Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [112]
“You’ve got to reach Jimmy,” Stevie wrote to me that visit, but, of course, there was nothing I could do for those five weeks, except hope he didn’t get caught using his Baxter alias.
Finally, on July Fourth weekend, he called and I told him Theresa had given him up. “Thank God, at least I know,” he said calmly, not sounding the least bit rattled. “I’ll call you back.”
When he called back a few days later, he told me to take some photos of his younger brother Jackie, which he could use for a new ID. He also told me he’d grown a mustache, which was a big change from his usual clean-shaven look, so I should make sure Jackie had a mustache in the photo. I talked to him for a few minutes about taking out Alan Thistle, since Thistle was dating Theresa and was working for the FBI and everything. But he said no. Going out with Thistle would be Theresa’s punishment.
So I went to Jackie’s house at 17 Twomey Court in South Boston with a blue cotton sheet, a phony mustache, and a Polaroid camera, and took a bunch of photos of Jackie, using the blue sheet for background. I chose the four best and spent a good month putting together the documentation necessary to get Jimmy a new Social Security number, driver’s license, and birth certificate.
In August, on the night Jimmy was supposed to call me back at eight, I waited at the phone number I’d given him, but he didn’t call. He was very punctual and it wasn’t like him to be even a minute late. When he finally called me at exactly nine, I figured out that he had to be in the Midwest, probably the Chicago area, with the time one hour behind us in the East, and he had gotten confused with the time difference. “You probably know where I am now,” he said when I told him I’d been waiting an hour.
“I’ve got an idea,” I said, and he told me to meet him in Chicago at Water Tower Place in two days and to bring the pictures of Jackie. I rented a little blue foreign car and drove out there with a girl. Pam and I were separated by then. After I made sure there was no one following us, we stopped overnight in South Bend, Indiana, near Notre Dame. The next day we met Jimmy and Cathy near Water Tower Place, a big modern building in Chicago. It was a beautiful late summer day and the four of us first had something to eat at an outside café. Afterward we walked around in downtown Chicago. The girls walked and talked together so Jimmy and I could walk alone. As always, no one recognized him.
When we were walking that afternoon, Jimmy told me how he had been in Louisiana, and had rented a place down there. He’d ended up befriending this family where the husband was kind of lazy. The guy was a carpenter by trade, so Jimmy bought him all kinds of carpentry tools. They were such nice people that he also bought appliances to help them out. He even went craw fishing with the guy, throwing out the nets and stuff. He ended up spending around forty grand on that family. I just laughed as he told me this story. It was typical of Jimmy to do the unexpected. There he is, on the run, and he’s taking care of other people. That’s Jimmy.
He also told me how he and Cathy were walking down the street in that Louisiana town one afternoon and the sheriff who was directing traffic stopped the cars to let the two of them get by. “Hi, Tom,” the sheriff greeted him, as friendly as could be. Jimmy smiled back and he and Cathy just kept on walking.
But even though Jimmy and Cathy looked terrific and I could tell he was still working out regularly, there was a sense that things might be coming down. At one point, while the two of us were walking, he told