Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (28 page)

One angel dust dealer needed a little extra persuasion, too. He lived in the Old Colony project, right down the street from where my mother lived on Pilsudski Way, and was selling dust to everyone. People started coming into the variety store to complain that he was even selling to kids who were getting messed up on the shit. So Jimmy and I drove down and waited for him to come out of his house. Then we grabbed him, put him in the back seat, drove him around terrorizing him, and then told him he was out of business and to get the fuck out of town. A short time later, we started to hear that the kid was back in business. Obviously, he didn’t realize we knew he was starting up again, because one afternoon he walked into the store. But as soon as I saw him, I went to stand in back of him and blocked the door. He took off running and screaming and calling so much attention to himself that I had to let him go.

The next day, Jimmy and I met down at the variety store, and as we exited the store to get to the car, we saw the kid coming across Old Colony Avenue. He was halfway across the street, standing on the median strip, yelling, “Whitey, Kevin, I’ll pay youse if you let me stay in business. I’ll give you half my money, half the money I make.”

Jimmy turned around, saying, “You little motherfucker,” and took out a knife, but the kid took off running again. A few weeks later, he got pinched for drug dealing. Law enforcement tried to get him to say he was paying us to sell drugs, that we were shaking him down so he could sell his angel dust.

“No,” the kid told them, “they were going to kill me if I didn’t stop selling. They told me to get out of town.” That was the only good thing the kid did. He told the truth.

Still, the cops continued to ask us for help with people selling heroin. “You guys can do things we can’t,” they kept telling us. So we’d go down and drive the dealers out of town, but then we started to hear that the same cops were grabbing the people afterward. “We know you’re paying Whitey and Kevin,” they’d tell the dealers, and try to get them to admit that. So we backed away from running people out of town if the police or even a Good Samaritan asked us. We figured there was a good chance it was a setup.

There was very little prostitution in Southie. It was pretty much restricted to Boston’s Combat Zone downtown. But whenever Jimmy and I saw anyone doing that, we went after them. I’d say over twenty-five years, it happened maybe two or three times. But when it did, we took care of the guys who had grabbed young girls and were trying to pimp them. We’d get ahold of the guys and tell them to get the fuck out of town. That was just one of the things we were against.

But we never ran out of people we wanted to run out of town. One especially despicable creep was this guy in his late thirties or early forties, who we all called Wheels because he was in a wheelchair. One Saturday in the early 1980s around two in the afternoon, I was standing on Broadway across the street from the South Boston Savings Bank with Jimmy, Kevin O’Neil, and Bobby Ford, who used to run a booking office in Southie for Jimmy. We looked over and saw Wheels bumming money off people. An alcoholic, the guy could get up and walk, but he preferred to shuffle his feet to push the chair and spin the wheels with his hands, pretending he was a cripple. That way, he could beg for money for wine. He’d typically ask a guy for change and wouldn’t say a word if the guy said no, but if a woman refused him money for wine, he’d be swearing and grabbing onto her dress. That afternoon, the piece of shit was swearing at one particular woman in her fifties who had a grandchild with her, calling her everything in the book.

Furious as I watched him degrade the poor woman, I walked across the street and grabbed the back of his chair by the handles. I intended to push him down the driveway behind the bank into the parking lot, but he put his feet down, grabbed the wheels, and stopped me dead. I couldn’t move him. So I threw the wheelchair and him over onto the ground. Then I picked up the wheelchair and smashed it on the street. Wheels was on the ground yelling, so I gave him a boot in the back. When I walked back across the street, the three guys were doubled over, laughing with tears running down their faces.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“You look like the meanest prick in town,” Jimmy told me in between bursts of laughter.

“Fucking asshole can walk,” I said.

“Yeah, we know, but they don’t,” Jimmy said and pointed to the people across the street. Sure enough, all the people were trying to help him up. They thought that poor old wino was being picked on.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

One night two weeks later, Kevin O’Neil and I were driving around when we saw Wheels in front of the Marion Manor Nursing Home in Dorchester, doing his same thing, going after women who were leaving from work at the nursing home. This time I jumped out of the car, came up behind him, pulled up the hood on my sweatshirt, and threw Wheels out of the chair. Then I pushed it up to Fourth Street where Kevin had parked the car and dumped it into the trunk. A few streets later, I took the chair out of the trunk and tossed it into someone’s backyard.

A week later, Bobby Ford saw Wheels on Broadway. Bobby did pretty much the same thing I did, except he drove over to the Summer Street Bridge, where he threw the chair into the water. That, we all figured, was the end of Wheels and his wheelchair.

A year later, Jimmy and I were walking into Store 24 on West Broadway when someone came up to Jimmy and said, “Hi, Whitey, how you doing?”

Jimmy stared at him for a minute and then yelled out, “Wheels!”

The guy was all dressed up with khaki pants and a nice shirt, his hair cut neatly and his face clean-shaven. “I’ve been sober for almost a year,” he told us. “I’m doing good.” A perfect example that even the worst prick can change.

There were times, however, when Jimmy wasn’t around, when I was called upon to take care of some of these pricks, particularly when they were messing with people who mattered to Jimmy. Like with Nancy Stanley, Theresa’s daughter. Jimmy was out of town when Nancy came down to the variety store, upset about some guy named John who had just gotten out of jail and was bothering her. First thing I did was call him and tell him I heard he was looking for a job. I asked him if he had a driver’s license and said he could have a job delivering liquor. I told him to come down to the variety store, which was next to the liquor store, to see me.

When the guy, who was probably around five-ten and 220 pounds, came into the store, I had him follow me downstairs to the office. As soon as we got there, I turned around and cracked him a right hand, splitting him open over both his eyes and breaking his nose. Then I stomped on his knee till it cracked. Finally, I hit him and broke his ribs. While John was moaning in pain, two of us dragged him upstairs and threw him on the floor. As he hobbled toward the door, a woman who worked at the store saw him on the floor and thought he’d been in a car accident. She started to dial 911, but someone told her, “Kevin did it,” and she hung right up. John managed to stagger into his car, but before he drove away, I came over to tell him that if he came near Nancy again, I’d kill him. I saw him a few weeks later on crutches. But he never came anywhere near Nancy again.

There were countless times when Jimmy performed generous acts toward those in need, not for notoriety, but because he thought it was the right thing to do. He was an extremely generous guy. No one, except the people he helped, knew exactly what he did. But he thought nothing of paying the rent for families in need, or buying bicycles or coats or food for needy kids, or cars for families who needed to take their kids to school. Many times he found jobs for people who needed them. At Christmastime he’d buy gifts for children and their families, and he always gave money to St. Augustine’s food pantry. If he saw an old lady having trouble trying to cross the street, he’d get out of his car and stop traffic to help her cross. If he saw a woman carrying boxes, he’d put her in his car and drive her home.

If someone was bothering a family, he’d say to me, “Let’s take a ride,” and he’d stop by to help with the situation, as well as to look around and see if anything was broken. If he saw the family needed a new refrigerator or some furniture, he’d go right down and buy whatever they needed and have it all delivered to them. If he heard about anyone picking on girls or mothers who were living in families without brothers or fathers, we’d go down and grab those guys. “Pretend she’s my mother or sister,” he’d tell the bullies. “And then go ahead and bother her again and see what I do. The only reason you’re picking on her is that you think no one will come after you. But I will.”

But we didn’t help every resident of Southie whose kid was being picked on. For example, one woman Jimmy knew well came to us to complain about a guy who was bothering her daughter. “Will Kevin give the kid a beating?” she asked Jimmy, while I was standing right there.

Jimmy looked at her and said, “What about your two sons? Why don’t they go after him?”

She turned around, looked at me, and said, “Oh, no, they could get in trouble.”

“Oh, and Kevin can’t?” Jimmy said. “You want Kevin to stick up for your family and you don’t want your own sons to get involved because they could get in trouble? Sorry, we can’t help you.” And the two of us walked away. It would have been a different story if she didn’t have any sons, but that woman had her own boys to take care of the problem.

Certainly, Jimmy made sure no one took advantage of his own family. One night when he was living with his elderly mother at the Old Harbor project, he heard some kids playing basketball outside. After midnight, he went down and told them to knock it off. When the kids ignored him and continued playing, he went out with a knife and stabbed and flattened the ball. One of the kids started saying stuff to him, so Jimmy turned around and stabbed him, too, opening up his stomach. Then he put the kid, who was in his late teens or early twenties, into his car and drove him to the hospital.

He’d get especially angry when he heard about someone in Southie being robbed by residents of the town. “Don’t rob off people who have less than you,” he’d tell the thieves. “Go to Newton or Wellesley, anywhere they have more money than here. But leave your own people alone.” When he heard about a young boy in Southie who was raped, he sent the whole family to Disneyland.

He also had a strong sympathy for gasoline station attendants. He’d pull in for gas when it was freezing out and take off his gloves and give them to the kid who was pumping his gas. “Keep them,” he’d tell the kid. “You’re out here in the rain and snow.” And he always tipped the kid who was pumping his gas. “You give five dollars to some asshole behind the bar who opens a bottle of beer for you,” he’d say. “Well, this kid is out there freezing his ass off and working a hell of a lot harder than the kid in the bar.”

Whenever he came across a cause he believed in, he didn’t hesitate to help out. Like with Charlie Ross, a longshoreman on the Boston waterfront whose family lived near ours on Pilsudski Way and whose daughters I went to school with. In the 1980s, Charlie was picketing the
Globe
with a few other members of the Ancient Order of the Hibernians because of a cartoon that was hurtful to the Irish. The cartoon depicted a rat plunging an explosive devise, wearing a shamrock top hat and dressed up as a leprechaun. Charlie wanted the
Globe
to retract the cartoon and make a positive statement, rather than to infer that all Irishmen were rats because of the IRA. Jimmy and I donated $200 to Charlie’s cause, money that Charlie turned over to the families of the political prisoners in Irish prisons like Long Kesh and Maze.

Jimmy’s loyalty to friends had no limits, even if the friends lived far from Southie. Two such friends were from Alcatraz, where Jimmy served time from 1958 to 1963. Jimmy often wore the belt buckle engraved with “Alcatraz, 1934–1963” that FBI agent Nick Gianturco had given to him. Clarence Carnes was a close friend of Jimmy’s during his years there, and the two of them had been involved in fights. Carnes had come to Alcatraz in 1945 at age eighteen, the youngest inmate ever imprisoned there. He’d been part of the May 1946 escape attempt in which six prisoners killed two guards and the Marines were called in to restore order. Carnes was spared the death penalty that two of the escapees received because he had not taken part in the murders of the two guards.

After Carnes died in 1988 and was buried in a pauper’s grave outside a Missouri prison hospital, Jimmy made arrangements to have his body exhumed and buried in a Native American funeral in Oklahoma. Jimmy had the funeral home take care of the details, and then he and Theresa flew out to Oklahoma, rented a car, and drove to the burial ground. The arrangements cost him $15,000 to $20,000.

The stories that Carnes was gay and died of AIDS were bullshit. He was an alcoholic, which was why he had gotten into trouble in the first place. At age sixteen, drunk, he’d held up a gas station and killed the attendant, for which he received a life sentence at Oklahoma State Reformatory. After an escape attempt there, he was transferred to Leavenworth and later sent to Alcatraz.

Even when he was eventually paroled, Carnes violated his parole and ended up back in prison where, on a dialysis machine, he died at age sixty-one from cirrhosis of the liver, not AIDS. At the Native American funeral ceremony, Jimmy met Carnes’s relatives, who thanked him for what he’d done.

Carnes wasn’t the only friend from Alcatraz whom Jimmy remembered. During a visit to Alcatraz after his release, Jimmy met Whitey Thompson, a former inmate who was now giving tours there. Thompson had been at Alcatraz from 1958 to 1962, but he hadn’t been a high-profile inmate, and he and Jimmy hadn’t known each other. None of the different guys from Alcatraz whom Jimmy had kept in touch with remembered Thompson, either. But when Thompson told Jimmy he was writing a book about his experiences at Alcatraz, Jimmy gave him $1,500 toward the book.

In 1989, after Jimmy got a copy of the finished autobiography, titled
Last Train to Alcatraz
and later retitled
Rock Hard
, he was furious. Whitey Thompson had written about another inmate, Alvin Karpis, referring to him as Creepy Karpis, the name law enforcement, which liked to give people nicknames to make them seem more sinister, had hung on him. Karpis had been with the Ma Barker gang and had served time in Alcatraz from 1936 to 1962.