Deuce is drinking Seagram’s 7 and 7s, grousing and cursing to himself as the minutes slowly go by. It’s late afternoon, and Jacob Wirth’s is busy. The air is heady with the odor of beer and cigarette smoke and the noises drinkers make when they’re having an unbridled good time. Wirth’s dark mahogany bar is the longest and shiniest Deuce has ever seen, and it is crowded shoulder to shoulder—in places two-deep—with a good mix of people, suits young and old and slinky well-dressed young women. Others wear jeans and sandals; a few sport shorts and halter tops. Some in the crowd are just there for drinks. Others are waiting for a dinner table.
The gunman gets another drink and then another, grabs some food for ballast, and tries to settle in. He spends more time castigating himself for getting involved with the Italians. He is jealous of their power and control, which keeps independent crooks like him in their place, forever small-time. And though he is loath to admit it, he fears them too. He thinks he may be looking at a setup. That happens; guys end up by the side of the road with a couple of bullets in their head, if they’re lucky.
Deuce is getting crocked, but he figures to hell with it. He gets another drink, decides he’d better slow down and nurse it. He looks at the lawyer’s business card again, shakes his head, and thinks about how he got himself into this mess.
The card came his way months earlier when he and Chucky were jailing together at the Massachusetts State Prison in Walpole. Gerry Ouimette was there at the time. The Italians he worships refer to him as “that fucking Frenchman” but tolerate him because his gang makes such good money. When he hits Walpole, the Italians protect him for a while. Ouimette is happy until they try to shake him down for his pipeline of drugs. He needs protection fast, and Chucky Flynn steps up, Deuce by his side, though Chucky rarely needs any help in a fight.
Earlier at Walpole, Chucky was prodded into a boxing match with a notorious slab of muscle named Vincent Flemmi, brother of Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi. Vincent was better known by either of two nicknames: “Jimmy the Bear,” because of his size and build, or “The Butcher,” because he often disposed of his victims by personally cutting up their corpses. A thug named Frankie Benjamin was a good example. Flemmi killed him in 1964 and left his headless body in a car in South Boston. Police never did find Benjamin’s head.
“Flynn just knocked the hell out of Jimmy the Bear,” says a guy who was ringside at the time. “No problem. He just beat him up. He was faster than hell, and he hit hard. I admired Chucky Flynn because he was tough as nails and he was stand-up, but I didn’t like him. He was a scary guy.”
Chucky and Deuce let it be known that Ouimette isn’t to be touched. Weeks later, Ouimette is transferred to the Adult Correctional Institutions, the euphemistic name for the state prison in Cranston, Rhode Island. The lawyer later visits Walpole to thank Deuce on Ouimette’s behalf; that’s when he leaves his business card.
In the bar, Deuce sips another 7 and 7 and laughs to himself. They’re much alike in some ways, he and Chucky. Impulsive? Brave? Maybe. Depends on what you know about the two men and how generous you want to be with your adjectives. Crazy might also fit, and a psychiatrist evaluating them both might toy with words like sociopathic, psychotic, or some unique combination thereof.
Thing is, Deuce lives for a good score and the high times that follow. Chucky does too, but he has real aspirations; Deuce has none. By the late 1950s, when Chucky moves to Deuce’s neighborhood from Wilmington, Massachusetts, just down the road from Lowell, he already has a history of trouble with the law, mainly because he likes to beat and rob people. He gets much better at it in Lowell.
Chucky and Deuce are teenagers together in the city’s grimy backstreets. Deuce and Chucky against the world, like brothers in arms only better, even when Deuce’s own brothers sometimes join in.
Through the 1960s Chucky pretty much controls prostitution, armed robbery, gambling, extortion, and drug traffic in Lowell, and he has a reputation as a marauder. With a small crew that often includes Deuce, he pulls scores of robberies throughout the hodgepodge of cities and towns in northeastern Massachusetts and across the border into New Hampshire. The newspapers refer to Chucky as the Billy the Kid of the Merrimack Valley—successful enough as a professional gunman and crook to think he should branch out formally and bold enough to believe he can.
In May 1969 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, he and another crook raid a popular illegal dice game called barbotte, which is especially favored by Greek bookies in the area. Nearly thirty men are playing at the time. The intruders train sawed-off shot guns on the players, and Chucky orders them to drop their pants. One of the men, to the delight of his fellow gamblers, is wearing women’s panties. After everyone has a good laugh, Chucky smiles and lowers and raises the barrel of his shotgun, signaling the one hapless gambler to pull up his pants.
Chucky and his friend flee with every cent of cash from the barbotte game. The heist is known for years thereafter as Chucky’s Panty Raid, and it enhances his reputation for bravado. The few thousand dollars he steals from the Greeks that night isn’t really the point. Chucky wants control of the barbotte games and has decided this isn’t their night. Unfortunately, it isn’t his either. A third man rats him out, and Chucky is sent to the state prison in Walpole on twenty counts of armed robbery. There he is reunited with Deuce.