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As I started to walk away, he got on the radio and talked to someone else. Then he turned around and called out my name again. This time, he said, “Kevin, you’re under arrest.”

When he handcuffed me, he asked me if I had any weapons.

“I have a knife in my back pocket,” I told him.

“Thanks,” he said, and reached in and took it out. Two agents from the DEA and State Police Task Force then put me in a car as other official cars drove by. A few minutes later, Dan Doherty from the DEA and Tom Duffy from the state police, acting as professionally as the other two agents, took me out of that car and put me in the back seat of their car. They drove me over to the DEA headquarters in a building over by City Hall, where they seated me in a room.

It wasn’t a surprise that I was being arrested. The night before, on November 16, I had been at the Teamster’s Pub for a billiards league. When I came out of the building with a friend of mine, we got in my car on Third Street. I took a left on D Street, and was driving up D Street when a van came through the lot where the gas station was. I could see that the driver of the van was burning me, looking at me hard. Immediately, I recognized him as Dave Lazarus from the IRS. He had been all over town lately, asking questions about me and giving everybody he talked to his card. He drove down the street behind me and I saw him making a U-turn. I had my scanner on and could hear him and his fellow agents talking about me. Then I spotted two or three other cars all converge and begin to follow me. At the time, I had two pistols on me. After I ran the red light through the intersection of Broadway, I took a left on Fourth Street, floored the car, and, without stopping for traffic, headed across Dorchester Street. As I took a right onto G Street, I could hear them saying on the police scanner that they had lost me. I went down the street and dropped off the friend who was with me, handing him the two pistols I had on me. He jumped into his car and took off with no problem. They weren’t following him. They were following me. Later on, I parked my car and walked back to my house. That was it for the night.

When I came out of my house the next afternoon, they were waiting. At the DEA headquarters, they gave me the twenty-nine-count indictment. That also didn’t surprise me. I had heard that they had grabbed Kevin Hayes, and they were trying to get him to cooperate against me. I had talked to a friend of mine who knew Hayes well and he had told me, “Don’t worry. He’ll never cooperate. He’ll never say a thing.”

“Are you sure?” I had asked my friend. “Because this guy can put me away.” I was prepared to take Hayes out, but my friend told me he was friends with Hayes’s wife.

“Don’t worry,” my friend said again. “He’ll never say a word against you.” It turned out that Kevin Hayes did give the DEA and the state police the Predicate Act in the last five years, meaning he told them about a criminal act that had occurred in the last five years, with which they were able to indict me on a RICO charge. They said I had kidnapped Hayes, which was not true. He had come in of his own will. Besides, the guy weighed 400 pounds. There was no way I could have kidnapped him. Hayes also told them that there had been two Igloo coolers in the room, the kind you use for sandwiches and cold drinks, and that I was going to put him in the coolers after I chopped him up. If I had ever chopped up his 400-pound body, I would have needed a freezer truck for all the pieces.

I was kept at DEA headquarters for about three hours. At first the agents tried to make a deal with me, telling me, “Kevin, you don’t have to go away. You can work with us.”

“You have nothing,” I told them.

Finally they said, “Bring in the other guy,” and brought in Kevin O’Neil. I had heard all along that they were going to indict me and Kevin, but I felt bad for Kevin. He had nothing to do with anything Jimmy, Stevie, or I were doing. For him, it was guilt by association. Eventually he pleaded guilty in October 2000