Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [67]
According to the local newspapers, who were quoting from an equally inaccurate police report, one afternoon Nicky Femia, the 240-pound mob enforcer who spent most of his time at the garage, was eating his McDonald’s lunch on the hood of Jimmy’s black 1979 Chevy Caprice. The story describes how Jimmy came out of the garage, saw Femia messing up his car with the food, and proceeded to humiliate him by flinging French fries into his face and screaming at him in front of a small crowd. The story is too ridiculous to repeat, and even more ridiculous to have ever happened. In the first place, Jimmy never acted like that to any of his associates. Second of all, Nicky was a very dangerous guy and if Jimmy ever humiliated him in front of others in that manner, Femia would be looking for revenge and Jimmy would have had to kill him. Just another example of inaccurate reporting and distortions of the truth about Jimmy.
The garage was the real setting, however, for some of Stevie’s best jokes. I used to call him Judd for the Defense, referring to the 1967–69 ABC television show about a flamboyant lawyer named Clinton Judd, because every time Stevie tried to stick up for me, he’d get me in more hot water with Jimmy. Even if it was a dead issue, something I had already done that had gotten Jimmy annoyed, Stevie would try to stir it up all over again. He’d get such a kick out of seeing Jimmy get on me. Like with my paintball tournaments. “So, how was that paintball convention last weekend, Kev?” he’d ask me days after Jimmy had gone at me for taking off for Texas for a tournament. “Where exactly did you say you went? I heard you did real well.”
Jimmy would start at me all over again and Stevie would stand in back of him, facing me, barely able to conceal his laughter. There was nothing mean-spirited about what Stevie was doing when he brought up my paintball tournaments. He was doing it all in fun. But all I knew was that every time Judd for the Defense stuck up for me in any matter, I always ended up getting convicted. “Hey, do me a favor and quit sticking up for me,” I’d tell him, but he would just smile and keep on busting my balls.
In his typical joking manner, Stevie had tried to convince me to take care of a cat, Mactavish, that he had over at the garage. I’d never seen such an ugly cat. First of all, it was the size of a dog, and it was missing an ear, which it had lost in a fight, along with large chunks of its fur. The dirty street cat was all scarred up and would attack anything that came within five feet of its broken tail. “Come on, Kev,” Stevie was always going at me, laughing as he was talking, unable to keep a straight face. “This cat loves you. It would be perfect for your kids. They’d love it. Come on. Take him home for a few days. He needs a good home. Give him a try.”
“Oh, yeah,” I told him. “He’d be great with my boys. Just the perfect family pet. I’ll come home one night and find the cat grazing on my kid’s arm.” But he never gave up pulling my leg about that miserable cat. Stevie never ran out of jokes, mostly off-color jokes, a lot of which he got from George Kaufman, an old Winter Hill associate of his. Stevie was a great joke-teller and got Jimmy to laugh at most of his jokes.
But he had his own passion, which wasn’t for paintball competitions, but rather for parachuting. He’d joined the International Association of Airborne Veterans, and with other former paratroopers, he jumped from planes in South Africa, East Germany, Israel, Russia, and Thailand, forming friendships with other Korean War vets. He enjoyed the jumps, and was always commenting about how modern the equipment was now as compared to what he had used during the war. He would describe the different types of parachutes the Army used and how they had improved over the years.