Not such a But he has his regrets
‘MY CHILDHOOD GRAFTING FOR MOBSTER WHITEY, WHO INSPIRED MOVIE KINGPIN’
JACK Nicholson dazzled and terrified as a Boston mobster in hit movie The Departed, based on real-life crime kingpin James “Whitey” Bulger.
Backed up by his savage sidekick played by Ray Winstone, the gang’s ruthless violence brought home the Oscar for best picture in 2007.
Mobsters don’t tell tales if they expect to live long, but Bulger’s real-life enforcer, Sean Scott Hicks, is rolling the dice with a gripping new memoir, The Devil To Pay, revealing the brutal depravity of the Irish mob that inspired the film.
“Jim Bulger was a psychopath, one of the most evil, manipulative, sadistic humans to walk the earth,” says Hicks (52).
Killed
“He killed with no hesitation and no concern, and then would lie down to take a nap with a smirk on his face. But he took a shine to me.
“He recognised my talent for violence and saw me as his perfect weapon. I never killed anybody, but I had a talent for getting information.
“I beat and tortured men to confess their secrets to me. Whatever happened to them afterward I didn’t want to know.
“Jim Bulger was crazy, but he was the real deal and I learnt a lot from his guiding hand, though in reality, it was misguiding.”
But after kidnapping and torturing two thieves who had short-changed Bulger’s share of a robbery’s proceeds, Hicks admits a shocking insight: “I realised I’d lost my humanity. My morality had vanished altogether.
“I had no limits and it scared me.”
Hicks writes with his bare knuckles, his bloody hands wrapped tightly around the reader’s throat, his whisky-soaked words landing like body blows from a swinging crowbar in a book already snapped up by Hollywood to become a movie and television series.
“I had night terrors writing the book, 20 times worse than nightmares,” he admits.
“They’re so vivid I see every face I hurt clear as day, remember every act of violence.”
Over the course of three decades Hicks served 20 years in seven different prisons on charges including bank robbery, theft, extortion, moneylaundering, kidnapping, violent assault and attempted murder.
Shot
His criminal record is 37 pages long.
“I’ve been shot four times: in the butt, left arm, right wrist – some idiot put a gun in my face and I got my hand up – and in the back,” he says. “I still have a bullet lodged in my spine.”
In a childhood reminiscent of Martin Scorsese’s classic 1990 Mafia movie Goodfellas, in which Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) became a schoolboy gofer for the mob, Hicks found himself running errands for Bulger’s infamous Winter Hill Gang – the most powerful Irish American mob.
At 15, he commanded a car theft ring after beating senseless the former boss.
“I realised you can’t be weak,” he says. “When dealing with monsters, you have to be a monster.”
By 16, he was smuggling narcotics on his
‘I lost my humanity, my morality had vanished altogether’