Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [30]
He wasn’t a big guy, maybe five-seven and 185 pounds. Of Arab descent, he had a mustache like Saddam Hussein. He also had a wife and couple of kids, and a three-decker townhouse on East Broadway and G. I was friendly with his daughter Louanne, who was a few years younger than me. That night, as always, he was talking in his obnoxious loud voice. Even when there were 400 people in the bar, you always knew Louie was there.
Jimmy was standing by the front door, at his usual place at the edge of the L-shaped bar. I was by the door, bouncing, maybe six or seven feet away. Louie came in with his loud, “Hey, Jimmy. How you doing?” and ordered a round of drinks for Jimmy and Kevin O’Neil and whoever else was there. There was a lot of small talk at the beginning, but then Louie brought up Joe the Barber and accused him of stealing money from the business. Jimmy knew the truth was just the opposite, that Louie had recently begun stealing money and selling drugs without paying Jimmy. He told Louie that Joe was a good guy and that he trusted him completely. The conversation, I could see, was getting Jimmy mad.
“You’ve stepped over the line,” he told Louie. “Now you’re a killer and people are going to treat you differently. If there’s a problem, no one’s going to just talk to you about it. They’ll know you’re capable of killing someone, so when they have a problem with you, they’re going to want to kill you. You’re no longer just a bookmaker.”
Jimmy’s voice was getting deeper and more pronounced, quieter and lower in tone, with stronger emphasis on each word he spoke. I knew right away that was a dangerous sign. I also noticed that the corner of his mouth was curling up and his eyes were turning bloodshot. Since I was bouncing, I wasn’t drinking and I observed everything clearly.
I could always tell when Jimmy was getting mad. He has these crystal-clear blue eyes, and when he gets angry, they turn from blue to bloodshot. It’s like a Dracula movie when Christopher Lee is about to bite his victim and you can see the red veins in his eyes. It was the same thing with Jimmy.
I could see that Jimmy’s blood was boiling and his blood pressure was rising, but Louie had a couple of beers in him and he didn’t pick up the danger signs. “I got nothing to worry about,” Louie told Jimmy. “I got you as a friend.”
“We’re not friends anymore, Louie,” Jimmy said coldly. But Louie just laughed and tried to shake it off like Jimmy was joking or this was a mere scolding. But I knew Jimmy was dead serious. And I also knew Louie had a problem. He was acting like a fool, talking about killing Joe the Barber, thinking he was on equal footing with Jimmy, that he was a killer now and Jimmy would respect him for that. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Personally, I liked Louie. Every Sunday night, he’d come down to Triple O’s and we’d play cards or pinball, twenty bucks a game. He was loud but funny, and had always been a good moneymaker for Jimmy. He should have just stayed a bookie and not tried to jump from the minor leagues to the majors. And now he wanted to kill a friend of Jimmy’s. There was no way that would be allowed.
Shortly after that, a week or so before my wedding, Louie was found stuffed into a garbage bag in the trunk of his car, which had been dumped in the South End. He’d been stabbed with an ice pick and shot. “He was color-coordinated,” Jimmy told me. “He was wearing green underwear and was in a green garbage bag.”
At the wedding, when I went around to greet his table, Jimmy pointed to the empty chair beside him and said, “Say hi to Louie.”
Stevie picked up a napkin and made like he was wiping his face. “He keeps on drinking and it keeps on leaking out of him,” he said, reminding us that Louie had been shot in