Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (24 page)

Of course, Jimmy lost money once the drug dealers were removed from the streets in the summer raid, but he always had other businesses going on. Knowing I had to build something on the side, I had concentrated on my shylocking and gambling businesses. The drug business had been good while it lasted. But our major involvement with it was over.

EIGHT

JIMMY

TEN MORE MURDERS

Some people might perceive these murders as more evidence of Jimmy’s darker side; others would look at them as Jimmy doing the right or only possible thing. Most of the time, it was just plain business: sometimes as payback for informing the FBI; other times to protect business interests; and, finally, just because he didn’t like the person. Even though I wasn’t around or involved in any of these murders, Jimmy told me about each one at one time or another.

Whatever the reason for the murder, Jimmy had no problem with the execution. His unique streak of violence, which had started when he was a kid, was simply part of his nature. He could stab people, shoot them, beat them with his bare hands or anything lying around, strangle them, hit them with his car, do whatever suited his purpose to inflict harm on someone he felt deserved it.

Paulie McGonigle was one of the victims Jimmy simply didn’t like, probably because he’d been with the Mullins gang, on the other side against Jimmy. Paulie’s was one of the many deaths that involved unsettled old scores from the gang wars. Jimmy had missed the early part of the gang wars of the 1960s in which eighty-two people died, but when he came out of prison in 1965, he aligned himself with the Killeens and Billy O’Sullivan and some other people from his past, against the Mullins gang with Tommy King, Jimmy Mantville, and Paulie McGonigle, among others. Unlike the McLaughlins and Winter Hill gangs, which were citywide and had players from all over the city, the Killeens and Mullins were South Boston gangs, and their battles from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s were basically a South Boston turf war.

The gang war between the Mullins and the Killeens erupted full-scale after a fight between Mickey Dwyer and Kenny Killeen in 1969. It was a barroom fight, and while Mickey was a boxer, Kenny was more of a barroom brawler. During the fight in the Transit Café in Southie, Kenny bit off part of Mickey’s nose. They were able to sew the nose back on, leaving Mickey with a scar on his nose, but that fight brought everything to a head between the two gangs.

Actually, when the fighting really started heating up, Kenny never came out of his house. Even though he was one of the reasons it started, he never wanted any part of the shooting. One night, however, while Kenny was sitting on the porch of his house near Columbia Road and Eighth Street, he was shot at with a rifle. The bullet hit the railing and fragmented, but Kenny got away that time. For the rest of his life, until he died of natural causes in the early 2000s, Kenny Killeen never left his house unless he was accompanied by his wife or a kid. His brother Donnie Killeen had been killed in 1972, but it was yet another lie that Jimmy did the job. Jimmy Mantville and another fellow did it.

Before peace was made between Jimmy and the Mullins gang and they combined forces, two of the Mullins were in a car when they spotted Jimmy driving in South Boston. As they chased after him on East Second and N streets, he jumped out of the passenger side of the car, where he started shooting at the guys across the hood of his car with an AR-15 assault rifle. One of the Mullins, Jerry Roake, who only had a .25-caliber pistol, had a lot of balls and shot back. But Jimmy hit him in the hand, and the bullet traveled up his arm and came out his elbow, completely mangling his arm. After a few minutes, the other guy took off and Jimmy got back in his car and got out of there, too. This was just one instance of these guys trying to kill each other.

Killing Paulie McGonigle, however, took Jimmy longer than he originally expected. Paulie talked a big game, but he wasn’t a shooter. Although he never did anything, he kept on stirring everything up with his mouth. So Jimmy decided to kill him. One day, while the gang war was still going on, Jimmy was driving down Seventh Street in South Boston when he saw Paulie driving toward him. Jimmy pulled up beside him, window to window, nose to nose, and called his name. As Paulie looked over, Jimmy shot him right between the eyes. Only at that moment, just as he pulled the trigger, Jimmy realized it wasn’t Paulie. It was Donald, the most likable of the three McGonigle brothers, the only one who wasn’t involved in anything.

Jimmy drove right over to Billy O’Sullivan’s house on Savin Hill Avenue and told Billy O, who was at the stove cooking, “I shot the wrong one. I shot Donald.”

Billy looked up from the stove and said, “Don’t worry about it. He wasn’t healthy anyway. He smoked. He would have gotten lung cancer. How do you want your pork chops?”

I had my own meeting with Paulie McGonigle in June 1974, the day after I graduated from high school. On graduation night, when Bobby Cox, Mikey Raymond, and I threw our big graduation party in the three-decker house we’d moved into for the summer, the 300 kids who showed up scattered around, inside and outside the house, drinking and making lots of noise.

The next morning, around noontime, I was in the back room sleeping when there was a knock on the door. I woke up to hear some yelling at the door. Quickly putting on my pants, I went to the door and saw a small guy threatening my friends. Unlike Jimmy, this guy didn’t have the presence of a gangster. Maybe five-eight, he had his hair combed all over to try and cover his balding head and was wearing a silk shirt that opened to his sternum, as well as a gold necklace, platform shoes, and black flared pants. And he was chewing gum. I was eighteen at the time and had no idea who he was, but he looked like something out of Studio 54. The guy was yelling about the party and a friend of his whose grandmother lived nearby. “I’ll punch your fucking heads in,” he kept repeating. “I’ll cut you up and take you all out of here in a garbage bag.” I made it clear that I would have no problem punching
his
fucking head in and taking
him
out of there in a garbage bag. With that, he took off.

Forty-five minutes later, there was another knock at the door. When I opened the door this time, I saw Jimmy standing there with two other guys, Pat Nee and Jack Curran, and the same gum-chewing guy from Studio 54. Jimmy looked at me and said, “Do you know who I am?”

“Yeah, I know who you are,” I said.

“And you’re going to punch this guy out and put him in a garbage bag?” he asked, pointing to Paulie.

“That’s not what happened,” I said. “He came up here and no one knows who he is. But he’s telling us he’s going to cut us up and take us out in garbage bags, so I told him I’d punch him out and put him in a garbage bag.”

I could see Pat Nee and Jack Curran standing behind Paulie, laughing and shaking their heads. “No more parties here,” Jimmy finally said.

“You got it,” I said. “It was just a one-time graduation party.” Jimmy looked at Paulie and shook his head. And the four of them left.

Five months later, on a November night, Jimmy took care of the right brother. He got Paulie in the car with Tommy King and shot Paulie in the head. Paulie was buried over at Tenean Beach. Less than a year later, Jimmy killed Tommy because they’d had words at Triple O’s. The same night Jimmy killed Tommy, he also killed Tommy’s friend Buddy Leonard, hoping to confuse the authorities about Tommy’s murder.

Photographic Insert

My father, John Weeks

My mother, Margaret Weeks, in Dorchester

The window over the tunnel was my bedroom window at 8 Pilsudski Way in South Boston’s Old Colony Projects.

Here I am as a high school senior at South Boston High, class of 1974.

Rock climbing on Hurricane Island off the coast of Maine during an Outward Bound course, Class H52, fall 1974

Triple O’s, the Southie bar at 28 West Broadway where I worked as a bouncer. Jimmy Bulger came here frequently on weekends to discuss business.