“Stole what? I stole nothing, not a fucking thing from no one.” I go on to explain the off-load deal with Chagra, the spoiled product. Red Beard. A full accounting. “Nobody stole nothing.”
“You better be telling me the truth,” George says and gazes at me.
“What the fuck am I gonna do, lie to you? You know me better than that.”
“This is bad,” George says, as if I don’t already know. “Very bad. You’ve got to make it right. It’s out of my hands.”
“Make it right? How? I don’t have a million dollars. And if I give them half of our loads, there’s nothing left for you and me.”
“Look, you heard me. This guy has got permission from the Hill in Providence. He’s very close to Raymond. There is nothing I can do.”
“Well… then fuck it. It’s over.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” George snaps and glowers at me.
“It means… I’m out of here. Out of Logan. Out of Boston. Fuck these people. They don’t want to pay me for off-loading their freighter, I’ll keep the pot.”
“You’re crazy!” He shakes his head, wags a finger in my face. “No, no… you don’t fuck these people! They’ll find you wherever you go. And then they will kill you. Make no mistake about it.”
“George, I did what Chagra hired me to do, that’s all. I’m not giving them shit.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“No. I just… I don’t like getting fucked.”
“You like getting killed?”
“They’ve got to find me to kill me.”
After a moment, George says, “Maybe I can get you a pass on the million, because you’re with me. But they’re going to want a piece of everything you do from now on. That’s just the way it is.”
I can’t even depend on Uncle George to help me out of this one. But I don’t care. I tell George I’ll deal with it myself. The more I think about it, the more I convince myself Capuana is full of shit. He and Chagra are trying to shake me down, and I’m not going for it. Stubborn Capricorn. Piss on them. George tells me that if I defy Capuana, I am pissing on Providence, and therefore he cannot protect me.
Two days later a load from Beirut arrives at Logan—135 kilos of primo blond Lebanese hash. My guy at the airport—not Gerry Grillo’s guy, Dominick, who had to open his big mouth about our catch, but the guy I deal with directly, Kevin, an Irish guy from South Boston—he tells me they want the load out of there immediately. It must be picked up this very night before the customs inspectors come around with dope-sniffing dogs in the morning. “Understand?” Kevin says. “You gotta get it out now, Rich.”
My first thought is that I’m being set up. Val drops me off at the airfreight terminal. Usually JD or Father Flaherty or one of the other drivers picks up the load. But this time I am doing it on my own. Out of necessity. The crates are marked ENGINE PARTS with JAL (Japanese Air Lines) stickers all over them, loaded into the rear of a panel truck parked at the loading docks. The hash was shipped from Beirut to Abu Dhabi, then transferred to JAL and relabeled ENGINE PARTS. I see my guy, Kevin, he gives me the keys, I hand him the envelope with thirty grand, and then I drive out without so much as a second look.
At my parents’ home in Wellesley, I stash the hash in the Global Evangelism motor home parked in the driveway. The panel truck I leave at a prearranged spot in East Boston, near the airport. Put the keys in the ashtray and walk away, praying Capuana and his boys aren’t waiting to drive by and clip me. I take a cab back to the hotel. But I am too antsy to stay there. Val and I drive out to Wellesley and spend the night in the motor home. We make love in air thick with the perfumed fragrance of fresh hashish.
I got the load out without giving Capuana so much as a gram. Now everybody is pissed at me. My local distributor, Benny, wants nothing to do with it. Uncle George doesn’t even want his cut. “You’re on your own,” he tells me. My guy at the airport, Kevin, calls and leaves a message on my answering service. When I call him back, Dominick comes on the line. “Someone wants to talk to you,” he says.
“Richie, you know who this is?” the guy asks.
“No… who?” I say. But I know.
“John. I met you with Mike the other night.”
“Yeah.”
“You think you’re pretty fuckin’ smart, don’t you?”
“John, I got no beef with you or with Capuana.”
“No? Listen, asshole. You know what I’m gonna do to you?”
“What’re you going to do?”
“I’m gonna find you. And when I do, I’m gonna cut your balls off and shove ’em up your mother’s cunt. Then I’m gonna kill you.”
I have to hand it to John Grillo, it’s a pretty vivid threat.
FOR THE FIRST time in over fifteen years in the dope business, I start to carry a gun, a .380 caliber automatic I buy at a gun shop in New Hampshire with one of the driver’s licenses I got from the Wizard. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the weapon, but it’s there, either in my pocket or in my new briefcase. During my rational moments I know I’m living out some childhood fantasy life of crime. I see myself as a character in a Cagney gangster movie playing in my head. I fondle the gun. Go out in the woods and shoot at beer cans or to the dump and shoot at rats. As a kid at camp I was a pretty good shot, got all my marksmen badges with a .22 rifle. And at my friend Godfried’s farm in Maine we used to target practice with his arsenal of handguns. But am I really going to shoot John Grillo or Mike Capuana or whomever they send to kill me, and leave them to die in the street? Do I have the balls to pull the trigger and kill another human being? Pick up a murder beef to add to whatever charges Wolfshein and the Feds have in store for me? I have my doubts…
Wolfshein… In all the excitement I almost forgot about him and the bust in Maine. The stolen briefcase. Shit. And I still have all that weed stashed in Maine to move. Plus the load of hash nobody wants to help me sell. Things are happening too fast. I begin to have vivid dreams about killing dark-haired men, fleshy-faced men with smirking smiles, and being consumed with how to dispose of the dead body. I’m in a house with a ton of weed in the basement and a chopped-up body in garbage bags outside in the rear of my car. Garbage bags full of weed, garbage bags full of body parts. I’m getting them mixed up. We call a pound of pot an elbow. Here, let me sell you an elbow. Or is it a torso? How much for a severed head? I’m shooting at these guys who are chasing me but my gun is like a toy, a cap gun. I’m really just a big kid beating them to death with my fists. But the blows are sluggish, slow motion, not really effective. Mike Capuana smiles back at me as I punch him in his round, moon face.
And still I’m not losing any sleep. I start to appreciate that I’m genuinely crazy, always have been. That’s okay, I can deal with that so long as my behavior doesn’t hurt anyone else—family, loved ones, girlfriends, friends, dogs. That is where my real fear lives. Grillo is indeed looking for me. George assures me Grillo has orders from Capuana to kill me. One night he finds me. Maybe he’s been following me, I don’t know. I’m with another guy, Jake, who is something of a badass himself, little Jewish guy like Meyer Lansky, an armed robber who did a bunch of time for manslaughter. Jake and his sister have been moving kilos of the new load of hash, sending it out to people in New Orleans, and they want more. We pull into a parking lot outside a busy club in Brookline where Jake’s sister works as a cocktail waitress. I’ve got twenty-five grand on me, so I take a moment to put it in the stash. When I get out of the Suburban and we walk toward the club, I see Grillo and another guy getting out of their car. Grillo follows us inside. I know it’s him; this isn’t a dream. I see him again at the bar, looking right at me. But I give him the slip in the crowded club. I grab Jake. His sister lets us out a rear door.
“What’s wrong?” Jake asks.
“Someone I don’t want to see.”
“Fuck ’em. Let’s go back and fuck ’em up.”
“No. You don’t want any part of these people.”
/> After a few days of missed calls, I contact the man who turned me on to Kevin and the airport freight handlers in the first place. He’s a successful Back Bay real estate broker with an expensive cocaine habit. Kevin has already clued him in on my problem with Capuana and the Grillo brothers. “Let me see what I can do,” he says.
Meanwhile Val and I have to convert the hash into cash. The Lebanese want their end. Val and her partner, Judy, take seventy kilos in the Global Evangelism machine and drive it out to their people on the West Coast. My Canadian distributor and close friend, Rosie, in Toronto takes most of the rest of the load and turns it in a matter of days. I have a suitcase full of money, $130,000, to deliver to the Arabs, who await me at a hotel in Manhattan.
At Logan, I buy a ticket on the shuttle to LaGuardia and check the suitcase. As I am going through the security checkpoint, I place my new briefcase on the conveyer belt. At the moment the briefcase disappears into the X-ray machine, I remember: Fuck. The gun. Oh, shit. It’s in the briefcase, the .380 automatic. How can I be so stupid?
I see by the look on the security guy’s face when he spots the outline of the gun in my briefcase, he’s as shocked as I am. I try to snatch the briefcase when it emerges from the other side of the X-ray machine and head back out of the terminal, saying something lame like, “I don’t think I’ll be going to New York after all.” The security guy grabs the briefcase. We wrestle with it for a moment while his co-workers summon the state police. Massachusetts has a strict minimum mandatory five-year prison term for anyone caught with a gun. I am quickly locked up in a holding cell at the airport while my suitcase with all that cash goes on to New York without me.
This is one of those moments when I am forced to conclude that not only am I crazy, I am also careless. Not on top of my game. My briefcase has disappeared, probably sitting in an evidence locker at DEA headquarters. Wolfshein is planning his next move. The mob is trying to kill me. George has withdrawn his protection. The Lebs want their money. Wolfshein and the Feds and Capuana and the mob are tracking me. And here I sit in a holding cell at the airport charged with possession of a handgun. Carrying false ID in the name of Paul Quinlan of Austin, Texas, while my suitcase with a hundred and thirty grand travels off to New York by itself. It occurs to me that this is the second time I have been locked up in as many months—not a good trend.
The arresting state trooper lets me call my Boston-based criminal lawyer, Thomas Heffernon, a childhood friend who has risen to become one of the best trial lawyers in town, and who is now overseeing my defense in the Maine case. Hef, a big redhead with a basso profundo voice and Celtic verbal gift that can talk birds out of the trees, already beat one hashish importation case for me in the Eastern District of New York—the one Wolfshein mentioned, where the DEA stole the load and couldn’t produce the evidence. Hef tells me to act agreeably and say nothing. He asks if he can speak with the arresting trooper. Whatever is said, I begin to get a glimpse of something out of the ordinary when the trooper tells me, “Your lawyer’s on his way. We’ll wait outside for him.” And he leads me out of the terminal.
Hef comes directly in to the airport and gets me an immediate hearing in an East Boston court. “This gentleman, Mr. Quinlan, hails from the great state of Texas,” Hef tells the presiding judge. “Out there, folks think nothing of carrying firearms. In fact, they consider it their God-given and Constitutional right as Americans to bear arms. He is not familiar with the Draconian statutes imposed in this fair state for what comes to a Texan as naturally as breathing clean air. This offense is an error of pure ignorance on the part of Mr. Quinlan. He is a law-abiding man and cannot be held to account for what he did not know. The trooper, however, was quite right in his interdiction of this matter. Even so, I ask the mercy of this Honorable Court on a true gentleman.”
After a moment of reflection, the judge gives me a lecture on the laws of Massachusetts. He then imposes a fine, $200, confiscates the gun and releases me. Hef hands me my briefcase and gives me a hug. “Take care of yourself,” he tells me. “You seem tense.”
“It’s been a rough couple of weeks.”
“You’re looking good in Portland,” he says. “I don’t believe they have enough to get an indictment. Unless, of course, someone flips.”
I MAKE THE four o’clock shuttle to LaGuardia. When I arrive and go to the baggage claim area, I am amazed and gratified by what I see. There is my suitcase, still making its lonely way around the luggage conveyer six hours after it arrived, waiting for me to claim it. Overcoming a moment’s hesitation, thinking that agents may have the place staked out and are just waiting to see who would claim the bag before they make their move, I grab the bag off the revolving belt and walk out of the terminal.
That evening, in Manhattan, I turn over a hundred grand to my Lebanese contact and tell him to start gathering together a big load.
“How much, Mr. Richard?”
“As much as you can get.”
* * *
MY FRIEND, THE real estate broker, is in touch when I return to Boston. He tells me he has someone he wants me to meet, who might be able to help me with “my problem.”
“Who?”
“You’ll find out.”
The meeting is set for the next afternoon at the broker’s business on Newbury Street in Back Bay. When I walk in to a rear office, I am introduced to a man I immediately recognize as the legendary boss of the Irish mob, James “Whitey” Bulger.
“Hi, how ya’ doin’?” Bulger greets me and we shake hands. “I understand you got a problem with Mickey Capuana.”
He is wearing a lightweight black leather jacket, shades, jeans, and sneakers. The bright blond hair that gave him the nickname “Whitey” is thinning. When he takes off his sunglasses I see the famous icy blue eyes. Bulger is in his late forties, early fifties. Fit. Lean. Medium height. He’s got the hard, contained look of a man who has done a lot of prison time. His younger brother, William Bulger, president of the Massachusetts State Senate, is one of the most powerful politicians in New England. Senator Bulger went to war with the Boston Brahmins, led by Judge Garrity, over forced busing in South Boston. “Don’t worry about it,” Bulger tells me when I explain what went down. “I’ll straighten out Capuana.”
A few days later I meet Bulger again, this time on his stomping grounds, at Castle Island in South Boston. He’s leaning against his black Mercury Monterey when I pull up in the Suburban. “Let’s walk,” he says. He’s wearing shades and a Red Sox baseball cap.
The peninsula of South Boston sticks out into the Atlantic like a left jab. It is a world apart from the rest of the city, almost entirely occupied by first- and second-generation Irish immigrants. As we walk around the island on the eastern tip of the point with a panoramic view of Boston Harbor, Bulger launches into a history lesson. He tells me that during the Revolutionary War, General George Washington placed his cannon on Dorchester Heights, high in the heart of Southie, and forced British troops to evacuate their garrison at Fort William and Mary—now the site of Fort Independence, a hulking, five-sided granite structure built in the 1800s. Castle Island was connected to the mainland in the 1930s by a man-made isthmus so streetcars could bring bathers to Pleasure Bay, known locally as the lagoon, a placid ocean pool skirted by white sandy beach.
“These fuckin’ guineas,” Bulger says and chuckles. “They think they run Boston.… Who ever heard of Mickey Capuana? He’s a punk. He thinks he can walk in here and start shaking people down. No, that’s not gonna happen. I’ll shake him down, this fuckin’ greaseball.” He stops walking, looks at me.
“He’s with Raymond. Big fuckin’ deal. Raymond is in Providence. This is our town. Right, kid?” He takes off the shades and gazes at me with those shiny blue eyes.
“What do you want me to do?” I ask him.
“Just keep taking care of my guys at the airport,” he says. “Maybe kick ’em up another ten, fifteen grand. It’s a sweet little setup. My guys are happy. They got an extra five or ten g
rand a month to play with. If that fuckin’ wop douche bag Dominick hadn’t opened his mouth… But don’t worry about him.” He smiles, nods. “You’re a good earner, kid. I checked you out. If there’s anything else you need, let me know.”
“What about Capuana?”
“I told you, I took care of it.”
We start walking again. I’m wondering, did he kill Capuana?
“The contract is lifted,” Bulger says and then, after a few moments, “I might need a favor from you.” He goes on to tell me his people have a warehouse full of pot and may need some help moving it. I tell him I’ll have my man come in and take a look.
“Good,” he says. “Thank you.”
I am impressed by how polite he is, reserved and respectful. Yet there is no question in my mind that he is a dangerous man. All the more so for his apparent intelligence. Walking around Castle Island, with the sun shining on Massachusetts Bay where my grandfather used to keep his sailboat moored, I feel like I have finally arrived—ascended to the pinnacle of the underworld. How appropriate that it all comes back to Southie.
My personal history with South Boston concerns the 175-acre island four miles offshore known as Thompson Island. One gets to Thompson Island by motor launch that leaves the mainland from Kelly’s Landing in Southie. I can see Thompson Island now from where Jimmy Bulger and I stand. In the 1800s, Thompson Island became home to the Boston Asylum for Indigent Boys, later named Thompson Academy. I was sent to Thompson Island in the eighth grade when I got kicked out of Wellesley Junior High. It was during my fledgling juvenile delinquent phase. Post Pink Rats. More like Marlon Brando in The Wild One. I wanted to be like the tough inner city kids I saw in Blackboard Jungle. Not some candy-ass rich kid from Wellesley Hills. I wore my hair like Elvis. Carried a switchblade knife. Wore a black leather motorcycle jacket. Hung out at one of the two places in Wellesley that had pinball machines—Ma’s Lunch, run by a toothless, old, Italian lady who used to let us kids smoke cigarettes.
Early one day during a Phys Ed class at Wellesley Junior High, I was out on the pitcher’s mound playing softball. But I had forgotten my sneakers. No sneakers, no softball—that was the rule. Mr. Wade, a student teacher from Springfield College—small guy, not much bigger than us eighth graders, a gymnast—ordered me off the pitcher’s mound. I was a wiseass and Wade didn’t like me. I refused to leave and Wade lost it. He came out onto the diamond, grabbed me, and tried to drag me from the playing field. We got into a knock-down, drag-out fistfight as Wade attempted to haul me up the hill to the principal’s office. I got him in a headlock and punched him in the face. He broke free, grabbed a stone and tried to crown me with it. The girls’ gym teacher was so freaked she herded all the girls into a bevy behind the backstop. I ran off. I ran all the way home, and I hid in the garage until my grandmother, Ba Ba, found me. I was expelled from Wellesley Junior High School. No other public or private school would take me, and as I was just thirteen at the time, Thompson Academy served as one wrong step away from a more serious reform school. The child psychologist my parents enlisted interviewed me and then signed some papers identifying me as a “person in need of supervision.”
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