Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [79]
Soon Jimmy started hearing from law enforcement that there was indeed an investigation on us. In the meantime, in the fall of 1984, the Valhalla had gotten grabbed, McIntyre had gotten grabbed and disappeared, and the investigations for those events had turned flat. So now the DEA had come in and decided they were going to get us for drug trafficking.
As soon as we started noticing the extra surveillance, I made several trips to a specialty store at 633 Third Avenue in New York to buy some new bug-sweeping equipment. Once I got the new equipment, I used it frequently to sweep both Jimmy’s car and his condo at Louisburg Square in Quincy. In both places, I kept getting high readings. In his condo, the readings were by the bow window, yet we couldn’t pinpoint the spots. Jimmy thought the law was aiming a laser at the windows to pick up sounds inside, but we couldn’t find anything to indicate that that might be the case.
In February 1985, at around four o’clock in the morning, Jimmy and Cathy came out of his condo to go for a walk. They frequently went for walks at that hour. The first thing Jimmy saw as he started to walk out of his front door were two guys in overalls coming around the corner. Immediately, Jimmy ran back into the condo and grabbed his car keys and he and Cathy drove off after the guys. One of the men took off, running into the unit at Louisburg Square that overlooked Jimmy’s unit. The other one jumped into a car and bent down under the seat, but his foot hit the brake light. Jimmy pulled up next to the car but couldn’t get a look at the guy’s face. That was a big tipoff that something was going on concerning his house and car.
A week or so later, I was scheduled for surgery to remove a broken disc in my neck. Over the years, from sports and boxing, the disc in my neck had been deteriorating. Finally, it had broken off and was cutting into my spinal cord, causing me a lot of discomfort and making my left arm go numb. The day before I went into the hospital, I swept the car and got an especially high reading. When I got out of the hospital, I swept the car again and got another high reading. Certain something was going on with Jimmy’s Chevy, I took it down to the mechanic on a Friday and showed him where the reading was coming from. After he checked things over, he said the high reading was caused by the car’s computer brain, which was sending out a signal that we were picking up.
Monday, I met Jimmy and told him, “I don’t like it. There is something in this car. I’m sure of it.” This time, when we went back to the mechanic’s garage, we were able to figure out that the high reading was coming from the passenger door. After closer inspection, I discovered a small wire hanging down from the lining on the door. When I pulled the lining away from the door, a microphone fell down. Then I saw that the microphone was attached to a piece of a coat hanger that was bent so it could hook onto a bar inside the car door to hold it in place.
Jimmy picked up the microphone and said, “One, two, three testing,” and with that about four cars rolled into the garage and agents jumped out with their guns drawn. One of the agents was Steve Boeri, another was Al Reilly, and two others were New York DEA agents. When the agents appeared with drawn guns, I was standing by the car. “Kevin, get away from the car,” one of the agents kept insisting. But I wouldn’t move because I was holding the piece of equipment I’d used to find the bug and I didn’t want the agent to see exactly what equipment I had. “Take your hand out of your pocket,” the agent