Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [101]
When I headed out of the airport, one of the security guards tried to follow me through the revolving doors. As I stepped out, Jimmy stuck his foot into the door, trapping the guard inside the middle door. Walking across the street, I saw two state troopers who had parked their car in front of mine. “Beautiful night, isn’t it?” I said calmly to them.
“Yeah, it is,” one of the troopers answered. Then I got into the black Chevy and drove away. As I pulled out of the airport, I put on the police scanner and drove back to the variety store. There was nothing on the scanner about the Logan incident.
Back at the airport, the officials found that both Jimmy and Theresa had less than $10,000, the specified amount a passenger is allowed to carry. “You can’t fucking hold me,” Jimmy told them. “You got nothing on me.” As it turned out, even though the officials could have made up any charge they wanted, said he assaulted a guard or charged him with disorderly conduct and made him go to court, they didn’t charge him with anything.
A couple of hours after I left, after a lot more swearing from Jimmy, the officials released the two of them. When I met Jimmy down at the variety store later that night, I gave him back the $80,000 in the money belt.
But the media screwed up the simple facts of that case. Both Howie Carr and Peter Gelzinis reported that Jimmy had a suitcase filled with $500,000 that he was trying to bring into Montreal. But the inaccurate facts didn’t stop there. On September 25, 1998, William Johnson, the state trooper who had initially detained Jimmy and Theresa, committed suicide in a New Hampshire field. The media tried to blame the trooper’s death on Jimmy, insisting that Billy Bulger, who was president of the Massachusetts State Senate, had taken revenge on Johnson by demoting him. But that simply wasn’t true. Other troopers told me the guy had mental health issues. Even though the trooper had plenty of problems before he met Jimmy, it made a much better story to link his suicide to the scene at Logan eleven years earlier.
Most of the time, the Boston Globe wasn’t as inaccurate as the Herald. They just knocked the people from Southie during busing. They also liked to describe me in all their stories as “Whitey’s surrogate son,” another example of the media putting labels on people they wrote about. Jimmy and I were friends, not like father and son. Even though he was the boss, he always treated me equally, like an associate, not a son. The reporter who seemed to do the most research and put real effort into getting the true story without having been there was Shelley Murphy, who had been at the Herald for ten years when she went to work for the Globe in 1993. But Jimmy and I usually just ended up laughing at most of the news stories, as time and time again the media had it wrong, over and over holding to their pledge to never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
When Jimmy and I, along with two of our friends, won the lottery, the press had another field day. The truth of the story is that in December 1990, Jimmy and I walked into the liquor store and saw a friend of ours, Pat Linskey, buying Mass Millions season tickets. When Jimmy asked him what he was doing, Patty said he was buying tickets as extra Christmas gifts in case he forgot friends and people who worked down at the store. Jimmy and I offered to help him pay for the tickets, but he said, “No, I have it.”
During that week, the three of us gave out the tickets to friends and relatives as last-minute gifts, telling everyone, in a more or less joking manner, “If you win, we’re partners.” But no one ever expected