Hitman

by Howie Carr

  Whitey and Stevie began an investigation of their own, by kidnapping a guy out of a Charlestown bar whom they suspected of being involved. He quickly gave up the name of the architect of the multimillion-dollar burglary—a criminal jack-of-all-trades named Bucky Barrett. But the Depositors Trust crew also had clout—Bucky was tight with Frankie Salemme, who was still in state prison for the Fitzgerald bombing. When Salemme told him that he’d ripped off some guys from In Town, Bucky did the right thing and returned their loot. Cadillac Frank told Barrett not to worry about Whitey and Stevie.

  “Jackals,” he said, when Barrett visited him at MCI-Norfolk. “That’s all those two are—jackals.”

  Whitey and Stevie had to lay off for a while, but they had long memories. In 1983, they had one of their minions dangle the lure of cheap, stolen diamonds in front of Bucky, and he walked into a trap in Southie. Soon Whitey and Stevie had him tied to a chair in the kitchen of a house belonging to a relative of one of the gang members.

  They wanted all of the Depositors Trust loot, but Bucky told them a lot of it had been returned to the Angiulos. He offered them $60,000 that he had hidden under the refrigerator in his home. They gave him a phone and he told his wife to turn off the burglar alarm and to then leave the house. Whitey then sent a guy to Bucky’s house to get the cash. Meanwhile, Barrett called a bar in Quincy Market and told somebody that he was sending a guy down in a cab to pick up $10,000 cash. Then he phoned a couple of other Charlestown hoodlums and asked them if they could help him out. They turned him down flat. Finally, Whitey told Bucky Barrett it was time to go into the basement.

  Bucky Barrett, murdered by Whitey in 1983.

  He walked slowly down the stairs, Whitey following him, holding in his hand a Mac10 machine gun equipped with a silencer. Whitey put it to Bucky’s head and pulled the trigger. Stevie then used his new dental kit to pull most of Bucky’s teeth.

  Some of the gang members dug a grave in the basement, and then Stevie’s man, Phil Costa, arrived with quicklime, to make the body decompose faster. They spread a layer at the bottom of the grave, threw the body in, and then poured what was left of the quicklime on top of the body.

  Phil Costa, the Flemmi associate who provided quicklime to hasten the decomposition of Barrett’s body.

  The Barrett family never recovered from Bucky’s disappearance. Over the next decade, two of his sons would commit suicide in the exact same way—by hurling themselves in front of Red Line trains.

  * * *

  STEVIE WAS having more girlfriend problems, this time with Marion Hussey’s daughter, Deborah, with whom Stevie had been having sex since she was thirteen. As she grew older, Deb Hussey had become a drug addict. Stevie got her a job as a bar waitress in a rough organized-crime hangout on Geneva Avenue in Dorchester, and soon she was turning tricks.

  In yet another wrongful-death lawsuit against the federal government in 2009, Marion Hussey testified how one day in 1982, she returned home from her job at a bank to find Stevie beating up Deborah. As Flemmi put it in a 2005 deposition, “She was doing a lot of things I didn’t approve of.” Marion Hussey described what happened next.

  “I said to him, ‘You’ve got to get her out of here.’ That’s when she said something about blowing him. She said, ‘I’ve been doing it for years.’”

  Marion Hussey threw Stevie out of the house he had bought for her. Stevie was irate, and there was a new number one with a bullet on the Hit Parade. She was twenty-four years old—the same age as Deb Davis when she was garroted.

  Marion Hussey, Stevie’s common-law wife, leaving court in 2009.

  Offering to buy her a new coat, Stevie lured Deb to the same house in Southie where they had killed Bucky Barrett. Whitey jumped her with a rope, breaking five of her ribs as he strangled her. This time Stevie helped out, grabbing one end of the rope as Whitey pulled the other end. After his stepdaughter was dead, Stevie again put his new dental kit to good use. Then they had one of their younger gang members, Kevin Weeks, dig another hole in the basement.

  When Marion Hussey began asking questions about what had happened to her daughter, Stevie shrugged. He said he had no idea, but that he’d ask around.

  * * *

  A COUPLE of years later, one of Marion’s sons by Stevie was hospitalized after a bad head-on car accident. Stevie, who had never reconciled with Marion, showed up at the hospital. In court Marion Hussey described what happened next.

  “We were arguing, because that’s what we did,” she said. “I went outside to have a cigarette and he came after me. I said to him, ‘You killed my daughter.’ He was taken aback. He was in shock. He grabbed a pole, knees bent. He said, ‘How could you?’”

  In his 2005 deposition, Stevie admitted that he had had Deb Hussey murdered. But, he insisted, there were “extenuating circumstances.” He did not elaborate.

  Marion was awarded $300,000 from the U.S. government for the murder of her daughter by the FBI’s two Top Echelon informants in Boston.

  * * *

  WHITEY AND Stevie were shaking down drug dealers now, too. Stevie testified later that he and Whitey once got $5 million for “protecting” a single load. “Protection” mostly meant not tipping off their favorite cops.

  Joe Murray was a career Charlestown criminal who had gotten into large-scale marijuana smuggling. Bucky Barrett had been in his crew. Murray was storing tons of weed in a warehouse in the Lower End, and that was where he got a call from Whitey one day. Whitey told him he’d just gotten a tip that the cops were on their way to Murray’s warehouse with a search warrant and that he’d better clear out pronto.

  Whitey’s tip, of course, turned out to be right on the money. A few days later, Bulger reached out to Joe Murray, telling him he wished he’d known that so much pot was being stored in the Town, because he might have been able to prevent the police raid altogether. Joe Murray took the hint; he had a new partner. The police raids ceased immediately.

  Meanwhile, though, Whitey continued to feed Zip Connolly information about his new associate. He mentioned Joe Murray’s barroom in Sullivan Square, the Celtic Tavern—“a sort of clubhouse for organized crime,” as Whitey described it. In other words, it was a lot like Triple O’s in South Boston. Whitey said Murray was “one of the best-kept secrets in organized crime.” He could have said the same about himself, given the blackout the papers had given him since his threats against the reporter from the Herald American.

  Kevin Weeks dug graves for Whitey’s victims.

  * * *

  WHITEY DECIDED he wanted to help the Irish Republican Army. After all, they generated a lot of cash from their sympathizers in the United States. All the gin mills in Southie and Charlestown and Brighton had clear jars on their bars next to the Slim Jims and the hard-boiled eggs, into which their patrons could drop their change for the cause of Irish freedom, or something. Whitey smelled a score, and put together seven tons of ordnance, as well as some bulletproof vests from the Boston Police Department, one of which was donated by Stevie’s younger brother Michael, a Boston cop who worked as a crime-scene photographer. Joe Murray was in charge of shipping the arsenal across the Atlantic.

  In Gloucester, the weapons were loaded onto a seventy-seven-foot fishing vessel, the Valhalla. Off the coast of Ireland, they were offloaded onto a smaller fishing boat, the Marita Ann. Pat Nee, who unlike the others really did care about his native Eire, was there to watch out for the gang’s interests, along with a couple of lesser Southie thugs.

  But the garda got a tip, and the Irish Navy stopped the ship. When the Valhalla returned to port, it, too, was seized. Whitey was livid; he suspected somebody had ratted him out. Eventually, his suspicions settled on one of Joe Murray’s gang, a crewman from Quincy named John McIntyre.

  After being arrested on a minor domestic charge, McIntyre began opening up to the Quincy police, and then to the DEA. He told them of his disdain for Whitey and the Southie gangsters who’d been on the Valhalla—“they got the Adidas jump suits, and they ain
’t got a speck of dirt on them. Every day they take two, three showers.”

  Still, he refused to mention Whitey and Stevie by name. Instead he referred to them only as “the two guys who ride around together.”

  Next, McIntyre told them about a drug ship, the Ramsland, that was headed to Boston carrying thirty-six tons of marijuana. Stevie testified later that he and Whitey’s projected cut from their “protection” of Ramsland was to have been “about a million.”

  The Ramsland bust was handled by the DEA, and as a departmental courtesy, the DEA revealed the identity of the informant to the FBI. That was all Whitey needed to know. On November 30, 1984, another of the Valhalla crew members, a Southie guy, invited McIntyre to a party at the same house where Bucky Barrett and Deb Hussey had recently been murdered and interred.

  The Southie guy dropped McIntyre off at the house, and he walked in carrying a case of cold beer, expecting a good time. Instead, he found Whitey Bulger waiting for him. They took him down to the basement and tied him to a chair. Whitey tried to throttle him with a rope, but it was too thick and he couldn’t finish the job. He then picked up a revolver and asked McIntyre if he wanted to be shot in the head.

  “Yes, please,” said McIntyre.

  Sixteen months later, Joe Murray and Pat Nee were indicted for gunrunning. So was the late John McIntyre.

  * * *

  THE EXTORTIONS continued. A local contractor got into a beef over a fence with Kevin Weeks. Whitey Bulger summoned him to Southie and shook him down for $200,000. A real-estate agent was brought to Triple O’s and ordered to come up with $50,000. He went to the FBI, and Whitey sent word to him to forget about it.

  There was another Southie guy Whitey heard about who’d moved to New York and made a fortune in penny-stock boiler-room operations. That sounded shady enough for Whitey to decide that it was time to pull another Bucky Barrett the next time this guy came back to Boston for a visit. He had to have a lot of cash, right?

  Another gang member called up the boiler-room guy in New York and asked him if he’d like to have dinner with the gangster who was becoming a legend in his own time—and mind. The penny-stock hustler was looking forward to the get-together until he got a frantic call from a different gang member he was acquainted with. The second gangster warned him that if he hooked up with Whitey, it might be his last supper. The boiler-room guy never set foot in the city again until 1995, when Whitey was safely gone.

  An enterprising young Southie businessman named Stippo Rakes started up a new liquor store with ample parking on Old Colony Avenue, in between two large housing projects. Just as the store opened in December 1983, Whitey and Stevie paid a visit to his apartment. Stevie put a revolver on his kitchen table and picked up Stippo’s two-year-old daughter and told him, “It’d be a shame if she had to grow up without a father.”

  Stippo sold them the liquor store for $60,000, then fled to Disney World with his family for a long vacation. When rumors began circulating that Whitey had killed Stippo, Bulger ordered him to return to Boston. He and Whitey spent hours standing at major intersections in Southie, waving to passing motorists, to prove that unlike so many others who had crossed Whitey, Stippo was still alive.

  Two months later, Stippo’s wife mentioned to her uncle, a Boston cop, what had happened. Within hours, Whitey was back in Rakes’s apartment, accusing him of going to the cops.

  “Bad fuckin’ move,” Whitey told him. Eventually, Stippo was able to convince Whitey he would never, ever think of going to any cops, especially his wife’s uncle, who a few years later would be sentenced in federal court to six months for aiding two illegal gambling businesses.

  Soon, business was booming at Whitey’s liquor store. A large green shamrock was painted onto the front outside wall of the store. During election season, candidates jockeyed to get their signs prominently displayed in the South Boston Liquor Mart’s front window. Having one that was visible from the traffic rotary represented an unspoken endorsement from the Bulgers. Every Christmas, agents from the Boston FBI office would stop by the Liquor Mart to pick up the booze for the office holiday party. Whitey made sure the G-men got the “professional discount.”

  As for Stippo, his career as a businessman was over. He took $3,000 of Whitey’s money that was left and obtained a job for himself at the MBTA, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, or, as the politicians at Billy Bulger’s St. Patrick’s Day roast always called it, “Mr. Bulger’s Transportation Authority.” Years later, when Stippo was called before a federal grand jury to testify about what Whitey and Stevie had done to him, he denied everything. He was indicted for perjury.

  South Boston Liquor Mart in the late 1980s.

  The real criminal enterprise here was these four guys—Whitey, Stevie, Zip, and Rico. If you crossed them you got robbed, or whacked, or put in a hole or sent to jail so somebody could get a feather in their cap.

  Just to name a few examples, they robbed Stippo, they put my brother and Pat Nee in jail, the two Debbies ended up in a hole, and poor Bucky—he got robbed, killed, and put in a hole. Bucky hit for all three—he was a quinella.

  Johnny’s old gang was being thinned out, one way or another. Joe McDonald’s Florida friend was arrested on drug charges in 1983, and Joe decided to return to Boston. He took the train north, with three Uzis in his luggage. When the train got to Penn Station, the FBI was waiting for him.

  I don’t know who tipped them. Maybe Whitey, but I’m more inclined to believe it was the guy in Florida. He was in a jam, and remember, Joe was still on the FBI Ten Most Wanted List. That’s a good catch. As for the guns, some people say he was planning to get ’em to the IRA. Hey, if it makes Joe look good, that’s the story I’ll go with, too. I have no idea.

  Jimmy Sims was the next to be picked up. The feds caught up with him in Key West, where he’d been hiding out for years. He had family down there, and had been working as a commercial fisherman. He was brought back to Boston with all the charges against him consolidated.

  One day in January 1983, he pleaded guilty in federal court to the race-fixing counts. The next morning, he was in Suffolk Superior Court to take the fall on various gambling and gun charges and even a few minor traffic violations, including running a red light on Columbus Avenue in the South End. He got four years total, to be served in state prison.

  As Sims was taken from the courtroom in handcuffs, he asked the guards, “Do they have televisions in Walpole?”

  * * *

  JERRY ANGIULO was having dinner at Francesco’s on North Washington Street on September 19, 1983, when FBI agents arrived to arrest him. As he was led away in handcuffs, he shouted back at the other patrons, “I’ll be back before my pork chops get cold.”

  He wouldn’t see the street again until 2007. In Town was on its way out. As for “the Man,” Raymond L. S. Patriarca, he died of a heart attack in 1983 at age seventy-five while getting a blow job, at least according to underworld lore.

  * * *

  H. PAUL RICO was staying busy. Alcee Hastings was the first black federal judge in Florida, appointed by President Jimmy Carter. It quickly became apparent that he was utterly corrupt, and soon the FBI realized they had a perfect opportunity to take him down.

  Santo Trafficante, the Mafia boss of Tampa, was coming up for sentencing in front of Hastings. What if the FBI could get an undercover agent masquerading as a mobster close enough to Hastings, or his bagman, to obtain enough evidence to indict him?

  The only question was, did the FBI have an agent who could pass himself off as a top-level gangster? It didn’t take long for the feds to come up with a perfect match—retired agent H. Paul Rico. Rico “pretended” to be a gangster, an emissary from Trafficante, and soon had more than enough evidence to end Hastings’s squalid career on the bench.

  Hastings was indicted, but a predominantly black jury in Miami refused to convict. However, he was then impeached in the U.S. House and convicted in a Senate trial. Hastings was removed from the federal bench, but
in 1992 was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from a majority-black district in South Florida. According to his Congressional website, Hastings is still known to many as ‘Judge.’”

  Special Agent Rico, meanwhile, was flown to Washington to testify before a Senate committee, which presented him with a commendation for his years of selfless service to the people of the United States of America.

  * * *

  COCAINE WAS extracting a fearful toll on Johnny’s old friends back in Boston. Nicky Femia had been in the old Barboza crew. After the breakup of the old Winter Hill Gang, Whitey had brought him aboard as hired muscle. But Whitey couldn’t abide his drug use, and later fired him.

  By October 1983, Femia had graduated to heroin, and he tried to hold up an auto-body shop, of all things, in East Boston. Holding a gun on the owner, he was staring off into the distance, yelling at someone who wasn’t there. That gave the shop owner long enough to grab his own gun and kill Nicky Femia.

  Sid Tildsley was a Somerville associate of the old gang. He ran the Broadway barroom around the corner from the Marshall Street garage, known over the years by various names, among them the Peppermint Lounge, Pal Joey’s, and finally El Sid’s. Tildsley was a runner for the gang during the race-fixing days, as was another Somerville guy named Bobby Duda. Both of them pleaded guilty and did short bits.

  After Duda was released from prison, he got heavily into cocaine. One night he and Tildsley were drinking in a bar in Union Square when suddenly Duda pulled out a gun and shot Tildsley between the eyes. A few days later, Duda’s body was found in a cheap motel room outside New York City. He had hanged himself.

  Weasel Mantville, the old Mullen gang member whom Whitey had tried to blame for the Halloran hit, followed Femia’s footsteps in graduating from cocaine to heroin. Soon he, too, was dead. Now Whitey could blame Weasel for anything.