I met Charlie Whitaker, retired ATF, at George Lane Beach in Weymouth, on Boston’s South Shore, once known as the Irish Riviera. Charlie said he’d rather meet me at the beach, a short walk from his home.
“Mrs. Whitaker,” he’d said on the phone, “prefers I no longer discuss firearms in the house.”
We sat on a bench, two coffee cups he’d brought with him from Panera between us. He was a tall, thin man who still had a lot of wavy white hair and still looked fit enough to be on the job.
“Thanks for seeing me,” I said.
“Belson called Quirk,” he said. “Quirk called me. Felt like the old days.”
“I assume Frank told you what I’ve been hearing about the Burkes,” I said.
“Wasn’t surprised,” he said.
“Why so?”
“Because there’s something going on lately, up and down the coast, even if we haven’t yet been able to get our arms around it, or our hands on the bad guys,” Whitaker said. “You probably know this, but used to be there wasn’t enough volume, no matter how steady the flow of guns was from down south, to make big enough money to get the big guys fully engaged. But over the last few months, we’ve heard about shipments disappearing. One here, one there. At first our guys thought it might be random. Couple trucks that simply went missing. Not front-page stuff, just noteworthy if you’re in the game. It’s as if someone is stockpiling. But the guys on my crew don’t believe those guns simply vanished. They’re somewhere.”
I grinned and said, “Stop, Charlie. You’re going too fast for me.”
“My old crew is on this, believe me,” he said. “But so far they’ve come up with nothing.”
I thought about my conversation with Albert Antonioni, who’d acted about as interested in the gun business as he was in lawn bowling.
Whitaker gave me a brief tutorial then about the Iron Pipeline, the name given to I-95 by various bad guys, from biker gangs to gun-runners. The people in charge, Whitaker said, send straw buyers with clean records to states like Virginia, where restrictions on gun sales are generally softer than soft ice cream. Then they bring the guns back, in whatever bulk they can manage, and sell them on the street in places like Providence, and before long the guns are on their way to Boston and various gang members.
“Any particular ethnicity?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “The country of mutts.”
He sipped some coffee and stared at the boats on the water.
“What they’re basically doing is trafficking in legal illegal guns that were originally purchased legally in fucking Gun Show America,” he said. “Then they start passing through one pair of hands and another — and another — until somebody’s using one of them to shoot somebody in the head.”
He smiled. “You can see why Mrs. Whitaker doesn’t want such talk in her kitchen?”
“Discretion,” I said.
“Better part of all that valor shit.”
“So it really could be worth it to Desmond and Felix Burke to get big into the gun business this late in their lives?”
“Especially if they’ve figured out a way to become one-stop shopping for all of New England,” he said. “Listen, guys like them have taken a big hit because of online gambling the way everybody else has, something that was always their bread and butter. Now, that hasn’t dried up completely, mind you. But the online stuff has created a drag. And they were never into girls the way Albert always has been, though I keep hearing that Tony Marcus might want to expand his interests down here. You know him, right?”
“Far better than I would prefer.”
“On top of everything else we’re talking about, it’s even been a while since the Burkes had the loansharking business to themselves in Boston,” Charlie Whitaker said, still staring out at the water. “So in a world where the fucking NRA becomes like an unindicted coconspirator if you want to buy and move guns, maybe switching lanes is just a practical matter for Desmond.”
“How much volume would there have to be?” I said.
“Most people just do it twenty to thirty guns at a time,” he said. “Most popular item, even after all this time, is still a nine-millimeter. But if Desmond has a way to expand that to bigger guns, like that AR-15, and trade in really big numbers, the old man could do very well for himself.”
“Albert Antonioni wanted me to think he himself isn’t particularly interested in the gun business,” I said.
“Since when?” Whitaker said. “It was always a secondary business for him. But if Albert thinks there’s money in it, he’d open a chain of lemonade stands.”
“So it might anger him off if he heard that Desmond was poking around at the edges of a big gun deal,” I said.
“Royally,” Charlie Whitaker said.
“Would you be interested in keeping your ears open for me on this?” I said, smiling at him.
Turning on the charm with another old guy.
“Royally,” he said.
We both stared at the boats on the water now.
“Just don’t tell my wife,” he said finally.
“Mum’s the word,” I said. “So to speak.”
“She’d probably shoot me,” Charlie Whitaker said and grinned. “Be ironic, if you think about it.”