Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [18]
Kevin O’Neil was about eight years older than me, and a businessman, good at making money. He was a large guy, around six-four and 320 pounds, with big hands and salt-and-pepper hair. An outgoing guy, he liked to laugh, and was a good friend of Jimmy’s. In 1981, when Kevin got married, I stood up for him at the wedding. His brother Billy, who I’d met at the South Boston Court House when we’d each been brought up on charges of assaulting a black person, was two years younger and a lot smaller than Kevin, at five-nine, 156 pounds, and ripped. It was Billy who had suggested I come to work at Triple O’s. The two of us got along great and often worked the door together.
But despite the clusters of girls looking to meet guys and the Gillette workers, Triple O’s was a rough place, where the neighborhood guys hung out, drank, and settled scores. The drinking age was eighteen then, so I knew most of the younger crowd there. Fights broke out almost every night, especially on the nights I worked. Lots of these fights were the breeding grounds for grudges that later resulted in killings, perpetrated by patients with Irish Alzheimer’s, a disease where everything is forgotten except a grudge. Most often it was a fistfight that spun out of control, but other times, people would use baseball bats, knives, or serious weapons.
My rapport with Jimmy began to form soon after I started working there. Hired, along with a bunch of my friends, to help out on St. Patrick’s Day, the rowdiest night of the year at Triple O’s, I was bringing in the beer and ice from downstairs when a fight broke out. There were eight guys working the door that night, seven of whom were my friends, and within seconds it was a full-blown free-for-all. All my friends were busy inside and outside, trying to take care of things. As soon as I got back upstairs, I jumped over the bar to help my friends and knocked out a couple of the worst troublemakers. Jimmy and Kevin O’Neil were standing there watching the whole scene. A week later, Kevin asked if I would work the door for $25 a night plus 10 percent of the tips of the waitresses and bartenders. I accepted.
Jimmy came in a night or two over the weekends, always quiet, reserved, and polite, dressed neatly, usually in dungarees, cowboy boots, and a leather jacket. Most nights he spent talking with Kevin O’Neil, but sometimes he came in with Stevie Flemmi, the partner he’d teamed up with in the early 1970s. Often they were in suits, having just gone out on a date for dinner with the girls they brought into Triple O’s. Jimmy would always say, “Hi, how you doing?” when he passed by me at the door. He never sat at the bar, but stood in his customary spot at the end of the bar, his back against the wall, not anxious to attract attention. Over time, he engaged me more and more in conversation and got to know me better. He was aware of all the fights I was in, of the people who got hurt bad and had to go to the hospital. But when the two of us talked, it was never about crime. Rather, he would tell me to read, to work hard, and to stay out of trouble and away from alcohol. Avoiding alcohol was never a problem for me, since I wasn’t a big drinker. I think he liked the fact that I didn’t have any major bad habits. He also liked that I kept in good shape, still running nearly every day, working out regularly at the gym and in my house, and occasionally boxing.
Some nights Jimmy, who was around forty-five then, would show up with good-looking women or young girls, anywhere from ages eighteen to forty. He never came in with the two women he shared two different homes with, Theresa Stanley, who was about ten years younger than him, or Cathy Greig, who was twenty years younger. He wasn’t much of a drinker and would