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

hair, which fell down below her waist, and her beautiful brown eyes, great smile, and terrific laugh. She was about five-six and had an unbelievable figure. I started talking to her and invited her to the graduation party that my friends and I were having on June 12 at the three-decker house four of us guys were living in for the summer. She came, as did about 300 other kids, and it wasn’t long before Pam and I were boyfriend and girlfriend. We married six years later. She was, and still is, the love of my life.
    After I graduated from South Boston High, I got a couple of jobs. During the summer, I drove a day care bus. I always liked kids and enjoyed driving them to the D Street day camp and from the park to the beach. I was out of the house then, living in the apartment in Southie with my friends.
    I started working at South Boston High as a security aide in September 1974, which coincided with the start of busing. I liked the job, being with my friends and in the place where I had always been comfortable. But thanks to Judge Arthur Garrity, whose legal decision ordered 17,000 Boston schoolchildren to be bused to integrate the Boston schools, South Boston High became a far different place from the one I had just graduated from.
    Because the quality of education in the black schools in Boston was deemed inferior to what the white kids received in their schools, the decision was made to integrate the schools. Rather than simply take whatever steps were necessary to improve the black schools with better-quality teachers and enhanced classrooms, students from South Boston and black students from other parts of Boston would now ride buses to the other side of the city to attend elementary, junior high, and high school at least forty-five minutes away from their neighborhood schools. Judge Garrity, who lived out in Wellesley, a wealthy suburb of Boston, came up with this program. But the program didn’t integrate anything. Instead, the city became a battlefield. Busing tore Boston apart, pitting parents against administrators and students against students. The media loved to portray the situation as racial: whites from South Boston against blacks from the rest of the city. But it wasn’t that way at all. It was about ripping kids out of their neighborhoods and sending them halfway across the city, when their schools were only two blocks away from their houses. But Judge Garrity knew what was best for South Boston from his Wellesley home. All the women of Southie, especially Boston City Council member Louise Day Hicks, stood their ground, forming an anti-busing group called ROAR, Restore Our Alienated Rights. Every politician in Southie was against busing.
    The saddest part is that there is a generation of Boston kids walking around today who basically have no high school education, who were condemned to not even mediocre jobs because of one man’s decision. These kids couldn’t get a decent education because Arthur Garrity took that opportunity away from them. A grand experiment, at the expense of the children of Boston, ultimately failed.
    But not before blood was shed at South Boston High. We now had black students in the school who were often twenty-one or twenty-two, older than the typical eighteen-year-old South Boston senior. You could feel the hatred in the corridors. Just a year earlier, there had been a great atmosphere in those same classrooms, where learning was taking place. Students looked forward to going to school, to their classes, to sports, and to just being around one another. But one year later, it was like Beirut. You were just waiting for the next fight to erupt. Kids from South Boston weren’t running scared, though. South Boston High was their home, and no one was going to come in and take their home from them.
    It was horrible for the black kids, but just as horrible for the poor white kids, too. Both groups of kids had to walk the corridors, which were now lined with the Tactical Patrol Force in