Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [59]
In the meantime, since the Valhalla had come back, the Ramsland, an old freighter from South America also owned by Joe Murray, was presently in the Chelsea Naval Yard, scheduled to be scrapped. This ship was presently carrying thirty tons of marijuana for Murray’s operation out of Charlestown, with a street value of $30 million minus expenditures. Jimmy and I each had a piece of that. In all, there were six people involved, each with equal shares that came out to about two and a half million to three million apiece after expenses. Although we’d used the Valhalla to send guns to Ireland, we had never sent drugs over there. It was fine to send the drugs to the English who were oppressing the Irish, but never to our own people.
But now, all of a sudden, the Ramsland, which had been sitting there for a month, got raided. And the customs agents who had boarded the boat knew exactly where to go for the hide. Taking the ballasts off the secret compartment, they had easily found the thirty tons of marijuana. We knew right away that they had been tipped off, and that the same person who was cooperating about the Valhalla was also cooperating here. And chances were excellent that that person was McIntyre.
The plan to grab him didn’t take long to arrange. Since McIntyre worked for Joe Murray, we talked to Joe about the situation, although we never needed permission from anyone. We did whatever we wanted to do. First, we discussed the possibility of sending McIntyre to South America where Murray had connections and could kill him or hide him till everything blew over. Then we considered whether we should prep him on what to say to the grand jury. But the plan we decided on was for Murray to tell McIntyre that he could invest in a drug deal with him that would pay ten times the return on his money. We would be dangling a carrot in front of him, playing on his greed. As it turned out, McIntyre went back to the customs agents, who gave him the $20,000 to invest, figuring they could set up a sting operation and nab Murray.
On November 30, 1984, McIntyre met with Murray on the South Boston waterfront, supposedly to give him the $20,000 to invest in the drug deal. On the waterfront, McIntyre got into the car with Murray and another individual. The three of them drove around and then dropped off Joe. When the other guy said he had to drop off some beer for a party on East Third Street, McIntyre went along, thinking he was doing a simple errand with him.
Around noon, the other guy walked into 799 East Third Street with a case of Miller Light and put it on a table. When he went back to the car to get another case, McIntyre, who was six feet tall, around 220 pounds, with brown hair and a light beard, came in, wearing dungarees and a light jacket, thinking he was coming to a party and carrying a case of beer himself. When he walked into the kitchen, he immediately saw me and Stevie and started to turn back. But I grabbed him by the throat and the back of his head and he went down to the floor. At the same time, Jimmy stepped out from behind the refrigerator with a machine pistol, a Mac-10 with a silencer, and said, “Let him up.” When I helped him up, Stevie and Jimmy sat him in a chair where Stevie handcuffed, shackled, and chained him. Leaving the three of them alone in the kitchen, I walked into the adjacent parlor and sat on the couch. For the next five or six hours, McIntyre was never tortured, although he was obviously mentally terrorized.
It took no more than two minutes of interrogation in the kitchen for McIntyre to admit he was the informant. From the parlor, I could hear him say, “I’m sorry. I was weak.”
Jimmy told him to take it easy, to calm down. “Don’t worry,” he told him. “We’re going to send you to South America or tell you what to say in front of the grand jury. You’ll be all right.”
Jimmy came out a minute or so later to tell me what was going on. When