Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [90]
Furious as I watched him degrade the poor woman, I walked across the street and grabbed the back of his chair by the handles. I intended to push him down the driveway behind the bank into the parking lot, but he put his feet down, grabbed the wheels, and stopped me dead. I couldn’t move him. So I threw the wheelchair and him over onto the ground. Then I picked up the wheelchair and smashed it on the street. Wheels was on the ground yelling, so I gave him a boot in the back. When I walked back across the street, the three guys were doubled over, laughing with tears running down their faces.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“You look like the meanest prick in town,” Jimmy told me in between bursts of laughter.
“Fucking asshole can walk,” I said.
“Yeah, we know, but they don’t,” Jimmy said and pointed to the people across the street. Sure enough, all the people were trying to help him up. They thought that poor old wino was being picked on.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
One night two weeks later, Kevin O’Neil and I were driving around when we saw Wheels in front of the Marion Manor Nursing Home in Dorchester, doing his same thing, going after women who were leaving from work at the nursing home. This time I jumped out of the car, came up behind him, pulled up the hood on my sweatshirt, and threw Wheels out of the chair. Then I pushed it up to Fourth Street where Kevin had parked the car and dumped it into the trunk. A few streets later, I took the chair out of the trunk and tossed it into someone’s backyard.
A week later, Bobby Ford saw Wheels on Broadway. Bobby did pretty much the same thing I did, except he drove over to the Summer Street Bridge, where he threw the chair into the water. That, we all figured, was the end of Wheels and his wheelchair.
A year later, Jimmy and I were walking into Store 24 on West Broadway when someone came up to Jimmy and said, “Hi, Whitey, how you doing?”
Jimmy stared at him for a minute and then yelled out, “Wheels!”
The guy was all dressed up with khaki pants and a nice shirt, his hair cut neatly and his face clean-shaven. “I’ve been sober for almost a year,” he told us. “I’m doing good.” A perfect example that even the worst prick can change.
There were times, however, when Jimmy wasn’t around, when I was called upon to take care of some of these pricks, particularly when they were messing with people who mattered to Jimmy. Like with Nancy Stanley, Theresa’s daughter. Jimmy was out of town when Nancy came down to the variety store, upset about some guy named John who had just gotten out of jail and was bothering her. First thing I did was call him and tell him I heard he was looking for a job. I asked him if he had a driver’s license and said he could have a job delivering liquor. I told him to come down to the variety store, which was next to the liquor store, to see me.
When the guy, who was probably around five-ten and 220 pounds, came into the store, I had him follow me downstairs to the office. As soon as we got there, I turned around and cracked him a right hand, splitting him open over both his eyes and breaking his nose. Then I stomped on his knee till it cracked. Finally, I hit him and broke his ribs. While John was moaning in pain, two of us dragged him upstairs and threw him on the floor. As he hobbled toward the door, a woman who worked at the store saw him on the floor and thought he’d been in a car accident. She started to dial 911, but someone told her, “Kevin did it,” and she hung right up. John managed to stagger into his car, but before he drove away, I