Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (20 page)

Stevie’s mother, Mary, was a terrific little lady, one of the world’s sweetest. Her greatest joy was cooking for her sons and their friends. Stevie had bought his folks a single-family home in Milton, but later moved them to Southie, where they lived next door to Billy Bulger. It was here where Stevie murdered Debra Davis. But it was also here, in her kitchen, that Mary happily cooked so often for Jimmy and Stevie and me, serving us delicious Italian specialties from large pots simmering on her stove. Jimmy did tell me that Marion wasn’t nice to Stevie’s parents, and I could never understand that.

When Stevie’s brother Jimmy the Bear died of a heroin overdose while serving a life sentence at MCI Norfolk for the murder of Francis Benjamin, Jimmy and I went to the wake. While we were viewing his brother lying in the casket, Stevie was standing there with his mother and father and Michael. Mary went over to Jimmy and said, crying, “Vincent was such a good boy. He never hurt anyone.”

Stevie looked at her and said, “Stop, Ma. He killed everybody.” Stevie was right. Jimmy the Bear was an extremely violent man, and as Barboza’s partner had been involved in the Boston gang wars of the 1960s. The murder of Francis Benjamin, for which the Bear had gotten the life sentence, was a particularly ugly one. After he’d shot Benjamin in the head, using a gun that belonged to a cop, the Bear had cut off the head to avoid any ballistics evidence tracing the gun to the crime. But they fingered him anyhow.

But Stevie had his own unique streak of violence. As I started to work more with him, I’d see him explode, at people who owed him money or didn’t do what they were asked to do. He’d start berating them, screaming at them, and I’d just watch. Jimmy, Stevie, and I never tried to calm one another down in a scene like that. We’d never embarrass one another by showing any divisions in public. If something had to be said about an incident like that, it was said in private when the three of us were alone. There were times when one of us would play the good guy and the other the bad guy, assuring the guy in the mess that we’d try to work things out. But the only way things could ever be worked out was for the guy to do exactly what Stevie wanted. Stevie rarely had to work hard convincing someone to do what he wanted. His reputation preceded him.

Like Jimmy, Stevie kept himself looking good by eating healthy and working out nearly every day in his own house, where he had weights and did calisthenics. He maintained vigorous exercise workouts because he felt the young guys were always sizing him up and he didn’t want to appear out of shape to them. Like Jimmy, Stevie felt that if you look formidable, there is less chance that people will challenge you. Stevie had a juice machine where he made himself all sorts of weird concoctions out of fruits and vegetables. He even bought me my own juice machine, which I used for a while. When I saw how hard it was to clean out every time I used it, I stopped using it. But Stevie never gave up on his. He was also big on vitamins, which he kept at his mother’s house and tried to convince me to use, too. Occasionally I would take them, but never as faithfully as Stevie. Like Jimmy, Stevie bought most of his food at the health food store, Bread & Circus, and didn’t smoke, gamble, do drugs, or drink much.

All three of us were big readers and talked about the different books we read. Like Jimmy, Stevie particularly liked books about World War II or Korea or Vietnam. He was close with his kids, especially his two sons, Billy and Stevie. Although, like Jimmy, he wasn’t big on professional sporting events, he made it to most of Billy’s wrestling matches. Stevie Jr. ended up straight, but even though Stevie didn’t want his kids involved in crime, Billy got mixed up in some criminal activities. It’s sort of interesting that the Italian mob most often replicates and goes on and on with family members joining, but the Irish gangs seem to last just one generation per family.

Stevie and I certainly didn’t work anywhere near as closely as Jimmy and I did. And we never ran in the same social circles. Like Jimmy and most of the guys, he didn’t bring a woman to my wedding, but had a great time. He always acted respectful and friendly to Pam and the boys. Like a regular friend, he was concerned with anything that came up in my life and offered to help in any way if he could.

Jimmy trusted Stevie, but he always said that he never knew what Stevie was thinking. The two of them had respect for each other, and even though they might have had disagreements, they were never heated. It would have been dangerous for them to have cross words with each other. On a typical day, Jimmy and I would spend an hour a day with Stevie, walking around doing business. I mean, we weren’t doing crimes every day. We weren’t animals, and except for the business aspect of our lives, we led boring, regular lives. But depending on what was going on, if we had an extortion or were collecting tribute from established rackets, we’d spend more time together. Stevie was exceptionally smart business-wise, paying attention to all aspects of business and always staying on top of things. I have little doubt that Stevie could have been successful at anything he tried to do. If he’d gone legit, he could have easily figured out how to let his excessive greed work for him, having people work for him and make him rich. But crime was his field and he did it brilliantly. He was a master criminal, involved in all aspects of crime, in loan-sharking, drug dealing, extortion, everything. I never realized till much later just how good he was at what he did, how adept he was at working both sides.

Like all big-time criminals, Stevie was involved in a network with other criminals in all facets of crime. Everyone he dealt with was a criminal to one degree or another. Even legitimate people who were around him were like groupies, people who wanted to be able to tell others they knew this guy or were connected to him. No matter what it cost them to be able to do that, they found it advantageous just being able to say that Stevie was a friend of theirs. That went for Jimmy, too. These wannabes thought they could ask Jimmy or Stevie for a favor at any time. They wanted to be able to say they knew wiseguys, that they had friends who would do anything. I still don’t know why legitimate people feel that way about wiseguys. Maybe it’s for the same reason, whatever it might be, that girls want to be around rock stars.

While Stevie and I spent most of our time together with Jimmy, the two of us did handle a few situations together. One involved the transfer of guns from the hide in George Kaufman’s house in Brookline. It was a move made necessary when George, a terrific guy who became our liaison with the Jewish bookmakers, sold his house in Brookline. So we decided to move our weapons, gathered from years before, from Brookline to Stevie’s mother’s house in South Boston.

Before the move, Jimmy, Stevie, and I spent a lot of time checking weather reports, waiting until we heard a report about a rainy night when not too many people would be out and about. Since those who were out would be hidden under umbrellas or looking down trying to get out of the rain as quickly as possible, it would be easier for us not to draw any attention on that type of night. Once we got the weather we wanted, I took off for George’s house and, around 9:00
P.M
., backed my car into the garage underneath his house. After George and I walked into the basement off the garage where the hide was, George took out a putty knife and slid it down the wall between the molding to a spot where it touched two copper nails with wires attached to them that were sticking out. As soon as the putty knife hit the nails, it made a connection and I heard a motor turning. As George and I walked out of the room, I saw that the wall had been on a track. Now the other side of the house opened up and we could see the hide. The two of us spent the next hour taking all the weapons out of the hide and packing them into the five duffel bags I had brought with me.

We were always acquiring guns and had stashed others in different houses, but it was certainly time to get them out of George’s house. It wouldn’t have been great for the new owner to have somehow moved the wall and discovered more than 200 weapons in his new home. Weapons were our tools of the trade, and we needed easy and constant access to them. We had to be prepared for anything that might come up. Obviously, we needed different weapons for different tasks, each need depending on the setting. For instance, if we were going car-to-car, we might need an assault weapon or a carbine machine gun with a silencer. Or if we were going after someone on foot, we’d need a pistol with a silencer. This arsenal had all those weapons, plus hand grenades, AK-47’s, Thompson and 9-mm submachine guns, bulletproof vests, and C-4 explosive, along with .25s, .32s, .38s, .45s, ski masks, holsters, walkie-talkies, and handcuffs. And boxes of ammunition for every caliber of gun there. More weapons than we could possibly use in a lifetime. Some we wanted to have with us if we were doing something, perhaps a hand grenade, just in case we might need it.

Jimmy, Stevie, and I, of course, knew how to use everything in this arsenal of weapons. We’d picked up a piece here or there, maybe from somebody selling one. They were often guns from robberies, stolen guns. It was never hard to get guns, since people were always wanting to sell them. And Jimmy, Stevie, and I took good care of ours, going down to our various hides once a month to clean the weapons and make sure they were functional.

Since we were criminals dealing with violent crimes, it wouldn’t have done much good for one of us to have walked up to someone with a flyswatter and said, “Give me your money.” Of course, not every criminal needs a weapon to commit his crime. White-collar types like WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers or Andrew Fastow of Enron use a pen or a computer, not a gun, to steal someone’s money. At least our weapons were easy to identify and there was nothing underhanded about our crimes. You knew when you were being robbed.

Anyhow, when George and I were through putting the duffel bags into my trunk, we went back into the house, made the connection again, and watched as the wall closed itself up. Then I drove to Stevie’s mother’s house in South Boston and backed the car into the driveway. In the rain, Stevie was waiting for me on the other side of the fence. I took the duffel bags out and passed them, one at a time, over the fence to Stevie, who carried each heavy bag into the screen house where he had built his own hide. The screen house was a separate building constructed in the yard with sliding glass doors that could open to let in the air while keeping out the insects. Here people could come out to relax. Ironically, it was constructed by Richie Bucchieri, the same man we shook down for $200,000 for putting a fence on my property. It had marble tiled floors, along with a bar, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The hide was in one of the walls. There were clips that attached to the interior wall, so that if you knew where to pull on the outer wall, the clips let go and the wall would open.

Around eleven, when I was through with my part of the maneuver, I said good night to Stevie and headed home. The whole deal had taken me maybe two hours from start to finish, and no one had noticed a thing.

Stevie and I also worked well together when one of us was involved in any sort of fight. For instance, one afternoon the two of us were down at the variety store when I got a call from the Fitzie—Steven Fitzpatrick, the bartender at Triple O’s. Fitzie wanted to tell me that some guy named Tommy McClure was demanding I come to the bar so he could show everyone I wasn’t as tough as I thought I was. He was giving the bartender a hard time, pulling money off the bar and being a complete asshole. Stevie was even more excited than I was when I told him what Fitzie had said, and he was in his car heading to Triple O’s before I could get into mine. When we got to the bar, Stevie headed for the back door and I walked in the front door and stood where I usually did.

Tommy was standing in the middle of the bar, shouting to Fitzie, “I told you to get him down here.” As Fitzie glanced at me, Tommy saw me. Tommy McClure was a redhead, five-eleven, maybe 190, with a medium build. I had my hands on the bar and was looking nonchalantly around the room. As Tommy turned the corner and started to approach me to say something, I lifted my hands and hit him. Tommy fell hard against the windows, where I proceeded to beat on him. In less than a minute, I had split him open and broken his ribs. This time he had showed how tough he was by hitting the floor and pissing and shitting himself as he went down.

I was still going at him when Stevie grabbed me off him. “You’re going to kill him,” he told me, pulling me away from the guy. That was pretty strange coming from Stevie, who would most likely have shot him in the head the minute he walked into the bar. But when Stevie let go of me, I saw the kid’s face was soaked with blood, while his pants were sopping with shit and urine. Not a pretty sight any way you looked at him. But I was through with him. I saw no reason to kill him. I’d just wanted to give him a beating. And I had.

Outside the bar, a cable crew was digging up the road to lay new cable and a cop was standing near the crew. The real tough guy who had wanted so badly to fight me staggered over to the cop and tried to tell him what had happened. The cop took one look at Tommy, saw the piss and shit, figured he was drunk and, disgusted, told him to get away from him. Somehow, Tommy pulled his stinking, bloodied body away from the street.

About six hours later, I noticed that my left hand had blown up, and two red lines were moving up my left arm. I drove over to the New England Medical Center, where an emergency room doctor examined me. It only took him a few minutes to see that when I hit the tough guy a left hook, I had knocked out one of his teeth, which then pierced my finger. The doctor didn’t hesitate. Explaining that I had blood poisoning from where Tommy’s tooth had entered my finger, he wrapped a rubber tourniquet around my arm and rushed me into an operating room to excise and drain an abscess where the tooth had gone into the knuckle of my ring finger and infected my entire arm. I ended up staying in the hospital for three days on intravenous antibiotics. After that, I was confined to my house for another seven days with a heparin lock inserted into my hand to administer IV antibiotics three times a day. Pam took one look at me when I got home from the hospital and said, “Now, you tell me who won the fight.”