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By Root 982 0

us, but not around us all the time. And the third tier included men who were not violent but were moneymakers who worked for us, like the bookmakers, drug dealers, and people involved in illegal activities, like card games or Vegas nights. Jimmy paid special attention to this important third group. If any of them were out drinking and had a problem that night, it quickly became our problem; to be specific, a problem in our pockets. The fact that these guys were paying us money, monthly or weekly, meant that we would have to go out collectively and straighten out their problem—another reason why Jimmy never liked people with bad habits to work for him.

But Jimmy also kept an eye on what was going around in the neighborhood, even on people who had nothing to do with us. One summer night, while the two of us were driving on East Eighth Street and Covington, by the old German Club, we saw two Southie brothers, Frankie and Kevin MacDonald, fighting, really going at it. Jimmy got out of the car and told Frankie’s three friends who were watching the fistfight—Ricky Marinick, Paul Moore, and another guy named Kevin MacDonald who we called “Andre the Giant”—to break it up. “Don’t let them fight,” he told the guys. “They’re brothers.”

After Frankie’s friends grabbed the two guys and broke up the fight, Jimmy ordered Kevin into the car while Frankie took off with his three friends. Kevin, seven years younger than me, was a nice kid I’d known for a long time, while Frankie, who was a few years older than Kevin, was a talented boxer and a tough kid. His body was like that of a Greek god, in tremendous shape from always working out hard.

Jimmy and I drove around with Kevin for a while. “He’s your brother,” Jimmy said to Kevin as we drove off. “It doesn’t look good for people to see you like that.” But Kevin told us Frankie was going on a score the next day and he didn’t want him to go, that he had a bad feeling about the score.

We dropped Kevin off at his house and sure enough, the next day Frankie got shot during a Wells Fargo armored car robbery in Medford. The bullet went under his arm where there was no cover from the bulletproof vest he was wearing, traveling through his lungs and ripping his aorta. Because he was in such tremendous shape, Frankie was able to run to the getaway car with a bag of money before collapsing in the back seat. Afterward, some people accused his friends of leaving him on the score, but the truth was he bled to death in a matter of minutes. Even if they had gotten him to the hospital, there was no way they could have stopped the bleeding. Frankie died on July 17, 1984, at age twenty-five. It was a terrible shame.

I went to the wake, which was painfully sad. Jimmy didn’t believe in wakes and didn’t attend. His feeling was that if a person died, that was it and there was no reason to have a wake or a funeral. When Jimmy’s mother died on January 1, 1980, Jimmy didn’t go to the funeral, knowing it would bring a lot of publicity to the family, especially to Billy. But he did go to the funeral home after it had closed so he could see her when no one was there.

But riding around with Jimmy at night, I never knew what could happen from one moment to the next. One particular night, Jimmy and I were in his Ford LTD when another car began to jockey for position with us on Morrissey Boulevard. It went on for a few minutes until we stopped at a set of lights. The other car pulled up beside us and the two guys in the car gave Jimmy and me the finger and began swearing at us. Jimmy started to get out of the car, but I jumped out first, went to the passenger window where the guy was still giving me the finger, and put my fist through the window. After I hit the guy in the face, I got back in our car and Jimmy drove off.

My hand was bleeding, and when I went to wipe off the blood, I noticed that a little piece of the three-carat diamond ring I wore on my pinky finger had sheared off. I wasn’t sure if the diamond had a flaw or what, but one of the corners of the ring was gone. Jimmy took a look at it when we pulled