The Departed Community Quotes

Dignam wants to talk about Billy's background in the neighborhood in Southie. For starters, he wants to know if Billy is a career criminal, and second, he wants to know if he can use Billy's connections to get close to Frank Costello.

Dignam likes to remind Billy that even though he comes from a rough neighborhood, his dad was some nobody who worked at the airport. After all, Dignam probably comes from the harder parts of Boston, and he doesn't want Billy posing as a gangster.

As Dignam likes to put it, Billy's family goes back for generations in the Southie neighborhood. And this is exactly why Billy might be so valuable as an undercover informant there. After all, it's not like Dignam can just take some kid fresh out of the academy and send him into a neighborhood like Southie.

Even though he wants to use Billy's background as an asset, Dignam wants to remind Billy that he's not really like the other people who grew up in Southie, since he had a rich mom who raised him with a silver spoon in his mouth. For Dignam, this is actually an insult to anyone who truly grew up in the hard parts of Boston.

When describing the story of someone who just got killed by Costello's people, Dignam mentions that the deceased was from Southie. The reason this is so important is because for the cops, Southie is where almost all of the drugs and violence in this town come from.

Mr. French would like nothing better than to mess Billy up, but the guy has such a strong sense of community that he remembers the days when Billy's grandmother was so nice to him. Apparently, something that happened decades ago is enough to make a violent mobster give someone a second chance. Now that's community.

Costello identifies as an Irish guy from Boston, and he often thinks about the old days when an Irish person had trouble finding a job because Irish people were considered dirty immigrants. But things definitely change over time, because eventually and Irish Catholic named John F. Kennedy became President of the United States.

The mafia is constantly trying to horn in on Costello's territory, and they definitely don't have a high opinion of the Irish community. The Irish would probably be just as quick to talk smack about Italians, which just goes to show how important it is in the criminal world to be part of a group or community.

Costello knows all about Billy and his family. But he also knows that Billy was raised away from the Southie community in a richer place. That's why he gets suspicious when he sees Billy hanging around Southie again. After all, Frank is a smart dude and he knows that Captain Queenan is just the kind of guy to send someone like Billy as a police informant.

The cop going door to door with Colin realizes that in the neighborhood of Southie, people aren't always friendly to the police. This might be because they like to take care of their own problems, but it's also because Frank Costello has them all so scared that they don't dare go to anyone but him.