Читать книгу Black Mass - Dick Lehr - Страница 7

Prologue

One summer day in 1948 a shy kid in short pants named John Connolly wandered into a corner drugstore with a couple of his pals. The boys were looking to check out the candy at the store on the outskirts of the Old Harbor housing project in South Boston, where they all lived.

“There’s Whitey Bulger,” one of the boys whispered.

The legendary Whitey Bulger: skinny, taut, and tough looking, with the full head of lightning-blond hair that inspired cops to nickname him Whitey, even if he hated the name and preferred his real name, Jimmy. He was the phantom tough-guy teen who ran with the Shamrocks gang.

Bulger caught the boys staring and impulsively offered to set up the bar with ice cream cones all around. Two boys eagerly named their flavors. But little John Connolly hesitated, heeding his mother’s instructions not to take anything from strangers. When Bulger asked him about his abstinence, the other boys giggled about his mother’s rule. Bulger then took charge. “Hey, kid, I’m no stranger,” he said. Bulger then offered the boy a quick but crucial lesson in history and bloodlines: both their fore-bears were from Ireland. They were hardly strangers.

Whitey asked again: “What kind of cone you want?”

In a soft voice Connolly said vanilla. Bulger gladly hoisted the boy onto the counter to receive his treat.

It was the first time John ever met Whitey. Many years later he would say the thrill of meeting Bulger by chance that day was “like meeting Ted Williams.”