Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [51]
But my extortions could never match Jimmy’s, who was Machiavellian in the way that he was able to outthink other people. Eventually everyone he extorted understood that we would either take them down or take their money. In every case, these guys made the decision to part with their money rather than their lives. No one, it seemed, was willing to make an enemy out of us. Sometimes all you had to do was threaten people with a physical beating and they would pay you. But, as with everything Jimmy did, violence was the last resort. Yet no matter what it took, we always managed to get what we wanted.
Still, some people made things difficult for themselves, like this one fellow who owed us fifteen grand. We got him into the car and sat him in the back seat next to me, while Jimmy and Stevie were in the front seat. The guy was complaining, giving Jimmy a tale of woe about how he didn’t have the money to pay, how he had put bets in and lost, how his daughter was getting married and he had no money for the wedding. At first Jimmy and Stevie were talking nice, but when it became obvious the guy thought it was all a game, Jimmy let him know it was for real. “Give me the money or I’ll kill you,” he told him.
Still playing around like we were suckers, the guy said, “You’ll be doing me a favor if you’d kill me.”
With that, I grabbed the guy and put his arms behind his back. Jimmy took out a pistol, leaned over the seat, and put it to his head. Now the guy started screaming, “I’ll get you the money!”
Jimmy said, “When?”
“Let me get into the house,” he said. We were parked in front of his house, so he went in and came out with the fifteen grand in twenty minutes.
When it came to extortion, Jimmy was anything but ordinary, often creating the problem and then solving it. Now, if a guy actually had a legitimate problem, such as someone trying to kill him, we would put ourselves between the two of them and make his problem our problem. Of course, the person in danger would have to pay us to do this.
But many times the problem was not only not legitimate, it wasn’t real. In those cases, we searched out someone we knew had money, created a problem for him, and solved the “problem” for a large sum of money. For example, we would corner the guy coming out of work and inform him that someone had been paid to kill him. We would take turns speaking, but it didn’t matter if it was Jimmy and me or Jimmy, Stevie, and me. The reaction was always the same. The person would be scared to death. But we’d calm him down quickly by telling him that if he paid us somewhere between $50,000 and $500,000, we would back the killer off. Ten out of ten times, the person would pay, always coming to the conclusion that while he could make more money, he couldn’t make another life. And this life was his most valuable commodity. If it was a large payment, we would put him on a payment plan with a certain amount of time to pay. And if we liked him, at the end, we might even tell him to forget about the final payments. But if we didn’t like him, we’d make it clear that this wasn’t a bank where you have lots of different payment plans. Here there was only one payment plan: We wanted our money now.
One night Jimmy and I went to the home of a drug dealer, rang his bell, and shook him down, telling him we had been paid to kill him. “You sold drugs to a guy’s grandchild,” we said. “And this guy offered us fifty thousand dollars to kill you. Now, you have the chance to pay us the same amount and we’ll back this person off so he won’t bother you.” That dealer ended up paying us $25,000 right away and then paid us the balance monthly. And ended up working for us from