• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

But even when he felt compassion for someone in need, Jimmy could appreciate the same morbid, black humor I enjoyed. For instance, one day, Jimmy, Stevie, and I were driving up Broadway in Jimmy’s dark blue Ford LTD when we noticed this lady coming down the street in a motorized wheelchair. Jimmy stared at her for minute and said, “I wonder what that poor lady does in the winter.”

I looked at him and said, “Snow tires.”

Laughing, he said, “You dirty bastard. Don’t you have any sympathy for anybody?” We had lots of those sick laughs.

But heroin dealers were one subject about which Jimmy had no sense of humor. We didn’t deal with them. Jimmy wouldn’t let them in town. Even though cocaine and marijuana were well established in Southie, if we found out anyone was selling those drugs to a kid, they had a problem. We went after them, too. However, as long as Jimmy was in charge, heroin never took root and was never going to.

If we found out about a heroin dealer, Jimmy and I let them know they had to get out of town. If they didn’t, I beat them up. It might have taken more than one business visit, but they always left. In the rare cases when they didn’t leave after a beating, we told them on our second visit we would kill them the next time. Then they left.

There were some exceptions, of course. Like the Kivlan brothers, Al and Pat. Unfortunately, the Kivlans, both ex-boxers in their forties with broken noses and scar tissue around their eyes, never listened to anyone. In 1990, a girl Jimmy knew came to the store and said her daughter couldn’t play in her own backyard because of the needles there. Jimmy and I went over to her house on F and Silver streets, a two-family house whose yard abutted the three-decker house where the Kivlans lived on the first floor. The houses were just up the street from where a Metropolitan District Commission cop lived. The girl showed us the needles and told us that every time the police came, the Kivlans got rid of the stuff and the cops couldn’t find a thing. The MDC cop told us the same story. Whenever he called the cops, everyone in the house was gone by the time they got there. The next day, they were back in business. The Boston cops told us directly that they couldn’t catch the guys.

One Friday night, we came to the house, and when people started pulling up, we told them to get the fuck out of there. On Saturday night, we came back and saw the same people pulling up. When they started to go into the house, Jimmy and I got out of the car and I beat up two or three of them. “You’re getting off easy with a beating,” Jimmy told them. “Next time we see you here, we’ll kill you.”

When nothing changed the next night, Teddy Devins and I went over to the Curley Lumber Yard on Monday and bought some sheets of plywood. Then we drove the truck over to the Kivlans’ house, stood on the bed of the truck, and, with people still inside the house, started to nail the plywood over the windows. The brothers were too scared to come out, but as we continued nailing, we could see one of their wives, stunned, looking out at us. When we finished, we spray-painted the plywood with the words, OUT OF BUSINESS NO DRUGS.

Later that day, we caught up with Al Kivlan and his brother on G Street and Fourth and told them they had twenty-four hours to get out or we would kill them. By Tuesday, they were gone from the house on F and Silver. For good. A day or so later, the MDC cop and some other neighbors came down to the store to thank us. They told us we had done what the Boston cops hadn’t been able to do. Obviously, we used different tactics than the Boston cops.

Another heroin dealer who needed some persuasion to move out of Southie was some kid in the Old Colony project. When we heard people complaining about noise at all hours of the night in one building there, we considered it unacceptable. There were little babies in that building. And residents had older kids who couldn’t sleep because of cars pulling up and doors slamming loudly at all hours of the night. The first time we