Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (21 page)

Two weeks later, I walked into the liquor store to go see Bo McIntyre, a friend of mine, and immediately spotted my buddy Tommy, holding a case of beer. He handed the beer to his friend and said to me, “We have something to finish.”

I nodded, hit him in the forehead with a right hand, and split him wide open. He also suffered a concussion. Bo McIntyre turned and looked at me and said, “What are these people thinking when they challenge you? Do they really think you’re going to walk away? They’re all nuts. What would make someone want to fight you?”

“I don’t know, Bo,” I said as I watched Tommy’s friend carry him out of the store. This time, he was the one going to the hospital.

I happened to run into Tommy a year later and figured, “Here we go again.” But he came up to me, stuck out his hand, and said, “I’m sorry. I was wrong.” I shook his hand and we actually became good friends after that. You might say we had become blood brothers.

While Stevie did attempt to end that fight and save a life, most often he was joining in and trying to accelerate the bloodshed. Like the night he pulled up to the liquor store at just the right time. I’d been there with a friend named Brian Feeney when two seventeen-year-old girls, dressed in spandex pants and halter tops, came in to buy tonic and cigarettes. As they were walking in, a group of college kids from Weymouth who had just come from the Medieval Manor restaurant drove by in a car and a pickup truck. As soon as they spotted the girls, they started leaning out their windows, whistling at the young ladies. They weren’t saying anything lewd, so I just ignored them and took care of the girls. But as they started to walk out, the guys became raunchy and began yelling sexual things to them.

I walked to the door and said, “Get out of here.”

A couple of the guys yelled back, “Who are you?”

“I own the place,” I told them.

“Well, fuck you,” one of the kids told me, getting out of the car.

“Fuck me?” I asked and walked over to the car and hit him before his feet touched the sidewalk.

As he went down, the car and truck quickly emptied as his friends came to his rescue. Just at that moment, Stevie pulled up in his car and jumped out. In a flash, he had hit one kid and knocked him out cold, as Brian ran out of the store and started to fight another kid. While Stevie and Brian were at work, I hit two more and they went right out. The remaining two took off running.

A week later, thanks to two Boston cops, Bob Ryan and Joseph Lundbohm, whose relative had a problem with me, I found myself in court in Southie with my lawyer, Bill Crowe. Lundbohm had gone to the kids in Weymouth and told them I was a gangster and in organized crime, urging them to press charges to protect themselves, which they did. Four of them showed up at the courthouse, and before we went on, they told me that for $5,000 each, they would drop the charges. I told them I was filing charges against them.

Inside the courthouse, my lawyer told me if I paid $5,000 to each of the four kids and also paid for their medical charges, they’d drop the case. “I couldn’t care less whether they get paid or you get paid,” I told him. “But there is no way everyone is going to get paid.”

“Fine,” he said. “We’re going to court.”

When we had our hearing for probable cause, the judge listened to everyone’s story. Then he turned to me and said, “Mr. Weeks, there were seven of them. How did you fight seven people?” Even though Stevie and Brian were involved, I was the only one who was charged. It was me they pointed the finger at because the liquor store was in my name.

“Your Honor, I surrounded them,” I told him.

He started laughing and said, “I tell you what. I’m going to find you all guilty or else I’m going to dismiss the whole case.” The kids suddenly understood that meant they would have records.

“I’m studying law and I go to USC, which is the University of Southern California…” one kid started to explain to him, obviously worried that having a record would hurt a future legal career.

The judge interrupted him, saying, “I know what USC stands for, son.” Then he turned to me and said, “What do you want to do, Mr. Weeks?”

“It doesn’t matter to me,” I said. “I work for myself, so I can’t get fired.” I wasn’t going to be the one to end this thing. It didn’t bother me one way or the other.

The judge looked at the kids and said, “Well, the choice is yours. What do you want to do?”

“We’ll drop the charges,” one of them said, and they all nodded in agreement.

There were numerous times, of course, when Stevie took matters into his own hands and handled the situation by himself. One afternoon Stevie was heading to the escalator at the Prudential Center when he bumped into a kid in his twenties. Stevie said, “Excuse me,” and the kid said something smart to him, concluding with “Fuck you.” With a crowd watching, Stevie then proceeded to beat the shit out of the kid. Right afterward, when Jimmy and I met Stevie, who was easily twice as old as the kid, he looked just fine. Not the least bit disheveled, he didn’t have a scratch on him. The three of us took a ride back to the Prudential, looking for the kid and his friends. Lucky for them, we didn’t find them.

A couple of other guys got off lucky, too. Especially when they got into situations they didn’t expect involving the three of us. One night in February 1984, about a year after Jimmy, Stevie, and I bought the liquor store, the three of us were in the store when two black kids pulled up in their car, walked into the store, looked around, and then walked out. Once they were outside, they got into their car, turned it around so it was facing out, and bent the license plate so no one could read it. At the time, Stevie and I were talking in the front of the store and Jimmy was upstairs in the office.

When we saw what the two kids were doing, Stevie asked me if I had a pistol. I said, “Yeah, I have a forty-five on me and a forty-four Bulldog under the counter.”

When I was giving the .44 to Stevie, Jimmy walked downstairs and said, “What’s going on?” We told him the two black kids had come in, then turned their car around and bent the plate. He nodded and walked back up to the second floor and the office.

A few minutes later, the two kids came back in and walked down the middle aisle of the store. One of them had his hands in his coat pocket and I could see the point of a pistol pushing out of his pocket. I was standing next to the counter and Stevie was by the door. Both of us had our pistols behind our backs.

When the two kids came up front, they looked at us and I pulled the hammer back on the pistol behind my back. At the same time, upstairs, Jimmy slid open the sliding glass window, which was a two-way mirror, and stuck the mini-Ruger 14, with a thirty-round clip in it, out the window. A few seconds later, he snapped the bolt and was looking down the barrel at the kids. When they turned around, they looked up at the gun pointing out the window, right at the two of them. Then they looked at me and Stevie, who was starting to laugh. Finally, they looked at each other and one of them said, “I guess we be going,” and without another word, they were out the door, in their car, and driving away.

Jimmy came down and the three of us were laughing about the whole scene. When we started talking about it, I said, “How would I have explained this since the three weapons were all registered to me? I mean, they got shot from the right with the forty-five, from the left with the forty-four, and from above with the mini Ruger.”

“You were fast,” Jimmy said. “Real fast.”

Right up until the last time I ever saw Stevie, I never knew exactly what was going on in his mind. Smart, fearless, good-natured, funny, violent, dangerous—he was all of those things. But there was a piece to the puzzle that was Stevie that I didn’t fit into the whole picture until the spring of 1997, when I learned about his real relationship with the FBI. Then he became a bit clearer. Or as clear as Stevie Flemmi could ever be to another person.

SEVEN

DRUGS

1980–1990

One afternoon in 1980, I was in the Broadway Appliance and Furniture store with Jimmy and Kevin O’Neil when Billy Shea and Freddie Weichel came in to talk to Jimmy. Billy, who was in his forties, had done time in Norfolk, a state prison in Massachusetts, and other state prisons for armed robbery. Now that he was out of prison, he was looking to figure out a way to make money. As for Freddie, he had a reputation around South Boston as being dangerous. That day, the two of them approached Jimmy in the front of the store to ask if it was all right if they started grabbing all the marijuana dealers in town and putting them in line. From then on, wherever these dealers might be buying marijuana, they would be working for the two of them. Whatever Jimmy wanted out of the business he could have. Jimmy told Billy and Freddie to go ahead and see what they could do. Up till then, it had been small-time people, nickel-and-dime bag sellers, handling things. This was the first time that someone wanted to control all these dealers.

Right away, Billy and Freddie started grabbing marijuana dealers, putting them in line, and taking them over. From that time on, if they were working in South Boston and were selling drugs, they were taken over by Billy and Freddie. Since I hadn’t been around during the gang wars of the 1960s and 1970s, all I really knew about Jimmy and the Mafia was that they coexisted. Now drug dealers would have to buy their marijuana from Billy and Freddie, who would be giving Jimmy a large percentage of their profits. No longer would there be any independent drug dealers, just the way there were no independent bookmakers or shylocks. Every once in a while, someone would pop up and go into business for himself, but eventually he would be grabbed.

Billy and Freddie had only been in business a matter of months when Freddie got pinched for a murder he didn’t commit. Once Freddie was gone, Billy Shea went back to Jimmy and asked him if I could go around with him to put all these people in line, to make them buy their product off him. When Jimmy asked me if I was interested, I told him I didn’t want anything to do with it. I just knew I didn’t want to deal with certain people. Jimmy’s response was, “Good, ’cause I don’t want you involved with it.”

Shortly afterward, Billy Shea enlisted Paul Moore as the muscle to go around with him to grab more drug dealers and control a larger portion of the marijuana business. There were few people who could stand up to Moore, one of the toughest kids in town, in a fight. Moore and Billy had only been working together a short time when they happened upon Joe Towers, a marijuana dealer in Southie, who introduced them and their associates to cocaine. Once Towers showed them about cocaine, how to step on it, putting in additives to increase the volume and make more profit, the cocaine business in South Boston really took off. Before then, cocaine had been around, but never on such a large scale as this.

It didn’t take long for Billy Shea’s network to increase. As he was moving more product, he had more people working for him; as he made more money, Jimmy made more money. In the beginning, they were moving between 7 to 10 kilos of cocaine a week. At the time, the street price was probably between $28,000 and $32,000 a kilo, depending on the purity of the kilo. By the time the person on the street got it, the coke had been stepped on four or five times, diluting it with the powdery substance nasitol, which was a diuretic, then pressed back together because people would want it in rock form. Next it was sold to the drug dealers, who would sell it to their street dealers, who would ultimately sell it to the people on the street.

However, things changed in 1986, when Billy Shea started to spend more time in Florida and pay less attention to business, which resulted in money being misappropriated. One afternoon in 1987, Jimmy and I were driving down D Street when we saw Billy in the D Street projects. Jimmy got out of the car to talk to him while I stood off to the side. Basically, Jimmy told Billy that Billy wouldn’t be involved anymore, that he was out of business and that his associates would be taking over. It was a short one-way conversation, since Jimmy had already made up his mind.

Right away, Shea’s associates took over and had their people working on the street. The midlevel dealers each paid us a flat monthly fee, somewhere between $1,500 and $1,800 a month depending on the size of their business. Some of the distrbutors, like Shea’s partners were paying $5,000 a week. What they were paying for was the right to be in business in different areas of the city. Shea’s people shook down drug dealers of various degrees all over New England. Some had been bringing in their drugs by the boatload and would now be paying Jimmy in order to continue doing this. None of them had a choice in the matter. If they didn’t pay, he would kill them. They couldn’t go to the law, so what else could they do but pay?

There was no change in the origin of the cocaine, which came from different states in different manners. Billy Shea’s organization had connections all over the place and often sent people down to Florida to bring it up here by car, truck, or van. The big people, the principals who were allowed to sell the cocaine to the dealers, were making good money. Many different groups were involved, and how much each group or individual made depended on how much effort they put into it. Some people were certainly making millions.

Jimmy, Stevie, and I weren’t in the import business and weren’t bringing in the marijuana or the cocaine. We were in the shakedown business. We didn’t bring drugs in; we took money off the people who did. We never dealt with the street dealers, but rather with a dozen large-scale drug distributors all over the state who were bringing in the coke and marijuana and paying hundreds of thousands to Jimmy. The dealers on the street corners sold eight-balls (the street name for approximately three and a half grams), grams, and half-grams to customers for their personal use. They were supplied by the midlevel drug dealer who was selling them multiple ounces. In other words, the big importers gave it to the major distributors, who sold it to the middlemen, who then sold it to the street dealers. In order to get to Jimmy, Stevie, and me, someone would have to go through those four layers of insulation. While street corner dealers often used drugs, the bigger dealers rarely used their own product.