• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Almost eight months later, on July 26, I was up in New Hampshire with family playing golf for the week. When I got back to the liquor store that weekend, I got a call from Pat saying that his brother Michael had hit the lottery for $14.3 million. That night, Patty and I met Michael, who said to Patty, “We’re partners.” Patty told Michael he was partners with me and Jimmy, and Michael said, “I don’t care what you do with your 50 percent. I know what I’m doing with mine.” So Michael got 50 percent, and Pat, Jimmy, and I shared the other 50 percent, with the three of us receiving $119,000 apiece before taxes for twenty years.

At that time, there was no love between Jimmy and Joe Malone, the state treasurer. Actually, if Danny Aiello and Jerry Cooney, a one-time heavyweight contender, mated, their son would look just like Joe Malone. Joe had the machine at the liquor store taken out. At the lottery headquarters, they checked their machine, and all the balls that were used to draw numbers were weighed to see if we had somehow rigged it. It was a waste of time. The drawing was legit.

At a press conference, Joe said that the only winner who could have caused him more trouble would have been his mother. The press was certain that somehow Billy had put the fix in for his brother and that it was all part of an after-the-win scheme to launder dirty money. Again, they were wrong. But the truth also was that it caused us more heat than it was worth.

The media also worked hard trying to make up stories about Jimmy’s sexual orientation. But there wasn’t any truth to any of those stories. One photo of Jimmy that often appears in the press shows him bare-chested except for a vest, wearing a cowboy hat and holding a gun. It’s supposed to equate him with the Village People, when he really was with a woman. The photo was taken when he and Theresa were on vacation and they went into a vintage costume place where you put on old-fashioned garb and have your photo taken. They never show the part of the photo where Theresa is dressed as a saloon girl. It’s just easier for the press to take Jimmy’s part of the picture out of context and leave Theresa out of it. Actually, Theresa has the complete photo and won’t release it. She’s saving it for when she writes her book.

Despite their continuous attempt to grab pictures of us, Jimmy and I were pretty alert and managed to avoid nearly every photographer who hounded us. There is one photo of the two of us, however, that continually accompanies articles about either one of us, and is usually shown on the Whitey Bulger episodes of America’s Most Wanted. This one was taken by a Globe reporter who happened to stumble across the two of us one summer day when Jimmy and I were walking around Castle Island. I was wearing a white T-shirt with FILA across its front and Jimmy had on a Boston Red Sox cap. The minute we spotted the photographer, with his footlong telescopic lens stretched across the roof of his car, Jimmy and I both gave him dirty looks. Then, as I started running toward him, the photographer jumped into his car and took off. For all the years the photographers hounded us, that was one of only two photographs they ever got of the two of us together.

There was one incident, however, in which Jimmy and I managed to use the media to further our own interests. In 1990, we were interested in the race for governor of Massachusetts and were anxious to do whatever we could to hurt the campaign of lieutenant governor Francis X. Bellotti. Jimmy had never liked Bellotti and particularly blamed him for the failed investigation into the fire that took place at the Hotel Vendome on June 17, 1972. During the fire, nine firemen lost their lives when the southeast section of the hotel collapsed. Jimmy always believed that the investigation was whitewashed because Franchi Construction, which was doing the renovation of the hotel, was a political contributor to Bellotti. It had been reported that some of the support beams were illegally taken out and should never have been removed during the renovation.