Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [39]
On Friday night after the murder, around midnight, Jimmy beeped me and asked, “Did you take care of it?” Of course, he would never have mentioned the word “car.” We never talked about anything specific on the phone.
But I knew what he was talking about and said, “No. I hadn’t heard from you.”
“Come on over,” he said. I drove over to Quincy and he met me outside his condo in Louisburg Square. When he asked me if I moved the car, I said no. “Thank God for Beck’s beer,” he told me. It seems that FBI agent John Morris, who was an incompetent wimp, had dropped by and all Jimmy had in the house to drink was Beck’s. When Morris had a few in him, he blurted out that the hit car was a bore job, meaning the engine was bored out, souped up, worked up. Apparently an FBI agent who had been assigned to Halloran had been down the street at the time of the murder and had watched the whole thing and gotten the plate, which was legally registered but in a fictitious name. As it turned out, that particular agent died of cancer six months later. But now they were just waiting for the car he had seen to surface. And it would have been me driving the car when it did.
So we left the car where it was until Jimmy had it moved and chopped it up without anyone ever seeing it. Within two weeks of the murder, it was gone. But it had fulfilled its mission and gotten Jimmy away from the scene. There was never any reason for Jimmy to create another car like that. After that murder, he changed his MO, sucking people in, meeting in houses and making them come to him. He didn’t need a hit car for that. That was Jimmy’s brilliance, always finding better ways to do the job.
One afternoon, Jimmy and Stevie and I drove over to the tow lot on Dorchester Avenue to take a look at the Datsun. As always when the three of us went anywhere together, Jimmy drove, Stevie sat in the passenger seat, and I was in the back seat. That was fine with me. I wouldn’t have wanted Stevie sitting in back of me. Jimmy walked right up to the driver’s side of the Datsun, opened the door, and hit the back of the headrest with his hand. As he did that, a piece of scalp with some hair attached to it fell off, a little piece of Donahue that the police had missed. You could see the holes where the bullets had ripped through the doors and the windows. It was a mess with blood all over the place, on the seats, on the roof, on the floor. The car was shredded like Swiss cheese, with gaping holes everywhere.
As we looked at the car, I was thinking about how much punishment the human body could take. Donahue might have gotten hit in the head and died instantly, but Halloran had taken twenty-one bullets. As Jimmy commented again about how he had placed the shots through the rear window into Donahue’s head, Stevie walked around looking at the car, shaking his head, still pissed he’d missed out on that murder. Finally Jimmy said, “Let’s get out of here,” and we took off.
A few months later, I stopped working for the T. From that point on, I worked for Jimmy full time.
FOUR
LEARNING THE BUSINESS
LOAN-SHARKING, EXTORTION, AND MURDER
Once I started working with Jimmy full-time in 1982, the year I left the T, I had a much closer view of his criminal activities. He would confide about them more openly and dealt more frequently with people in his circle in front of me. Although I rarely dealt personally with any of these bookmakers, as all those business deals had been established before I came on board, Jimmy included me in most of these meetings. For instance, I was now included in sitdowns with bookmakers who were arguing about money owed or