Howie Carr
Page 19
Stippo’s new job at the MBTA cost him $3,000. Cash.
Years later, after Whitey had fled Boston, Stippo was sitting in the new federal courthouse on Northern Avenue, talking to one of the prosecutors, when the fed opened a desk drawer and extracted a stiletto—a penlike knife, almost five inches long when closed. The prosecutor held it in his hand, then clicked it open—now it was nine and a half inches long.
The prosecutor then folded the blade back in, and Stippo heard the click again.
“Do that again,” he told the fed.
“Do what again?”
“Open it and close it.” The fed did. Click-click. Click-click. “You know whose knife this was?” the prosecutor said. Stippo shivered. “I know,” he said.
CHAPTER 14
BY THE MID-1980S, THE heat over World Jai Alai had died down, and business was booming at the South Boston Liquor Mart. Gerry Angiulo and Larry Baione were in jail, awaiting trial, and Raymond Patriarca was dead. What remained of the local Mafia was leaderless and dispirited, little more than a handful of trigger-happy crews whose main source of income was cocaine. The intelligent tough guys whose absence Gerry Angiulo had bemoaned on the FBI tapes never did materialize.
It was a wonderful time for Whitey, and now he wanted more. He wanted to control everything, and to do so he would have to eliminate every other competing wiseguy in the city.
Once everyone else of any stature was gone, he could demand tribute from any hoodlum who wanted to run any sort of organized criminal enterprise in Boston. As the victims continued to pile up, along with the money, the weapons, and the ruined lives, Whitey found it all quite amusing. He was deep into the cocaine trade himself, first as a protector of local dealers, and then, once he realized the potential profits, as a distributor. And yet, in the Globe, he was still lionized by his brother’s sycophants as the heart-of-gold, Cagneyesque hood who “kept the drugs out of Southie.”
Billy traveled the world with the cardinal, Bernard Law, who spoke eloquently of the plague of drugs that was destroying the youth of his archdiocese, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it was his traveling companion’s brother who was actually directing the drug rings wreaking such havoc in Boston. Later, in court, Kevin Weeks was asked how such an incredible situation could be so utterly ignored, or covered up, in America.
“We weren’t in America,” Weeks replied. “We were in Boston.”
Whitey read the papers carefully, keeping track of who said what, if not about him, then about his brother. He shopped in bulk for “his” FBI agents and cops; at Christmas he didn’t want to just simply give them an envelope of cash. That would have been just too déclassé. His cops would receive, in addition to the money of course, something more thoughtful—Whitey liked presenting them with collectible figurines, which he bought by the dozen to pass out.
He was always “Whitey” now, the guy in charge, the one who picked up the tab, if anyone dared even hand him a bill. After all the wasted years, he was “the Man,” and in his rare introspective moments, Whitey would rationalize what his life had become.
“I never killed anyone,” he would say, “who wasn’t trying to kill me.”
And yet, despite his reign of terror, Whitey remained nearly invisible to the larger world. In the first draft of a report by a presidential commission on organized crime, he was identified as “Jimmy Bolger.” When a short-lived political journal published a profile on his brother Billy, he was described, thanks to a typo, as “the dreaded Whitney.” Even the Globe seemed to have forgotten the entire gang, and the city from which it sprang. When Howie Winter was finally released from prison in 1987, a brief story claimed that the Winter Hill Gang was named after Winter. Again, no one caught the mistake.
That was fine by Whitey. Out of sight, out of mind.
Extortion, bribery, truck hijackings, gun smuggling—Whitey was game for any racket. But the gang’s major source of income was increasingly narcotics. At first Whitey mainly protected marijuana dealers who had taken to storing their loads in abandoned warehouses in Southie.
One of Whitey’s earliest sources of drug money was a thirty-seven-year-old smuggler from Charlestown named Joe Murray. In 1983, Murray was running a drug warehouse at 345 D Street in South Boston. Whitey, who at the time was not receiving any protection money from Murray, stopped by one day to check the place out, and then left. As usual, he had been keeping Zip apprised of his rivals—he’d described Murray as a “real sleeper” and “the best kept secret in organized crime.” But he wasn’t for long. Moments after Whitey left it, the warehouse was raided by DEA agents and cops. Fifteen tons of marijuana were confiscated.
A few days later, Whitey went to Murray and told him his warehouse was bringing down too much federal heat on Southie, and was costing him money. Whitey also told Murray that he could arrange it so that he’d know about any future raids—before they occurred. The service would be expensive, but what choice did Murray have? He paid $80,000 to Whitey and suddenly they were “partners.” What that meant was, Murray had to pay Whitey to leave him alone. He had to cut him in on the profits from every deal. Whitey, of course, did none of the actual work of buying and importing and then selling the drugs. Whitey didn’t want to break a sweat. He just wanted the cash, in return for which Murray would not be bothered either by Whitey or the cops.
Murray succinctly described the situation later to FBI agents: “MURRAY said that WHITEY BULGER and STEVIE FLEMMI have a machine and the Boston Police and the FBI have a machine and he cannot survive against these machines.”
As he consolidated his power, Whitey began tying up loose ends, picking off people who had eluded him for years. One such person was Arthur “Bucky” Barrett, an associate of Joe Murray’s and a professional burglar who had been arrested in the raid at the D Street marijuana warehouse. Bucky was a good earner; in addition to his income from drugs and burglaries, he owned a bar in Quincy Market. He was ripe for a shakedown.
Whitey had had his eye on Bucky Barrett ever since 1980, when a bold crew of burglars had tunneled into the Depositors Trust Bank in Medford over the Memorial Day weekend and looted hundreds of safe-deposit boxes, many of which belonged to organized crime figures. Gangsters from both the Mafia and Winter Hill lost thousands, if not millions of dollars in cash, jewelry, and negotiable bonds.
The underworld quickly figured out who was behind the heists, but several of the ringleaders were cops, and thus off-limits to Mob retribution. But Bucky Barrett, the crew’s safe-cracker, was fair game. He’d gotten at least $175,000 and some jewelry as his end of the deal.
By now, Whitey and Zip discussed criminal matters as gangland partners might, strategizing about the best approaches to use in realizing their objectives. In this case, the objective was shaking down Bucky, and Whitey and Zip decided that Morris was the man to make the first run at him. Morris approached Barrett and warned him that Whitey knew what he’d done and was coming after him. Bucky, though, also had friends on both sides of the law, and he didn’t panic. He called in his chits, especially with the crooked cops he was stealing with, and Whitey decided to back off, at least temporarily. But Whitey was patient, and by July 1983 he had a new plan. Kevin Weeks would lure Bucky to the home of another gang member in Southie. Weeks told Bucky he had some stolen diamonds he wanted to fence.
When Bucky arrived at the house, Whitey was waiting for him with a machine gun. Stevie and Kevin Weeks were there too, and they handcuffed Bucky to a chair and then interrogated him ruthlessly about every racket he was mixed up in. They were particularly interested in learning more details about the drug operations of their new partner from Charlestown, Joe Murray, “who was making millions,” as Kevin Weeks put it.
They demanded all of Bucky’s money. He was allowed to call Joe Murray’s brother, Michael, at his liquor store. Bucky told him he’d “been tied up all day” and now needed $2 million cash. Michael Murray asked him if he was crazy, and Bucky threatened to “give him up.”
Murray
hung up. He never heard from Bucky again. Barrett then admitted that he had a stash of cash in a strongbox at his house. Whitey ordered him to phone his wife, Elaine, and tell her to clear out. Then Whitey and Stevie drove over and ransacked the house. When they returned to Southie, they sent Weeks over to Bucky’s bar, Rascals, to pick up another $10,000 of Bucky’s money. Weeks, of course, didn’t actually enter the bar himself. He took a cab to Quincy Market, then sent the cabbie in to pick up the cash. That way, there were no witnesses against him. It was an old Winter Hill trick.
When Weeks returned to the house in Southie, Whitey told him that “Bucky was going downstairs [to] lay [sic] down for a minute.”
As they walked down the stairs, Whitey put the machine gun to the back of Bucky’s head and pulled the trigger. But nothing happened.
As Weeks testified later, “[Whitey] took his glasses out and checked the gun, flipped the safety off. At that point, Bucky had walked down a couple more steps and then [Whitey] shot him in the back of the head.”
With the body still warm, Stevie took out a pair of pliers and pulled most of Bucky’s teeth out of his mouth, to prevent any forensic dental identification. They weren’t worried about fingerprints, because one of Stevie’s guys had arrived with a couple of bags of lime, to make the body decompose faster. Then Weeks started digging a hole in the basement.
After finishing the burial, they split the take, with everyone getting between $9,000 and $10,000. In 2002, Weeks recounted Whitey’s explanation to them of why Bucky had had to go.
“Jim stated Bucky had a big mouth,” Weeks testified. “He couldn’t trust him. He’d be telling people what happened. Later on I found out that it was more personal. He had tried to shake Bucky down before, and Bucky had ran [sic] to someone, back him off—”
And nobody got away with that. It had taken three years, but Whitey had made his point. If Whitey shook you down, you either took it, or you died.
Bucky wasn’t the last of the Barretts to die. His older sons were never the same after his disappearance, and both ended up committing suicide, eleven years apart, in the same gruesome manner, by hurling themselves in front of Red Line subway trains.
Once someone became “partners” with Whitey, there was only one way to dissolve the partnership. This held true for Stevie’s domestic partners as well. In early 1985 Deborah Hussey was twenty-six, the same age as Debbie Davis when she’d been murdered. She was the daughter of Marion Hussey, Stevie Flemmi’s common-law wife.
When he’d returned from Montreal in 1974, Deborah was fifteen years old. Almost immediately he began having sex with her. He bought her a new car when she turned sixteen, and later he set her up in an apartment in the Back Bay, even as he continued more or less living with her mother in Milton. By age seventeen, she had graduated from waitress in a tough gin mill on Geneva Avenue in Dorchester to stripper in the Combat Zone downtown.
By 1984, Deborah Hussey was out of control, willing to say or do anything. That fall, in front of her mother in the family home on Blue Hill Avenue, Deborah Hussey personally confronted her “stepfather” and accused him of sexually abusing her. Stevie sputtered out a feeble, halfhearted denial, and Marion then threw Stevie out of the house he’d bought for her almost twenty years earlier.
Deborah Hussey had signed her own death warrant.
A few months later, in March 1985, Stevie took Deborah out shopping. Weeks and Whitey waited for them in the same house where Bucky Barrett had been murdered, and then interred in the basement. Weeks was upstairs using the bathroom when Stevie and Deborah arrived.
“As I was coming down,” Weeks later testified, “I heard a bang, and I walked down the stairs, and Jim Bulger was strangling her.”
This time, Stevie decided to help.
“He at one point put his head on her chest and said she was still alive,” Weeks said, “and then he wrapped a rope around her neck and stuck a stick through it and was twisting it.”
After she was dead, Stevie straddled her corpse and again used a pair of pliers to remove her teeth. Then he removed her shoes and stockings and used an ax to chop off her toes, after which he then chopped off her fingers.
Then they buried her in the basement, next to Bucky Barrett. In October 1985, the house would go up for sale, and Weeks would be assigned the grisly task of disinterring the bodies and, after dark on Halloween night, reburying them in a lot across the street from Florian Hall in Dorchester.
Digging up the corpses, Weeks and another gang member wore painters’ masks to cut the stench of the rotting flesh, then loaded the bodies into a station wagon they dubbed “the Hearse.”
In the vacant lot, the other gangster dumped the remains into predug graves, while Weeks stood guard with a machine gun. At one point, a passing car slowed down, but the driver apparently saw nothing and quickly sped off. Later that evening, when Weeks reported back, Whitey was outraged that his underling hadn’t killed the mysterious witness and thrown his body into the makeshift grave with the others.
Years later, when Weeks was on the witness stand, a prosecutor asked him why he had never tried to stop any of the murders.
“Because,” he said, “then I would have been going into the hole myself. They would have killed me. They’re not used to people saying no to them. I seen firsthand what happens to people that went to law enforcement.”
The shakedowns continued. Anything could be used as a pretext for extortion. A real estate developer in Quincy was taken for $200,000 after he advised a neighbor of Kevin Weeks’s in a dispute over the location of a fence. The developer, Richard Bucheri, got a call from Stevie Flemmi ordering him to appear at the Flemmis’ house in South Boston. When he arrived he saw Whitey sitting at a table, a sawed-off shotgun in front of him.
“Why the fuck did you get involved in that beef over the fence?” Whitey demanded. “Kevin is like a son to me. You should have minded your own fucking business and kept your fucking mouth shut.”
He stood up, and pointed the shotgun at Bucheri.
“I oughta fuckin’ kill you,” he said, before relenting. “I’ll let you go, but it’s gonna cost you two hundred grand.”
Bucheri paid Stevie by check. When the check cleared, Bucheri got a call from Flemmi.
“Jim says you’re his friend now,” Stevie reported.
Another victim was a South Boston real estate developer named Raymond Slinger. In federal court, Slinger later testified that Kevin O’Neil called him one day and told him that someone wanted to see him at Triple O’s. He understood that this was not an invitation he could refuse. He arrived at the bleak tavern and Kevin O’Neil escorted him up the stairs, where Whitey was waiting for him.
“I’ve been hired to kill you,” he told Slinger, using almost the exact same words that had so terrified Stippo Rakes.
Whitey told Slinger that there were alternatives available. He could pay Whitey to kill the other guy, or scare him.
“How much would it cost me to have you tell the other guy to leave me alone?” Slinger testified that he asked Whitey. “A thousand bucks? Two thousand?”
Whitey fixed him with an icy stare. “Are you shitting me? My boots cost more than that. Fifty grand would be more like it.”
Once he was back at his office, Slinger called City Councilor Jimmy Kelly. Kelly was a friend of both Bulgers, a former small-time criminal himself who’d done a stretch at the Deer Island House of Correction for illegal possession of a handgun. It was Kelly to whom Whitey turned when Theresa Stanley’s son wanted a city job.
Kelly assured Slinger he’d straighten out the matter. But a couple of weeks later, Slinger received a call from Kevin O’Neil.
“The man wants to see you again,” he said.
This time, Slinger brought a gun with him. But while frisking him for body wires, Weeks and O’Neil found the gun. Kevin Weeks punched him in the gut and threw him down into a chair. Whitey entered and Weeks handed him Slinger’s gun. Finding one bullet inside, Whitey walked over to Slinger and pr
essed the barrel against the top of his head.
“You know what happens if I shoot you?” Whitey asked. “When the bullet goes in from the top, there’s no blood.” He glanced over at Weeks. “Go get me a body bag.”
At least that was Slinger’s recollection. Weeks remembered Whitey saying, “Go get me a bottle of beer.”
Slinger paid Whitey $25,000. The shakedowns stopped after two FBI agents visited him at his office. When the feds had left, Slinger called O’Neil to tell him about his visitors. He was petrified that Whitey would think he’d made the call. He’d heard what happened to anyone who called the cops.
The Mafia was on the ropes. By 1986, the Angiulos and Larry Baione had all been convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms, and there were no obvious candidates to succeed Gerry and Larry. Whitey wanted the Mafia disarray to continue. It was good for business.
Eventually, a new Mafia crew emerged, led by a cold-blooded 1971 graduate of Boston College named Vinny “the Animal” Ferrara. The crew set up their headquarters, not in the North End this time, but in the Back Bay, at the Prudential Center, in a bakery called Vanessa’s. But they made one mistake. They told Stevie Flemmi their plans. Soon the FBI had a wire in the back room of Vanessa’s.
The crew was planning the shakedown of Harry “Doc Jasper” Sagansky, an eighty-nine-year-old former dentist who had been running an extensive gambling operation in Boston since the 1930s. When he answered their summons to appear at Vanessa’s, they demanded a half-million dollars.
Doc Sagansky’s counteroffer was $3,000-a-month “rent”— double what he’d been paying the Angiulos. The Animal stuck to his demand for a half-million. Doc shook his head.
“Kid, I’m eighty-nine years old,” Sagansky said to the Animal. “How long am I gonna be in business? How can I go to work and make the kind of money youse talkin’ about? Listen, take the business, will you please, and forget about everything.”