A MAN'S REPUTATION IS A FUNNY THING, built out of the little things like a house is made brick by brick as much as by the cornerstone. Over time, a name and a face get associated with words and actions until, in the end, the very idea of that man's life is surrounded by an imposing edifice, good, bad, or indifferent, that can never be altered. Right now the uproar surrounding Joe McCain, Jr., and his suspension from the Somerville P.D. and the trash-pulling incident and all of Joey's idiosyncrasies and peccadilloes are coming together to determine his image and how he'll be remembered.
Not so his father. Because of his handy fists and kind heart, not to mention the sheer number of big cases he tackled and solved, Joe Sr.'s reputation is already tinted with the sorts of hues attached to icons like Santa Claus and John Wayne, figures he was often compared to. And this spring, when Joe McCain's name goes on the memorial to slain police officers in Washington, D.C., the true depth, breadth, and color of his life will be established once and for all.
But the most definitive way to gauge big Joe's reputation is not through the testimonials of other cops or district attorneys or through the recollections of family and friends. To really understand the measure of his influence, you have to hear from the guys on the other side of the street. The hustlers, gangsters, check kiters, con men, and thieves who dealt with Joe McCain every day knew just what kind of man he was.
Now in his early sixties, Black Jimmy is the sort of anonymous fellow you might see hanging around the pari-mutuel window at the dog track. Average height, slender of build, dressed in jeans, sneakers, and sweatshirts, Black Jimmy, a Lebanese Catholic who grew up poor in Boston's South End, is so called because of his olive complexion and his dark hair, which is salted with gray. Known for his fast, nervous patter, Black Jimmy always has an angle, is always edging closer to the score that's going to get him off the treadmill of busted trifectas and petty cons. And you probably will see him at the track, since in his declining years the harmless-looking handicapper makes his living there, following the 'hounds from Massachusetts to Florida to Colorado and back again.
Black Jimmy goes all the way back to the start of Joe McCain's career as a Met detective. He covered the spectrum of being an informant, doing all he could to keep himself out of jail by dropping a dime on somebody else. And he had balls, since more than one of the guys Black Jimmy put the finger on were mobsters who knew the dope on them was coming from somewhere and would just start killing off the likely suspects until they got the right one. So on a rainy night just after Christmas 1969, it was with considerable trepidation that Black Jimmy donned his favorite sport coat and headed out to meet James Vincent “the Bear” Flemmi at a Jamaica Plain nightspot called the Pond Café.
At that time, the shifting roster of the Winter Hill gang was comprised of the Bear, his brother Stephen “the Rifleman” Flemmi, Howie Winter, James “Whitey” Bulger, and Joseph “the Animal” Barboza, along with the usual motley assortment of strong arms and collectors. Loosely organized and reckless even for mobsters, they were all “graduates” of Walpole State Prison, where most of them had served time in the early sixties. By the decade's midpoint, the Winter Hill gang had a piece of the loan sharking, gambling, prostitution, drug trade, and truck hijacking from Somerville to Mattapan, but the North End Mafiosi Jerry and Donato Angiulo had a lot more, and the Flemmis coveted it.
Jimmy “the Bear” Flemmi was flamboyant, outgoing, and crazy; even the Angiulos, who employed a string of contract killers themselves, were scared to death of him. Law enforcement officials, including Joe McCain, estimated that the Bear had committed as many as thirty murders, often brutalizing the corpses beyond recognition. In one case that bore Flemmi's imprint, McCain and Leo Papile helped to fish a body out of the Muddy River near the Boston Globe offices on Morrissey Boulevard. The corpse, which had been deposited in the ocean, eventually floated down through Quincy and lodged itself in a narrow canal. The killer, or killers, had shot the man in the chest, obscuring his identity by cutting off the victim's head and arms, and burying a hatchet in his torso to hide the bullet wound.
It was well known that the Bear liked to chop 'em up, that he loved guns and knives and hatchets. At one time he had owned a butcher shop on Dudley Street.
Black Jimmy had done four and a half years in Walpole State Prison while James Flemmi was serving a much longer sentence for aggravated assault. They were both local guys, and to a degree, the young con artist had a rapport with Flemmi. But the Bear, a stocky, balding man who weighed over two hundred pounds, was the type that could smile at you one minute and stab you the next. One day in prison Black Jimmy was talking to another inmate named Jimmy O'Toole, a tough son of a bitch who had shot and wounded Flemmi on the outside, and the Bear followed Black Jimmy to his cell. “If you ever talk to that motherfucker again I'll kill you,” Flemmi said. Then he asked Black Jimmy if he knew a fellow named John Murray. Jimmy did; he and Murray were friends. “I killed John Murray,” said the Bear, with a smirk. “And then I cut his fuckin' head off.”
When Black Jimmy got out of Walpole and was assembling his crew and working out a new con, the Bear allowed him to do business, for old times' sake. The con was running like a dream, and Black Jimmy was cruising around town in a brand-new Buick convertible, brown with a cream leather interior, the same car driven by one of the leading wiseguys in the Winter Hill mob. But Jimmy's new Electra raised suspicions; what exactly was he doing to be doing well enough to afford such a sweet ride? The Winter Hill gang was roaming all over in those days, extracting penalties from crooks of every description as a form of tribute. Whatever Black Jimmy's game was, the Bear wanted a percentage.
Jimmy's game, which he had just about perfected, was called slow walking. It was the culmination of several lesser schemes: a sleight-of-hand activity known as shortchanging, a vacuum cleaner scam, and a two-man operation called the wedding ring con. To make the game work, Black Jimmy had pieced together a reliable crew of actors that included his childhood pal from the South End, Billy Dennett; Al Forzese, who sang in a rock band that played the Combat Zone; a degenerate gambler known as the Cowboy, who Black Jimmy met in a Denver card game; and a light-complected Irishman from West Roxbury, James O'Grady, who was referred to as White Jimmy.
White Jimmy taught his counterparts how to 'loid a door, using the thin edge of a plastic card to pry open a lock— his favorite tool was a prayer card from the Mission Church imprinted with the slogan “Never Give Up.” He also said that, if the boys were casing for jewels and there were four mailboxes, Shaughnessy, Shapiro, Goldman, and Sullivan, “go for the Jews, 'cause the Irishman, he's got nothin'.”
As their cons grew more elaborate, demanding a larger ensemble, Black Jimmy occasionally invited a jewel thief named Richie Carney to participate. A charming, handsome fellow, Carney talked like a Harvard grad and was the son of the Massachusetts Port Authority director. But one day on Storrow Drive he surprised Black Jimmy when he was unable to read a street sign. Although possessing a genius IQ and as well-dressed as a Back Bay stockbroker, Richie Carney was illiterate.
In the classic version of the slow walk game, the actors would rent a room and install a pair of telephones— one for incoming calls and one for outgoing. Using the yellow pages, Black Jimmy would call up a string of bars, identifying himself as “Al, the UPS guy,” and when he got the owner or manager on the line, he'd say, “You still interested in that TV?”
“Huh? What TV is that?”
Parlaying the bar owner's initial confusion (“Is this Joe? Oh, I'm sorry, I thought it was Joe. We talked about this last week”) into an offer to buy televisions far below cost, Black Jimmy would suggest that he drop by with more information. A short while later he'd show up, dressed in the brown shirt and trousers of a UPS driver, equipped with a full-color brochure from Sears.
“Check these model numbers out,” Black Jimmy would say, explaining that Sears had received an overshipment and he knew someone inside who would sell the TVs straight from the loading dock, complete with store receipt and warranties. “The guy wants five hundred apiece for these eighteen-hundred-dollar models.”
As the sucker perused the brochure, Jimmy would add, “Grab seven or eight and we'll give you one for nothing. You can sell 'em to your friends for eight hundred, make yourself a little profit.”
The game preyed on the sucker's greed. As soon as a guy said “No shit?” and began scheming out loud to sell himself ten or twelve or sixteen televisions, Black Jimmy knew he had one on the line. All the bar owner had to do was consolidate a few orders, Jimmy said, and he stood to make well over a thousand dollars.
Once the sucker was hooked, Black Jimmy would make arrangements to meet him in a Sears parking lot. Deals were cash only, he'd say, and the selected mall would usually require a drive of twenty or thirty miles, to ensure the sucker's commitment. The sucker was instructed to tell no one: Al the UPS guy and his buddy at Sears would lose their jobs if anyone found out.
In the Sears parking lot, the sucker would meet Billy Dennett, a chubby, jocular man who told dirty jokes and was an expert at closing the deal. It was a psychological game, what Black Jimmy referred to as “dress up,” wigs and horn-rimmed spectacles with ordinary glass in them and a prop as basic as a shipper's vest. All Billy Dennett had to do was slip on that flimsy gray vest with “Sears” embroidered on it, stick a pencil behind his ear and a clipboard under his arm, and he became the Shipper, master of the loading dock.
White Jimmy, a trim, narrow-shouldered fellow who dressed like Johnny Carson, usually played the part of the store manager. One time he went into a bar at the North Shore Mall to get the cash from a couple of suckers, and an hour and a half later he hadn't returned, which worried the other guys. So Black Jimmy crept into the mall and up to the bar entrance just in time to see a table loaded with five suckers, all of them drunk, regaling White Jimmy with “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow.” When O'Grady came out, the two Jimmies rode off with an extra eighteen hundred dollars.
When Black Jimmy brought Dennett and White Jimmy in, he revealed the secret to making the game work: go for the kill right away, before the sucker could change his mind. In the mall parking lot, Billy Dennett would hand over an invoice for the TVs, take the envelope filled with cash, and tell the sucker to meet him around back. Dennett promised to stamp the invoice paid when the man picked up his TVs on the loading dock, just like a regular transaction.
The sucker got in his car or pickup truck, eager to see his new televisions. And Black Jimmy and Billy Dennett walked off in different directions; moments later, they reunited in a far corner of the lot, jumped in a beautiful brand-new convertible with cream leather interior, and zoomed away, counting the sucker's money.
Dennett coined the term slow walking after an old con where he followed half a block behind the mailman, clipping the welfare checks. The idea was to avoid rushing the play by talking or walking too fast, keeping it cool and natural to put the sucker at ease. One time Dennett and Black Jimmy sent a rookie, a twenty-year-old kid who wasn't too bright, to collect the envelope. From a parked car they watched the kid approach the sucker with a flurry of nervous tics. When the envelope came out, the kid grabbed it and sprinted across the parking lot and down the main road.
Dennett and Jimmy caught up to him and opened the door so the kid could jump in. “I got the money,” he said, flourishing the envelope, his eyes glazed with adrenaline.
“What the fuck are you running for?” asked Dennett. “The name of the game is slow walking.”
In the crudest form of the game, Black Jimmy might get away with a few grand. But what had attracted the Winter Hill gang's attention was the size and frequency of the hits Jimmy was making. Adding the Cowboy to the crew brought a whole new dimension to the con. He was a big man, six foot three and 230 pounds, with a size fourteen shoe. (Black Jimmy used to tell the Cowboy to tiptoe up on the suckers; his flapping feet would scare them away.) In the latest permutation of the slow walk, the Cowboy, dressed in suit and tie, would go into the electronics department at Sears and ask to see the manager. Hale and hearty, he would slap the man on the back and say that he represented the Ramada Inn and that it was the manager's lucky day: the chain wanted to buy fifty entertainment units for one of its hotels.
That's just great, the manager would say.
“Listen, I gotta couple of my people coming in this afternoon to finalize things,” the Cowboy would say. “Let me borrow your office for a half hour.” He'd explain that he needed a quiet place to fill out the paperwork.
Later that day, the Cowboy would lead a sucker into the mall. Somewhere along the way a bartender who had been slipped a hundred bucks would call out, “Hey, Bob, how's things over at Sears?” Farther along, the Cowboy would stop outside a boutique and tell the sucker, “Wait here a second. See that girl in there? I like her sister.” Then, out of the sucker's earshot, he'd go inside the store, smile at the girl, say something funny, and ask her where Sears was. The salesgirl would laugh and point and the sucker would think that she and “Bob” were discussing her sister.
On a big hit, Al Forzese would be hanging around the men's wear department, dressed in a nice shirt and slacks and wearing a phony I.D. badge. He'd wink at the Cowboy and mention that he loved his new TV and wanted another one. See me later, the Cowboy would say.
The Cowboy and the sucker would walk into the manager's office, and there would be White Jimmy, who had slipped inside at the last moment. Posing as the manager in his well-tailored suit, White Jimmy would tell the sucker that he had some excess inventory and would be willing to make a nice side deal— he'd even throw in the warranties. Then White Jimmy would call Black Jimmy at a pay phone and pretend he was talking to the warehouse, and a few seconds later Billy Dennett would appear in his floppy gray shipper's vest and it would be all over. The sucker would hand over an envelope filled with ten, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars, and White Jimmy would tell him to drive around back and he'd get his television sets.
As soon as the sucker left, the crew would split up, head for the exits, and disappear. On a good day, they'd work a couple of hours and net up to five thousand dollars apiece. Everyone would go away happy, except the sucker. And he had very little recourse: he couldn't go to the police and say, “I was going to buy some stolen TVs that didn't exist and I got ripped off.”
Black Jimmy was a student of human behavior, a genius really, and in a short time he and his crew were beating suckers for even larger amounts of money. One of their best scores came on the vacuum cleaner scam. White Jimmy, posing as a district manager for the Howard Johnson restaurant and hotel chain, approached the Kirby Vacuum Cleaner Company and said that HoJo's wanted to change their entire system over to Kirby's. In advance of this, White Jimmy had visited the coffee shop at the local HoJo's, got friendly with the waitresses, spread a little money around on tips, and told the staff that his name was Mr. Parker. When he returned to HoJo's with the Kirby salesman in tow, everyone knew and liked him, and the sucker had no trouble believing he was the manager.
Mr. Parker told the Kirby salesman that if his initial order panned out, he'd go through this dealership for a nationwide buy. To fill HoJo's order, which was a rush, the Kirby salesman collected fifty units and drove them over to Howard Johnson's in a company truck. Clad in overalls, Black Jimmy and the Cowboy unloaded the vacuums while White Jimmy took the salesman into the coffee shop. There “Mr. Parker” was greeted by name and treated to a bevy of smiles.
The two men sat down in a booth near the exit, and Mr. Parker asked one of the waitresses, a girl named Tammy, which items on the menu looked good that day. “Get whatever you want,” said Mr. Parker to the salesman. “I'll take care of it.”
So the Kirby salesman ordered a BLT with French fries and a chocolate frappe and Mr. Parker told him that he was a very smart man indeed as the HoJo frappes were excellent. Meanwhile, Black Jimmy and the Cowboy had finished loading the vacuums into their own truck and, by a prearranged signal, called White Jimmy in the coffee shop and had him paged.
“Mr. Parker, your office is on the line,” said Tammy. “They want you to run up there.”
Telling the Kirby salesman that he'd return in a minute, bringing the thirty-day purchase order with him, White Jimmy strode out of the restaurant. Shortly thereafter he and Black Jimmy and the Cowboy were on their way down the road with fifty vacuum cleaners. Later they heard that the sucker waited for a half hour before approaching the front desk to inquire about Mr. Parker.
“Who?” asked the clerk. “There's no Mr. Parker here.”
The Kirby salesman began to cry, and the desk clerk phoned the Boston Police. When the cops arrived, one of them said, “You gave him a truckload of vacuums, wholesale value $450 apiece, and what'd he give you? Nothing.” The cops thought it was hilarious.
As Black Jimmy expanded his group of cons, he realized that more players in the game meant more risks: Richie Carney had been drinking at a bar called the Forum in Kenmore Square, bragging about a score he had made, when the Bear caught wind of it. Flemmi wasn't sure how the con worked, but he knew Black Jimmy was running it. And there were rumors that Jimmy and Billy Dennett were giving information to the cops on the Flemmis and their associates to keep the heat off themselves.
The rumors about ratting on the Bear were true. The complicated rules that Black Jimmy lived by allowed him to ring up a score in one arena while informing on the dirty players in another. Meanwhile, Joe McCain, with his active stable of informants, pending arrests, grand jury testimonies, and Herculean caseload, was like the nous of Greek cosmology; he saw most of what Black Jimmy and his associates were doing but intervened only when necessary. Big Joe was willing to ignore the shady activities of bookmakers and con men if they helped him to pinch a violent criminal. His Marshall Street upbringing made him a realist: there were lesser evils and greater evils in the world, and greater and lesser goods. In police work, the greatest good was getting a shooter off the street. Therefore, turning someone like Barboza into an informant made no sense, as the best you could hope for was to trade a stone killer for another killer. On the other hand, Black Jimmy never hurt anyone and was often the source of up-to-the-minute information on the most dangerous crooks.
Black Jimmy and Joe McCain struck their first bargain when the thirty-year-old flimflam man, straight out of Walpole and still on probation, got in a beef over the wedding ring con. In that game, an actor would walk into a nice middle-class joint, hail the bartender, and say that his wife had lost a diamond ring there the night before. Again preying on the bartender's greed, the actor would offer a five-hundred-dollar reward for the safe return of the diamond, saying he'd come back the next day to see if anything had turned up.
A couple of hours later, the second actor would turn up with a paste diamond that looked like the real thing. Claiming he'd found the ring beneath one of the tables, the actor would feign surprise when he heard that there was a reward being offered. “Gee whiz, I could really use five hundred bucks, but I can't stick around,” he'd say. “Tell you what, I'll split it with you. Give me two-fifty from the till, and when the reward comes in, you can keep it.”
At $250 a whack, it was a pretty short con, but Black Jimmy got pinched on it anyway. Billy Dennett, who was already an informant, introduced him to McCain, and Joe fixed it: restitution of $250, charges dismissed, in exchange for Jimmy's promise to let Joe know if anything big was about to go down on Winter Hill. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
THE NIGHT JAMES “THE BEAR” FLEMMI summoned him to the Pond Café, Black Jimmy had the feeling that something was going to go down, all right: him. Still, he kept his nerve and, with Richie Carney along for moral support, drove across town to erase Flemmi's concern that he might be an informant. It was raining hard, a fine, cold sleet that hung like wires in the sky above Jamaica Plain, when he parked the Buick across the street from the bar and he and Carney sprinted over with yesterday's racing form covering their heads. They stamped their feet on the mat and burst into the crowded, smoky club, shaking off their overcoats and scanning the room for the Bear.
Black Jimmy cursed himself for not bringing a gun— ehh, not even the Bear would shoot someone in front of so many people. But he felt his luck returning when another wiseguy said that Flemmi hadn't been there all night, and Jimmy signaled to Carney, who was up at the bar ordering a drink: let's go.
As soon as Black Jimmy and Carney stepped outside, Flemmi appeared in front of them, dripping with rain. “Hey, where're you guys going?” he asked.
“Nowhere,” said Jimmy.
“Gimme a ride to the Forum,” the Bear said.
Black Jimmy didn't want to do it, but he had very little choice. If he wasn't talking to the cops— and he certainly wanted Flemmi to believe that— then there was no reason to carry a gun or refuse the Bear a lift. Playing suckers had taught him to maintain an easy, open demeanor, and never to tip his hand. But James “the Bear” Flemmi was no sucker.
Black Jimmy tossed his keys to Carney and got in the passenger side; if the shit went down, he figured he'd jump out of the car. The Bear ducked into the backseat and moved over directly behind Jimmy. Carney started the engine with a roar, and they drove off.
In the backseat Flemmi was uncharacteristically silent. But as Jimmy wondered what to do next, he heard two metallic clicks. Glancing back, he saw that the Bear held a silver-plated .32 down by his ankles and had drawn the extractor back, chambering a round. Jimmy leaped over the seat, clamping both hands over Flemmi's as they wrestled for the gun. Driving along May Street at thirty miles an hour, Richie Carney looked over his shoulder at the two combatants, unlatched the driver's side door, and jumped into the street and tumbled away.
The Buick careered along the shiny thoroughfare with no one at the wheel. Snarling and pumping his elbows, Black Jimmy braced his feet against the door and tried to wrest the pistol from Flemmi's grasp; the Bear leaned down and bit Jimmy's finger to the knuckle, and at that instant, the gun fired twice. One round lodged itself in Flemmi's right shoulder and the second bullet creased the top of his head and passed through the rear window. Then the Buick struck a parked car, jumped the curb, and piled into an oak tree, springing open the passenger side door.
Dazed, Black Jimmy climbed out of the backseat into the pouring rain. Flemmi groaned from inside the Electra, crawling over the floorboards as he searched for the gun. Taking a last look at his beautiful new car, its fender crumpled and steam whistling through the grille, Jimmy shed his tattered sport coat.
And he ran.