Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [77]
The guy somehow mistook Jimmy’s words as a request, so he answered that he was going to continue not to be with anyone. Jimmy’s mood and voice changed real quick. “I’m not asking,” he told Lindholm. “I’m telling you.”
But the guy repeated that he wanted to continue by himself. He had barely finished saying those words when Stevie hit him with a body shot. He doubled over and fell off the chair, but I grabbed him and picked him up before he hit the ground. As I held him up and sat him back in the chair, Jimmy pulled out a pistol with a silencer on it. I was pretty sure we were trying to shake him down for money, so we wouldn’t kill him, and that the pistol was just to emphasize the point that he needed to pay us. The guy perceived no such assurance, so he immediately agreed.
A week later, Jimmy and Stevie told me nothing came out of that extortion, that the law had got wind of it so they had backed away. I had no reason to doubt them, but years later when I got arrested and charged with that particular extortion, I found out that Jimmy and Stevie had actually collected about $1,600,000 from Lindholm in a matter of months. I was a little mad when I found that out and even angrier when I learned that the same thing had happened a few other times. After all, I had put just as much ass on the line as they had and they hadn’t given the money to me. But by then everything had changed between the three of us, so in some small way, we were all even.
The only people we ever put out of business were the heroin dealers. Jimmy didn’t allow heroin in South Boston. It was a dirty drug that users stuck in their arms, making problems with needles and, later on, AIDS. While people can do cocaine socially and still function, once they do heroin, they’re zombies.
From the very beginning, there were serious attempts by law enforcement to get us on drug trafficking charges. One of their biggest efforts had been Operation Beans in 1985. This DEA operation actually began one afternoon in the spring of 1983. That particular day, Jimmy and I had been driving down West Broadway by the D Street projects when a fellow named Ronnie Costello waved us over. Ronnie, who was on the scene and knew a lot of people, happened to be working construction in the D Street projects, putting windows in the buildings and generally refurbishing them. That day, he told Jimmy and me that something big was going on at D and First streets, that all kinds of law enforcement were there. Ronnie got in the back seat of the car, behind me, and the three of us drove down D Street toward First Street, pulling up about a block and half away, where we used binoculars to watch what was going on. All kinds of law, the FBI and DEA, were everywhere, the agents wearing their windbreakers identifying their agencies with big letters across the back. We were there for about five minutes when Jimmy said, “Let’s get out of here before someone spots us and thinks we had something to do with this.”
As it turned out, we later discovered, the marijuana in the warehouse that had attracted the law belonged to Joe Murray, a large-scale Charlestown marijuana dealer. When Jimmy found out that Murray had been storing his marijuana there, he reached out and had someone bring Murray in for a meeting. At the meeting, he fined Murray $90,000 for storing the marijuana in Southie and putting the heat on us. That was our introduction to Joe Murray, with whom we later became involved in the effort to ship arms to Ireland on the Valhalla. Our relationship with this particular drug dealer ended years later when he decided to pack it in. When Murray finally chose to go his own way, we shook him down for $500,000. While no one ever volunteered to pay when they were packing it in, we considered