Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [54]
None of these extortions were hard to put together. We did them so often, it was second nature. We’d be driving around and see someone and we’d formulate a plan. And I never felt bad about any of them. These people had something I wanted, so I took it. The only time I might have felt bad was if they didn’t give me the money.
As for money laundering, that was a mundane crime, not an exciting one. Any time you take illegal money and put it to work for you, that’s money laundering. Even if you take money gained illegally, deposit it in the bank, and put that interest to work for you in any business or transaction, that’s money laundering. For instance, Stevie bought businesses with illegal money he saved and that was money laundering.
It was just one more thing the government can get you for, as obscure a crime as it is. While money laundering might still be considered a big crime, to my way of thinking it is just an attempt to put money back into the economy. All we were trying to do was to help the growth of our gross national product. I call it economic stimulation; the government calls it money laundering.
The truth is that this book contains some of what we did, but certainly not all. It would take another two to three books to chronicle the other 80 percent of the story. But whatever Jimmy and I and all the others did, it was always for the money. Not even for the power. Just the money.
FIVE
THREE MURDERS
BARRETT, MCINTYRE, AND HUSSEY: 1983–1985
The first body I buried was in 1983 in a house at 799 East Third Street in South Boston, diagonally across the street from Stevie’s mother’s house. The house belonged to the brother of a friend and the body to Arthur “Bucky” Barrett, a hoodlum from Quincy in his mid-forties who was skilled at bypassing alarms and robbing banks and safes. He was also a drug dealer who’d hooked up with Joe Murray and the Charlestown crew that was involved in Murray’s drug operation. Bucky might have been a talented safecracker and successful drug dealer, but he’d made a big mistake three years earlier, neglecting to pay Jimmy from a $1.5 million heist at the Depositors Trust bank in Medford in 1980. Instead he’d reached out to Frank Salemme, Stevie’s partner from the 1960s, giving him $100,000 to keep people, specifically Stevie and Jimmy, off of him and the rest of his money. Since Salemme was doing time for a crime Stevie had been involved with, Stevie had no choice but to back away when Frankie told him Bucky was with him. Bucky’s going to Frankie didn’t sit well with Jimmy or Stevie.
Three years later, however, a chance meeting with Jimmy drastically changed things for Bucky. That day, Bucky was heading down a flight of stairs in a building in Dorchester, having just visited his probation officer, when he ran into Jimmy and me. We were headed to a travel agent in the same building so Jimmy could plan a trip. Jimmy introduced me to Bucky and the two of us shook hands. I continued walking up the stairs and left them talking for a few more minutes. Then Bucky left the building and Jimmy and I walked into the travel agency. That little encounter was all that was needed to pique Jimmy’s interest in Bucky Barrett.
A few months after that encounter, Jimmy and Stevie worked out a plan to shake down Bucky. At the time, there was no mention of killing him, so I thought all we were doing was a shakedown for that bank heist money and whatever else we could get from his drug business. Since Bucky had a penchant for diamonds and liked to collect jewelry, the plan was to have him come over to the house on East Third Street to meet with a fellow who deals in hot diamonds. My part in the plan was to be that fellow.
That August afternoon, around noon, a friend of Bucky’s who knew Bucky was going to be shaken down rather than buy hot diamonds brought him into the house. While most of the houses in South Boston were triple-deckers—three-story row houses