Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [53]
After that scene in Triple O’s, Ray went to a local politician to try and get us to back off and stuff, but to no avail. Then he started talking around town and telling people what had happened at Triple O’s. That story got back to the FBI and subsequently got back to us, and Jimmy told Kevin O’Neil to tell Ray to forget about the rest of the money. When Ray was first approached by the FBI to tell them what had happened to him, he was hesitant. But then he gave them a story in which Jimmy had told me to get a body bag, not a beer. I know he heard exactly what Jimmy had said to me, because he had asked for a mixed drink instead of a beer. And I never heard of any bar in South Boston that has a body bag behind a bar, not even Triple O’s back in those days. But after that conversation with the FBI in which he had thrown in that body bag detail to make his story more dramatic, Ray understood that he could never come around us, that we would never talk to him again. Whatever he said would be his word against ours. He had no proof of what we had said. If he ever got wired up, we would have known and would have answered his questions with, “What are you, crazy? Are you on drugs?” As it turned out, Jimmy got what he wanted that afternoon, and Ray Slinger got his mixed drink, not a body bag.
One extortion concerned me personally. It was a case where I literally had the guy over the fence. After I bought a house in a Boston suburb, the bank came out to survey my property for insurance purposes and discovered that my neighbor’s thirty-foot-long fence was six inches on my side of the property line. When I told my neighbor it had to be moved, he went to a friend of his, a developer named Richie Bucchieri. The guy who sold me my house told me that Bucchieri wanted him to backdate a bill of sale for the land the fence was on. The next thing I knew I had Richie Bucchieri meeting Jimmy and Stevie at Stevie’s mother’s house, where he was fined $200,000 for—for lack of a better term—interfering. Since I ended up sitting outside in the car during the meeting, I got $50,000 for basically doing nothing. Nothing happened to the neighbor, but the developer had to pay $200,000 for six inches of fence.
Another extortion involved Michael Solimondo, who turned out to be a standup guy. In 1982, after John Callahan, the accountant who was cooperating with the FBI in the Roger Wheeler World Jai Alai murder, was killed, we extorted Solimondo, who had been Callahan’s partner in the construction business. We had him come down to Triple O’s, where Jimmy, Stevie, and I were waiting for him upstairs in the function hall. Here we sat him on a stool in the little bar, where Jimmy was holding a machine gun with a silencer under a towel on his lap, and I had a pistol tucked into my waistband, which he might or might not have seen. Jimmy started to talk to him about Callahan’s offshore account in Switzerland, telling Solimondo he wanted his money.
“I know nothing about that,” said Solimondo, who was a bodybuilder. Jimmy went on and on about wanting “his fucking money.”
Finally Jimmy ripped the towel off his lap and stuck the machine gun into Solimondo’s massive chest. “Your muscles aren’t going to do you any good now,” he told him. “Give me your fucking money or I’m going to kill you.” Solimondo gave in right away and within a day or two we got $120,000. Not too long after that, we got six payments of $80,000 until we had the $600,000 Jimmy wanted.
A few years later, when Solimondo got called to a grand jury, we found out about it. Jimmy grabbed him again, and this time he and Stevie told him exactly what to say