Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (16 page)

A few years later, when Solimondo got called to a grand jury, we found out about it. Jimmy grabbed him again, and this time he and Stevie told him exactly what to say to the grand jury about the extortion. I don’t know what he actually said, but that was the end of it. Nothing ever came out of his appearance.

None of these extortions were hard to put together. We did them so often, it was second nature. We’d be driving around and see someone and we’d formulate a plan. And I never felt bad about any of them. These people had something I wanted, so I took it. The only time I might have felt bad was if they didn’t give me the money.

As for money laundering, that was a mundane crime, not an exciting one. Any time you take illegal money and put it to work for you, that’s money laundering. Even if you take money gained illegally, deposit it in the bank, and put that interest to work for you in any business or transaction, that’s money laundering. For instance, Stevie bought businesses with illegal money he saved and that was money laundering.

It was just one more thing the government can get you for, as obscure a crime as it is. While money laundering might still be considered a big crime, to my way of thinking it is just an attempt to put money back into the economy. All we were trying to do was to help the growth of our gross national product. I call it economic stimulation; the government calls it money laundering.

The truth is that this book contains some of what we did, but certainly not all. It would take another two to three books to chronicle the other 80 percent of the story. But whatever Jimmy and I and all the others did, it was always for the money. Not even for the power. Just the money.

FIVE

THREE MURDERS

BARRETT, MCINTYRE, AND HUSSEY: 1983–1985

The first body I buried was in 1983 in a house at 799 East Third Street in South Boston, diagonally across the street from Stevie’s mother’s house. The house belonged to the brother of a friend and the body to Arthur “Bucky” Barrett, a hoodlum from Quincy in his mid-forties who was skilled at bypassing alarms and robbing banks and safes. He was also a drug dealer who’d hooked up with Joe Murray and the Charlestown crew that was involved in Murray’s drug operation. Bucky might have been a talented safecracker and successful drug dealer, but he’d made a big mistake three years earlier, neglecting to pay Jimmy from a $1.5 million heist at the Depositors Trust bank in Medford in 1980. Instead he’d reached out to Frank Salemme, Stevie’s partner from the 1960s, giving him $100,000 to keep people, specifically Stevie and Jimmy, off of him and the rest of his money. Since Salemme was doing time for a crime Stevie had been involved with, Stevie had no choice but to back away when Frankie told him Bucky was with him. Bucky’s going to Frankie didn’t sit well with Jimmy or Stevie.

Three years later, however, a chance meeting with Jimmy drastically changed things for Bucky. That day, Bucky was heading down a flight of stairs in a building in Dorchester, having just visited his probation officer, when he ran into Jimmy and me. We were headed to a travel agent in the same building so Jimmy could plan a trip. Jimmy introduced me to Bucky and the two of us shook hands. I continued walking up the stairs and left them talking for a few more minutes. Then Bucky left the building and Jimmy and I walked into the travel agency. That little encounter was all that was needed to pique Jimmy’s interest in Bucky Barrett.

A few months after that encounter, Jimmy and Stevie worked out a plan to shake down Bucky. At the time, there was no mention of killing him, so I thought all we were doing was a shakedown for that bank heist money and whatever else we could get from his drug business. Since Bucky had a penchant for diamonds and liked to collect jewelry, the plan was to have him come over to the house on East Third Street to meet with a fellow who deals in hot diamonds. My part in the plan was to be that fellow.

That August afternoon, around noon, a friend of Bucky’s who knew Bucky was going to be shaken down rather than buy hot diamonds brought him into the house. While most of the houses in South Boston were triple-deckers—three-story row houses—this house was a two-story structure. It was a small house, with two rooms on the first floor, one an ordinary kitchen with the basic sink, oven, and refrigerator, and the second a parlor with a couch against the front windows looking out to the street, a couple of chairs, TV and stereo, and no carpets on the floor. There were stairs off the kitchen that led to the second floor, where there were a couple of bedrooms and a bathroom. A wrought-iron fence wrapped around the outside.

When Bucky walked into the house, I was standing in the parlor, which was connected to the kitchen, and reached out and shook his hand. Heavyset, maybe five-nine, Bucky was an average-looking guy, wearing dungarees and a long-sleeved button-down shirt with an open collar. When I said, “How you doing? Nice to meet you,” I could tell he didn’t recognize me and assumed I was the diamond guy.

He didn’t get a chance to say anything to me because the minute I stopped talking, Jimmy, holding a Mac-11 nine-millimeter machine gun with a silencer, stepped out from behind the refrigerator, and yelled, “Bucky Barrett, freeze.”

At that moment, Bucky looked panicked. I have no idea what he was thinking, but I still thought this was just a shakedown. Pointing the gun toward Bucky, Jimmy motioned for him to sit down in a kitchen chair and told the guy who had walked him in to get out of there. Before Bucky had come into the house, Stevie had removed chains and handcuffs from a small black zippered carryall bag and placed them near the chair. It didn’t take long for him to handcuff Bucky and put the chains around his legs and waist and manacle him to the chair.

Jimmy sat down on a chair across from Bucky, placing the machine gun on the table in front of him, while Stevie sat down in another chair facing Bucky. At that point, I wasn’t doing anything besides standing there, watching. As Bucky sat there, I could see that he was nervous, but he wasn’t trembling or shaking or anything. He was taking it like a man. I went to sit on the couch in the parlor while Stevie and Jimmy began to interrogate Bucky. Although I could look into the kitchen from the couch, I couldn’t see the table. But I could listen to the conversation, which was going on in a nice calm manner, with no yelling or anything.

Bucky answered their questions for hours, talking about the drug business, how much pot he was selling, how much money he was making. Jimmy and Stevie were particularly interested in Joe Murray, the drug dealer Bucky was involved with who was making millions. Bucky was giving up information for the next crime, probably a shakedown on Murray. Even though Jimmy kept the machine gun on Bucky, since he was well shackled, there was no further need to threaten him.

A couple of times Jimmy came out into the parlor to tell me what was going on, what Bucky was saying about the drug business, how he’d offered to pay us $40,000 a month from now on. But Jimmy rejected that offer and decided instead to pay a visit to Bucky’s house in Squantum to get some more of his money. Using a telephone with a speaker hooked up to it, Jimmy had Bucky call his house. When his wife, Elaine, answered, Jimmy made Bucky tell her he was bringing some friends over and she had to leave for a couple of hours.

After the phone call, Stevie and Jimmy led Bucky down to the cellar and then called me down there. The basement was unfinished, with a cement floor painted military gray and overhead lighting. Off that main room was a small room with hot water heaters. A little step led up to another small room, maybe 12 feet by 12 feet, with a dirt floor and a ceiling so low you couldn’t stand up in it. A bulkhead opened to the backyard, with a driveway to the side. Handing me the machine gun, Jimmy told me to watch Bucky while he and Stevie went over to his house. Bucky and I were down there for about an hour, but I didn’t say a word to him during that time. I didn’t think it was appropriate for me to talk to him. He was sitting there, softly saying his prayers to God. That whole time, I didn’t think about anything in particular. It was just business. But I did feel bad for him, for here was this guy, chained up and saying his prayers. I still thought it was just a shakedown, but I wasn’t in charge and I understood that whatever happened to Bucky was not my decision.

When Jimmy and Stevie returned from Squantum with only $47,000 from a hide that Bucky had told them about in his house, they brought him back upstairs. At that point, I was sent out to pick up an Asian guy who will remain nameless to accompany me to a restaurant, Little Rascals, at Faneuil Hall. Our job was to collect the $10,000 that belonged to Bucky from his partner. When we got to the restaurant, I remained in the car while the Asian fellow went in to pick up the envelope with the money. Once he got back in the car, I took the envelope and dropped him off at another location and went back to the house on East Third Street. I ended up receiving between nine and ten thousand from the money taken from Barrett. Jimmy and Stevie got approximately the same.

An hour or so after I got back to the house, around 6:00
P.M
., Jimmy told me to go grab a bite to eat, so I went home and ate. I’d only been home forty-five minutes when Jimmy beeped me to come back. Back at the house, I saw that Bucky looked pretty much the same as when I’d left. He hadn’t been beaten up or tortured or anything like that. And I still assumed he was going to be shaken down and released. But when Jimmy said, “Bucky’s gonna go downstairs and lay down,” I understood something else was up.

Bucky turned his head and, with no begging or pleading for his life, looked at Jimmy and said in a compliant way, “Yeah, lay down.” He knew the end was near and just acquiesced to it.

Still manacled, he started to walk down the stairs, very slowly, one step at a time, following Stevie, with Jimmy behind him. A few steps from the bottom, Jimmy put the gun to the back of Bucky’s head and pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. Jimmy stopped, took his glasses out of his shirt pocket, and, realizing the safety was still on, flipped it off. Bucky had continued walking very slowly down the last two stairs. Jimmy descended a few more stairs and then put the gun to the back of Bucky’s head a second time, this time killing him instantly, splattering blood, along with brains and skull, all over the stairs and floor.

Once Jimmy and Stevie were positive Bucky was dead, Jimmy went upstairs to take a nap. He was nice and relaxed, not the least bit excited or anything. He just lay down on the couch and went to sleep while Stevie and I set about cleaning up the mess. I noticed that Jimmy seemed to calm down after the murder, almost as if he’d just taken a Valium. Although he stayed that way for a while, eventually he turned a bit hyper. I noticed this after other murders, too. Nothing seemed to relax him or make him feel quite so good as a murder. The first thing Stevie did was to remove Bucky’s teeth with a pair of channel-lock pliers in order to foil dental identification. This was before DNA was being used to identify bodies. He tossed the teeth in a bag that he would dispose of later. Stories about Barrett being terrorized while he was alive, of his feet and hands being cut off, of his teeth being removed while he screamed in pain, were pure fiction.

After I dug the hole and began to bury the body in the basement, Stevie opened the bulkhead and Phil Costa, an associate of his, came in. Phil handed me a couple of bags of lime, which we spread over the body to help speed up its decomposition. Then Stevie and I went upstairs, where he took out a blue plastic basin, sort of a tub that you would wash dishes in, filled it with cold water, and put liquid soap in it. Then Stevie grabbed a sponge and we both went back downstairs to clean up the blood and brains. We used cold water, which, unlike hot water, helps to congeal the blood and the brains. Since the basement floor was painted with gray deck paint, blood was unable to seep into it.

After the execution and burial, when I went back upstairs, I caught a glimpse of Bucky’s wallet on the kitchen table. It was open to a photo of a little blonde girl, who looked to be around two or three. I had no idea, and never found out, if that was his daughter, but I had a year-old kid of my own and felt bad when I thought about a little girl maybe growing up without her father. But I had had no say. The die had been cast years earlier. As soon as Bucky had run to Frankie, the whole deal had become personal between him and Jimmy. Bucky had been killed because he had a big mouth and Jimmy couldn’t trust him. He wasn’t going to let Bucky run to someone like Frankie to back him off a second time. But I had to hand it to Bucky. This time he had been a man from the minute he’d been walked into the house until the very end. He never begged, he never complained, he never pleaded for his life.

After the cleanup was finished and Stevie took off to get rid of the teeth, I drove Barrett’s brown Cadillac over to Savin Hill, where I parked it and made sure it was all wiped down. Jimmy had followed me, so I hopped into his car and we headed over to Castle Island, where we parked and took the garbage bag filled with Barrett’s clothes out of the trunk. After we poked a couple of holes in the bag, we walked to the end of the pier and dropped the bag into the water. For a few minutes, we just stood there and watched it move out noiselessly with the tide. It was a warm summer night and a couple of guys were right there, fishing out on the pier, with their gas lanterns set up not too far from where we stood. When we had walked out with our two bags and dumped them over the side, they had barely noticed. As a matter of fact, when Jimmy and I walked back by them after we’d taken care of our business, one of the guys said, “I’ll watch your stuff for you while you’re gone.”

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll be right back.”

It was just another example of how when you go about your business in a normal way, no one pays any attention to what you’re doing. When you’re in these types of situations, you don’t run, you walk. Growing up in the projects, I learned early that when someone slammed a car door, everyone looked to see what was going on. To escape attention, you close the door quietly and click it shut with your hands. That night on the pier, Jimmy and I strolled calmly off the pier as Barrett’s clothes sank to the bottom of the ocean.