Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [29]
And he was right. A bookmaker in his late forties, Louie had made things hard for himself when he suddenly decided he wanted to be a bad guy and started killing people. The first person Louie shot was a guy in his early thirties named Lip Mongelio. Louie and Lip were involved in a card game at Hap’s Lounge in South Boston, a bar Louie owned with his partner, Jimmy Matera. Lip accused Louie of cheating, which he was. When an argument ensued, Louie shot Lip four or five times, but Lip survived.
The next day, Jimmy told me all about it. It seems that right after he shot Lip, Louie had been walking down Broadway when Jimmy drove by. Jimmy pulled over to the sidewalk and asked Louie, “What are you doing?”
Louie said, “I just shot Lip and I’m going to turn myself in to the police.” Obviously, it was Louie’s first time shooting anyone and he’d panicked. He was a bookmaker, not a violent criminal, so there he was, heading for the District Six police station near D and West Broadway.
“What are you, crazy?” Jimmy asked him. “Get in here.” Jimmy put him in the car, calmed Louie down, and dropped him off at his house. Then Jimmy sent Alan Thistle, a fucking piece of shit in the street who later became an informant for the FBI, to talk to Lip in the hospital. Thistle persuaded Lip not to testify against Louie, and everything was dropped. After all, Louie was also a good moneymaker. No reason to send a profitable bookmaker away for attempted murder.
A few days later, however, Louie decided he wanted to kill Alan Thistle, for no reason other than he just didn’t like him. But Jimmy told him he couldn’t. “He just talked the kid out of pressing charges against you and now you want to kill him?” Jimmy said. “He did you a favor.” And that was the end of that.
But a month or so later, Louie made things more complicated again when he got into an argument during another card game, this time with his partner, Jimmy Matera. Matera caught Louie cheating and slapped him in the face during the game. About a week later, they were having problems at the bar with an outrageous water bill, and Louie convinced Matera there must be something wrong with the water meter. When the two of them went down into the cellar, Louie told Jimmy to take a look at the water meter, which he said was broken. While Matera was staring at the meter, Louie shot him in the head for slapping him.
Unfortunately for Louie, there was a witness, Bobby Conrad, the bartender who was working that night. Conrad, around fifty, was a nervous wreck over what he’d seen, so Louie wined and dined him in Las Vegas. Then he took him to a little place he had up in Nova Scotia, where he promised to hide him till everything blew over, assuring him everything would be fine and he had nothing to worry about. He killed him there, took him out of the back of the house in a wheelbarrow, and buried him. He ended up hiding him so well that thanks to the laws in Canada limiting their access to search for bodies, the DEA and State Police couldn’t find him.
After that murder, Louie came back to Boston, convinced now that he was a killer. It didn’t take long for him to have another falling-out with a partner, this time with Joe the Barber, a barber by trade and his partner in the bookmaking operation.
One night, around eleven, Louie strolled into Triple O’s, dressed in his usual stylish manner, perfectly groomed, his fingernails manicured, a flat scally or newsboy cap covering the balding top of his dark hair, anxious for people to notice him. Louie’s clothes were