Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [89]
The third time I went up to the house, I knocked on the door, the dealer answered, and I gave him a beating and knocked him out. But he still didn’t learn. Shortly afterward, we heard that he had started dealing again. One afternoon, Jimmy and I were driving down East Ninth Street in the Old Colony project when Jimmy noticed him walking on the sidewalk. Jimmy just pulled the car onto the sidewalk and ran him over. The kid ended up in the hospital with some broken bones in his legs, but he moved out of Old Colony. How many times do you have to tell someone to get out before he finally gets the message?
One angel dust dealer needed a little extra persuasion, too. He lived in the Old Colony project, right down the street from where my mother lived on Pilsudski Way, and was selling dust to everyone. People started coming into the variety store to complain that he was even selling to kids who were getting messed up on the shit. So Jimmy and I drove down and waited for him to come out of his house. Then we grabbed him, put him in the back seat, drove him around terrorizing him, and then told him he was out of business and to get the fuck out of town. A short time later, we started to hear that the kid was back in business. Obviously, he didn’t realize we knew he was starting up again, because one afternoon he walked into the store. But as soon as I saw him, I went to stand in back of him and blocked the door. He took off running and screaming and calling so much attention to himself that I had to let him go.
The next day, Jimmy and I met down at the variety store, and as we exited the store to get to the car, we saw the kid coming across Old Colony Avenue. He was halfway across the street, standing on the median strip, yelling, “Whitey, Kevin, I’ll pay youse if you let me stay in business. I’ll give you half my money, half the money I make.”
Jimmy turned around, saying, “You little motherfucker,” and took out a knife, but the kid took off running again. A few weeks later, he got pinched for drug dealing. Law enforcement tried to get him to say he was paying us to sell drugs, that we were shaking him down so he could sell his angel dust.
“No,” the kid told them, “they were going to kill me if I didn’t stop selling. They told me to get out of town.” That was the only good thing the kid did. He told the truth.
Still, the cops continued to ask us for help with people selling heroin. “You guys can do things we can’t,” they kept telling us. So we’d go down and drive the dealers out of town, but then we started to hear that the same cops were grabbing the people afterward. “We know you’re paying Whitey and Kevin,” they’d tell the dealers, and try to get them to admit that. So we backed away from running people out of town if the police or even a Good Samaritan asked us. We figured there was a good chance it was a setup.
There was very little prostitution in Southie. It was pretty much restricted to Boston’s Combat Zone downtown. But whenever Jimmy and I saw anyone doing that, we went after them. I’d say over twenty-five years, it happened maybe two or three times. But when it did, we took care of the guys who had grabbed young girls and were trying to pimp them. We’d get ahold of the guys and tell them to get the fuck out of town. That was just one of the things we were against.
But we never ran out of people we wanted to run out of town. One especially despicable creep was this guy in his late thirties or early forties, who we all called Wheels because he was in a wheelchair. One Saturday in the early 1980s around two in the afternoon, I was standing on Broadway across the street from the South Boston Savings Bank with Jimmy, Kevin O’Neil, and Bobby Ford, who used to run a booking office in Southie for Jimmy. We looked over and saw Wheels bumming money off people. An alcoholic,