Blow (5 page)

Ermine was an O'Neill from Boston, and judging from her first impression of Fred when the couple met in the 1930s, she had reason to expect more in the way of a future when she married him. For one thing, in the hard times that characterized the Depression, the heating-oil business seemed safe economic territory, considering that people would prefer to stint on fancy clothes and cuts of meat long before they'd freeze to death in the harsh New England winters. For another, Fred seemed to be a man on the move. He owned a total of three oil trucks then, large tractor-trailer jobs; he had employees working for him and a long list of customers. There's a snapshot of him taken around then showing a prosperous-looking man in a suit and a fancy white hat beside a big Packard touring car. Family legend has it that Ermine's mother, a stage entertainer named Ethel O'Neill who sang in music halls of Boston, urged her daughter into the marriage on the grounds that Mr. Jung was obviously going places.

Unfortunately for his family, one of the places he was going fairly regularly was the Suffolk Down Racetrack. He had a winning streak at first, but pretty soon he was losing consistently and in large enough amounts so that he had to mortgage his fleet of oil trucks to pay mounting debts. He lost the trucks eventually, and when the war came, he ended up working at a defense job in the naval shipyard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Fred recovered a little of his oil business after the war, when the family moved to Weymouth. He acquired a smaller oil truck and secured a contract with the Stetson Oil Company to take care of a list of customers in Boston. But it wasn't nearly the same. There was tension in the family. One day George remembers his father teaching him the art of poker and how to handle cards smartly, doing the one-handed shuffle, the reverse cut, fanning out the deck over the table surface. George's mother came into the room, grabbed up the deck, and threw it into the wastebasket, saying something sharply to the effect that there'd be no more of
that
in this household.

George's uncle, George Jacob Jung—now there was a man for Ermine to admire! Whereas Fred came out of high school at the start of the Depression and went right to work, his brother, George, nine years his senior, had gone off to the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, enlisted in the navy, and come home after World War II a full commander. A man of sound financial resources—he held a good-paying job as an engineer for the state, and his wife, Myrna, worked as a restaurant manager for Filene's in Boston—Uncle George traveled widely and frequently about the world. The couple occupied a substantial gabled residence on Norman Avenue in Melrose, a middle-class suburb located north of Boston, and considerably up the social scale from Weymouth. George and Myrna remained childless, but it was to their house that the Jung family members repaired for Sunday dinners, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Besides Fred and Ermine and their two children, there were the two Jung sisters—Auntie Gertrude, a divorcée who was also childless, and Aunt Jenny and her husband, Ray Silva, whose son, Bobby, was George's only cousin. Bobby Silva went into banking and eventually became the president of the Citizens National Bank in Putnam, Connecticut. Starting out, however, he'd worked at a bank in Danbury at the same time Cousin George happened to be in residence at the federal prison there, a piece of intelligence he was undoubtedly not too eager to share with the guys at the office.

In the house in Melrose, Uncle George's navy dress sword hung over the fireplace, along with a photo of him in his whites. There was a prominent picture of the battle cruiser he'd served on in the Pacific. Making a big deal out of mixing daiquiris for the ladies, Uncle George would regale the company with tales of his recent travel adventures—he journeyed abroad seventeen times during his lifetime. Or he might talk about the latest charity drive of the Shriners, of which he was a stalwart member, or a horticultural award he'd received for his roses, or the story in the local paper on the occasion of his attendance at the Fourth International Rose Conference in London, where Queen Elizabeth had put in an appearance. Indeed, in Fred's eyes, no less than in Ermine's, George had always occupied such a commanding position in the family that when his own son was born on August 6, 1942, after discovering Ermine had told the hospital the boy was to be named after his father, Fred marched down and had the name on little Frederick's birth certificate changed to match that of his brother. Although he certainly felt honored at the time, Uncle George had good reason later on, and on more than one occasion, to regret the gesture. One of them occurred at JFK International Airport in New York City, where, on the way back from Europe, he was detained for an hour or so by U.S. Customs officials while they investigated as to whether this sputtering, angry old man was the George Jacob Jung wanted by the FBI for jumping bail on a drug charge.

For all his wide-ranging interests and exposure to different cultures, Uncle George maintained a fairly stern and unbending outlook on life, a dour Dutchman to the core. “My brother was what you might call a straight-down-the-line kind of a guy,” says Auntie Gertrude, who also worked at Filene's, as manager of its beauty shop. “You couldn't really say he had much of a sense of humor.” On the occasion when an underling would come by his office to ask the boss for an approval on some matter, a request for a raise perhaps, rather than waste words giving a reply, Uncle George liked to direct the visitor's attention with a wave of his hand toward a sign he had printed up and sitting on the front of his desk. The sign said
NO
.

*   *   *

When it comes to divining the root causes of antisocial behavior, criminologists have produced murky speculation at best. With even less success have doctors and psychologists been able to predict with any certainty which little boy will grow up to become a public enemy. The most recent edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
the
DSM III-Revised,
has nothing to say, for instance, about what to watch out for if you're worried your kid is in danger of becoming a drug smuggler. The “incipient criminality factors” detailed in the
DSM
are given to such generality as to forecast that a rascal like Tom Sawyer would emerge perforce as a serious menace to society.

Whatever the litmus test, little Georgie Jung scored very low when it came to committing the standard predictive acts: He showed no outstanding propensity for lying in his early years, or for stealing, playing hooky, vandalizing property, getting into fights, lighting fires, running away from home, or torturing helpless animals. At about age five he did purloin a neighbor's pet hamster to provide it the benefits of living in his own room, a move his father countered by getting a policeman friend to show up in uniform at the front door and scare George into taking it back. And he certainly was devilish enough to keep his mother on the run, chasing him about the house and poking for him with a broomstick when he'd wriggle under a bed to avoid his comeuppance. There are no reports from family members about any capital transgression on George's part. He received an honorable discharge after three years with the Cub Scouts. He dependably served the Quincy
Patriot Ledger
on his route every day after school, winging the papers with his left-hand sidearm pitch up onto the porches. He went sailing on the Fore River with Malcolm MacGregor in a little boat they kept moored down in back of the Circle. He dug for clams at Wessagussett Beach to earn spending money. A photograph of him in grade school shows a little boy with a carefully combed shock of hair sticking upright over his forehead, and a wide, impish grin that to one relative, at least, proved memorably disarming. “As a little boy he was a perfect charmer,” Auntie Gertrude remembers. “He was really—what can I say?—he could just steal your heart away.”

Were he enrolled in elementary school today, his parents might have been counseled to look at the possibility of dyslexia as a factor in his having to repeat the first grade because of reading problems, or Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder as an explanation for his general behavior. Little Georgie certainly appears to have been full-blown hyperactive, at times difficult to control, even subject to fits and explosions of temper, to the point where his mother once felt the need to consult the family doctor. His advice was to stick the boy's head under a faucet the next time he had an outburst. George still remembers with some annoyance the series of duckings forced on him after that consultation.

By the time George was entering adolescence, his parents were having serious marital problems. These usually didn't evince themselves to George until they'd reached an extreme stage, when Ermine would pack up her suitcase and leave home. George remembers her walking down to the bottom of the hill to get the bus for Quincy, and from there the train into Boston. He would follow her down the hill and stand across from the bus stop by the minister's house shouting out to her to come back. “I didn't want her to leave, but I didn't know how to stop her, so I threw rocks at her,” he says. “Not really rocks, they were stones. But I didn't know what else to do to make her stay.” On these occasions Ermine would stay with her mother, who lived on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, or go down to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where her brother, Jack O'Neill, owned a string of music stores. During one of his mother's absences, George lived for several months at the house in Melrose with Uncle George and Aunt Myrna. That was where he finally learned his multiplication tables, when he was going into the fifth grade. As George recalls, “Aunt Myrna sat me down at the kitchen table and said, ‘You're not stupid, Georgie. There's no reason why you're failing all the time; you just don't know what discipline is.' There were these two little girls next door that I really liked, and she said I was never going to get to know those girls unless I learned the times table all the way up to twelve. And I did. I learned it that summer.”

George's academic troubles dogged him in one way or another all the way up through high school. By contrast, his older sister, Marie, not only had an absolutely unblemished scholastic record, with never less than an A in any course, but would in every school she attended win the unqualified adoration of her teachers, qualities of which her younger brother was never allowed to remain ignorant. One of Marie's biggest fans, for instance, was Mary Toomey, her English teacher at Weymouth High School. At the mere mention of Marie's name Miss Toomey's face still lights up and exudes an almost beatific glow. “Marie Jung was just beautiful, not in the sense she was all decorated, but she had a naturally classic face, lovely long eyelashes, beautiful manners, you could send her anywhere, totally trustworthy,” Miss Toomey says. “She really had everything—talent, looks, charm, brains. She was just so good, such a good person.”

Miss Toomey, now retired and living in a cottage near the sea in the village of Eastham on Cape Cod, had taught at the school since the 1940s, when she also coached some of the athletic teams while the males were off at war. Later on it seemed natural that she was the teacher coaches came to when one of their players required extra tutoring so as not to fall below the C average needed to stay on a team. This was especially true of the football coach, Harry Arlinson, a legend in eastern Massachusetts for his teams in the 1940s and 1950s, whose record of 135 wins, 17 losses, and 3 ties earned Weymouth High a large picture spread in
Look
magazine in 1953. She recalls that Arlinson would take her aside and say in a near-whisper, as if engaging in some conspiracy, “I have a boy who I can't play because he can't pass English, and they're going to give him one last test.…”

This meant the boy would become one of Miss Toomey's “special cases,” to be given private lessons after school; she'd even search the newspaper to see if there wasn't a Shakespeare play to take him to in Boston. Miss Toomey also played a large part in choosing the questions that appeared on the subsequent test, which may or may not have been the reason every one of her special cases managed to pull through.

Harry Arlinson had left Weymouth to coach at Tufts University several years before young George entered high school in the fall of 1958, but the new head coach, Jack Fisher, picked up on Miss Toomey's services to keep his boys qualified for play. Miss Toomey already knew all about the Jung children, however, and the very first week of George's high school term, she took it upon herself to send a note down to have Marie's little brother brought to her office. “I don't remember what year that was exactly, but I do remember calling him in and exhorting him to do better now that he was in high school. I told him I would spend the time and give him all the help he wanted.”

George remembers sitting in homeroom that day when the word came down that Miss Toomey wanted to see him. He was certainly familiar with the name. “Miss Toomey was everything in our house; everybody loved her, Marie, my mother especially. And here I was in high school, and now Miss Toomey, she was waiting for
me.

“I remember going up to her office on the third floor, thinking to myself, ‘All right, here comes the bullshit.' I walked into her classroom and she introduced herself—a round cherub face, a little overweight, wide in the hips, a flowered dress. ‘Oh, you're Marie's brother! She was such a wonderful student. Such a wonderful person. And I've looked over your grades in junior high, and I think you can do a lot better. You're a football player, and Mr. Fisher is my good friend. We can work together and I'm going to help you. I'm going to devote all my free time to you,' and blah blah blah. I listened through it all, and when she was all finished, I just said to her, ‘No you won't, Miss Toomey,' and ‘Thank you anyway, Miss Toomey,' and ‘Good-bye, Miss Toomey,' and I walked out.”

Marie kept up with Miss Toomey after graduation and down through the years, sending word every Christmas about what her children were doing, detailing the milestones in Otis's career at Eli Lilly. “She wrote me that Otis made a big breakthrough in robotics that's going to benefit his company tremendously. And the children, you could easily see Marie in the children. A son graduated from West Point, another son is an attorney, and Karen, I think, is at Purdue Engineering School. You could see there was good stock there. The genes were good.” Of George, Miss Toomey heard nothing after graduation, not a word for nearly twenty years, until she was talking one day with her handyman, Paul Deschamps, whose son was a member of the Eastham Police Department. “It was in 1980, I think. Paul was working at the house one day, and, ‘Oh, by the way,' he said, ‘there's been a very big thing happened in Eastham with drugs. There's this fellow, actually, the fellow came from Weymouth. Did you ever hear of a George Jung?'”