Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [104]
And I wasn’t worried about my involvement in the case, since I had nothing to do with the Jewish bookmakers. I also knew that for the past year or two, Jimmy and Stevie had been receiving weekly updates about what was going on with the grand jury, which had already received a couple of extensions. They knew what people were saying there from their sources in law enforcement, as well as from people who had been summoned there. They’d held the grand jury out in Worcester to try and cut down on leaks, but it wasn’t working. In all the information they were getting, my name had never been mentioned. Jimmy knew the whole cast of characters involved, the bookmakers and everyone else the grand jury was targeting, as well as the witnesses they were calling in. And he’d been maintaining a lower profile than before. Normally, Jimmy was pretty elusive, but he’d been even more so for the past year and a half. He’d also been taking more trips than usual, getting out of town when the heat was turned up.
In 1993 and 1994, before the pinches came down, Stevie and Jimmy were traveling through the French and Italian Riviera. The two of them traveled all over Europe, sometimes separating for a while. They’d be gone two or three weeks at a time. Sometimes they took girls; sometimes just the two of them went. They would rent cars and travel all through Europe. It was more preparation than anything, getting ready for another life. They didn’t ask me to go, not that I would have wanted to.
Jimmy had prepared for the run for years. He’d established a whole other person, Thomas Baxter, with a complete ID and credit cards in that name. He’d even joined associations under Baxter’s name, building an entire portfolio on the guy. He’d always said you have to be ready to take off on short notice. And he was.
Stevie, however, was, as usual, all over the place. He wasn’t curtailing any of his activities or anything. Over the past two years, Jimmy had been especially upset with Stevie’s traveling back and forth to Cambridge and Brookline, meeting with Frank Salemme at the Busy Bee restaurant. Frankie went back to the 1960s with Stevie and had made a successful bid in the late 1980s to take over the New England Mafia. Recently, however, Frankie had taken off after he and his son got indicted for some scam in Hollywood on a movie production. But for years before Frankie went on the lam, Stevie had headed to the other side of town during the day and then came back over to meet with us in Southie around four-thirty in the afternoon.
Jimmy kept saying, “What are you doing? You’re over there with him and then you come over to us. You make it look like one big gang and you’re the liaison between Frankie and us. You’re making us one big target.”
“No way, Jimmy,” Stevie said. “I’m just staying on top of things.”
“Are you making money with this guy?” Jimmy asked him. “Do you have anything going with him?”
“No,” Stevie said.
“Then why are you over there?” Jimmy asked.
“We’re friends,” Stevie told him.
“Yeah, well, they’re getting pictures of you and Frankie together, and then the feds are taking pictures of you leaving and meeting with us here,” Jimmy said.
But it had been useless for Jimmy to talk to Stevie. He continued moving around, not changing any of his activities just because a grand jury was investigating him. Stevie wasn’t as keenly attuned to the law as the two of us were. Many times they were on him for days and he didn’t have a clue.
One October afternoon in 1994, a few months before the indictments, Stevie picked me up at the variety store just to take a ride. I hopped into the car with him, and we drove downtown toward Andrew Square and took a left onto Boston Street. As we did, I turned the visor down so I could look in the mirror and immediately picked up four cars following us: a van, a Trans Am, a red Camaro, and a Ford LTD. We hadn’t gone more than three