Irish Thunder

by Bob Halloran

  He started grabbing fights wherever he could find them for whatever money he could make, nothing more than three thousand dollars. In the summer of 1981, he drove up to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to fight Allen Clarke. It turned out be Dickie’s most violent fight.

  “It was the eighth round. I went bam with the right hand in the jaw, and he winked at me on his way back to the corner,” Dickie begins. “And I thought, ‘Oh my God! You’ve got to be kidding me.’ So, the ninth round comes. I went bang into his side. Once I hit him with that shot, I knew I had him.”

  With just a hint of jealousy, Dickie stops his story to point out that they call that hard left to the body the Micky Ward body shot, “but that’s my shot,” he says. Then he continues.

  “I could have backed up after that shot, but I remembered him winking at me, so I chased him to the other side of the ring, and I hit him, bang! boom! boom! One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten! Ten big shots! And his eyes rolled into the back of his head.”

  This time with just a hint of pride, Dickie explains that the Halifax news station that night introduced the boxing highlights by saying, “This is not for the faint of heart.”

  Dickie claims to have put Clarke into a coma, but the records show that Clarke fought for the Canadian welterweight title only five months later. Quick recovery.

  After knocking out Clarke, Dickie fought only nine more times in the next four years. Training became difficult for him because his trainer, Johnny Dunn, was in Boston. Dickie had a falling out with Ramalho when he turned pro. Ramalho had given him full use of his gym, trained him, and nurtured him through the Silver Mittens and Golden Gloves. Ramalho assumed that when Dickie turned pro, he’d still be his trainer, but Dickie had other ideas. He and his mother wanted someone with more connections, so they passed over the “Lowell Connection,” and went with the sixty-eight-year-old Dunn.

  “I trained Dickie myself for nine years,” Ramalho says. “He was a great, great fighter. But he kind of broke my heart, because he came to me and said he was going pro, but his mother wanted him to go with this other trainer in Boston, Johnny Dunn. Dickie was like one of my own kids. I expected to be training him when he turned pro. I just got so mad, I didn’t want nothing to do with him. We’re good friends now, though. He’s told me a thousand times his biggest mistake was leaving me, but you know how parents can be sometimes.”

  The decision to go with Dunn was a sound one. Dunn was one of boxing’s true characters. Born John D. Donarumo, Dunn had worked with former champions, such as Terry Downes and Bob Foster, but he spent most of his time working with the local hopefuls, Jaynes, Eklund, and Ward. He was a bit of a family caretaker in that way. When Dickie was about to fight Sugar Ray Leonard, Dunn told him in the locker room: “We’ll beat this fucker!”

  He promised both Dickie and Micky at different times that he would make them champions, but he died of heart failure in December 1990 without ever making good on those promises.

  “Johnny always had something to offer,” Dickie says. “He knew more than the trainers you hear about now, but he never got the recognition. We had to help him into the ring, but just having him around was like having someone around who was eighteen years old.” Dunn trained fighters up until one month before his death, but he was of little help near the tail end of Dickie’s career. Dickie began training in his own basement, but he was unable to find sparring partners and suffered from a swollen left knee that he hurt while jogging. He grabbed a three-thousand-dollar payday against a part-time fighter named Mark Harris in April 1982, but the fight fell through. He ended up facing a lesser fighter, Cesar Guzman, for less money. Guzman lost twenty-four of his twenty-seven professional fights, but his specialty was going the distance. Like many others before and after, Dickie couldn’t knock him out either.

  Dickie won the decision, and a year later, in 1983, he won the New England welterweight title in a split decision over James Lucas up in Portland, Maine. He beat Lucas again nearly two years later. And that was it. He hung up his gloves with an unimpressive 19-10 lifetime record. It means he was better than some, worse than others. But nobody knows if he could have been the best, or at least one of the best. Dickie was just another one of Lowell’s “should have beens.” Instead of raising a fist in victory and becoming a world champion, Dickie raised a crack pipe to his lips as often as he could and wound up as one of the lost lives of Lowell. In fact, he was one of the dubious stars of the HBO documentary filmed by his distant cousin, Rich Farrell, called High on Crack Street: The Lost Lives of Lowell.

  In the film, Dickie is seen walking around wearing a pair of shorts and a backwards baseball cap. He is emaciated, gaunt. He looks far worse than he ever did at the end of one of his twenty-nine pro fights. While holding a lighted match about an inch away from a homemade crack pipe, he pauses and looks directly into the camera and says, “I fought Sugar Ray Leonard on HBO.”

  He is standing in the middle of a rundown crack house off Branch Street in the Lower Highlands of Lowell. Curtains cover the windows, but nothing covers the smell, a mix of burning plastic, severe body odor, and rotting food. Furniture is sparse. The couch serves the dual purpose of being about the only place to sit and the place where the matches, crack pipes, and assorted other drug paraphernalia are “hidden.” A crack house is nothing but squalor. Even the crack addict wants to leave. The people who wander in and out are in and out of their minds. They are psychotic. Their faces are distorted. Paranoia strikes deep, and violence is always a distinct possibility. “It ruins everyone’s life,” says Brenda. She is one of the film’s main characters. “Nobody can handle it. I do it because I love it more than anything, more than life itself. But yet I hate it worse than anything. I wish I could wipe it off the face of the earth. It’s the devil.”

  Farrell, a former heroine addict himself says, “Crack cocaine is something you smoke, and it gives you this incredible high. In some cases when you’ve been doing it for a while, you get this incredible high for thirty seconds, and then you come right down, and you have to do it again.”

  For a mere thirty seconds of euphoria, the crack addict has to face the intense agony, hypersensitivity to pain, chronic nausea, and uncontrollable tremors of withdrawal.

  Dickie would spend days inside a crack house, stepping out only long enough to rob someone of his or her money to pay for his next fix.

  “I just knocked people out for their money,” he says. “I had to be sober to beat somebody up, because when I was high I’d do anything you want. If you told me to go sit in the corner, I’d do it and be happy.”

  But when the money or the crack ran out, Dickie would get clean and return to the gym and pick up right where he had left off. By the time, High on Crack Street was being filmed, Dickie was thirty-two-years-old and had been retired for several years, but he could still throw punches incessantly, and he could still outlast anyone in a sparring session. He had a motor and could go all day. Then he would go all night.

  “It’s a battle for the rest of your life,” Dickie tells the filmmakers. Then he calls his three-year-old son, Dickie Jr., over to him and says, “I love you.”

  “There’s no danger out there for Dickie,” Alice Ward says. “He can do anything he wants to do. Just say, ‘I’m not doing it today.’”

  But Dickie adds a truthful piece of personal reflection: “The biggest danger is the whole world out there.”

  Dickie, by the way, refers to High on Crack Street as “that scumbag movie.” He claims that Richie Farrell gave him money knowing full well that he would run out and get crack, and that would make the film better.

  “He’d stop by at midnight and give me fifty bucks,” Dickie says. “Sometimes he’d just come by to say ‘Hello,’ and then when he’d leave, there’d be a fifty on the ground. He left it there, and he knew what I was going to do with it. They never paid me for the movie, though. They got Emmy Awards, and I got nothing. Richie’s fucking blood, man. He’s fucking blood, and he does that to m
e.”

  The bloodline was such that Dickie’s maternal grandmother (Alice’s mother) and Richie’s paternal grandmother were sisters. Beyond that, Richie Farrell and Dickie Eklund simply grew up in the same town. They went to different schools. Richie’s father taught at Lowell High School; to avoid any conflicts of interest and to get him out of Lowell as much as possible, Richie was sent to Austin Prep, the Catholic high school a few towns over in Reading. Dickie and Richie didn’t know each other until they were teenagers, but everybody knew who Dickie was and what he was doing with his life. So, after six months of searching crack houses for the most articulate addicts, Richie settled on three candidates, Brenda, Boo Boo, and Dickie, and began shooting a documentary film in his troubled hometown for the next eighteen months. Dickie had actually lobbied for a part in the film. He was going to be a star.

  For his part, Rich Farrell says Dickie was never given any money during the filming, but that ten thousand dollars was put away in a trust fund for Dickie Jr. He suspects that the boy’s mother got her hands on the money and spent it.

  “Dickie would come to us and threaten to tell the newspapers that we were giving him money to buy crack, but that never happened,” Richie explains. “So, we told him to go ahead and do whatever he wanted.”

  Dickie never went to the newspaper. After all, he was a crack addict with a long arrest record and a bad history with the police. What could he say, and who would believe him? Instead, Dickie made suggestions on how to make the film better.

  “He wanted us to film him robbing people,” Farrell says. “We knew they were robbing prostitutes and Johns, and he wanted us to film that.”

  Dickie and a couple of his hooker friends had devised a creative scheme to victimize horny guys with money to spend. The girls took their positions on the street, and when cars driving by slowed down enough to indicate an interest, the girls would wag their tongues in a lewd pantomime. That would generally get a would-be John to stop. A girl would get in and direct him to a secluded place around the corner.

  Once the hooker had confirmed the mark had plenty of money, she would light a cigarette. That was Dickie’s cue to come screeching up in another car with his high beams pointed directly at the unsuspecting mark.

  “I would never tell them I was a cop,” Dickie says. “But everything I did made them think I was. I would yank them out of the car, pat them down, and I’d say something like, ‘I’ll bet you’re married, too! You scumbag! ’ They almost always were. They were so scared that their wives would find out that by the time I sent them off, being robbed was the least of their worries.”

  Dickie never showed the victim a gun, but he always had one with him, just in case. For most of his robberies, he preferred a sawed-off shotgun. The rest of the time he carried a 9mm. Drugs and guns and hookers and jail. Dickie had ventured onto a road he’d never imagined.

  Dickie’s life of crime started small enough. There were a few early arrests for being disorderly or drunk in public when he was still a teenager. He took it to the next level with assault and battery and larceny charges in 1981, a month after his twenty-third birthday. He went the next five years without further arrests, which only means he wasn’t caught, but it was in January 1986 that he popped a police officer in the mouth and ran. Two months later, a man tried to break up an argument Dickie was having with his sister Gail so Dickie broke his jaw and robbed him. He then fought with the police who came to arrest him. For those offenses, which he admitted to, he was sent to the Billerica House of Correction for three months. While he was awaiting sentencing, he was released and fought with another police officer who was arresting him for being drunk and disorderly. There wasn’t much Micky could do to help his brother.

  “I was drinking one night,” Micky begins a story. “Just a couple of beers, but I hadn’t seen Dickie in a couple of days, so I went after him. He was in a house on Branch Street. I knew where he was gonna be. I get up there, and they tell me he’s not there. Somebody had told me he was in there. But at the door, they tell me he’s not. But I just go right in and everyone’s fucking scared of me, because they’re messed up, and I guess I was looking pretty angry. But I just plowed right through and started looking all over the house. Finally I find him hiding behind the shower curtain. He was all dressed and everything, but he was so stunned and whacked out at the same time when I pulled that curtain back. I just yelled at him for a while. ‘What are you doing? Where have you been?’ Stuff like that. Then I just left him there. There was no talking to him. An addict doesn’t want to hear you tell him what a fuckup he is. He gets enough of that. He’s got to do it himself anyway. The next day he comes up and says he’s never gonna do it again. I just stopped listening after a while. He never listened to me anyway. He’d just rebel and go back out there again anyway.”

  The next time Micky and Dickie saw each other after their encounter at the Branch Street crack house was at the gym. They didn’t speak about the incident. They just began working out. Micky was training for his eleventh professional fight against Randy Mitchum, which would be held at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium. It would also be Micky’s first fight on national television, and Dickie would be by his side.

  A day before the fight, Mitchum broke his foot, so Micky wound up fighting Carlos Brandi instead. Micky handed Brandi his first loss by knocking him out in the second round. Micky and Dickie were interviewed after the fight, and Dickie spoke proudly of his brother’s performance.

  “Each and every fight he comes out with something better. The reason he didn’t switch [to southpaw] was because we had gotten film of this other guy, and we found out the night before that we were fighting this guy. After we studied for him and trained for him, but Micky was ready for anybody tonight.”

  A few days later, the pride was gone from Dickie’s voice and the cell door closed behind him. He was in the Billerica House of Correction, which is just a short ride from his home. In jail, Dickie started working out every night, even contemplating a comeback.

  “There’s no beer in jail,” he says.

  He was released on New Year’s Eve, the biggest party night of the year. But he didn’t go out partying. But he didn’t continue his training either.

  “He kept saying he was going to,” Micky says. “But as the days went on and the weeks went on, it just wore off.”

  So Dickie returned to the streets, and five months after his release from Billerica, his evening at the Cosmo escalated into another arrest.

  Police Chief Sheehan was quoted as saying:

  First and foremost, Dickie is very concerned and interested in Micky’s career. Of course his heart is in the right place. But then you have to look at his lifestyle, his frame of mind, his approach to life. What are the proper influences for a young boxer like Micky? Is Dickie doing these things for himself? He has to do it for his brother. I’ve seen it generation after generation after generation. The similarities jump right out at you. All of these fighters have outstanding amateur careers. They win title after title and they have no trouble with the police. Then sometime between their amateur and professional careers, something happens. Every once in a while a kid comes along with the caliber of Micky Ward. In time, somebody’s got to come along, take him under his wing and keep him on the straight and narrow.

  That protective wing didn’t come until much later, in the second half of Micky’s career. In the early going, he had his mother managing him, and not particularly well, and he had Dickie training him.

  “Dickie should be more smarter,” Ouchie McManus said. “He’s Micky’s big brother, right? If Dickie handles him right, the kid’s going to make it. But life is one big party.”

  The party ended when Dickie stood in Lowell Superior Court on the morning of March 20, 1995. The charges against him: “. . . breaking and entering in the nighttime with the intention of committing a felony, masked armed robbery, kidnapping, possession of a firearm without a license.”

  Judge Wendie Gerahengorn ordered Dickie to serve
eight years at the state’s maximum security prison, MCI-Cedar Junction in Walpole. His mother and three of his sisters were there for the sentencing. They cried. Dickie was led hurriedly away in cuffs.

  Dickie was late for court that morning. He had spent his last night as a free man with Boo Boo smoking crack. Boo Boo was kind enough to offer, “Dickie, you want to go first since you’re going up?”

  Dickie accepted and said, “This stuff destroyed me. It destroys everybody.” Then he flicked a lighter with his left hand, brought the pipe to his lips, and inhaled with inexplicable pleasure the very thing that had destroyed him. “We’ve had a lot of good times,” Boo Boo said.

  When Dickie finally did race up the court steps in his gray sweat suit, he was immediately admonished by the judge, but politely and apologetically, he explained his tardiness.

  “It was so important for me just to tell my son that Daddy’s going away. I’m sorry.”

  Dickie was going to jail because one of his victims finally went to the police with a story of Dickie’s violent, abhorrent, criminal behavior. On most days, a John went into one of several Grand Street apartments looking for a prostitute. Once the mark was inside, preferably in a vulnerable position with his pants down, Dickie would jump out of a closet with a shotgun, frighten the man half to death, steal his money, and send him away crying, thankful that he was alive and swearing to himself that he would never go looking to buy sex again. The victim would be too embarrassed to tell the police his story, not wanting his complaint to become public record. But on one bad day, September 20, 1993, Dickie ran into an innocent man, or someone who was willing to lie about one important detail.

  “Grand Street was wild back then,” Dickie recounts. “I had all the Cambodians doing whatever I wanted them to do. My sister Gail was on one side, and this other girl was selling crack in her house. Now, this guy shows up, and he claims he needed to use a phone. But he comes into the house, and I’ve got a bag over my head, and this other guy’s got a bag over his head.”