Patrick Nee - A Criminal and an Irishman: The Inside Story of the Boston Mob-IRA Connection

AUTHORS NOTE

Not one account in this book is taken from a newspaper article, a police report, or somebody elses gangster book. Everything detailed in this book I have either done, seen done, or heard about from the person who did it.

Most reporters and authors who write Southie gangster books use CIsconfidential informersas sources. However, seldom is the majority of information compiled by these sources correct information. Confidential informers are self-serving criminals who lie.

This book is different from other books on the Boston Irish mob or any other Whitey/Southie crime book. If my recollections dont match those in some other book by some other criminal, I dont care. My memory is not perfect. This is my life as I remember it. And Im comfortable with that.

P ATRICK N EE

My mother always said that the biggest mistake she ever made in her life was not throwing me off the back of the Britannic as we crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1952. She said it would have been very easy to pull offme being so small, I would have hit that dark, cold blanket of water in the middle of the night and no one would have been the wiser.

If only I had known, back then, shed say. If I had any notion youd turn out to be a gunslinger, I wouldve saved your father and me a lot of headaches. If I could have seen the future, you would have been on the bottom of the Atlantic.

Warring is all Im really good at. I was born in Ireland during World War II, came to America at the beginning of the Korean conflict, saw action in Vietnam as a U.S. marine, and fought in the Mullen-Killeen gang war for control of South Bostons underworld during the 1970s.

So it was only natural that I would take my military expertise back to my homeland and engage the enemy, the British.

Some might think Im overstating my role in helping the IRA kick the English out of Ireland. Let me explain by beginning at the end: the day my role in the IRAs fight came to a conclusion.

Engaging the enemy was all I knew. Thats why I decided to take down an armored truck on a suburban street outside of Boston. Military precision was the key to my successor my complete failure.

You never hit an armored truck that has more than a driver and a messenger inside. I was the lead charger. My job was to surprise the driver before he stepped out of the truck and had a chance to react. Id rip his gun out of his holster, force him back toward the drivers seat, stick a .357 Magnum in his ribs under his Kevlar vest, and give him the order to drive. Everything had to be perfectly synchronized. The two rear chargers had to startle the messenger before he could communicate with someone inside the bank, move him quickly inside the truck, and close the back doors at the same instant I ordered the driver to go. We had three to five minutes to snatch the truck, clear the area, and get the truck to a place where we could rob it discreetly. We wouldnt want to rob a truck in full view of bank employees and passersby.

Like any other risky endeavor in life, the secret to a successful heist is proper planning. Proper execution is the result of doing your homework. If you do it well, nobody diesand almost as important, everyone gets rich. The asshole robbers who kill guards needlessly are mostly whacked-out drug addicts. I was a criminal with a passion: to drive the British out of Ireland. I didnt want anyone to die needlessly in that pursuit.

I was born in Ireland and came to the United States as a kid. In my thirties I developed tremendous respect for the Irish Republican Armys mission. So I had two defined goals when I began robbing armored trucks. I wanted to continue helping the IRA get the English out of Ireland, and I wanted to acquire enough money to accomplish that goal. The way I saw it, the more money I had the more help I could give the IRA.

I had already been assisting the IRA in any way that I could. Since the early 1970s Id been sending weapons to the freedom fighters in Ireland; in January 1989 I was released from Danbury Federal Correctional Institute after serving eighteen months for orchestrating the largest shipment of guns ever smuggled to Ireland. On September 29, 1984, acting on a tip-off, two Irish Naval Service ships seized a fishing trawler, the Marita Ann, some two hundred miles off the west coast of Ireland. Inside the hull they found 163 assault rifles, 71,000 rounds of ammunition, one ton of military explosives, a dozen bulletproof vests, rocket ammunition pouches, 13 military-surplus weapons, weapons manuals, and military operation manuals. My friends and I had amassed the 7.5 tons of weapons, valued at some $1.2 millionall slated for the IRA.

For seven months following my release from federal prison I sat in the Coolidge Halfway House on Huntington Avenue in Boston, just biding my time and being a citizen. In fact, while I was there I completed a sixteen-week class in Irish studies at the University of Massachusetts. That was the great thing about living in the halfway house: I had the freedom to attend classes with regular students at the Boston campus.

It was only a few months after I finished my stay at the Coolidge House that I jumped back into the service of the IRA. I got a call one evening that an IRA man needed to see me in Quincy, just south of Boston. When I got there he told me hed spent the last six months looking up and down the East Coast for a list of desired handguns. For some reason he just couldnt put them together. I looked at the list and fought hard not to show that I was very, very pleased: I had every weapon the IRA needed.

It took me about an hour to gather them up. All I had to do was drive to South Boston and raid my private stash. Many of those guns belonged to James J. Whitey Bulger, the notorious South Boston mobster turned informer. Whitey loved being associated with the IRA and the cause of Irish freedom; it seemed to give him a sense of purpose. In raiding Whiteys cache there was satisfaction for me in knowing how much every IRA man whod ever met Whitey distrusted him while Whitey sucked up to them and thought that being associated with them gave him some legitimacy. That was all the incentive I needed. Besides, every day I spent in Southie convinced me more and more that I had to pull away from Whitey Bulger.

There was just no way around itWhitey was no good. He was a paranoid control freak with psychopathic and homicidal tendencies. Whitey clearly derived sexual pleasure from torturing and killing. He was smart and calculating, yes, but he was also a seriously sick fuck. Besides, by now I knew that Whitey Bulger was a rat; it was just a matter of time before the rest of the world knew it too. It just wasnt safe to be close to him anymore.

The IRA had come to Boston in the 1960s to explore the possibility of robbing banks and armored cars to support their cause. Theyd been doing it in Ireland and England for years and they were interested in seeing if it would be easier to do in the States. Both Irish and British intelligence agencies had marked many of the IRA men and had even assassinated one of them, Larry McNally. With those IRA men out of the picture, and with the criminal scene in Southie having changed so drastically since my release from prison, I had to rethink the situation.

I decided to hold up armored trucks in order to send money to my IRA contacts. Clearly I had to balance the risk of getting caught with the potential for huge reward, along with the possibility of having to kill a guard, but I was confident that with the right planning, and more importantly the right guys, we could be successful.