Read Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob Online
Authors: Kevin Weeks; Phyllis Karas
So we left the car where it was until Jimmy had it moved and chopped it up without anyone ever seeing it. Within two weeks of the murder, it was gone. But it had fulfilled its mission and gotten Jimmy away from the scene. There was never any reason for Jimmy to create another car like that. After that murder, he changed his MO, sucking people in, meeting in houses and making them come to him. He didn’t need a hit car for that. That was Jimmy’s brilliance, always finding better ways to do the job.
One afternoon, Jimmy and Stevie and I drove over to the tow lot on Dorchester Avenue to take a look at the Datsun. As always when the three of us went anywhere together, Jimmy drove, Stevie sat in the passenger seat, and I was in the back seat. That was fine with me. I wouldn’t have wanted Stevie sitting in back of me. Jimmy walked right up to the driver’s side of the Datsun, opened the door, and hit the back of the headrest with his hand. As he did that, a piece of scalp with some hair attached to it fell off, a little piece of Donahue that the police had missed. You could see the holes where the bullets had ripped through the doors and the windows. It was a mess with blood all over the place, on the seats, on the roof, on the floor. The car was shredded like Swiss cheese, with gaping holes everywhere.
As we looked at the car, I was thinking about how much punishment the human body could take. Donahue might have gotten hit in the head and died instantly, but Halloran had taken twenty-one bullets. As Jimmy commented again about how he had placed the shots through the rear window into Donahue’s head, Stevie walked around looking at the car, shaking his head, still pissed he’d missed out on that murder. Finally Jimmy said, “Let’s get out of here,” and we took off.
A few months later, I stopped working for the T. From that point on, I worked for Jimmy full time.
LOAN-SHARKING, EXTORTION, AND MURDER
Once I started working with Jimmy full-time in 1982, the year I left the T, I had a much closer view of his criminal activities. He would confide about them more openly and dealt more frequently with people in his circle in front of me. Although I rarely dealt personally with any of these bookmakers, as all those business deals had been established before I came on board, Jimmy included me in most of these meetings. For instance, I was now included in sitdowns with bookmakers who were arguing about money owed or paid out or complaining about certain customers not paying or complaining about their own payments to Jimmy and Stevie. I was also present at meetings with other loan sharks or those who owed debts. While most of these sitdowns or meetings took place in Triple O’s or later at the variety store or liquor store that Jimmy owned, some were inside clubs, restaurants, or bars.
Although there were some people to whom I was introduced, often I wasn’t introduced at all, and just stood there and listened. If the people had no idea who I was, they’d just glance nervously at me, most likely wondering what I was about. Inevitably, it would create a chilling effect as I watched and listened and didn’t say a word.
The first and only time I met Chico Krantz, who ran a bookmaking operation, was at an afternoon meeting in Triple O’s. Chico was in his late forties or early fifties, kind of a big guy, with a mustache and bald head with hair on each side, always covered with a Stetson hat with a wide brim. At this meeting, there seemed to be a problem concerning the amount of money Chico was receiving and what he was paying to Jimmy and Stevie. There were about twenty people in the bar, none of whom noticed the three of them sitting quietly at a table. Jimmy and Stevie did all the talking and I stood off to the side. It took no more than fifteen minutes before Chico agreed to pay them around $90,000 more. The meeting never got heated and all three of them remained calm. After the meeting was over, Chico stood up, they all shook hands, and he left.
When I first went to work at Triple O’s, I had begun my own loan-sharking business. It was a simple business. I’d taken whatever money I made and turned it over, increasing it little by little by lending it to people who paid it back at a certain rate, between two and five points a week. It wasn’t rocket science. I simply decided my own rates and loaned to people, mostly my age or a little bit older, who I had known over the years. It was a quick loan for people who couldn’t go or didn’t want to go to a bank; people who had jobs or who I knew could come up with the money they’d owe me.
Someone would come up and say, “Kev, I need five hundred bucks,” and I’d give it to them and say, “Here you go. You pay me twenty-five a week on interest for the five hundred.” That was the juice that didn’t come off the principal. When I began, I had from twenty to twenty-five customers and I lent from $100 up to $25,000, with interest from two and half points to five points. If someone borrowed $25,000 at two and a half points, they’d have to pay me $625 a week interest, which I collected weekly. Sure, they paid more interest than at a bank, where they paid a maximum of 21 percent a year on a credit card. With me, it was up to 260 percent a year or five points a week, while a bank could only do 21 percent a year or a point and a half a month. But my customers needed cash quickly with no questions asked, and that was exactly what I provided, albeit at exorbitant rates.
Since I knew everybody I dealt with, there was no need for me to keep detailed records on every loan I made. I’d keep the smaller ones in my head and just write the larger ones down for my records. Now that I was with Jimmy, I was loan-sharking at the variety store and the liquor store, as well as at Triple O’s and the L Street Tavern, and my reputation grew even stronger. When I told Jimmy I was going to continue to do it, he had no problem. “Fine. Just be careful,” he told me.
As my business expanded, I had $150,000 to $200,000 on the street, still not a large business, but a comfortable one. My base continued to grow as customers would introduce me to other people who needed money. I rarely said no to the criminals who I knew would make money. There was no violence involved in my loan-sharking business because most people paid it back. If they didn’t pay it back on time, they’d tell me a story and I’d say, “Don’t worry about it. You’ll pay me back when you get on your feet.”
The only loan-sharking customer I ever had a problem with was Jimmy Santry, and it didn’t involve the money I had loaned him. One night, in front of people in a bar, he told me to go fuck myself, so I knocked him out. That has always been a good reason for me to fight. Always has been. Always will be.
Spending more time with Jimmy Bulger, however, I got to see that his personal habits were pretty simple. Unlike me, he didn’t care for sports. He considered professional sports prolonged adolescence and felt they prevented people from moving forward with their lives. All sports, not just professionally played sports, were not only a waste of time, but were dangerous. For instance, if you were playing a pickup basketball game, you might get injured and miss work. You were better off, he’d tell me, reading a book than playing a game of ball. Working out and keeping yourself in shape was different. That you did for yourself and there were less chances of getting hurt.
And he certainly didn’t approve of the paintball games I enjoyed or the tournaments I went to four or five times a year. Nor did he support my interest in karate. I was in my mid-thirties when I started taking karate lessons with Pat Nee, a friend of mine, at the Boston Athletic Club. Pat and I had only been taking the classes for two weeks when we heard about an upcoming tournament for the New England championships. As it turned out, none of the black or brown belts who had been taking lessons for years at the karate school wanted to enter the tournament and represent the school. So Pat and I went to the instructor, Clarence Wilder, and told him we would fight in the tournament. Clarence, who was a fifth-degree black belt, felt that we were too inexperienced and that it wasn’t a good idea for us to go. But after Pat and I assured him we could take care of ourselves, Pat, Clarence, and I headed to the tournament at the Walter Brown Arena at Boston University.
Students from karate schools all over New England were there, with nine rings set up for fights scheduled in every ring. In my first tournament fight, when the signal was given to start, my opponent suckered me with a right hand. They stopped the fight and gave him a warning for illegal contact. I went back to the corner and told Pat and Clarence no one was suckering me and that I was going to knock this kid out. Pat called over a couple of black belts he knew and told them, “Kevin’s mad. You better watch this fight.”
When the fight resumed and they gave the signal to start, I hit the kid a left hook and knocked him out with one shot. But because he had hit me illegally first and then I had hit him illegally, he could no longer continue. As a result, I was allowed to go on to the next round of fights.
Pat won his first fight, too, though legally. In my second fight, because of all my years of boxing, I had the advantage with my hands. So when my opponent threw a roundhouse kick, I stepped inside and hit him a right hand to the ribs, breaking his ribs. When he couldn’t continue, I went on to the next round. In Pat’s second fight, he won a close decision, so the two of us continued on to the third round.
In my third fight, in the quarterfinals, I hit my opponent in the chest and knocked the wind out of him. He went right down. When he couldn’t continue in the time allotted, they stopped the fight and I got a warning, but was allowed to go on to the next round. Pat won his third fight easily.
In the semifinals, my opponent jumped up in the air to deliver a kick to the head. I stepped inside to hit him a body shot underneath his heart, but when he came down, he landed on his feet and went down lower than I expected. I caught him square in the jaw, knocking him out, and was disqualified from the tournament. They said I was being malicious, intentionally trying to cause bodily harm. In all four of my fights, my opponents had gotten hurt. It wasn’t that I was trying to hurt them. I just knew I couldn’t compete with them with their feet and that they couldn’t compete with me with my hands. So when I hit them, I tried to hurt them. Pat got outpointed in his fourth fight, so we were both out of the tournament. But since we had only been taking karate for two weeks and had made it to the semifinals, we felt we’d made a good showing.
The fellow I’d fought in my last fight went on to win the division and was given a six-foot trophy. When the tournament was over, I told him, “You know that’s my trophy.” He didn’t say anything to me, but just walked away.
A month later, Pat and I fought in a tournament at UMass Boston, where we took first and second place. In a third tournament on the South Shore, we did equally well. We were throwing some kicks in the fights, but mostly we were using our hands. We continued taking classes at the BAC for about a year. They also had an open night of sparring every Thursday night, so we would go down to spar. It was something different for us and I enjoyed the exercise and the workout. But a lot of Boston police were coming down to the BAC to work out and were getting a good look at us. Jimmy didn’t like the fact that I was down there with the cops, so finally I stopped going. He always used to say to me, “You know what beats a black belt? A gun belt.”
Jimmy couldn’t tell you a thing about baseball or football, but once the daughter of Theresa Stanley, his longtime girlfriend, married Montreal Canadiens hockey player Chris Nilan, he took an interest in the Montreal games. Even though he’s wearing a Red Sox cap in the only photograph of us together, he had no special feeling for the team. In the summertime when the sun was out, he’d put a hat on but couldn’t care less what emblem was stuck on it.
The only sports he ever watched were the fights, and I got a kick out of seeing him come up to my folks’ house to watch them with my father. He usually came over when there was a title fight. Jimmy looked far younger than my father, who was only seven years older than him, but my dad had a bad heart and poor health and always looked older than he was. Even though Jimmy avoided funerals and wakes, when my father died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-six on June 17, 1989, he paid for the funeral.
While Jimmy avoided big crowds and never tried to draw attention to himself, he was acutely aware of what was going on around us, both in Boston and in the world. He didn’t watch much TV, but did catch the news or a good movie and liked the History Channel. Every night at midnight, the two of us would drive over to Store 24 on West Broadway and grab the first editions of the next day’s two Boston newspapers. Then we’d pull into the parking lot next to Southie Savings Bank to read them, passing them back and forth. First Jimmy would read the Metro section of the
Globe
and then the crime section of the
Herald,
commenting aloud on anything referring to our business or associates. Most often he would pick out an inaccuracy in one of the articles, saying the reporter or the law enforcement official quoted didn’t know what he was talking about. “The Boston press is not known for its accuracy,” he would tell me. “And they never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” But he felt that it was a good thing for us that none of these people knew what they were talking about, since that meant they had no idea what they were looking for in their investigations. It’s like reading fairy tales, he would say, instead of solid newspaper reporting.
But mostly he read books. When he had been in prison, he’d read a lot of history and psychology books. Although he rarely talked about prison, he did discuss the LSD program he’d been part of in Atlanta, blaming his frequent insomnia and nightmares on that useless, torturous experiment he’d taken part in during the late 1950s and early 1960s to lessen his prison sentence. He’d been one of eighteen inmates in the MKULTRA program under Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, a program that the public knew little about at the time. Funded by Coca-Cola, the program had supposedly been created to find a cure for schizophrenia, but in actuality it was run by the CIA, which was looking for a truth serum.