Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [56]
When Jimmy and Stevie returned from Squantum with only $47,000 from a hide that Bucky had told them about in his house, they brought him back upstairs. At that point, I was sent out to pick up an Asian guy who will remain nameless to accompany me to a restaurant, Little Rascals, at Faneuil Hall. Our job was to collect the $10,000 that belonged to Bucky from his partner. When we got to the restaurant, I remained in the car while the Asian fellow went in to pick up the envelope with the money. Once he got back in the car, I took the envelope and dropped him off at another location and went back to the house on East Third Street. I ended up receiving between nine and ten thousand from the money taken from Barrett. Jimmy and Stevie got approximately the same.
An hour or so after I got back to the house, around 6:00 P.M., Jimmy told me to go grab a bite to eat, so I went home and ate. I’d only been home forty-five minutes when Jimmy beeped me to come back. Back at the house, I saw that Bucky looked pretty much the same as when I’d left. He hadn’t been beaten up or tortured or anything like that. And I still assumed he was going to be shaken down and released. But when Jimmy said, “Bucky’s gonna go downstairs and lay down,” I understood something else was up.
Bucky turned his head and, with no begging or pleading for his life, looked at Jimmy and said in a compliant way, “Yeah, lay down.” He knew the end was near and just acquiesced to it.
Still manacled, he started to walk down the stairs, very slowly, one step at a time, following Stevie, with Jimmy behind him. A few steps from the bottom, Jimmy put the gun to the back of Bucky’s head and pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. Jimmy stopped, took his glasses out of his shirt pocket, and, realizing the safety was still on, flipped it off. Bucky had continued walking very slowly down the last two stairs. Jimmy descended a few more stairs and then put the gun to the back of Bucky’s head a second time, this time killing him instantly, splattering blood, along with brains and skull, all over the stairs and floor.
Once Jimmy and Stevie were positive Bucky was dead, Jimmy went upstairs to take a nap. He was nice and relaxed, not the least bit excited or anything. He just lay down on the couch and went to sleep while Stevie and I set about cleaning up the mess. I noticed that Jimmy seemed to calm down after the murder, almost as if he’d just taken a Valium. Although he stayed that way for a while, eventually he turned a bit hyper. I noticed this after other murders, too. Nothing seemed to relax him or make him feel quite so good as a murder. The first thing Stevie did was to remove Bucky’s teeth with a pair of channel-lock pliers in order to foil dental identification. This was before DNA was being used to identify bodies. He tossed the teeth in a bag that he would dispose of later. Stories about Barrett being terrorized while he was alive, of his feet and hands being cut off, of his teeth being removed while he screamed in pain, were pure fiction.
After I dug the hole and began to bury the body in the basement, Stevie opened the bulkhead and Phil Costa, an associate of his, came in. Phil handed me a couple of bags of lime, which we spread over the body to help speed up its decomposition. Then Stevie and I went upstairs, where he took out a blue plastic basin, sort of a tub that you would wash dishes in, filled it with cold water, and put liquid soap in it. Then Stevie grabbed a sponge and we both went back downstairs to clean up the blood and brains. We used cold water, which, unlike hot water, helps to congeal the blood and the brains. Since the basement floor was painted with gray deck paint, blood was unable to seep into it.
After the execution and burial, when I went back upstairs, I caught a glimpse of Bucky’s wallet