Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (18 page)

The two of them dropped me off at my house and went out for dinner. As soon as I got home, I threw my clothes in the washing machine and went into the shower. And how did I feel? Fine. Because to me it was just business. All I thought about when I was doing business was making money and staying free. There was no sense in doing a crime if you couldn’t get away with it. And McIntyre had turned into an informant who was trying to make me lose my freedom. As an informant, he got what he deserved. A legitimate person would have been different. But someone who comes around and is involved with us and then is giving us up is trying to hurt us. McIntyre wasn’t my partner. He was just a score, an informant who had to be taken care of. Luckily, I can compartmentalize things so they don’t eat away at me. While it’s happening, it’s just business. When it’s over, it’s over. And I don’t think about it ever again. To me it didn’t matter if McIntyre was dead or in South America, as long as he couldn’t hurt us.

The third murder that took place in the house at 799 East Third Street was Deborah Hussey, Stevie’s “stepdaughter.” Stevie had been complaining that Deborah was bringing blacks to the house in Milton where he lived with Marion, Debbie’s mother and his common-law wife, or whatever you call her, and their other kids. Marion said that Debbie was upsetting the household, that she was stripping in town and doing drugs. Little by little, Marion was souping Stevie up, but I hadn’t realized the severity of it or how mad he was getting over the situation.

I had also heard that 799 East Third Street was being sold and that eventually we were going to have to move the two bodies already in the basement. Jimmy and I had been talking about acquiring the house so we could control it and not have to bother moving the two bodies. And I knew Stevie had been talking about buying the house himself.

One day, Jimmy called me up and told me to meet him, and the two of us drove down to that house. I didn’t particularly care for that house because every time I was there someone got killed, but he had called me, so I went. When I asked him what was up, he said we were meeting Stevie at the house, that he had taken Debbie shopping and was buying her a coat. I was thinking maybe that meant he wanted to buy the house for her, which would eliminate the need to move the two bodies.

There were lots of women in Stevie’s life, all beautiful young women, of different nationalities and different backgrounds. It had only been a few years earlier, in 1981, that he’d killed his gorgeous longtime girlfriend, Debra Davis. She had tried to leave him, but his ego had gotten in the way, making it impossible for him to live with her leaving him for another guy. If he couldn’t have her, no one could. So he had killed her, strangled her in his mother’s house at 832 East Third Street. That’s the type of guy he was.

But that night, four years after he killed Debra Davis, Stevie came walking into the house at 799 East Third Street, diagonally across the street from his mother’s house, with Debbie Hussey, also twenty-six. At the time, Jimmy was on the first floor while I was upstairs using the bathroom. As I was heading downstairs, I heard a thud, and when I walked into the parlor, Debbie, her brown hair falling against her shoulder, was lying on the floor. I’d never seen her before and she certainly wasn’t looking good. I could see that she was a rough-and-tumble kind of girl, sort of small, probably five-three and 115 pounds, and not the prissy type. I knew she’d been drugging and stripping in the Naked Eye in downtown Boston, so even if she had been pretty at one time, she wasn’t any longer.

But at that moment, Jimmy was on the floor, too, with his arms wrapped around Debbie’s neck, his legs wrapped around her waist and her chest, squeezing, strangling her. I could see that her lips and face were blue, that her eyes were bulging, that she was already dead. But Stevie put his head on her chest and insisted she was still alive. It was another case of him and Jimmy trying to outdo each other on who’s the better killer here. To prove his point, Stevie took a clothesline type of rope, wrapped it around Debbie’s neck, stuck a stick in it, and kept on twisting it and twisting it like a garrote.

She was definitely dead then, so Stevie and I took her downstairs while Jimmy just laid on the couch upstairs. The two of us basically went about the same thing we’d down twice before, with Stevie stripping her down, removing her black dungarees, blouse, and thin coat, and pulling her teeth out with the pliers while I dug the hole. Then we put her in and buried her. There was no blood with this murder, so there was little cleanup.

Stevie said he’d take care of the clothes and teeth. He was all business, going about the task of cleaning up and pulling teeth. Even though he had a long-term relationship with Debbie, this wasn’t bothering him any more than it had bothered Jimmy. Stevie was actually enjoying it, the way he always enjoyed a good murder. Like a stockbroker going to work, he was just doing his job. Cold and relaxed, with no emotion or change in his demeanor, he was performing a night’s work. Whether he then went out to meet another of his girlfriends or went home to Marion, I have no idea.

Later on, when I was alone with Jimmy, I asked him what that was all about. “Who knows?” he answered. “She was bringing blacks back to the house. She was doing drugs. Stevie was probably fucking her.” I never asked again, but it was just kind of distasteful killing a woman. I can see killing guys. That’s the life they chose, the life they’re involved with, the life we all chose. But a woman is different. It wasn’t a nice thing.

Years later, it came out that Stevie was in fact having sex with Debbie. And she’d been his stepdaughter since she was three years old. Who knows if she knew anything else about him? But to kill a woman because she threatened to tell that you were fucking her didn’t make any sense, no more than it did to kill a girlfriend because she wanted to leave you. According to Stevie’s testimony in a later trial, when it came out that he had been having sex with her daughter, Marion still continued to see him. She didn’t know about the murder, but she knew about the sex. That didn’t make any sense, either.

But that was the last murder in the house.

As it turned out, six months after Debbie Hussey’s murder the house got sold, so we had to get the bodies out of there. On Halloween weekend in 1985, an appropriate time for such a move, Stevie and I and another fellow went down to the house to exhume the three bodies and put them in body bags. The three of us arrived around five in the morning, put gloves on our hands and little painter’s masks over our noses and mouths, and got to work. Since Bucky Barrett had been there for a couple of years, McIntyre maybe for a year, and Deborah Hussey for less than that, we knew it wasn’t going to be a pleasant task to dig them all up.

The first body we dug up was Bucky, who had kind of mummified rather than decomposed, because of the lime we’d put on him. Apparently Phil Costa had brought us the wrong kind of lime the night Bucky got killed. Instead of buying the lime that helps with decomposition, Phil had bought the lime that is some kind of fertilizer you use for gardening. As a result, when we pulled Bucky out of the hole, his head snapped off and broke away, but we managed to get it into the bag with the rest of the body. The other two bodies were a little fresher, so it was pretty gory with the stench of the flesh, but we got each of them into a body bag without any parts breaking off. It took us a good eight hours to dig up the bodies, put them in the bags, and clean up everything, including all the small bones and the bits and pieces.

Stevie and I waited upstairs until it got dark out and Jimmy pulled a station wagon, with its back seat down flat, into the driveway at the side of the house. The three of us carried each body into the wagon, which we called the hearse, and drove off. Master criminal that he is, Jimmy had already figured out exactly how we would dispose of the bodies. We’d spent days riding around scouting out possible locations before he finally chose a wooded spot, a gully overlooking the Southeast Expressway, across from Florian Hall on Hill Top Street in Dorchester. At the time we had the DEA all over us, but we never had any problem losing them.

The night before we took the bodies out of East Third Street, the three of us had gone to that wooded spot, predug a hole six feet wide and eight feet deep, filled ten duffel bags with dirt, stuck them back in the hole, and piled the remaining dirt on top of them. Jimmy even put a twenty-dollar bill under a rock on top of the dirt so we would know if anyone had spotted the grave. He left nothing to chance.

On Halloween night, after we arrived at the selected spot, Jimmy checked to see if his twenty-dollar bill was still there. When he saw that it was in the exact place, under the rock, where he’d left it, he put it in his pocket and we took the bodies out of the hearse before he drove it to a nearby spot. While he was gone, Stevie and I carried each body over to the little wooded area. When Jimmy got back, the three of us took turns on watch, with one of us working the police scanner and holding the grease gun, a cheaply made World War II machine gun fitted with a silencer, just in case anyone stumbled upon us while we were burying the bodies. Jimmy went on watch first while Stevie and I began to replace the duffel bags with the three body bags. As we were transferring the bodies out of the bags into the hole, Bucky’s head got loose again and rolled out of the bag. This time I had to push it into the hole with my foot.

The whole time we were working, a big Halloween party was going on across the street at Florian Hall, spilling out into the parking lot. Twenty yards from us, people were parking and heading to the party. While I was lying facedown with the gun and Stevie and Jimmy were busy at the hole, a kid got out of his car maybe twenty feet from us. We had been real quiet, so I was sure he hadn’t heard or seen us. All he did was relieve himself, since he’d obviously been drinking, and then got back in his car and drove away. After the kid left, Jimmy was a little upset with me for letting anyone get that close and not killing him. He would never have taken a chance and would have shot him the minute he stepped out of his car. “There’s plenty of room in the hole for the kid,” he told me. But there had been no reason to kill the kid. He hadn’t seen anything. That kid never knew how lucky he was that it was me on the gun, not Jimmy.

Anyhow, we finished up burying the bodies right there under everybody’s noses. One of the body bags ended up with a broken zipper and couldn’t be used again, so we tossed it into the hole with the three bodies. When we were through, about forty-five minutes after we’d gotten there, we stuffed nine of the empty duffel bags inside the tenth bag and carried it, along with the two body bags, back to the hearse. Later, after I got into my own car, I pulled off my boots and tossed them out the window onto the Expressway. When I got home, I threw all my clothes into a garbage bag and got rid of it in a Dumpster behind the Stop & Shop in Dorchester. But for three days, I could still smell the stench from the bodies in my nostrils. It was a pretty gruesome, rough night, but I don’t think much about it anymore. It had to be done. And that was just the way it was.

SIX

STEVIE FLEMMI

I first met Stevie Flemmi in 1974, the night he and Jimmy walked into Flix, a downtown bar where I was bouncing. I knew Stevie’s reputation as Jimmy’s close associate and supposed hit man for the Winter Hill gang. He wasn’t a big guy, maybe five-eight, 156 pounds. I was pretty sure he was around forty, a few years younger than Jimmy, but it was obvious that he, too, worked out and took good care of himself. Clean-shaven, wearing jeans and a black leather jacket, Stevie had dark brown hair, neatly trimmed, and brown eyes.

The press idiotically loves to call him “The Rifleman,” referring to the Roxbury native’s days as a paratrooper/shooter with the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team in the Korean War. But even I knew that no one close to him would ever use that inane nickname. I’d also heard a bit about his two brothers, Vincent, who had his own nickname of Jimmy the Bear, and Michael, a sergeant with the Boston Police Department. His brothers gave Michael lots of business, as the Bear’s capability for violence was as legendary as Stevie’s.

From the first time I met Stevie, I was surprised at how likable and easygoing he was. When I started to work at Triple O’s and got to know him better, he was still friendly and outgoing, a nice guy who liked to joke around. For the following twenty-five years that we worked together, I rarely had a problem with him and never incurred his wrath. I learned right away that his main goal was making money, which he accomplished exceptionally well, and that even though he was an intelligent, creative thinker, his first course of action toward anyone who went against him, who wasn’t doing what they were supposed to do, who so much as talked to him in a way he didn’t like, was to kill them. In fact, while Stevie was eventually charged with ten murders, the correct number is more like thirty. Like Jimmy, he had a violent temper and was extraordinarily brutal. But while Stevie was hot-blooded, Jimmy was cold-blooded. Stevie would kill someone anywhere, anytime; Jimmy was more calculating and took his time to pick the right place and the right moment. The badge Stevie had earned during the Korean War as a highly skilled shooter was all the more reason to fear his hot-blooded temper. I was never afraid of Stevie, but I knew he was explosive and I knew when to be cautious around him.

When we first met in 1974, Stevie had just come back from five years on the lam in New York and Canada with Frank Salemme. In 1968, the two of them had taken off after blowing up the car of John Fitzgerald, the lawyer who was representing Joe Barboza, a mob hit man who’d flipped and turned into a government witness. Fitzgerald, who Frankie and Stevie figured facilitated Barboza’s flip, lost a leg in the car bombing, but survived the attack. As it turned out, Salemme got pinched in 1973 by John Connolly on a New York sidewalk. But Stevie played it safer and was able to wait it out another year until the heat died down, the case fell apart, and he could safely return to Boston. There was, I later learned, more to that story, but it was many years before I understood exactly who was helping Stevie stay out of prison for that crime.