Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [47]
As it turned out, the night King and Leonard were killed there was supposed to be a third victim, Billy Gallant, but he didn’t show up. I’m not sure exactly why Jimmy intended to kill Gallant. I think he just didn’t like him. A few years after that night, Jimmy and I were driving up Dorchester Avenue when we saw Billy walking alone. It was raining out, so Jimmy pulled over and said, “Billy, come in. I’ll give you a ride.”
I hopped into the back, but Billy just leaned into the passenger door and said, “Whitey, no offense, but people get in that car and they never get out. Thanks anyhow, but I’d rather walk.”
Jimmy nodded, I jumped back into the front seat, and we drove away. Jimmy started laughing, looked at me, and said, “Smart guy.” There was no doubt he would have killed Billy that night. As it turned out, Billy died of pneumonia a few years later. Maybe he got a cold that rainy night.
It didn’t take me long to learn how to grasp Jimmy’s reaction to people by his facial expressions. Even though he wore sunglasses a lot, when I could see his eyes, I read them perfectly. And who was going to stop him then? Nobody. I certainly wasn’t going to put myself between him and some asshole who deserved what he was going to get. It was rarely necessary for Jimmy to tell me to hit someone who was bothering him. I could just see that he was getting madder. Then someone would say something smart and I would just crack him.
There were times, of course, when Jimmy would get mad at me. Sometimes he’d yell. Or be cold. Those times, I’d give him his time and when he was ready, usually a few hours later, he’d come looking for me and we’d talk about what had gotten him upset. One thing that did bother him was if I was out drinking, which I didn’t do very often. He always worried that when we drank in local bars, I might get into a fight there, and if I did, the outcome would never be good. “You’re not being fair,” he always told me. “If someone has a fight with you and you beat him up, you could do serious damage, even kill the person. Yet if by some chance he beats you, he thinks it’s over, but it’s not the end of it. You’re not through. You’re going to want go back and kill him.”
And he was right. When I was younger, it had been different. I could have survived losing a fight. But as I got older, I couldn’t live with the idea of someone walking the streets saying they beat me. I’d just have to kill him. At the very least, I’d have to hurt them badly to make an example. I could never afford to let them win. I was never the toughest guy out there, but I was of a different mind-set than other guys. I couldn’t handle not beating them. I certainly wasn’t worried about someone coming after me after I beat him. I knew I could handle myself no matter what came my way. But if someone beat me, I would bide my time. Whether it took six months or a year, I would wait for the talk to die down and the person to think he didn’t have a problem, and then I would go after him.
And Jimmy was just like me. He, too, couldn’t live with being beat. If someone ever did anything to him, we’d be out every day and every night hunting him down. Neither one of us could afford to be beaten. We made a living being feared. If one person beat us, then he would have made it easier for the next person to come after us. So we’d take care of the person any way we could.
I did have guys shoot at me, but I always carried a pistol, for which I had a permit, and quickly shot back. And the time when Chucka Devins’s brother Franny got hurt and some kid pulled a knife on me—to be truthful, I hadn’t been thinking about trying not to kill that kid. I hadn’t cared one way or the other. To me, it was just a fight.
There was no doubt