Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob Read Online Free PDF Page A

sometimes even connected to my schoolwork. My favorite teacher was Vincent Borelli, who taught seventh-grade math. He was from the North End and came from a family of boxers. A bunch of us would stay after class to fight with him. I was thirteen and he was twenty-four at the time. A good-sized guy, he didn’t try to hurt us, and we all had fun fighting him. He also ran a boxing program three times a week, which I joined. He finished his career as a vice principal at the Grover Cleveland Middle School in Dorchester and today we are still friends.
    I went to Boston College High for the ninth grade, but left at the end of that year to go to South Boston High, where I graduated on June 12, 1974. It was a great place to go to school. Until busing entered the picture in September 1974, South Boston High was all white. Billy and Johnny both attended Boston Latin High and English High before getting full academic scholarships to Harvard. Johnny actually got a perfect 800 on his math SATs.
    Maybe things would have been different for me if I had followed in their footsteps and stayed at Boston College High. Not that staying there was my choice. With less than two weeks left in my freshman year there, I ran into a little problem. After parents’ night at the school, McDevitt, a kid from Dorchester, said, “Hey, I saw your mother, Peg Leg,” referring to the fact that my mother had a brace on her leg. I cracked him and he went down. When I jumped on top of him, the seminarian who taught the class turned the ring on his finger around and cuffed me on the back of the head with the ring. I couldn’t see who had hit me, but figured it was another kid. I swung around and punched the teacher in the face. He went down against a desk, and the next thing I knew it had become a big thing. The faculty had a meeting to consider the fact that I had hit a seminarian.
    Mr. Swain, my guidance teacher, came to my aid. “The kid is from South Boston,” he said. “He turned around to protect himself.” But I had to leave school for the last week and never went back. My parents told me I was thrown out.
    Twenty-five years later, when my older son, Kevin Barry, got accepted into BC High, I went over to tell my mother the news. “Oh, you could have graduated from there,” she told me.
    “Ma, I got thrown out,” I reminded her.
    “Oh, that’s not exactly right,” she said. “We never told you the truth. We decided you should go to Southie and save the eight hundred dollars tuition.” Maybe that $800 was the crossroads or turning point in my life. Or maybe nothing would have been any different. But Kevin Barry graduated from BC High four years after I told my mother about his acceptance, and I had no trouble paying the $6,500-a-year tuition. And he turned out great.
    When I was in high school, I never pushed myself and coasted by easily with B’s. Some of my friends went off to college and became professionals, like lawyers, while others went into construction or became policemen or firemen. By the time I was in high school, my brothers were long gone from the house. They lived at Harvard while they were students there. When Billy had gotten an appointment to Annapolis, my father had wanted him to go there, but Billy decided to go to Harvard instead. My father was so mad he didn’t speak to Billy for a year. In 1972, during the Vietnam War, Johnny’s student deferment ended at the end of his freshman year at Harvard. He got drafted and spent two years as an MP guarding a nuclear facility in Sandy Hook, New Jersey, which has since closed. After that, he went back and graduated from Harvard.
    On June 10, 1974, just before my graduation from South Boston High, I met a beautiful dark-haired girl named Pam Cavaleri, who was a junior in high school. That day, she was standing across the street from the L Street Bathhouse with her friends when I walked by with a friend of mine who was dating her girlfriend. Right away, I noticed Pam’s long dark