Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (6 page)

The guest list for the wedding included the older guys I was now spending more time with. Jimmy Bulger and Stevie Flemmi sat at a table with Kevin O’Neil, another owner of Triple O’s; Freddie Weichel, a friend of mine; and Johnny Pretzie, a friend who trained me late in my boxing career. I made sure the wedding photographer understood that there would be no pictures taken of that table. Everybody acted like gentlemen and had a great time. Pam’s and my song was “Always and Forever” by Heatwave, and our disc jockey was Joey Cunningham. It was a beautiful April afternoon and a perfectly happy occasion. My new wife and I left two days later for a week in Disney World where we stayed at the Contemporary Hotel.

But from the time Pam and I got engaged, I had been spending more hours at Triple O’s, the rowdy, popular South Boston watering hole on West Broadway, named for and owned by the three O’Neil brothers, Jackie, Kevin, and Billy. I’d left Flix and gone to work there, along with some of my friends, bringing up ice and beer, keeping the ice stocked. I was also working for the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority from 7:00
A.M
. to 4:00
P.M
., at a job my brother Jack got me, laying track. It was simple but hard work and I enjoyed the physical labor. Even though I wasn’t making great money there, I was getting all the benefits.

But on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, I was working at Triple O’s, a dimly lit, smoke-filled place with booths for eating, as well as a long bar with stools. Local South Boston artists covered the walls with colorful cartoon drawings of Disney scenes and the Seven Dwarfs and some caricatures of Triple O’s regulars. Bartenders poured shots and waitresses served hamburgers and steak tips, along with cold sandwiches like ham and cheese. A small dance floor with a jukebox occupied a section of the bar. On weekends, a DJ or sometimes a live band came in. The place could hold over 150 people and was always busy, especially so on my nights. As soon as Gillette switched shifts at 4:30 in the afternoon, the place got packed. The corporate headquarters and factory for all the Gillette personal grooming products was right behind Triple O’s. At 9:00
P.M
., the Gillette people would filter out to go home and the locals would come in. There were all kinds of women there, from ages eighteen to sixty, looking to meet guys or spend the night with a date or just have a good time with friends. Southie girls always dressed up and looked great, pretty much staying in their own group, not mingling much with girls from other neighborhoods, such as Dorchester.

Kevin O’Neil was about eight years older than me, and a businessman, good at making money. He was a large guy, around six-four and 320 pounds, with big hands and salt-and-pepper hair. An outgoing guy, he liked to laugh, and was a good friend of Jimmy’s. In 1981, when Kevin got married, I stood up for him at the wedding. His brother Billy, who I’d met at the South Boston Court House when we’d each been brought up on charges of assaulting a black person, was two years younger and a lot smaller than Kevin, at five-nine, 156 pounds, and ripped. It was Billy who had suggested I come to work at Triple O’s. The two of us got along great and often worked the door together.

But despite the clusters of girls looking to meet guys and the Gillette workers, Triple O’s was a rough place, where the neighborhood guys hung out, drank, and settled scores. The drinking age was eighteen then, so I knew most of the younger crowd there. Fights broke out almost every night, especially on the nights I worked. Lots of these fights were the breeding grounds for grudges that later resulted in killings, perpetrated by patients with Irish Alzheimer’s, a disease where everything is forgotten except a grudge. Most often it was a fistfight that spun out of control, but other times, people would use baseball bats, knives, or serious weapons.

My rapport with Jimmy began to form soon after I started working there. Hired, along with a bunch of my friends, to help out on St. Patrick’s Day, the rowdiest night of the year at Triple O’s, I was bringing in the beer and ice from downstairs when a fight broke out. There were eight guys working the door that night, seven of whom were my friends, and within seconds it was a full-blown free-for-all. All my friends were busy inside and outside, trying to take care of things. As soon as I got back upstairs, I jumped over the bar to help my friends and knocked out a couple of the worst troublemakers. Jimmy and Kevin O’Neil were standing there watching the whole scene. A week later, Kevin asked if I would work the door for $25 a night plus 10 percent of the tips of the waitresses and bartenders. I accepted.

Jimmy came in a night or two over the weekends, always quiet, reserved, and polite, dressed neatly, usually in dungarees, cowboy boots, and a leather jacket. Most nights he spent talking with Kevin O’Neil, but sometimes he came in with Stevie Flemmi, the partner he’d teamed up with in the early 1970s. Often they were in suits, having just gone out on a date for dinner with the girls they brought into Triple O’s. Jimmy would always say, “Hi, how you doing?” when he passed by me at the door. He never sat at the bar, but stood in his customary spot at the end of the bar, his back against the wall, not anxious to attract attention. Over time, he engaged me more and more in conversation and got to know me better. He was aware of all the fights I was in, of the people who got hurt bad and had to go to the hospital. But when the two of us talked, it was never about crime. Rather, he would tell me to read, to work hard, and to stay out of trouble and away from alcohol. Avoiding alcohol was never a problem for me, since I wasn’t a big drinker. I think he liked the fact that I didn’t have any major bad habits. He also liked that I kept in good shape, still running nearly every day, working out regularly at the gym and in my house, and occasionally boxing.

Some nights Jimmy, who was around forty-five then, would show up with good-looking women or young girls, anywhere from ages eighteen to forty. He never came in with the two women he shared two different homes with, Theresa Stanley, who was about ten years younger than him, or Cathy Greig, who was twenty years younger. He wasn’t much of a drinker and would spend the night nursing a vodka tonic or the same beer that sat in front of him all evening. For the most part, people kept a respectful distance and would walk by, nod, and keep on going, rarely if ever invited over. Plenty of guys had no idea who he was, which was how he preferred it. The last thing Jimmy wanted was for everyone to recognize his face.

Over a period of three years, from 1975 to 1978, I could see that he was watching how I conducted myself in fights and how I handled the door. There was no doubt I had a temper and was quick to react when someone bothered me, but for the most part, I remained pretty easygoing. My objective at the door, however, was simple: Stop trouble before it came in. It was important to quickly recognize people who would become belligerent. Maybe I’d had problems with them before, in which case I wouldn’t let them in again. Even though they might be mad when I turned them away, eventually they would leave. I wasn’t nasty, but I would explain calmly that they couldn’t come in if they were drunk or had been barred. I also kept them out if they had phony IDs, or if I just didn’t like their demeanor and could sense they were going to be trouble.

I made sure I was never a bully and never hit people just to hit them. But sometimes, when people deserved it, I hit them and I enjoyed it. Still, the only time I hit anyone was if they hit me first or hit or bothered someone else. Often strangers or out-of-towners who I’d never seen before would come in and start something. Then I had no choice but to get into the middle of the fight to stop it. I didn’t think about it; I just did my job. Even though some nights I was able to talk to people and calm them down, most often, I ended up physically throwing out the troublemaker. I tried to side with the regular customers, since they were the ones spending money, and toss out the person who had come in for the first time.

One night I was at the door with another bouncer when a couple of brothers started a fight with us, just a drunken barroom thing. We had taken the fight outside when a third guy jumped out of a car and came running at us with a hatchet. Furious, I grabbed an aluminum baseball bat back inside behind the door and, defending myself, slugged him with it. As he went down, he dropped the hatchet and I picked it up, determined to give it back to him, but in my own special way. A minute later, he took off and I ran after him with the hatchet in my hands, catching up with him at Cardinal Cushing High School. Still angry at his attacking me, I planted his weapon in his shoulder blade and watched as his shirt turned red with blood. He ran away, the handle of the hatchet flopping up and down in the wind. I’d never seen the guy before and never saw him again, but I was certain he ended up in an emergency room, trying to explain the huge wound in his back.

Some nights, I bartended and bounced. Before we were married, I brought in Pam, who started out as a waitress and then filled in at the bar. She made a terrific bartender, but because she was so beautiful, guys were always trying to hit on her. Knowing my temper, Pam never wanted me to get into fights, so she wouldn’t tell me if someone grabbed her. But still, whenever I saw anything, I ended up knocking the guys out, breaking their jaws and teeth or splitting their faces open. It wasn’t good for business to have her behind the bar and me at the door! Once she got pregnant with our first son, she stopped working.

Working on the T—Boston’s subway system—and still bouncing, I wasn’t making a lot of money, but I could see that Jimmy was getting more comfortable with me and was bringing me around to his world slowly and cautiously, having me meet the people in his circle, all the people he dealt with. I understood from the beginning that he wasn’t the kind of person who took a shine to someone overnight, that he would never just jump into something. If he was going to work with someone, he wanted to know exactly what he was getting before he moved even a small step forward.

But as he’d talk to me a bit more each night, he was taking pains to get to know me better. One afternoon, in 1978, right after he told Nicky Femia, one of his associates who was doing coke and getting out of hand, to go his own way, he asked me to get in the car with him and drive around. From then on, the two of us rode around more and more, often in his blue Chevy Malibu or Ford sedan, often for a couple of hours after I got off work at the T and before I started at Triple O’s. His cars were always fast cars, never registered to him, and had police scanners and toggle switches for the lights so the interior light wouldn’t go on, but they were nondescript and never stood out. Police scanners were pretty much standard operating procedure for most cars, but Jimmy didn’t listen to the Boston police. Mostly he listened to the FBI, the DEA, and the State Police signals.

One night when I wasn’t working at Triple O’s, Jimmy suggested I take a drive with him and another guy. Immediately I got a little nervous and began to wonder if I had done something wrong. The three of us had been driving around for a half-hour or so when Jimmy pulled over to pick up a kid in his early twenties at a bar on East Broadway. When the kid got into the back seat with me, I still didn’t know what was going on. I knew I’d been in a lot of fights. Maybe I’d hit the wrong person.

Then Jimmy started yelling at the kid for supposedly smacking his niece and pulled over to the park at M and Third streets. Then I understood what was happening. And it had nothing to do with me. Right away I saw that the kid had a buck knife in a sheath, which he tried to cover up. But Jimmy turned around, saw the knife, grabbed it off him, and slashed him across the throat with it, using the blunt side. Jimmy looked at me, and I got into it, punching the kid, busting his nose, and knocking out his teeth. Blood poured out of his nose and mouth. Then Jimmy reached into the kid’s back pocket and pulled out a police-type leather sap. As he beat the kid with the sap, he managed to hit me as much as he was hitting the kid. My hand swelled right up, but I didn’t notice it till afterward.

The kid ended up crouched in a fetal position on the floor of the back seat. Jimmy then drove back to the bar on East Broadway and dumped him out in front of the bar so everyone could see what had happened to him. After the kid stumbled into the bar, his friends came storming out, shouting, “Who did this?”

Jimmy and I were standing there, and I knocked out the first one who ran out. “Anyone else want to bother my niece?” Jimmy asked, and they all went back into the bar. Quickly.

“I thought you cut his throat with that knife,” I told Jimmy.

“I meant to,” he said. “The truth is he was just lucky I held it wrong.”

We found out later on that it had been another girl, not Jimmy’s niece, who had been slapped, but I didn’t feel bad about it. I had shown Jimmy that I would do whatever he asked me to do. And besides, the kid still deserved to be beaten up for beating up a girl.

A couple of days later, in the car, Jimmy gave me a thousand dollars. “It’s for you,” he said as he handed me the cash. That was pretty big money for a young kid. It was all pretty amazing. Here was Jim Bulger giving me money. It felt good getting all this cash. Real good. From then on, I spent more time with him. I knew, of course, that my life had changed. But I could handle it. I never felt the need to talk to anyone about what I was doing. I certainly never talked to Pam, or any woman, about anything that would involve criminal activity. As the years went on, Pam might have surmised what I was doing, but I would never put a loved one in jeopardy by discussing these matters.

I had learned early that once a crime was committed, you never talked about it. There was never any reason to. If someone ever got in the car with us or came over to talk to us at a bar about something we had done, we would immediately suspect that he was wired and trying to get us to talk about a crime.

But back then, I was getting busier with my own family. Our first son, Kevin Barry, was born at St. Margaret’s Hospital on December 12, 1982. Three and a half years after that, Brian Michael was born on May 2, 1986. After growing up with six sisters, it was something for Pam to get used to handling boys. But she did a fantastic job and raised two terrific sons. I was excited with each birth and cut the umbilical cord both times, so grateful to have two beautiful sons. Girls, I was certain, would have given me more to worry about. But by the time the boys were born, I was working for Jimmy full-time and it was often hard to find time for my kids. I wish I had found more.