Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [76]
When Jimmy, Stevie, and I got to the restaurant, the place was packed with the lunch crowd, but Mickey and the teacher were already sitting in a booth. Jimmy sat down next to the teacher, pinning him in the corner so he couldn’t go anywhere. He was wearing glasses and khaki pants and looked like a typical teacher. As I sat down on the opposite side of the table, I opened my coat so the teacher could see the pistol. Jimmy introduced the three of us, and by the time we left the restaurant, the teacher had promised us $100,000. Two hours later, he handed the money to Mickey to give to us. It was a one-shot deal for us. As for the teacher, after that lunch, he got out of the drug business. Real quick.
Another shakedown, in 1988, involved John “Red” Shea (no relation to Billy Shea), who we heard had made a few disparaging remarks about Jimmy and me. When that information got back to us, Jimmy was upset, and since Red was in the drug business, we decided he would have to pay us from then on. We also decided that if he didn’t do what we asked him to do, we were going to kill him.
So we had him come down to 309–325 Old Colony Avenue, the end building near a block of stores. Jimmy and Stevie stayed upstairs while we had Red brought down to the cellar of the building. As soon as Red got into the basement, I pulled a machine gun on him and explained what we wanted. It didn’t take long to figure out an agreement where he would pay us an amount somewhere between $1,500 and $1,800 each month, depending on his business.
Red was an agreeable and pleasant person, especially when he turned out to be a standup kid in 1990, going to jail for eleven years in the raid that netted fifty-one of our drug dealers. Rather than rat us out, he took it on the chin. If he had known the true story about Jimmy and Stevie, I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had given us up then. But he didn’t know a thing about it, even in jail, where he got into a lot of fights defending Jimmy. Of all the drug dealers we dealt with, I liked Red Shea the best. He was a tough kid and very honorable—his word was his bond. Although he was never in the inner circle with Jimmy, Stevie, and me, he was a person I would have trusted. I wouldn’t say that about a lot of people.
Another shakedown involving a likable person took place one afternoon when I was driving down Dorchester Street and had a chance meeting with a kid from South Boston who was selling cocaine. I knew the kid, who was in his mid-twenties and will remain nameless, from around town and when he used to box. That day, I waved him over and we had a five-minute conversation, during which I shook him down for $12,000. An hour later, I had the money and he was allowed to do his own thing. The kid was basically a street dealer, not large-scale, but he’d been in business a long time. We never bothered him again. Normally people would have paid monthly, but because I did like the kid, it was just a one-time thing. I felt bad about shaking him down, but no one could deal without paying.
Not every drug extortion, however, put money in my pocket. Like the one in 1981 involving an antiques dealer, David Lindholm, who was dealing drugs off the islands of the Cape. The guy was smuggling 1,000 pounds of marijuana a month into Nantucket when Jimmy found out about his little business. Jimmy had someone walk Lindholm into the Marconi Club on Shetland Street in Roxbury, where Stevie was based. Jimmy, Stevie, and I were upstairs in the hall when two guys walked Lindholm in. The guy was a yuppie, average-looking, somewhere around thirty-five, medium build, around five-nine, with wire-rimmed glasses and brown hair, wearing corduroy pants and a sweater.
We had Lindholm stand on a chair while I frisked him to make sure he wasn’t wired and didn’t have a gun. The guy was shaking with fear while he stood on the chair