Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [46]
But nothing was more important to Jimmy than business, and he never ceased to ponder all aspects of it. He spent a lot of time teaching me how to deal with the people in our business, stressing the importance of never leaving them with a bad feeling and never socializing with them. He’d tell me to always remember that we were not dealing with regular people, that we couldn’t be nice to the people we did business with. They were criminals. When you’re dealing with regular people, you’re nice to them, they’re nice to you. While there were some criminals who might be regular, normal people who happened to be involved in criminal activity, you had to remember that they, too, were criminals. “No one is happy about paying you,” he told me. “Don’t ever think you’re their friend. Some of these people don’t understand anything. You can’t reason with them. Then you have no choice but to use violence to make them understand.”
He had his own unique way of dealing with people when things went wrong. It was fascinating to watch how he could come down on someone, reduce him to the ground verbally, putting him in his place and degrading him completely. But then he would slowly bring the guy back up, so ultimately the guy left with a good feeling, understanding exactly what he had to do to improve himself, how he had to work hard, save money, and stay away from drugs and gambling.
But there were some people Jimmy simply didn’t like at all, and these people were rightfully afraid of him. As a criminal, he made a point of only preying upon criminals, as opposed to legitimate people. And when things couldn’t be worked out to his satisfaction with these people, after all the other options had been explored, he wouldn’t hesitate to use violence. Certainly, if he thought there was a chance of this person coming back to cause some harm, there was no sense in bothering to give him a beating. He might as well fucking kill him. And he did.
Tommy King, in 1975, was one example. Although I was nineteen at the time and not yet working for Jimmy, he told me the whole story. Tommy’s problem began when he and Jimmy had words at Triple O’s. Tommy, who was a Mullins, made a fist. And Jimmy saw it. The next day, Tommy went to the Old Harbor projects where Jimmy was living with his mother and tried to make amends. He said he had been drunk and hadn’t meant anything he had said the night before. Jimmy told him, “Don’t worry about it. Forget it.” A week later, Tommy was dead.
Tommy’s second, and last, mistake had been getting into the car with Jimmy, Stevie, and Johnny Martorano. That night, Jimmy put Tommy in the passenger seat with Stevie and Johnny in the back seat, and told him that they were looking for someone to kill. That someone, of course, was Tommy. As they were driving around, Tommy banged on his supposedly bulletproof flak jacket and joked, “If we don’t find him, we can try this out.” The minute he finished that joke, Johnny shot him in the head from the back seat. The bullet went right through his head, splattering blood and brains all over the place, but Jimmy just reached over, propped Tommy up, and put a baseball cap on his bloodied head.
A minute later, Johnny said he had to make a phone call and asked Jimmy to pull over by the Dunkin’ Donuts in Quincy. He was gone a few minutes, supposedly to make a bet, then got back in the car and the four of them drove off. Jimmy drove around for a few more minutes and then found a spot at the Neponset River where they buried Tommy. Later that same night, Jimmy killed Buddy Leonard and left him in Tommy’s car right on Pilsudski Way in the Old Colony projects to confuse the authorities.
Tommy, a