Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob by Kevin Weeks; Phyllis Karas Read Free Book Online Page A

had to pity her poor father, Rocky, with seven daughters and only one bathroom. Rocky was a great guy, one of the gentlest men I ever met, and a loving father who was proud of all his daughters. But three years before we got married, Pam’s mother, Marie, died at age forty-seven from lung cancer. Marie was a beautiful woman who looked like Veronica Lake. When Marie got sick, Pam quit her job and took amazing care of her, never leaving her mother’s side while she was dying. But that’s the kind of person Pam has always been: loyal and loving. The whole Cavaleri family has always been a warm, emotional, and outgoing family, very different from mine. While my brothers and sisters are loyal to one another, we’re not demonstrative like Pam’s family. We all have sick senses of humor, sort of a black humor that makes us laugh at things most people would not find funny. Like if one of us fell down the stairs, an ordinary family might run to help him, but my brothers and sisters would fall over each other laughing hysterically. Same thing if one of us got a hand caught in the door. Another person might say, “Oh, my god! Are you all right?” and race over to help. Not our group. We’d be convulsed in laughter. It doesn’t mean we’re cold-hearted or unloving. It’s just this weird way of looking at things we all share. And it’s completely different from the way Pam’s family would respond to the same event. Even today, though Pam is sadly no longer my wife, I still keep in touch with her family and have always been grateful for how supportive they are of our boys.
    At the wedding, Billy Connell was my best man. Billy and I had known each other since we were kids growing up in the Old Colony projects and had lived together on West Third Street before Pam and I got married. We’d had some fun times decorating that apartment. One night, around 4:00 A.M ., Billy, Pam, and I walked into an all-night Howard Johnson’s restaurant in Andrew Square, picked up a seventy-five-pound plant, and walked out with it. When a waitress asked us what we were doing, I told her in a serious, no-nonsense tone that we were tree surgeons. She nodded just as seriously as we carefully set the plant in the back of Pam’s father’s Suburban and drove off. My first parlor set came from the hotel part of the same restaurant a few weeks later. That time, around two in the afternoon, another friend and I picked up a couch and love seat like we knew what we were doing and threw them in the back of the Suburban. No one paid any attention to us. I learned a good lesson decorating that apartment: Nobody will think anything is wrong if you do it calmly. It’s too obvious to be a crime. That particular lesson turned out to be useful.
    The guest list for the wedding included the older guys I was now spending more time with. Jimmy Bulger and Stevie Flemmi sat at a table with Kevin O’Neil, another owner of Triple O’s; Freddie Weichel, a friend of mine; and Johnny Pretzie, a friend who trained me late in my boxing career. I made sure the wedding photographer understood that there would be no pictures taken of that table. Everybody acted like gentlemen and had a great time. Pam’s and my song was “Always and Forever” by Heatwave, and our disc jockey was Joey Cunningham. It was a beautiful April afternoon and a perfectly happy occasion. My new wife and I left two days later for a week in Disney World where we stayed at the Contemporary Hotel.
    But from the time Pam and I got engaged, I had been spending more hours at Triple O’s, the rowdy, popular South Boston watering hole on West Broadway, named for and owned by the three O’Neil brothers, Jackie, Kevin, and Billy. I’d left Flix and gone to work there, along with some of my friends, bringing up ice and beer, keeping the ice stocked. I was also working for the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority from 7:00 A.M . to 4:00 P.M ., at a job my brother Jack got me, laying track. It was simple but