Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [42]
The fellow I’d fought in my last fight went on to win the division and was given a six-foot trophy. When the tournament was over, I told him, “You know that’s my trophy.” He didn’t say anything to me, but just walked away.
A month later, Pat and I fought in a tournament at UMass Boston, where we took first and second place. In a third tournament on the South Shore, we did equally well. We were throwing some kicks in the fights, but mostly we were using our hands. We continued taking classes at the BAC for about a year. They also had an open night of sparring every Thursday night, so we would go down to spar. It was something different for us and I enjoyed the exercise and the workout. But a lot of Boston police were coming down to the BAC to work out and were getting a good look at us. Jimmy didn’t like the fact that I was down there with the cops, so finally I stopped going. He always used to say to me, “You know what beats a black belt? A gun belt.”
Jimmy couldn’t tell you a thing about baseball or football, but once the daughter of Theresa Stanley, his longtime girlfriend, married Montreal Canadiens hockey player Chris Nilan, he took an interest in the Montreal games. Even though he’s wearing a Red Sox cap in the only photograph of us together, he had no special feeling for the team. In the summertime when the sun was out, he’d put a hat on but couldn’t care less what emblem was stuck on it.
The only sports he ever watched were the fights, and I got a kick out of seeing him come up to my folks’ house to watch them with my father. He usually came over when there was a title fight. Jimmy looked far younger than my father, who was only seven years older than him, but my dad had a bad heart and poor health and always looked older than he was. Even though Jimmy avoided funerals and wakes, when my father died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-six on June 17, 1989, he paid for the funeral.
While Jimmy avoided big crowds and never tried to draw attention to himself, he was acutely aware of what was going on around us, both in Boston and in the world. He didn’t watch much TV, but did catch the news or a good movie and liked the History Channel. Every night at midnight, the two of us would drive over to Store 24 on West Broadway and grab the first editions of the next day’s two Boston newspapers. Then we’d pull into the parking lot next to Southie Savings Bank to read them, passing them back and forth. First Jimmy would read the Metro section of the Globe and then the crime section of the Herald, commenting aloud on anything referring to our business or associates. Most often he would pick out an inaccuracy in one of the articles, saying the reporter or the law enforcement official quoted didn’t know what he was talking about. “The Boston press is not known for its accuracy,” he would tell me. “And they never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” But he felt that it was a good thing for us that none of these people knew what they were talking about, since that meant they had no idea what they were looking for in their investigations. It’s like reading fairy tales, he would say, instead of solid newspaper reporting.
But mostly he read books. When he had been in prison, he’d read a lot of history and psychology books. Although he rarely talked about prison, he did discuss the LSD program he’d been part of in Atlanta, blaming his frequent insomnia and nightmares on that useless, torturous experiment he’d taken part in during the late 1950s and early 1960s to lessen his prison sentence. He’d been one of eighteen inmates in the MKULTRA program under Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, a program that the public knew little about at the time. Funded by Coca-Cola, the program had supposedly been created to find a cure for schizophrenia, but in actuality it was run by the CIA, which was looking for a truth serum.
Jimmy told me that for eighteen months he was either injected with