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

full riot gear. These guys were a goon squad, seeming more like vicious rejects from the Boston police force. They acted unprofessionally, attacking both blacks and whites, whacking everyone with their fists and their clubs. They seemed to forget that these kids were still minors, and added to the chaos, antagonizing all the students and the teachers rather than making anybody feel safe.
    A year later, when the TPF was disbanded, the state police came in and were more professional. They would break up the fights and separate everybody. Some fights would start in the cafeteria, where the kids all sat in their own groups. They would begin as food fights and the next thing you knew there were fistfights everywhere, despite the high concentration of police there. Most fights, however, began on the second floor, at a crisscrossing point outside the auditorium.
    One fight involved Mikey Faith, a good friend of mine. In December 1974, he was walking out the door of the school library when a black kid used a buck knife with a black handle to stab him in the stomach. They must have had words before or else the black kid had the wrong person. But while Mikey held his stomach and went down outside the library, his assailant ran toward the stairway between the second and third floors. I heard the screaming and came running up. When I saw the kid with the knife running, I ran after him. A cop and I grabbed him at the same time and I sucker-punched the kid. Mikey recovered, but he was in the hospital for a week or so. His attacker got probation or some bullshit thing.
    That afternoon, things got pretty rough. A mob of angry parents formed outside so the black kids couldn’t leave the building and go to their buses. It was more of a safety issue and a fear of retaliation that made the police keep the black students inside the building until the mob dissolved. During the melee, a bunch of kids overturned a police car. In the newspaper the next day, there was a picture of the overturned car, with me standing next to it. That was typical of the media, to grab a picture of the Southie kids wreaking havoc. As bad as things really were, the Globe and the Boston Herald American (in 1973, the Record American/Herald Traveler became known as the Boston Herald American ; in 1982, the name was changed to the Boston Herald ) were portraying it as a black-and-white issue. But that was not the way it was at all. All the people in South Boston wanted was for their kids to go to their neighborhood schools.
    Another fight I got involved in began when a bunch of black girls went into the girls’ lavatory on the second floor and held the door shut. Then they jumped the two white girls who were already in there. One of those two girls was my Pam. When Ricky Calnan—a friend of mine who grew up in the Mary Ellen McCormack projects and was working as an aide with me—and I heard the yelling, we came charging into the bathroom and found a fight going on. When I went to break it up, this black girl named Gracie Richards, a little stocky thing, scratched my face bad. I gave her a right hand and knocked her out. Pam and the other white girl, Ronnie Barrett, were okay. The scratches on my face were pretty deep from where Gracie’s fingernails had gone in and I needed a tetanus shot. We carried Gracie down to the nurse’s office, where she came to.
    Another fight took place outside the office of the principal, Dr. Reid. I jumped in to break it up and ended up wrestling with a black kid who was swinging and punching. When Dr. Reid opened the door to try and get the kid into his office, I ended up throwing the kid through the window next to the door. The window smashed, sending glass everywhere. The kid wasn’t badly hurt. And all I was doing was defending myself.
    One black kid, whose name was actually Sigfried Goldstein, would walk around with a Communist flag on his jacket. Older and bigger than the rest of the kids, around six-three and 265 pounds, he was