Read Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob Online
Authors: Kevin Weeks; Phyllis Karas
Jimmy was put on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List in August 1999 for eighteen counts of murder. There is a $1 million reward for information leading to his arrest. And he’s still on the run…
Before he was killed, Tommy King had threatened a Boston police detective that he was going to kill him. Knowing Tommy’s violent reputation and that he was a capable guy, the detective was afraid of him. Jimmy met with the detective, who was a tenacious investigator, and promised to talk to Tommy and make him listen to reason. If Tommy wouldn’t listen to him, Jimmy said, he would put himself between Tommy and the detective to defuse the situation and make sure no harm came to the detective. About a week later, Jimmy informed the detective that he no longer had a problem. He told him Tommy hadn’t listened to him, but he didn’t have to worry about anything, that Tommy would no longer bother him.
The truth was that even though Tommy King had made the threats, when Jimmy met with the detective, Tommy had already been dead for two weeks. Jimmy had ended up using Tommy’s death as leverage with this detective. He’d become friends with him by letting him think Tommy was gone on his behalf. It was just another case of Jimmy’s Machiavellian side, turning a potentially bad situation to his advantage.
Billy O’Sullivan’s death might not have happened if he had listened to Jimmy. Billy O had been with Jimmy against the Mullins and had shot Buddy Roache during the gang war. Buddy, whose brother Mickey later became Boston’s police commissioner, ended up crippled and in a wheelchair. In March 1971, not too long after he shot the wrong McGonigle, Jimmy went to New York to pick up guns. Before he left, he told Billy to be careful while he was gone and not to drink. But that night, Billy hung around with Kevin O’Neil down at the Transit Café and ended up drunk. Kevin offered him a ride home, but Billy refused the offer. Heading home, he was chased by a couple of men with the Mullins gang who caught up with him when he tripped on a manhole cover about 200 yards from his house and fell down. While he was lying there, his pursuers shot him to death. If Kevin O’Neil had ended up driving Billy O’Sullivan home that night, he probably would have been killed, too.
The reason for Richie Castucci’s murder five years later wasn’t any more difficult to understand. A bookmaker, Castucci had been cooperating with the FBI about the Winter Hill gang and bookmaking, shakedowns, and murder. He was also giving information as to the whereabouts of certain members of Winter Hill who were on the lam. Once FBI agent John Connolly informed Jimmy about Castucci’s cooperation, Winter Hill put in a bunch of bets with the bookmaker. If they lost, Castucci wasn’t getting his money because they were going to kill him. If they won, they would collect the money off Castucci and still kill him. As it was, they lost the bets. A meeting was set up for Castucci to come over and collect the money. When Castucci came over to meet Jimmy and Stevie and Johnny Martorano, Jimmy and Stevie gave him a bag of money and told him to go to the house around the corner to count the money. While Castucci was sitting at the kitchen table counting the money with Jimmy and Stevie, Johnny came in and shot him in the head. They put Castucci’s body in a sleeping bag, which made it easier to move him, and deposited it in the trunk of his Cadillac. An associate who had some involvement in the murder actually wanted to be reimbursed for the $17 he had laid out to buy the sleeping bag!
Jimmy O’Toole, a well-known gangland figure involved in armored car robberies, had been aligned with members of the Charlestown-based McLaughlin gang. His murder in December 1973 was hastened by Eddie Connors, who alerted members of Winter Hill that O’Toole was leaving the Bulldogs Tavern on Savin Hill Avenue. Jimmy O’Toole hadn’t gone far down Savin Hill and Dorchester avenues when four Winter Hill cars surrounded him, two to block off the ends of the street so no one could get in or out, one to act as a crash car in case the police arrived, and the fourth to serve as a hit car. O’Toole ducked behind a mailbox, which was on a cement pad, not attached to the ground. He kept moving the mailbox from side to side to keep it between himself and the bullets which poured out of the cars. Finally, Joe MacDonald got frustrated and jumped out of the car, walked up to O’Toole, and shot him in the head. Although he was in one of the four cars, Jimmy didn’t fire the fatal shot that night. I believe the murder was more payback for O’Toole’s involvement in the shooting of Stevie’s brother, the Bear, when O’Toole was hooked up with the McLaughlins, than for anything else. The Bear had been hit eleven times but survived.
Eddie Connors, who also had a hand in the rackets, died less than three years later. After he was arrested for a $500,000 armored car robbery, Jimmy and Stevie were worried he wouldn’t stand up and might be cooperating with law enforcement. They thought he was starting to talk about his part in the O’Toole murder.
On the night of June 12, 1975, members of Winter Hill sent a message to Connors to give them the number of a pay phone where they could call him. Connors gave the number of a phone booth outside a Sunoco station across from Orbit’s department store in Dorchester. He then parked his Lincoln Continental with the motor running and walked over to the booth to await the call. Waiting in the weeds outside the telephone booth on Morrissey Boulevard, Jimmy and Stevie killed Eddie when he picked up the phone. Jimmy had a shotgun and Stevie a rifle, and the first shot Jimmy fired blew Eddie’s hand off. After the two of them finished Eddie off, Johnny Martorano picked up Jimmy and Stevie and the three of them took off. As they were driving away, Johnny was obeying the speed limit, and Jimmy said to him, “What are you doing? Pull over.” Then Jimmy jumped into the driver’s seat and drove off. Quickly.
Roger Wheeler’s murder was purely business. A respected millionaire from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the owner of Telex Corp., Wheeler bought World Jai Alai in 1978 for $50 million. A few years later, however, he began to suspect possible skimming from the company’s Connecticut office and started to check things out. When Wheeler started to tighten the reins, John Callahan, a former president of World Jai Alai, broached the subject to Winter Hill that if Wheeler was out of the way, then he could take over and Winter Hill would have a piece of it.
On May 27, 1981, as Wheeler was getting into his Cadillac after a round of golf at the Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Johnny Martorano and Joe MacDonald were waiting in the parking lot for him. While Joe remained in the car, Johnny walked up to Wheeler’s car and shot him between the eyes, thus setting off the events for the Halloran and Callahan murders. A major investigation went on after the Wheeler murder, and after a period of time, Winter Hill stopped getting money from Jai Alai.
John Callahan, who was a big man, six feet tall and about 250 pounds, went soon after that, again for business reasons. Jimmy told me that a year after Wheeler’s and Halloran’s deaths, FBI agent John Connolly told him and Stevie that Callahan was going to be called in front of the grand jury and put under extreme pressure on the two murders. Of course, Connolly denies this. At the time, Johnny Martorano was already down in Florida. But Jimmy and Stevie flew down to New York and Johnny came up from Florida and met them at a hotel at one of the New York airports. Here, they discussed Callahan and whether or not he would stand up when facing the possibility of doing twenty years. It was decided Callahan would have to go.
Shortly thereafter, Callahan flew into Miami International Airport where Johnny Martorano and Joe MacDonald picked him up in a van and asked him if he wanted a drink. When he said yes, Johnny shot him in the back of the head. Then they put his body in the trunk of his Cadillac and left him at the airport. But Jimmy was upset that they didn’t bury him. Since the ground in Florida is mostly sand, it would have been easy digging. If they had put him under, no one would have found him, and it would have looked like he had taken off and become another dead end. However, when his body was found in the trunk of his car, the investigation continued.
Years later, H. Paul Rico, a former Boston FBI agent who worked security at World Jai Alai, was charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder in Wheeler’s death. Investigators accused Rico of aiding Johnny in the murder, but Rico died in custody in Oklahoma before he was brought to trial. The truth was that Rico had done all the legwork. He had told Johnny where Wheeler was going to be, what he drove, and what he looked like. Basically, Rico had set up the murder.
Approximately a year after Rico died, John Connolly was indicted for Callahan’s murder and charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy for allegedly providing information, the tip to Jimmy and Stevie, that prosecutors said led to Callahan’s death.
Ten murders, ten violent deaths. Jimmy might have been responsible for only nine of them, but any way you look at it, the world was left missing nine criminals and one innocent businessman.
Jimmy had his own unique sense of morality. Even though he spent so much of his life involved in violent crime, he still believed that certain crimes could not be committed, certainly not on his turf, anyhow. And he never hesitated to help someone he felt needed his help.
But even when he felt compassion for someone in need, Jimmy could appreciate the same morbid, black humor I enjoyed. For instance, one day, Jimmy, Stevie, and I were driving up Broadway in Jimmy’s dark blue Ford LTD when we noticed this lady coming down the street in a motorized wheelchair. Jimmy stared at her for minute and said, “I wonder what that poor lady does in the winter.”
I looked at him and said, “Snow tires.”
Laughing, he said, “You dirty bastard. Don’t you have any sympathy for anybody?” We had lots of those sick laughs.
But heroin dealers were one subject about which Jimmy had no sense of humor. We didn’t deal with them. Jimmy wouldn’t let them in town. Even though cocaine and marijuana were well established in Southie, if we found out anyone was selling those drugs to a kid, they had a problem. We went after them, too. However, as long as Jimmy was in charge, heroin never took root and was never going to.
If we found out about a heroin dealer, Jimmy and I let them know they had to get out of town. If they didn’t, I beat them up. It might have taken more than one business visit, but they always left. In the rare cases when they didn’t leave after a beating, we told them on our second visit we would kill them the next time. Then they left.
There were some exceptions, of course. Like the Kivlan brothers, Al and Pat. Unfortunately, the Kivlans, both ex-boxers in their forties with broken noses and scar tissue around their eyes, never listened to anyone. In 1990, a girl Jimmy knew came to the store and said her daughter couldn’t play in her own backyard because of the needles there. Jimmy and I went over to her house on F and Silver streets, a two-family house whose yard abutted the three-decker house where the Kivlans lived on the first floor. The houses were just up the street from where a Metropolitan District Commission cop lived. The girl showed us the needles and told us that every time the police came, the Kivlans got rid of the stuff and the cops couldn’t find a thing. The MDC cop told us the same story. Whenever he called the cops, everyone in the house was gone by the time they got there. The next day, they were back in business. The Boston cops told us directly that they couldn’t catch the guys.
One Friday night, we came to the house, and when people started pulling up, we told them to get the fuck out of there. On Saturday night, we came back and saw the same people pulling up. When they started to go into the house, Jimmy and I got out of the car and I beat up two or three of them. “You’re getting off easy with a beating,” Jimmy told them. “Next time we see you here, we’ll kill you.”
When nothing changed the next night, Teddy Devins and I went over to the Curley Lumber Yard on Monday and bought some sheets of plywood. Then we drove the truck over to the Kivlans’ house, stood on the bed of the truck, and, with people still inside the house, started to nail the plywood over the windows. The brothers were too scared to come out, but as we continued nailing, we could see one of their wives, stunned, looking out at us. When we finished, we spray-painted the plywood with the words,
OUT OF BUSINESS NO DRUGS
.
Later that day, we caught up with Al Kivlan and his brother on G Street and Fourth and told them they had twenty-four hours to get out or we would kill them. By Tuesday, they were gone from the house on F and Silver. For good. A day or so later, the MDC cop and some other neighbors came down to the store to thank us. They told us we had done what the Boston cops hadn’t been able to do. Obviously, we used different tactics than the Boston cops.
Another heroin dealer who needed some persuasion to move out of Southie was some kid in the Old Colony project. When we heard people complaining about noise at all hours of the night in one building there, we considered it unacceptable. There were little babies in that building. And residents had older kids who couldn’t sleep because of cars pulling up and doors slamming loudly at all hours of the night. The first time we went into the building, the dealer jumped out the side window and took off. On our next visit, we caught up with him and told him that was it. He was out of business. Things died down a little bit, but a week later the heroin dealer was back in full swing.
The third time I went up to the house, I knocked on the door, the dealer answered, and I gave him a beating and knocked him out. But he still didn’t learn. Shortly afterward, we heard that he had started dealing again. One afternoon, Jimmy and I were driving down East Ninth Street in the Old Colony project when Jimmy noticed him walking on the sidewalk. Jimmy just pulled the car onto the sidewalk and ran him over. The kid ended up in the hospital with some broken bones in his legs, but he moved out of Old Colony. How many times do you have to tell someone to get out before he finally gets the message?