Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (9 page)

But Halloran was also a bully who’d ended a life himself. To be specific, he had taken out George Pappas, a reputed drug dealer, in a Chinatown restaurant, the Golden Dragon, a year earlier. I’m not quite sure what that murder was about, probably drugs, most likely cocaine. As it turned out, Halloran had one of his first strokes of good luck here. Jackie Salemme got nabbed for that murder, and after he served a few years, the case was overturned. Salemme walked and the case remained unsolved. So in 1982, Halloran was trying to trade info to get off on any future case against Pappas involving him and headed to the FBI with stories about Jimmy. Only one group of FBI agents believed his shit; the other camp didn’t believe his story because he made his worth to the Winter Hill gang more than it was. A lot of them knew Jimmy didn’t like Halloran and wouldn’t use him for any jobs. But the info that Halloran was talking came straight through to Jimmy from sources he had at the FBI, so it didn’t make any difference what any FBI guys thought. Of course, at the time I knew nothing about Jimmy’s “other” relationship with the FBI and merely knew that he paid money to his sources at the agency for information about the law and his crimes.

Halloran’s first story was that Jimmy and Stevie had asked him to murder Tulsa millionaire Roger Wheeler. Wheeler had bought World Jai Alai, a sports betting enterprise with headquarters in Florida and Connecticut, in 1978, and was beginning to figure out that Jimmy and Stevie were skimming money, extorting $1 million a year from the company’s Connecticut operation. Jimmy and Stevie had gotten involved with the operation through former FBI agent Paul Rico, who was now head of security at Jai Alai. Actually, it was Winter Hill mob hit man Johnny Martorano who ended up taking care of Wheeler at his Tulsa, Oklahoma golf course, shooting him between his eyes as he got into his Cadillac after a round of golf. When Halloran refused to take a lie detector test about his role in the murder plan, that turned out to be fuel for the camp that thought he was a liar. Which he was. The idea of Jimmy offering Halloran a contract was bullshit.

The second piece of info Halloran was feeding the FBI was closer to the truth. It had to do with the murder of Louie Litif, one of Jimmy’s bookmakers, in April 1980. I remember the date well because Louie was invited to my wedding later that month and Pam and I were having a hard time with the seating arrangement. We couldn’t figure out where to put Louie because he was a loud, abrasive guy and certain people didn’t like him. I had no trouble with Jimmy’s table, where we sat Stevie, Johnny Pretzie, Freddie Weichel, Kevin O’Neil, and others, but Louie was harder. When I told Jimmy I didn’t know where to put Louie at the wedding, he told me, “Don’t worry about it. He probably won’t show.”

And he was right. A bookmaker in his late forties, Louie had made things hard for himself when he suddenly decided he wanted to be a bad guy and started killing people. The first person Louie shot was a guy in his early thirties named Lip Mongelio. Louie and Lip were involved in a card game at Hap’s Lounge in South Boston, a bar Louie owned with his partner, Jimmy Matera. Lip accused Louie of cheating, which he was. When an argument ensued, Louie shot Lip four or five times, but Lip survived.

The next day, Jimmy told me all about it. It seems that right after he shot Lip, Louie had been walking down Broadway when Jimmy drove by. Jimmy pulled over to the sidewalk and asked Louie, “What are you doing?”

Louie said, “I just shot Lip and I’m going to turn myself in to the police.” Obviously, it was Louie’s first time shooting anyone and he’d panicked. He was a bookmaker, not a violent criminal, so there he was, heading for the District Six police station near D and West Broadway.

“What are you, crazy?” Jimmy asked him. “Get in here.” Jimmy put him in the car, calmed Louie down, and dropped him off at his house. Then Jimmy sent Alan Thistle, a fucking piece of shit in the street who later became an informant for the FBI, to talk to Lip in the hospital. Thistle persuaded Lip not to testify against Louie, and everything was dropped. After all, Louie was also a good moneymaker. No reason to send a profitable bookmaker away for attempted murder.

A few days later, however, Louie decided he wanted to kill Alan Thistle, for no reason other than he just didn’t like him. But Jimmy told him he couldn’t. “He just talked the kid out of pressing charges against you and now you want to kill him?” Jimmy said. “He did you a favor.” And that was the end of that.

But a month or so later, Louie made things more complicated again when he got into an argument during another card game, this time with his partner, Jimmy Matera. Matera caught Louie cheating and slapped him in the face during the game. About a week later, they were having problems at the bar with an outrageous water bill, and Louie convinced Matera there must be something wrong with the water meter. When the two of them went down into the cellar, Louie told Jimmy to take a look at the water meter, which he said was broken. While Matera was staring at the meter, Louie shot him in the head for slapping him.

Unfortunately for Louie, there was a witness, Bobby Conrad, the bartender who was working that night. Conrad, around fifty, was a nervous wreck over what he’d seen, so Louie wined and dined him in Las Vegas. Then he took him to a little place he had up in Nova Scotia, where he promised to hide him till everything blew over, assuring him everything would be fine and he had nothing to worry about. He killed him there, took him out of the back of the house in a wheelbarrow, and buried him. He ended up hiding him so well that thanks to the laws in Canada limiting their access to search for bodies, the DEA and State Police couldn’t find him.

After that murder, Louie came back to Boston, convinced now that he was a killer. It didn’t take long for him to have another falling-out with a partner, this time with Joe the Barber, a barber by trade and his partner in the bookmaking operation.

One night, around eleven, Louie strolled into Triple O’s, dressed in his usual stylish manner, perfectly groomed, his fingernails manicured, a flat scally or newsboy cap covering the balding top of his dark hair, anxious for people to notice him. Louie’s clothes were always color-coordinated, like if he wore a red jacket or shirt, he put on red shoes. He had green shoes to go with his green jacket. And so on. That night, he was decked out in black flared-leg pants, a black silk shirt open at the neck, a short black leather jacket, black shiny shoes, gold chains, and rings. That was Louie.

He wasn’t a big guy, maybe five-seven and 185 pounds. Of Arab descent, he had a mustache like Saddam Hussein. He also had a wife and couple of kids, and a three-decker townhouse on East Broadway and G. I was friendly with his daughter Louanne, who was a few years younger than me. That night, as always, he was talking in his obnoxious loud voice. Even when there were 400 people in the bar, you always knew Louie was there.

Jimmy was standing by the front door, at his usual place at the edge of the L-shaped bar. I was by the door, bouncing, maybe six or seven feet away. Louie came in with his loud, “Hey, Jimmy. How you doing?” and ordered a round of drinks for Jimmy and Kevin O’Neil and whoever else was there. There was a lot of small talk at the beginning, but then Louie brought up Joe the Barber and accused him of stealing money from the business. Jimmy knew the truth was just the opposite, that Louie had recently begun stealing money and selling drugs without paying Jimmy. He told Louie that Joe was a good guy and that he trusted him completely. The conversation, I could see, was getting Jimmy mad.

“You’ve stepped over the line,” he told Louie. “Now you’re a killer and people are going to treat you differently. If there’s a problem, no one’s going to just talk to you about it. They’ll know you’re capable of killing someone, so when they have a problem with you, they’re going to want to kill you. You’re no longer just a bookmaker.”

Jimmy’s voice was getting deeper and more pronounced, quieter and lower in tone, with stronger emphasis on each word he spoke. I knew right away that was a dangerous sign. I also noticed that the corner of his mouth was curling up and his eyes were turning bloodshot. Since I was bouncing, I wasn’t drinking and I observed everything clearly.

I could always tell when Jimmy was getting mad. He has these crystal-clear blue eyes, and when he gets angry, they turn from blue to bloodshot. It’s like a Dracula movie when Christopher Lee is about to bite his victim and you can see the red veins in his eyes. It was the same thing with Jimmy.

I could see that Jimmy’s blood was boiling and his blood pressure was rising, but Louie had a couple of beers in him and he didn’t pick up the danger signs. “I got nothing to worry about,” Louie told Jimmy. “I got you as a friend.”

“We’re not friends anymore, Louie,” Jimmy said coldly. But Louie just laughed and tried to shake it off like Jimmy was joking or this was a mere scolding. But I knew Jimmy was dead serious. And I also knew Louie had a problem. He was acting like a fool, talking about killing Joe the Barber, thinking he was on equal footing with Jimmy, that he was a killer now and Jimmy would respect him for that. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Personally, I liked Louie. Every Sunday night, he’d come down to Triple O’s and we’d play cards or pinball, twenty bucks a game. He was loud but funny, and had always been a good moneymaker for Jimmy. He should have just stayed a bookie and not tried to jump from the minor leagues to the majors. And now he wanted to kill a friend of Jimmy’s. There was no way that would be allowed.

Shortly after that, a week or so before my wedding, Louie was found stuffed into a garbage bag in the trunk of his car, which had been dumped in the South End. He’d been stabbed with an ice pick and shot. “He was color-coordinated,” Jimmy told me. “He was wearing green underwear and was in a green garbage bag.”

At the wedding, when I went around to greet his table, Jimmy pointed to the empty chair beside him and said, “Say hi to Louie.”

Stevie picked up a napkin and made like he was wiping his face. “He keeps on drinking and it keeps on leaking out of him,” he said, reminding us that Louie had been shot in the head and any drink he might have put to his mouth would pour right out of his face. And they all broke out laughing.

Louie’s family wouldn’t have thought that was funny. The day after Jimmy took care of Louie, his nephew went to the South End to pick up his uncle’s car. When he got back to Southie, he opened the trunk to get his golf clubs and found his uncle. No one was ever tried for Louie’s murder, but now Halloran was putting himself at the scene.

Halloran told the FBI he had driven down to Triple O’s with Louie and that Jimmy and someone else were there when he dropped Louie off. He said Jimmy and that other person had killed Louie and carried him out the back door. Strangely enough, Jimmy told me, “Louie’s last words to me were a lie.” Apparently Louie had insisted that he’d come by himself and that no one had driven him over. It was hard to figure out why Louie lied to Jimmy that night. If he’d told Jimmy that someone had driven him, he might have gotten a pass. But it wouldn’t have lasted long, since Jimmy had no intentions of letting Louie run wild.

Now Halloran was playing just as dangerous a game as Louie. And making fatal errors. The worst mistakes were coming back to Boston and trusting the FBI. Of course, FBI agent John Connolly was feeding Jimmy all the info about Halloran. Jimmy and Stevie talked about it in front of me, saying Halloran was lying, at least about the Wheeler case.

Figuring it was just a matter of time until Halloran was taken off the streets and put in Witness Protection, Jimmy went looking for him. I assumed we were just going to brace him, read him the riot act, but let him go. After all, if the FBI didn’t believe him, why should we have to take him out? But I was new to the game and didn’t understand all the ways in which Jimmy’s mind moved. Nor did I know all the goings-on with the Wheeler murder. Twenty-six years old then, I was still holding onto my job at the MBTA, working from seven to four, laying track. I’d also been working for Jimmy for five years, and after work I would head over to the Broadway Appliance and Furniture store on F and West Broadway that I now owned with Kevin O’Neil to meet Jimmy and ride around with him for a few hours, collecting envelopes and beating up people. Even though Jimmy and I had opened a bar on F and West Second called Court’s Inn, I was still bouncing some nights and weekends at Triple O’s, from nine to two. I had more than a few jobs, but I needed the dough. At that time I was a married man and planning on starting a family.

And I had other responsibilities, too. Every Thursday, from the time I’d graduated South Boston High and begun to work full-time, I’d go over to the house in the Old Colony projects at 8 Pilsudski Way, apartment 554, second floor, to give my mother an envelope. That was the right thing to do. I gave her cash, usually a couple hundred each week, most of it money made working illegally from Jimmy. She was still suffering from her severe arthritis and other health problems. My father had a bad heart and couldn’t work much. Ma was grateful for the money and always said, “Thank you.”

My mother had heard things about me, but she chose not to believe them. Once I was involved in a fight with a kid who pulled a gun on me, then jumped in his car and took off. I hopped into my car and followed him, each of us shooting at the other through the windows. He drove through the Old Colony projects, right by 8 Pilsudski Way, and I was still shooting at him out of my car window. My mother looked out the window and started yelling to my sister Patty to call the police. When Patty told her, “Ma, that’s Kevin,” Ma said, “Oh, my God!” and moved away from the window.

Anyhow, the day Jimmy went looking for Halloran, I’d just gotten off work at the T, and was still dressed in my work clothes—dungarees and work boots. I was talking with Jimmy down at the Broadway Appliance store when John, a capable fellow from Charlestown and an old Winter Hill associate of Jimmy’s, stopped by to shoot the shit. Casually, he mentioned that he’d just spotted Brian Halloran on a pay phone outside the Pier restaurant on the South Boston waterfront. John knew from conversation around certain criminal circles that Halloran was cooperating, and that Jimmy had been looking for him for over a month. Jimmy also knew that the window of opportunity for taking out that piece of crap was closing. He wouldn’t be left unprotected on the streets for long.