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By Root 1036 0

next day I went out and got a paper, and there it was in black and white. Jimmy and Stevie, FBI informants. For twenty-five years, I had believed that Jimmy was corrupting the FBI through greed and money, paying them for information to help us. But I couldn’t deny what I had just seen and read. Sure, I knew that the media all too frequently got it wrong or outright lied. But this time Stevie had said on the stand, under oath, that he and Jimmy were FBI informants. The words had come right from his mouth, not from a reporter’s pen. It was incomprehensible. I thought about how intelligent Jimmy was, how he had always turned percentages in his favor. But we had always said the criminals take the good with the bad. You don’t give up your friends. I knew that a lot of criminals had connections in law enforcement and that they were given information in return for money and favors. But it was not supposed to be the other way.

I had really liked and respected Jimmy. He had treated me well. But I couldn’t understand this. You just don’t cooperate with law enforcement. If you have enemies, you don’t talk about them to law enforcement. Rather, you take it to the street and handle it that way. You don’t rat on them and sic the law on them. You don’t eliminate the competition that way. Much later, I came up with my own theory on why Jimmy might have become an FBI informant—that he had been coerced into it by crimes he had committed with Stevie—but on that spring day I was still reeling from the shock of finding out that twenty-five years of my life had been a lie.

After I got the papers, I went down to the store and talked to Kevin O’Neil, who was as shocked as I was. In disbelief himself, Kevin had no idea what was going on. I tried to find a few other people and see if they had heard what I had. Some people hadn’t heard it and those who had had no idea what was going on. But most of the people around us couldn’t believe it. The only thing all of us knew was that we were the ones getting info. A few said they had suspected it but could never prove it. I had never even thought it.

But the one thing I knew for sure was that I now had a problem. People would be thinking I had something to do with these two guys being informants. No one was saying anything, but from that minute on, I was walking around with two pistols to protect myself. I made sure I had plenty of firepower, usually carrying two .45s or two .38s. I kept the pistols in my waistband or inside my coat pocket. I wore a coat with the pockets cut out so when my hands were inside the coat, they were actually on my pistols.

The night after I heard the news, Stevie called me at eight, the way he usually did. As always, there was the recorded voice informing us that the call was being taped. Stevie was in his usual cheerful mode, having just finished another day in the hearings. Everything was hunky-dory. Nothing was wrong. “What’s going on?” I asked him.

“Oh, that thing you heard was nothing,” he told me. “Wait till the whole story comes out.”

The next day I went up to Plymouth to see him. At that time, I was usually going once a week, as was his brother Mikey, his sons, Stevie Junior and Billy, and Phil Costa. I sat down opposite the glass partition separating the two of us and picked up the phone. “What are you doing?” I asked Stevie.

“I know what I’m doing,” he told me. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Do you know you put a bull’s-eye on my back?” I asked him. “I’ve been around you all these years and now you’re putting a bull’s-eye on me?”

“You weren’t involved in all that,” he said. “You don’t have to worry. It’s nothing. Wait till the whole story comes out.”

“Stevie,” I said to him, “it’s all over the news that you and Jimmy are informants.”

“Well, we never said anything about you,” he said.

That’s when I put the phone down and said, right into the glass partition, “How could you? Everything I did, I did with the two of you.” He couldn’t give me up without giving himself up.

The next time I saw John Connolly at the Top of the Hub, he, too, told me to wait until I heard