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Two weeks later, I walked into the liquor store to go see Bo McIntyre, a friend of mine, and immediately spotted my buddy Tommy, holding a case of beer. He handed the beer to his friend and said to me, “We have something to finish.”

I nodded, hit him in the forehead with a right hand, and split him wide open. He also suffered a concussion. Bo McIntyre turned and looked at me and said, “What are these people thinking when they challenge you? Do they really think you’re going to walk away? They’re all nuts. What would make someone want to fight you?”

“I don’t know, Bo,” I said as I watched Tommy’s friend carry him out of the store. This time, he was the one going to the hospital.

I happened to run into Tommy a year later and figured, “Here we go again.” But he came up to me, stuck out his hand, and said, “I’m sorry. I was wrong.” I shook his hand and we actually became good friends after that. You might say we had become blood brothers.

While Stevie did attempt to end that fight and save a life, most often he was joining in and trying to accelerate the bloodshed. Like the night he pulled up to the liquor store at just the right time. I’d been there with a friend named Brian Feeney when two seventeen-year-old girls, dressed in spandex pants and halter tops, came in to buy tonic and cigarettes. As they were walking in, a group of college kids from Weymouth who had just come from the Medieval Manor restaurant drove by in a car and a pickup truck. As soon as they spotted the girls, they started leaning out their windows, whistling at the young ladies. They weren’t saying anything lewd, so I just ignored them and took care of the girls. But as they started to walk out, the guys became raunchy and began yelling sexual things to them.

I walked to the door and said, “Get out of here.”

A couple of the guys yelled back, “Who are you?”

“I own the place,” I told them.

“Well, fuck you,” one of the kids told me, getting out of the car.

“Fuck me?” I asked and walked over to the car and hit him before his feet touched the sidewalk.

As he went down, the car and truck quickly emptied as his friends came to his rescue. Just at that moment, Stevie pulled up in his car and jumped out. In a flash, he had hit one kid and knocked him out cold, as Brian ran out of the store and started to fight another kid. While Stevie and Brian were at work, I hit two more and they went right out. The remaining two took off running.

A week later, thanks to two Boston cops, Bob Ryan and Joseph Lundbohm, whose relative had a problem with me, I found myself in court in Southie with my lawyer, Bill Crowe. Lundbohm had gone to the kids in Weymouth and told them I was a gangster and in organized crime, urging them to press charges to protect themselves, which they did. Four of them showed up at the courthouse, and before we went on, they told me that for $5,000 each, they would drop the charges. I told them I was filing charges against them.

Inside the courthouse, my lawyer told me if I paid $5,000 to each of the four kids and also paid for their medical charges, they’d drop the case. “I couldn’t care less whether they get paid or you get paid,” I told him. “But there is no way everyone is going to get paid.”

“Fine,” he said. “We’re going to court.”

When we had our hearing for probable cause, the judge listened to everyone’s story. Then he turned to me and said, “Mr. Weeks, there were seven of them. How did you fight seven people?” Even though Stevie and Brian were involved, I was the only one who was charged. It was me they pointed the finger at because the liquor store was in my name.

“Your Honor, I surrounded them,” I told him.

He started laughing and said, “I tell you what. I’m going to find you all guilty or else I’m going to dismiss the whole case.” The kids suddenly understood that meant they would have records.

“I’m studying law and I go to USC, which is the University of Southern California…” one kid started to explain to him, obviously worried that having a record would hurt a future legal career.