped up over our table and, knocking him over, grabbed the pistol out of his pants.

“Whoa, slow down,” Jimmy said, but when I pulled out the pistol, he got mad. “You dirty motherfucker!” he shouted at Ray. “You bring a pistol around me? Where did you get it?”

“I borrowed it off a friend,” he told Jimmy. “For protection.”

With the gun now in his hand, Jimmy told Ray to sit down. After that, despite the lies printed by the media, no one beat up Ray or punched him. All I had done was thrown him off his feet, making him bang off the wall. But the guy was hyperventilating as Jimmy put the gun to the top of his head, saying, “I could shoot you on the top of your head and there would be no blood.” Ray started shaking uncontrollably, tears coming down his face, as Jimmy continued. “Listen,” he told Ray, “I’ve been offered fifty thousand dollars to kill you.”

“By who?” Slinger got out.

“It doesn’t matter,” Jimmy answered him. “Unless you give me the money, I’ll kill you.”

When Slinger said, “I can give you two thousand dollars,” Jimmy kicked him in the shin with his cowboy boot.

“My boots cost more than that,” Jimmy said, and Slinger looked like he was going to have a heart attack. “Hey, calm down,” Jimmy told him and then told me to go downstairs and get him a beer.

I had started to head down the stairs when Slinger said, “No, I want a mixed drink.” I went downstairs and got him a gin and tonic. He drank half of it down in one gulp.

Then Jimmy said, “I’m going to talk to Ray,” and Kevin and I went downstairs. Fifteen minutes later, he called the two of us back upstairs and told Kevin, “You’re going to meet Ray on Friday and he’ll give you an envelope. And then, every other Friday, he’ll meet you with an envelope until everything is straightened out.” At this point, Ray was sweating and pale. As it turned out, Ray Slinger paid us $25,000 of the $50,000 we charged him for not killing him. No one had offered money to kill Ray, but Jimmy was shaking him down because he didn’t like the way Ray treated people in town.

After that scene in Triple O’s, Ray went to a local politician to try and get us to back off and stuff, but to no avail. Then he started talking around town and telling people what had happened at Triple O’s. That story got back to the FBI and subsequently got back to us, and Jimmy told Kevin O’Neil to tell Ray to forget about the rest of the money. When Ray was first approached by the FBI to tell them what had happened to him, he was hesitant. But then he gave them a story in which Jimmy had told me to get a body bag, not a beer. I know he heard exactly what Jimmy had said to me, because he had asked for a mixed drink instead of a beer. And I never heard of any bar in South Boston that has a body bag behind a bar, not even Triple O’s back in those days. But after that conversation with the FBI in which he had thrown in that body bag detail to make his story more dramatic, Ray understood that he could never come around us, that we would never talk to him again. Whatever he said would be his word against ours. He had no proof of what we had said. If he ever got wired up, we would have known and would have answered his questions with, “What are you, crazy? Are you on drugs?” As it turned out, Jimmy got what he wanted that afternoon, and Ray Slinger got his mixed drink, not a body bag.

One extortion concerned me personally. It was a case where I literally had the guy over the fence. After I bought a house in a Boston suburb, the bank came out to survey my property for insurance purposes and discovered that my neighbor’s thirty-foot-long fence was six inches on my side of the property line. When I told my neighbor it had to be moved, he went to a friend of his, a developer named Richie Bucchieri. The guy who sold me my house told me that Bucchieri wanted him to backdate a bill of sale for the land the fence was on. The next thing I knew I had Richie Bucchieri meeting Jimmy and Stevie at Stevie’s mother’s house, where he was fined $200,000 for—for lack of a better term—interfering. Since I ended up sitting outside in the car during the meeting, I got $50,000 for basically doing nothing. Nothing happened to the neighbor, but the developer had to pay $200,000 for six inches of fence.

Another extortion involved Michael Solimondo, who turned out to be a standup guy. In 1982, after John Callahan, the accountant who was cooperating with the FBI in the Roger Wheeler World Jai Alai murder, was killed, we extorted Solimondo, who had been Callahan’s partner in the construction business. We had him come down to Triple O’s, where Jimmy, Stevie, and I were waiting for him upstairs in the function hall. Here we sat him on a stool in the little bar, where Jimmy was holding a machine gun with a silencer under a towel on his lap, and I had a pistol tucked into my waistband, which he might or might not have seen. Jimmy started to talk to him about Callahan’s offshore account in Switzerland, telling Solimondo he wanted his money.

“I know nothing about that,” said Solimondo, who was a bodybuilder. Jimmy went on and on about wanting “his fucking money.”

Finally Jimmy ripped the towel off his lap and stuck the machine gun into Solimondo’s massive chest. “Your muscles aren’t going to do you any good now,” he told him. “Give me your fucking money or I’m going to kill you.” Solimondo gave in right away and within a day or two we got $120,000. Not too long after that, we got six payments of $80,000 until we had the $600,000 Jimmy wanted.