Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [82]
I said, “What? The visor?”
They looked at me for a minute and then used a Phillips screwdriver to take the three screws out of the visor and took it with them. Afterward, Jimmy and I drove away and laughed. We knew they got nothing.
But the presence of the law all over the neighborhood and their frequent raids had slowed the business down well before the August 1990 bust. By that time, just about everyone had packed it in and stopped dealing, and drug users were traveling out of town to get their drugs. While there was always someone to pick up the business, it was nowhere near so large a scale as before.
The Southie drug bust itself involved three separate groups: the Paul Moore group, the Red Shea group, and the Hobart Willis group. In 1987, Billy Shea had packed it in, so they didn’t get him. But the DEA made the 1990 raids early one morning and continued into the next day, looking for people. They got the majority of them that first morning, and arrested the rest of the three groups the next day. Jimmy, Stevie, and I were the only ones they didn’t get. Because we knew the raids were coming down, I used to sleep with a police scanner, tuned into my DEA channel, by the side of my bed. A short time earlier, I’d sent away for some books and papers explaining how to get a list of government channels and had figured out how to punch in the numbers from one frequency to the next. Eventually, I’d been able to figure out what channel was the FBI, the DEA, and so on. Then I’d plugged the channels into the scanner and had them available whenever I needed them. Today, with the evolution of cell phones, people talk more on their cell phones than on the scanner, but at that time, I relied on my scanner.
And sure enough, the day of the raid, at 4:00 A.M., I was woken up by the words, “Good morning, gentlemen. It is now our turn.” I could hear the team they had assembled for the raid talking to one another. I jumped out of bed, got dressed, and called Jimmy. A few minutes later, he picked me up and we drove over to the Boston Common. Here we sat on a park bench, listening to the radio and how all the raids and arrests went down, looking over at the bridge where the water is, at the spot where they’d later film a scene from Good Will Hunting. At noon, Jimmy made a call and we got word they weren’t looking for us, so we went back home.
We didn’t know 80 percent of the people who were arrested, for most of them didn’t work for us, but rather for the people who were paying us. Some of the dealers were held in jail, while others were released on bail, or got time or probation or house confinement. Hobart Willis got seventeen years. Paul Moore got nine. Jackie Cherry originally got nine years, but they brought him up in front of a grand jury and gave him immunity. When he refused to testify, they gave him an additional eighteen months dead time for contempt. Red Shea ended up with eleven years. But they couldn’t get to Jimmy. He was too well-insulated.
Of course, Jimmy lost money once the drug dealers were removed from the streets in the summer raid, but he always had other businesses going on. Knowing I had to build something on the side, I had concentrated on my shylocking and gambling businesses. The drug business had been good while it lasted. But our major involvement with it was over.
EIGHT
JIMMY
TEN MORE MURDERS
Some people might perceive these murders as more evidence of Jimmy’s darker side; others would look at them as Jimmy doing the right or only possible thing. Most of the time, it was just plain business: sometimes as payback for informing the FBI; other times to protect business interests; and, finally, just because he didn’t like the person. Even though I wasn’t around or