Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [13]
“Do whatever you have to do,” I told him.
That afternoon when Sigfried went to his locker, Billy was waiting for him. He walked up to him and asked, “Why don’t you pick on me?”
Goldstein looked at him and said, “You ain’t shit.”
At that, Billy Allen knocked him out. When a few of the black students tried to jump on Billy, I jumped on them and a big brawl broke out. When it had been broken up and everything had cleared, the authorities asked me what happened. “Sigfried suckered Billy,” I told them, and they put Sigfried in a holding room, where you went when you got into a fight. Nothing happened to Billy, but Sigfried got real quiet after that and stayed away from Billy and the smaller kids. A few years later, I heard that he got pinched for murder. Didn’t surprise me.
One time a lady from the neighborhood came to me and told me that a black aide who was working there was giving her son a hard time. When she asked me to take care of the problem, I said, “Sure.”
The aide was stationed in the stairwell in back of the auditorium, the spot where a lot of fights took place. Since I knew what time he went to lunch, one day I walked down the back of the auditorium as he was coming up the stairs and told him to leave the kid alone and quit bothering him.
“Fuck you,” he told me. “You’re bothering all the black kids.” With that I suckered him and he fell down the stairs. When he went down, I started banging him. Then I turned around and walked back up the stairs and out. The aide, who ended up with a cut over his eye and all lumped up, went to the office and reported me. No one saw the incident, so I had my friends, who were also working there as aides, say I was with them, and nothing ever came of it. The aide was a good-sized guy, eight or nine years older than me, but I was boxing at the time and in great shape. After that day, he was scared of me and wanted no problem with me or any of the kids.
That first year, lots of teachers transferred. Joe Foley was a phys ed teacher who I knew from the Boys Club. He used to call me the Avenger, because I always got everybody back who did anything to me. But he was a great guy and a terrific teacher. He ended up getting transferred during busing, which was a real shame because he loved South Boston High and South Boston. Some other teachers left because they wanted to, some because they spoke out. The mess finally ended more than twenty years later when busing was declared a failure. But even then, Judge Garrity would not admit that. The day he died was one of the best days in South Boston history.
Even today, I get upset when I think of what one person did to a community such as South Boston. The judge’s grand experiment failed, and who was left to pay the price? You could not understand what it was like unless you lived there and saw a proud town condemned by busing. If I have strong feelings on certain issues, I have a right to. I was there and lived through those times. I have seen the results of forced busing and more recently, forced housing. Where did they want to start these programs? With the poor people, of course, forcing the poor people to move out and let the minorities move in. The neighborhood went downhill and nobody got along anymore. The people of South Boston had the will of others forced upon them. Because of the actions of others, they were the ones who had to leave their schools and their houses. A true South Bostonian is someone whose family has been there for two, three, or four generations; anyone else is an interloper. Today, sadly, South Boston is just a shell of its former self. And that is all a result of busing, the grand experiment that destroyed a once grand community.
Things were rough all over Southie during those years. In 1974, a cop got beat up at the Rabbit Inn in South Boston and the TPF