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By Root 996 0

me a bit more each night, he was taking pains to get to know me better. One afternoon, in 1978, right after he told Nicky Femia, one of his associates who was doing coke and getting out of hand, to go his own way, he asked me to get in the car with him and drive around. From then on, the two of us rode around more and more, often in his blue Chevy Malibu or Ford sedan, often for a couple of hours after I got off work at the T and before I started at Triple O’s. His cars were always fast cars, never registered to him, and had police scanners and toggle switches for the lights so the interior light wouldn’t go on, but they were nondescript and never stood out. Police scanners were pretty much standard operating procedure for most cars, but Jimmy didn’t listen to the Boston police. Mostly he listened to the FBI, the DEA, and the State Police signals.

One night when I wasn’t working at Triple O’s, Jimmy suggested I take a drive with him and another guy. Immediately I got a little nervous and began to wonder if I had done something wrong. The three of us had been driving around for a half-hour or so when Jimmy pulled over to pick up a kid in his early twenties at a bar on East Broadway. When the kid got into the back seat with me, I still didn’t know what was going on. I knew I’d been in a lot of fights. Maybe I’d hit the wrong person.

Then Jimmy started yelling at the kid for supposedly smacking his niece and pulled over to the park at M and Third streets. Then I understood what was happening. And it had nothing to do with me. Right away I saw that the kid had a buck knife in a sheath, which he tried to cover up. But Jimmy turned around, saw the knife, grabbed it off him, and slashed him across the throat with it, using the blunt side. Jimmy looked at me, and I got into it, punching the kid, busting his nose, and knocking out his teeth. Blood poured out of his nose and mouth. Then Jimmy reached into the kid’s back pocket and pulled out a police-type leather sap. As he beat the kid with the sap, he managed to hit me as much as he was hitting the kid. My hand swelled right up, but I didn’t notice it till afterward.

The kid ended up crouched in a fetal position on the floor of the back seat. Jimmy then drove back to the bar on East Broadway and dumped him out in front of the bar so everyone could see what had happened to him. After the kid stumbled into the bar, his friends came storming out, shouting, “Who did this?”

Jimmy and I were standing there, and I knocked out the first one who ran out. “Anyone else want to bother my niece?” Jimmy asked, and they all went back into the bar. Quickly.

“I thought you cut his throat with that knife,” I told Jimmy.

“I meant to,” he said. “The truth is he was just lucky I held it wrong.”

We found out later on that it had been another girl, not Jimmy’s niece, who had been slapped, but I didn’t feel bad about it. I had shown Jimmy that I would do whatever he asked me to do. And besides, the kid still deserved to be beaten up for beating up a girl.

A couple of days later, in the car, Jimmy gave me a thousand dollars. “It’s for you,” he said as he handed me the cash. That was pretty big money for a young kid. It was all pretty amazing. Here was Jim Bulger giving me money. It felt good getting all this cash. Real good. From then on, I spent more time with him. I knew, of course, that my life had changed. But I could handle it. I never felt the need to talk to anyone about what I was doing. I certainly never talked to Pam, or any woman, about anything that would involve criminal activity. As the years went on, Pam might have surmised what I was doing, but I would never put a loved one in jeopardy by discussing these matters.

I had learned early that once a crime was committed, you never talked about it. There was never any reason to. If someone ever got in the car with us or came over to talk to us at a bar about something we had done, we would immediately suspect that he was wired and trying to get us to talk about a crime.

But back then, I was getting busier with my own family. Our first