Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (34 page)

Right after that visit, I got some important news I needed to share immediately with Jimmy, but it turned out to be five weeks until he next contacted me. I’d only been back in Boston a few days when it got back to me that Theresa was dating that piece of shit Alan Thistle, who everybody knew was an informant for the FBI, the state police, and the Boston police. It was also well known that he was a drug user.

As soon as I heard that news, I just showed up at Theresa’s house on Silver Street in South Boston around seven at night and rang the bell. Theresa seemed a little surprised to see me, but let me in. She’d always been a beautiful woman, and dressed in dungarees and a long-sleeved white blouse, she still looked stunning. She was around fifty-four or fifty-five, with platinum-white hair. Right away, I said, “So, what are you doing going out with Alan Thistle?”

“
He’s
with Cathy,” she answered me. “I have my life to live.”

“There’s plenty of guys out there to go out with. Why him?” I said. “He’s an informant for law enforcement. He’s just pumping you for information.”

I knew Thistle worked for John Gamel and I’d always thought that he might be wired up. Once Thistle had asked a friend of mine what kind of watch he had. “If I get enough money off the FBI, I’m going to buy a watch like that,” he told my friend.

Before my friend could answer, I jumped in and said, “It’s a cheap one, not expensive.” I didn’t want him to have any info at all. I knew he would try and use the fact that my friend had a gold Piaget in a negative manner. You just had to measure every word you said to this guy.

Before Jimmy took off in 1994, while the investigation was going on, Thistle had approached me and another fellow and told the two of us he was getting $1,500 a month from Gamel. “Yeah, I know what he looks like,” I told him. “He’s always trying to follow us around.”

“Well, if you want to pay me, too,” he said, “I can be a double agent for you and Jimmy. I can let you know what they’re saying and what they’re doing.” He went on to tell me that they were bugging the benches where we sat at Castle Island.

“We’re not interested,” I told him. “We’re not doing anything.”

But that night at her house, Theresa kept defending him. “Everything you tell this guy, he’s going to go back and tell law enforcement,” I kept repeating. I was there close to three hours, trying to explain to her that she shouldn’t go out with this guy, that he was bad business.

Finally, when I got ready to leave, she said, “Well, it’s too late.”

“What do you mean it’s too late?” I asked.

She told me to come downstairs and follow her into the kitchen. In the kitchen, she lit up a cigarette. Jimmy hated her smoking, and she never smoked in front of him or me. I could see she was nervous, and her hands were shaking as she pulled out a card and handed it to me. The card said,
FBI SPECIAL AGENT JOHN GAMEL
. As I looked at it, she said, “I already talked to him. He came by the house and I told him everything. Where Jimmy and I were in New York. The name Thomas Baxter that he was using. Everything.” Even that she and Jimmy had stayed with a relative of mine in upstate New York. I could see she was real excited and nervous, but I needed to find out everything she had said about the six weeks she and Jimmy had been together on the run, especially about the ID that Jimmy had developed back in 1985 and had just started to use. “All right, relax, calm down,” I said gently. We were both standing up in her kitchen. If Thistle had walked in at that moment, I would have broken his jaw for him, but he didn’t. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll figure it out.”

We talked for a few more minutes, although she didn’t have much more to add. Then I said, “I’ll get back to you,” and left. Hell hath no fury like that of a woman scorned. It certainly hadn’t made Theresa happy when Jimmy dumped her off and took off with Cathy ten minutes later. I never talked to Theresa again after that. There was no reason to.

Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do but wait for Jimmy’s call. After I saw Theresa, I visited Stevie at Plymouth and told him what she’d had done. Since it wasn’t safe to talk about most subjects on the prison phone, we both used pads of paper to write each other messages that we would hold up to the glass partition. After we were through with each message, we would scribble over it in case anyone got hold of the piece of paper. Jimmy had always been just as concerned with writing things down. The two of us hardly ever wrote anything down, but the few times we did, we would burn the piece of paper or rip it up into small pieces and throw it out the car window while we were driving down the highway.

“You’ve got to reach Jimmy,” Stevie wrote to me that visit, but, of course, there was nothing I could do for those five weeks, except hope he didn’t get caught using his Baxter alias.

Finally, on July Fourth weekend, he called and I told him Theresa had given him up. “Thank God, at least I know,” he said calmly, not sounding the least bit rattled. “I’ll call you back.”

When he called back a few days later, he told me to take some photos of his younger brother Jackie, which he could use for a new ID. He also told me he’d grown a mustache, which was a big change from his usual clean-shaven look, so I should make sure Jackie had a mustache in the photo. I talked to him for a few minutes about taking out Alan Thistle, since Thistle was dating Theresa and was working for the FBI and everything. But he said no. Going out with Thistle would be Theresa’s punishment.

So I went to Jackie’s house at 17 Twomey Court in South Boston with a blue cotton sheet, a phony mustache, and a Polaroid camera, and took a bunch of photos of Jackie, using the blue sheet for background. I chose the four best and spent a good month putting together the documentation necessary to get Jimmy a new Social Security number, driver’s license, and birth certificate.

In August, on the night Jimmy was supposed to call me back at eight, I waited at the phone number I’d given him, but he didn’t call. He was very punctual and it wasn’t like him to be even a minute late. When he finally called me at exactly nine, I figured out that he had to be in the Midwest, probably the Chicago area, with the time one hour behind us in the East, and he had gotten confused with the time difference. “You probably know where I am now,” he said when I told him I’d been waiting an hour.

“I’ve got an idea,” I said, and he told me to meet him in Chicago at Water Tower Place in two days and to bring the pictures of Jackie. I rented a little blue foreign car and drove out there with a girl. Pam and I were separated by then. After I made sure there was no one following us, we stopped overnight in South Bend, Indiana, near Notre Dame. The next day we met Jimmy and Cathy near Water Tower Place, a big modern building in Chicago. It was a beautiful late summer day and the four of us first had something to eat at an outside café. Afterward we walked around in downtown Chicago. The girls walked and talked together so Jimmy and I could walk alone. As always, no one recognized him.

When we were walking that afternoon, Jimmy told me how he had been in Louisiana, and had rented a place down there. He’d ended up befriending this family where the husband was kind of lazy. The guy was a carpenter by trade, so Jimmy bought him all kinds of carpentry tools. They were such nice people that he also bought appliances to help them out. He even went craw fishing with the guy, throwing out the nets and stuff. He ended up spending around forty grand on that family. I just laughed as he told me this story. It was typical of Jimmy to do the unexpected. There he is, on the run, and he’s taking care of other people. That’s Jimmy.

He also told me how he and Cathy were walking down the street in that Louisiana town one afternoon and the sheriff who was directing traffic stopped the cars to let the two of them get by. “Hi, Tom,” the sheriff greeted him, as friendly as could be. Jimmy smiled back and he and Cathy just kept on walking.

But even though Jimmy and Cathy looked terrific and I could tell he was still working out regularly, there was a sense that things might be coming down. At one point, while the two of us were walking, he told me, “If anything ever comes down, put it on me.” I said nothing in response. I didn’t understand at the time why he was thinking that. I also figured he was in touch with others, although we didn’t talk about it and I never knew for sure.

But the IDs turned out to be all wrong. Jimmy’s mustache looked nothing like the one I’d put on Jackie. The fake one was much bigger than the pencil-thin one Jimmy now wore. So we went shopping and bought a Polaroid-type camera and some blue sheets and headed to his hotel to take new photos. He hadn’t been able to get a room in a nice hotel, so he’d had to settle for a crummy one. In the room, we took a bunch of photos that worked fine. He’d done his homework and had four new names with addresses and social security numbers, which we could use on the second set of IDs. One of the aliases was Shackleton, the name of a man he befriended in the Illinois area and and whose ID he had acquired. I have no idea how it happened, if he gave the guy money or what. He chose the photos he liked best and compared them to the size of my license picture to ensure they would fit into the frame. Once he was satisfied with them, we were ready to head out for dinner.

Around nine, we walked over to a nearby Japanese restaurant. It was a warm, pleasant summer evening and Jimmy and I wore regular slacks and shirts. Cathy, dressed in white pants, a blouse, and a light jacket, walked on ahead with the girl I was with. Three black kids in their early twenties walked by and started to stare at the girls. They were saying something to the girls, but they were mumbling so Jimmy and I couldn’t really hear them.

Jimmy burst out, “What are you looking at, you motherfuckers?” Out came his knife and out came my knife, and we ran right toward them. The guys took off running down the street. I don’t think the girls realized what was going on with the guys, but they saw us pull out the knives. That’s Jimmy, too. On the run and still aggressive. Not taking shit from anyone. We had a good laugh about that scene during dinner.

When we walked into the restaurant, Jimmy said, “Every day out there is another day I beat them. Every good meal is a meal they can’t take away from me.” It was strange talk from him, but a few minutes later he was acting as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

We sat in the back of the restaurant at an ordinary table. Jimmy asked the waiter what he recommended and then checked with the three of us. Finally, Jimmy ordered some chicken dishes, some meat dishes, and some vegetable dishes. We had a couple of beers with the meal. It was a relaxing, pleasant meal with good food and friendly conversation.

After dinner, we walked the few blocks back to his hotel. We shook hands and I told him I’d be leaving early the next morning. He said he’d give me a call. Chicago was busy and there weren’t that many hotel rooms available, but I’d gotten a room earlier that day a few blocks away from his hotel. That room also turned out to be a shithole, even shabbier than Jimmy’s. After ten minutes we checked out, along with the cockroaches that had their suitcases packed, too. The two of us headed back to South Bend and spent the night in a motel on the main drag there. By the next night, we were back in Boston.

Back home, I finished the IDs and gave them to a friend I trusted to bring them to New York. There was too much heat on me to make the trip myself. While looking for Jimmy, the law had increased the surveillance on me a notch or two. But Jimmy knew I was sending someone I trusted, so it was no big deal. As it turned out, Jimmy wasn’t happy with the finished IDs. He called me to complain that there was no date of issue on the licenses. “They don’t put date of issues on Massachusetts licenses anymore,” I told him. “If they put one on and a cop stops you, he’s going to pick it right up that it’s a phony.”

He finally accepted what I said and then we talked for a while about the case. From what both of us had heard, it looked as if the case was actually falling apart. George Kaufman, the liaison between the Jewish bookmakers and Jimmy and Stevie, had died. He’d been a real sweetheart, but he had a heart attack from his diabetes. At least he died of natural causes.

A few months later, in mid-November, Jimmy asked me to come back down to New York. It took some careful arrangements, switching cars and stuff, but I was able to elude the law and take the train down. Again, I met him “at the lions.” He and Cathy looked exactly the same, like two hassle-free tourists in New York. We talked about the case for a while and I showed him my driver’s license and how there was no date of issue on it.

It was a cold November day and we headed out to a restaurant in a nearby hotel. On the way, he stopped to ask a street cop for directions. Cathy stood next to him while he talked to the cop, but I moved to the side. If the cop recognized Jim, I knew I’d have to crack him. I felt a surge of adrenaline that I might have to bang this guy out so Jimmy could take off. But the cop just told us to go down a few blocks and take a left. I knew this was all part of Jimmy’s belief that the best defense is offense. When we were walking away, he said, “The best place to get lost is a big city. People are just walking around thinking about their own problems. You don’t stand out there.” If he wanted to, however, he knew how to disarm people with his personality and mannerisms. Otherwise, he would terrorize them. There just wasn’t too much in the middle of those two sides.

I had known all along, however, that it would not be easy for anyone to capture Jimmy. If he saw them coming, he would take them with him. He wouldn’t hesitate. Even before he went on the run, he’d always say, “Let’s all go to hell together.” And he meant it. I also knew Jimmy wouldn’t go to trial. He would rather plead out to a life sentence than put his family through the embarrassment of a trial. If he had a gun on him, he’d go out in a blaze of glory rather than spend the rest of his life in jail. But I don’t think they’ll ever catch him.

I’d always thought he could end up traveling around Europe. I figured that if he ended up in Germany, there would have to be a new Third Reich. If he took off for Mexico, the entire village would be speaking English. It’s not like he would ever conform to them. I also knew he would be smart enough to avoid putting himself in the position of killing anybody. But then again, if anybody fucked with him, he’d kill him.