Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [48]
Still, I always believed that when it came to a street or bar fight, there was no such thing as a winner. We were all losers. Even if someone wins the fight and is a winner in the eyes of others, he still pays a price, both physically as well as mentally. In nine out of ten of my fights, the person I fought was hurt badly. And when it was over, I was always mad at him, thinking, You made me do this to you. In professional sports, like with boxing, the fighters aren’t mad at one another. It’s a professional fight. But in street fights, even when you win, a little bit of you is hurt. And chances are you’ve made an enemy as well.
Despite Jimmy’s concern about how hard I hit, we went to whatever clubs we wanted. We never expected a problem. We never looked for a problem, but we never walked away from a problem. And if it wasn’t handled that night, it would be handled later, but on our terms. The outcome was never good for the other person. Neither Jimmy nor I drank much, but there were times when I might drink a bit more than he thought safe. And even if he wasn’t with me when that happened, somehow he managed to keep tabs on me. One afternoon, I was with a friend, Brian Lee, having a good time in a Faneuil Hall bar owned by Sean Driscoll. Around nine that night, Sean came over to tell me that I had a phone call and I could take it in his office.
It was Jimmy on the phone. “What are you doing?” he asked me. I could tell he was upset.
“Having a few beers,” I told him.
“Meet me in fifteen minutes,” he told me, and that was the end of my drinking. I left right away and drove over to South Boston, grateful that I wasn’t drunk. I have no idea how he found out where I was. Maybe one of the owners wanted to get me out of the place before anything happened.
One thing Jimmy did not tolerate was drug use among his associates. It made them too unpredictable. Nicky Femia, who was hooked on cocaine, was an example of what happened when that rule was ignored. After Jimmy pushed Femia out of the business, Femia got killed trying to shake down a kid, robbing him of his coke.
After I’d been with him a year or so, Jimmy told me that I was the smartest guy he’d ever met. I think he meant that I considered everything carefully, thinking over all aspects of a situation before I acted. Not that he had any fools around him, but what he did have around him were a lot of tough guys. But he wasn’t interested in just tough guys; he wanted smart tough guys. Over and over, he explained to me how we were all hostage to one another, how everything one of us did reflected on everyone else. I understood exactly what he was saying. And I knew that whatever he asked me to do, I would do. If we killed somebody and the police came upon us, we were prepared to handle the situation. We would have shot it out with them. I wouldn’t say that we were armed to the teeth, but we always had arms available—assault rifles, hand grenades, whatever we might possibly need, more arms that we could possibly use in a lifetime. Some we’d bought in New York and some Jimmy had that went back to the 1960s.
Unlike me, most of the people around Jimmy went back years and years. But like me, most of these men were extremely violent men. I thought of the people surrounding Jimmy as being in three tiers. In the inner core were Jimmy, Stevie, myself, and two other people who were out on the streets at the time, both of whom will remain unnamed, who went back to the 1960s with Jimmy. The second group was composed of men, also violent, close friends of ours and involved with