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By Root 1003 0

on the kitchen table. It was open to a photo of a little blonde girl, who looked to be around two or three. I had no idea, and never found out, if that was his daughter, but I had a year-old kid of my own and felt bad when I thought about a little girl maybe growing up without her father. But I had had no say. The die had been cast years earlier. As soon as Bucky had run to Frankie, the whole deal had become personal between him and Jimmy. Bucky had been killed because he had a big mouth and Jimmy couldn’t trust him. He wasn’t going to let Bucky run to someone like Frankie to back him off a second time. But I had to hand it to Bucky. This time he had been a man from the minute he’d been walked into the house until the very end. He never begged, he never complained, he never pleaded for his life.

After the cleanup was finished and Stevie took off to get rid of the teeth, I drove Barrett’s brown Cadillac over to Savin Hill, where I parked it and made sure it was all wiped down. Jimmy had followed me, so I hopped into his car and we headed over to Castle Island, where we parked and took the garbage bag filled with Barrett’s clothes out of the trunk. After we poked a couple of holes in the bag, we walked to the end of the pier and dropped the bag into the water. For a few minutes, we just stood there and watched it move out noiselessly with the tide. It was a warm summer night and a couple of guys were right there, fishing out on the pier, with their gas lanterns set up not too far from where we stood. When we had walked out with our two bags and dumped them over the side, they had barely noticed. As a matter of fact, when Jimmy and I walked back by them after we’d taken care of our business, one of the guys said, “I’ll watch your stuff for you while you’re gone.”

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll be right back.”

It was just another example of how when you go about your business in a normal way, no one pays any attention to what you’re doing. When you’re in these types of situations, you don’t run, you walk. Growing up in the projects, I learned early that when someone slammed a car door, everyone looked to see what was going on. To escape attention, you close the door quietly and click it shut with your hands. That night on the pier, Jimmy and I strolled calmly off the pier as Barrett’s clothes sank to the bottom of the ocean.

The second murder in that house was John McIntyre’s. He was a thirty-two-year-old drug smuggler and, like many from the Irish communities of South Boston and Charlestown, had a lot of sympathy for the IRA and their cause.

In 1984, Jimmy and I had been involved with an attempt to smuggle seven tons of ammunition and weapons on board the Gloucester-based Valhalla. Around nine o’clock on a September night, Jimmy and I arrived in Gloucester in his Malibu to await the arrival of vans carrying the weapons and ammunition that would be loaded on the Valhalla and sent to the IRA in Ireland the next morning. The ship was owned by Joe Murray, who used it to run drugs out of South America for his Charlestown drug business. That night, Jimmy and I found a spot with a view of the dock, as well as the road from opposite directions. Dressed in dark clothes, we sat in the car, monitoring the police calls with the scanner.

At one point, I did get out of the car and walked to a spot a little bit higher with an even better view. Things were quiet until, about an hour after we had gotten there, we got the call on our walkie-talkies from one of the drivers of the vans. “We’re on our way,” the driver said, and I answered with one word, “Green,” meaning, “Go. The coast is clear.” Since our job was to provide security, Jimmy and I stayed in the Malibu and watched as five vans pulled up to the dock. Everybody involved in the operation had their job to do, so the drivers had plenty of help on the pier as they emptied the five vans. We remained in our spot as one van after another pulled up, and its crates and duffel bags, filled with pistols and high-powered rifles of all different calibers, bulletproof vests, and various kinds of