Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob by Kevin Weeks; Phyllis Karas Page B

from Balloonhead. As I looked at Halloran at a table of four having a few beers, I was glad it was him and not me having his last beers. Even though I was carrying a gun at my waist, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be using it. My role was basically the lookout, to call the hit in. Not that it made a difference who pulled the trigger. Everyone played a part to make it happen, and I was playing mine. Jimmy had often used the analogy of a finely oiled machine or a watch when discussing jobs. Everyone had to do his part for everything to go smoothly. All the little cogs in the watch had to move perfectly. If one wheel stopped or broke, then the watch would stop working. More important than committing the crime was getting away with it. And in order for that to happen, everything had to go just right. It didn’t matter who pulled the trigger. The person who called in the hit or drove the crash car or listened to the scanner was equally as important. There were times when we would stop before the crime was committed, like with a shakedown, because one of us didn’t think everything would work perfectly. That afternoon, if I wasn’t there to call in the hit, Halloran would have gotten away. My role, I understood from the beginning, was no different than Jimmy’s. Just like him, I was committing the murder.
    I wasn’t there more than ten minutes when Halloran got up, and the other three guys he was with followed suit. I figured they were all leaving, so I called out on the walkie-talkie, “The balloon is rising.” A minute later, Halloran came walking out the front door of the Pier with one other guy in front of him. That guy, who I didn’t recognize, was six feet tall and heavyset. When he got into a car in the parking lot, I realized that Halloran had probably come with him. For a minute I wondered if this might mean Jimmy would call off the hit. If Halloran had been with a small child, the hit wouldn’t have happened, since Jimmy would never have taken the risk of hitting a kid. But I was pretty certain he wouldn’t let this one detail of another guy in the car stand in his way of getting the job done.
    This time I gave Jimmy the message, “The balloon is in the air,” knowing he’d understand that meant Halloran was now outside. A minute later, a four-door blue Datsun pulled up, Halloran got into the passenger seat, and I repeated two or three more times, “The balloon is in the air.” I knew from the minute I spoke those words that my life, along with Halloran’s, had forever changed.
    And faster than either of us could ever imagine. Halloran was barely seated in the car when, suddenly, across the street, Jimmy whipped the Tow Truck next to the Datsun. Halloran was in the passenger seat, facing out to the streets, and the Tow Truck was facing the opposite direction, the two cars passenger window to passenger window. It was a beautiful Tuesday night in May and all kinds of people were still walking around the waterfront, dressed in business suits and casual wear, looking to enjoy the night.
    Jimmy had the passenger window of the Tow Truck down, and he slid over and yelled, “Brian!” Halloran turned his giant head and the shooting began.
    “Shit,” I said to myself, “here it comes.” Through the binoculars, I had a clear look at Jimmy’s face, and when he opened his mouth to yell Brian’s name, I could see that he was gritting his teeth. Hard. I also knew that he was using a .30-caliber carbine with a selector switch so it could fire fully or semiautomatic. As it turned out, although Jimmy thought it was on full, he had forgotten to switch the selector, so he was actually on semiautomatic. Later on, he said it was better that way because he could place his shots easier. The shooter in the Tow Truck’s back seat popped up and started firing, too, using a fully automatic Mac-10 with a silencer. Jimmy had no silencer. The autopsy report would say Halloran was hit twenty-one times, his driver, multiple times.