Read Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob Online
Authors: Kevin Weeks; Phyllis Karas
Even today, I get upset when I think of what one person did to a community such as South Boston. The judge’s grand experiment failed, and who was left to pay the price? You could not understand what it was like unless you lived there and saw a proud town condemned by busing. If I have strong feelings on certain issues, I have a right to. I was there and lived through those times. I have seen the results of forced busing and more recently, forced housing. Where did they want to start these programs? With the poor people, of course, forcing the poor people to move out and let the minorities move in. The neighborhood went downhill and nobody got along anymore. The people of South Boston had the will of others forced upon them. Because of the actions of others, they were the ones who had to leave their schools and their houses. A true South Bostonian is someone whose family has been there for two, three, or four generations; anyone else is an interloper. Today, sadly, South Boston is just a shell of its former self. And that is all a result of busing, the grand experiment that destroyed a once grand community.
Things were rough all over Southie during those years. In 1974, a cop got beat up at the Rabbit Inn in South Boston and the TPF determined the patrons in the Inn had done it. TPF went into the bar in full riot gear, with their badges covered, and proceeded to use their sap gloves to whale on everyone there. When they started to whale on Eddie Crow, a regular at the Rabbit Inn who had braces on both legs, Flash Flaherty, another regular at the bar, dove on top of Eddie to protect him and ended up getting whaled on mercilessly. That was what was going on in South Boston, not just in the schools, but in the bars and on the streets.
Even though there was never a day at the high school without at least one fight, it wasn’t a tough job for me. I could handle the fights and liked being around my friends. And besides, I could watch out for Pam. After the incident with Mikey Faith, they put metal detectors at the front door. But the black kids would take one or two teeth out of their Afro picks, put the picks between their fingers, and use them to punch kids. Unlike the black kids, the white kids weren’t using weapons. They just used their hands. They would walk up to a black kid and crack him and start fighting. But the black kids were scared for their lives, and doing what they could to protect themselves.
It was a tough year for all the kids. You had white kids who were mad because no education was going on and their school and college plans were being destroyed. Attendance was way down every day. Kids were boycotting the teams, so all sports were canceled for the year. The parents who could afford it sent their kids to private schools, while some kids just quit and hung out, doing nothing during the day. Even though senior year was ruined for most kids, somehow they did manage to have a graduation. No more than twelve black kids came to graduation, but when one black kid went up to get his diploma, a white kid took off his mortarboard cap and whipped it at his head like a Frisbee.
During that year, my brother Johnny kept speaking to John Marquandt, the dean of admissions at Harvard, about my attending Harvard. I guess the folks at Harvard thought it would be special if three brothers from the projects went there, so the dean arranged it so I would spend a year at prep school. If my grades were good enough, I’d get a full scholarship to Harvard in September 1976. I got a scholarship to the Commonwealth School, an academically demanding private school for grades 9 to 12 in Boston, and left my job at South Boston High to start at the prep school in September 1975. I moved out of the apartment with my friends and back to Pilsudski Way.
But things didn’t work out so great for me at the coed prep school. First of all, I was nineteen then, and the kids in my classes were sixteen or seventeen, and had been there since the ninth grade. Nearly all of them were from the suburbs, and even though it wasn’t a religious school, most of the kids were Jewish. They even had this mandatory retreat for Yom Kippur. They were smart, nice kids, but I was an Irish kid from Southie and all I wanted was to be with my girlfriend. It was culture shock to be with these kids. I was a complete outsider and felt lost there.
The school was in a Victorian house with small classrooms, no more than twelve to fifteen kids in a class. I liked the classes, but I didn’t fit in at all. Things came to a head for me in the dining room. Each kid was supposed to set the table and serve the food for a week. I had no desire to dish out anybody’s food, and I never liked anyone telling me what to do. “Hey, you’re big boys,” I told a couple of kids who put their plates in front of me. “Here’s a spoon. Help yourself.”
When one kid said, “You have to serve me,” I did. I threw a plate of food in his face. I finished the week out and never went back. I had lasted two months there. But I felt great; no regrets. Johnny was a little upset and felt like I’d thrown away my chance to go to Harvard, but my parents were okay with it. Besides, they were older and more tired by then. As I had gotten older, they had less and less control over me. My father had his first heart attack in 1974 and wasn’t doing great. My mother’s arthritis was as bad as ever, and she was even more exhausted than he was.
I have no idea why I was the only one in the family to become a criminal. No one else in my family rebelled against my father, and all my sisters and brothers became hard-working, law-abiding professionals. Today, all of us are close. My brothers would do anything for me, short of killing someone. The only difference is that if necessary, I would take it one step further. Yet in some strange way, my father lived through me and the life I chose. Here he had these two great sons, both of whom graduated from Harvard and went on to lead successful, respectable lives, and he was the most proud of the son who became a criminal. It’s hard to understand. And sad.
But back in the fall of 1975, I was eager to get my job back at South Boston High, and help out my parents. I had been back working at the high school for just a few months when I ran into a problem. A new principal, Jerome Winegar, had been brought in from Minnesota to replace Dr. Reid, who was forced out. Winegar seemed to think he was intellectually superior to everyone around him. He had thin hair and a pock-marked face, and looked like a tall version of the comedian Professor Irwin Corey. I only wish I could have used the cord attached to the glasses that hung around his neck to strangle him. It was something that they brought in a guy from Minnesota to show the city of Boston how to achieve integration in a high school. Winegar came for the money, not because he believed in the concept. Every time I saw him involved in a situation, he was cajoling the black students or favoring the minority teachers. He was there for six or seven years and the problems from busing certainly didn’t get any better under his leadership.
One day, a few months after I’d returned to my job at the high school, a group of us aides, including Richie Turpin and my best friend, Billy Connell, were on the second floor of the auditorium, taking a break. A black kid walked by and said something smart to Richie, who said something smart right back to him. The kid went home and told his father, and a couple of days later, we had this big meeting at the school. Winegar set up this long table for the major from the state police who was in charge of the troops at the school, the vice principal, the black student and his father, and Richie, Billy, and me. Richie, Billy, and I were sitting on one side and the black kid, his father, Winegar, and the police major were on the other side. We were all going back and forth over who said what to who. The father, who was wearing a black T-shirt covered with the words
SUGAR SHACK
in glittering letters, turned around and said to his son, “I don’t care about who said what. Just show me the boy who hit you.”
None of us had hit him, but the kid pointed at me of all people and said, “It was him, Daddy. It was Weeks.” I’d never had a word with the kid, but the father jumped up like he was coming over the table at me. I jumped out of my seat and suckered him over the table. When Billy and Richie jumped over the table, the state police major jumped in and broke it up.
Jerome Winegar backed the kid’s story, and it looked like I was going to be brought up on charges. The state police major wrote up his report, gave it to Jerome Winegar, and told him, “You should read it.”
Winegar said, “I think we all saw the same thing.” But he read the report and was dumbfounded. The state police major told me he’d written that the black man was coming after me and I was defending myself. Winegar insisted that he saw it the other way.
The state police major said, “I’ve been a trooper for over twenty-five years. In my experience, he was defending himself.”
A week later, Jerome fired me, not Richie or Billy. And I got brought up on charges of assault and battery. This was my first time as a defendant, but the case got thrown out at a probable cause hearing in Southie. At that hearing, I met Billy O’Neil, one of the owners of Triple O’s, a popular bar in Southie, who had been brought up on charges of beating up a black cabdriver. It was Billy who offered me a job bouncing at Triple O’s and the chance to get to know James “Whitey” Bulger.
I had no idea then exactly what I was getting involved in. But I believed then, as I do now, that every time something negative happens in my life, something good will occur. It was time to begin a new chapter in my life. I never look back on anything that has happened to me and dwell on it. Not then, not now. It happened. It’s over. I have no regrets about any parts of my life, except for two mistakes: losing Pam and not being a better father to my two sons.
But in the winter of 1976, as I left South Boston High for the last time and traveled one mile to the doors of Triple O’s, I wasn’t entering a completely unfamiliar world. In the summer of 1974, I’d been bouncing at Flix, a nightclub in the Somerset Hotel on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. The club handled a rough crowd, and the owner had asked if eight of us would come in and clean up the place, which we did. There were lots of fights, and my friends and I were busy every night taking care of them. One night, after the bar had closed, someone rode by on the expressway and shot out the club’s windows. I have no idea if they were involved in the shooting, but a half-hour later, Jimmy came walking in with Stevie Flemmi. It was the first time I’d ever seen Stevie, although I certainly knew he was a member of the Winter Hill mob, and had been involved in the gang wars of the 1960s and 1970s. My friend gave the two of them a hard time at the door and told them the club was closed when the owner recognized Jimmy and Stevie and immediately let them in.
But that was not the first time I’d seen Jimmy. Six years earlier, when I was thirteen and sitting next to my brother Billy, who was driving my father’s car down Burke Street in the Old Colony projects, I had seen Jimmy walk out of the back of a building. It was summertime and he was by himself, wearing a short-sleeved, blue-and-white-striped shirt. He looked like he was in great shape.
“Stop staring at him,” Billy had told me. “He’s Whitey Bulger.”
“I know who he is,” I said.
On Christmas Day 1978, at her parents’ house on East Fourth Street in South Boston, I gave Pam a ring. It was a nice ring and cost me around $3,000. I had no problem paying for the ring, since I was making some money by then. I put the ring in a box and tried to surprise her with it, but like most women she probably knew exactly when and what she was going to get. A year and a half later, on April 26, 1980, we got married at the Gate of Heaven Church in South Boston. Pam planned the big wedding, with eighteen people in the wedding party, and I just agreed with everything she said. She looked absolutely stunning. It took her longer to walk down the aisle of the church than for us to say the vows. As soon as the priest finished, everyone clapped loudly and I kissed the beautiful bride.
I’d always liked Pam’s terrific family, which includes her six sisters: three older sisters, Paula, Sue, and Karen; and three younger sisters, Marie, Michelle, and Christine. But you had to pity her poor father, Rocky, with seven daughters and only one bathroom. Rocky was a great guy, one of the gentlest men I ever met, and a loving father who was proud of all his daughters. But three years before we got married, Pam’s mother, Marie, died at age forty-seven from lung cancer. Marie was a beautiful woman who looked like Veronica Lake. When Marie got sick, Pam quit her job and took amazing care of her, never leaving her mother’s side while she was dying. But that’s the kind of person Pam has always been: loyal and loving. The whole Cavaleri family has always been a warm, emotional, and outgoing family, very different from mine. While my brothers and sisters are loyal to one another, we’re not demonstrative like Pam’s family. We all have sick senses of humor, sort of a black humor that makes us laugh at things most people would not find funny. Like if one of us fell down the stairs, an ordinary family might run to help him, but my brothers and sisters would fall over each other laughing hysterically. Same thing if one of us got a hand caught in the door. Another person might say, “Oh, my god! Are you all right?” and race over to help. Not our group. We’d be convulsed in laughter. It doesn’t mean we’re cold-hearted or unloving. It’s just this weird way of looking at things we all share. And it’s completely different from the way Pam’s family would respond to the same event. Even today, though Pam is sadly no longer my wife, I still keep in touch with her family and have always been grateful for how supportive they are of our boys.
At the wedding, Billy Connell was my best man. Billy and I had known each other since we were kids growing up in the Old Colony projects and had lived together on West Third Street before Pam and I got married. We’d had some fun times decorating that apartment. One night, around 4:00
A.M
., Billy, Pam, and I walked into an all-night Howard Johnson’s restaurant in Andrew Square, picked up a seventy-five-pound plant, and walked out with it. When a waitress asked us what we were doing, I told her in a serious, no-nonsense tone that we were tree surgeons. She nodded just as seriously as we carefully set the plant in the back of Pam’s father’s Suburban and drove off. My first parlor set came from the hotel part of the same restaurant a few weeks later. That time, around two in the afternoon, another friend and I picked up a couch and love seat like we knew what we were doing and threw them in the back of the Suburban. No one paid any attention to us. I learned a good lesson decorating that apartment: Nobody will think anything is wrong if you do it calmly. It’s too obvious to be a crime. That particular lesson turned out to be useful.