Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (29 page)

Jimmy told me Karpis’s own explanation of how he’d been captured in 1936. J. Edgar Hoover had declared him Public Enemy #1. When the feds finally surrounded Karpis and threw their guns on him, Hoover was around the corner hiding behind the bushes. He yelled out to his men, “Is it safe? Do you have him?”

“It’s all right, boss,” they told him. When they had subdued Karpis on the ground, Hoover came out from the bushes and put the handcuffs on him. That way, he could say he was the one who got Karpis.

No one who knew Karpis ever called him “Creepy.” But one time Karpis and another guy were digging an escape tunnel in a narrow passageway, down by the boiling-hot steam pipes. It was so hot that the two guys would strip down to their underwear and go in to dig the hole. When they came out, they were so filthy and covered with dirt that they jumped right into the shower. After one guard saw the two of them together in the wide-open shower, he reported they were homosexuals. In his book, Whitey Thompson wrote that Karpis was a fag.

Jimmy knew Karpis well, and he took exception to that statement. Furious that he had given money to Thompson to get his book started and that he had written all kinds of lies in it, Jimmy flew back out to Alcatraz. This time, he waited for Whitey Thompson to come around and give his tours. There was no doubt he was going to kill him. After he couldn’t find Thompson at Alcatraz, Jimmy found out that he was living in Washington, so he traveled up there to find and kill him. Thompson was just lucky that Jimmy had to stop tracking him up there and return to business in South Boston. If it weren’t for that, Jimmy, who was a hunter, would definitely have found and killed him. As it turned out, Karpis wrote two books about his experiences in Alcatraz,
Public Enemy #1
and
On the Rock
, before he died in Spain in 1979. Thompson died on June 7, 2005. Hmm, I wonder where Jimmy was that day…

TEN

STIPPO

The story of Stippo’s Liquor Store is a classic example of how the media latches onto a false story and runs with it, never letting the true facts get in the way of a good story. This had all the elements of a terrific crime story: a hard-working, law-abiding young husband and his adoring wife, their two beautiful, innocent little daughters, a highly successful liquor store, and two ferocious mobsters who threaten the lives of this perfect family in order to seize the store. The trouble is, except for the innocent little girls, every other detail of the story is a lie and I said as much under oath. Here is the true story, the one happily ignored by the media for more than twenty years.

In the fall of 1983, Stippo, whose real name was Stephen Rakes, and his wife, Julie Miskel Rakes, were given money by his parents to buy a run-down Texaco gas station at 295 Old Colony Avenue near St. Monica’s Church. The Rakes’s plans were to turn the gas station with its two service bays into a liquor store. Shortly after that, Stippo purchased a liquor license at auction for $5,000, which he transferred to 295 Old Colony Avenue. Although he planned on opening Stippo’s Liquor Mart on Thanksgiving, it didn’t open until a week or two before Christmas.

Local liquor stores in South Boston shared an unwritten understanding that liquor would be marked up 33 percent, while wine would go up 50 percent. The prices of beer would run all the same across the board. There might be a twenty-five-cent difference here or there, but basically the prices were pretty level. However, when Stippo opened the door, he was undercutting everyone, only marking everything up 5 percent.

Shortly after he opened Stippo’s Liquor Mart, Stippo started receiving bomb and death threats. Someone was calling up the store, threatening Stippo, his wife, and his father, who was a friend of mine, saying they were going to blow the place up and kill them all. At the time, Jimmy and I had already opened our bar at F and Second streets, originally called the Old Time Tavern, which we’d renamed Court’s Inn.

Stippo’s sister Mary, who was a friend of mine and Jimmy’s, came down to the bar one Friday afternoon and asked me if Jimmy was there. When I told her he would be in shortly, she said she was supposed to meet him there. After he came in, the two of them sat down in a booth and had a conversation. Then he called me over and told Mary, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

After Mary left, Jimmy explained to me about the death threats Stippo and his family were getting. Jimmy and I both liked Mary and her father and mother, who were good people, so we left the bar and went down to the liquor mart to talk to Stippo. His father was down there but his wife, Julie, was home. Apparently, Stippo told us, she was scared about receiving the threats and didn’t want to be down there anymore. Jimmy said we’d look into it and find out who was doing it and make it stop. When we asked him if he had any idea where the threats might be coming from, he said no, but he did tell us that he had previously been partners in a liquor store at Dorchester and West Ninth with the Luongo brothers, and it might be them.

After Jimmy and I left Stippo’s store, we went to the package store owned by the Luongos and talked to two of the three brothers who were there. After a forty-five-minute conversation, we were convinced the Luongo brothers had nothing to do with the bomb threats. But they were open about the fact that they didn’t like Stippo and that there had been hard feelings when they had parted ways. They also told us Stippo had been stealing money off them and had previously tried to buy a liquor store on the same block as their store. The Luongos said that when the owner refused to sell it to him, the store had mysteriously burned down. There was no doubt that Stippo did not have a good reputation in town and that more than one piece of property he had owned went up in flames. He’d even been investigated by the arson squad, although nothing ever came of it. But still it was clear that the Luongo brothers, despite their dislike of Stippo, had not made the bomb threats.

After we left the Luongos, Jimmy and I decided to go our separate ways for supper and meet later in the evening. On his way home, Jimmy drove up to Perkins Square and went into the Bayview Liquor, a store owned by the Barrys. When I met Jimmy later, he informed me that the people there didn’t know anything about the bomb threats. During the week, the two of us went to a couple of other places, but we couldn’t make any headway. No one we talked to knew anything about the bomb or death threats.

The following Monday afternoon, Jimmy and I were driving down Andrew Square when an old friend of Jimmy’s yelled out, “Hey, Sonny,” using an old nickname Jimmy had since he’d been a kid. Jimmy pulled over and introduced me to Domi Musico, who owned a liquor store and also a bar near Andrew Square, not far from where Stippo had opened his store.

We were talking small talk for a little while when, out of the clear, Domi said, “So, do you believe that cocksucker Stippo opening up and undercutting everybody? But that’s all right. I keep calling him up and telling him I’m going to blow the place up and kill them all.”

Jimmy and I looked at each other and started laughing. We had just stumbled onto it. Then Jimmy looked at Domi and said, “Domi, you can’t do that. His father is a friend of Kevin’s.”

“I’m not going to do anything,” Domi said. “But I want that cocksucker to have some restless nights like I’ve had.”

“Don’t do anything,” Jimmy told him again.

“I won’t do anything,” Domi promised Jimmy. “I just hate him.”

Later that evening, we went back to Stippo’s and told him we had found out who was making the threats and that he didn’t have any more problems. “It’s all taken care of,” Jimmy assured him. Stippo was pleased and thanked us. And that was the end of it. Or so we thought.

The following week, after Christmas, Mary came back down to Court’s Inn and sat in a booth with Jimmy. After they’d been talking for a while, Jimmy called me over. “Stippo wants to sell the liquor mart,” he told me. “He wants to know if we’re interested. A legitimate business wouldn’t be a bad idea. What do you think?”

Mary was still there but I said, “It doesn’t hurt to listen.”

That night, Jimmy and I went down to Stippo’s. He and Jimmy started talking, but Stippo didn’t want to talk in front of his wife, who was down at the store at the time. He asked us to meet him later at his house on East Fourth Street. I knew the house well, from when I used to visit its former owner, Marty McDonough, a high school hockey referee who worked as a liquor salesman and was a real nice guy, a legitimate guy. Later that evening, when Jimmy and I went up to his house, Stippo told us he wanted to sell the business, that he needed to get out, that it was too much for him, and that he was in over his head. Basically working on a 5 percent markup, he’d only had the place three weeks, but he couldn’t keep it going any longer.

I set up another meeting with him for the next night, when I would go over the books with him. When I went to his house for the second meeting, he showed me the books. Then I met him again, this time with Kevin O’Neil, who was in the liquor business. Even though I had a bar, Kevin had been in the business much longer than I had.

On my fourth visit, Jimmy and I went to Stippo’s house and the three of us agreed on a price of $100,000 for the store, along with a note Stippo would carry for $25,000 to make it look legit. The $100,000 was cash, the $25,000 on paper. When Jimmy and I were leaving Stippo’s house that night, Jimmy said, “You know Stevie is going to want a part of this.”

“I have no problem with that,” I told him.

The night we were going to give Stippo the money, I brought $30,000 in cash to Theresa’s house, all one-hundred-dollar bills. Jimmy took the $30,000 in hundreds downstairs and came back up with $30,000 in twenties and tens, having replaced my money with his. Obviously, he wanted to keep the hundreds for himself. Then he took $70,000 from him and Stevie and put that in a brown paper bag, along with my $30,000, and we went to Stippo’s. I don’t have a clear recollection as to whether or not Stevie was with us that night. But when we got to the house, Stippo let us in and we sat down at the dining room table. Stippo’s two little girls were running around the house, and when one came over to us, Jimmy picked her up and put her on his knee, commenting on how pretty she was. As soon as the money was on the table, Jimmy told Stippo to count it.

At that point, Stippo turned around and said, “I don’t know about this. My wife doesn’t really want to sell.” He started hemming and hawing, but knowing Stippo the way I did, it seemed clear to me that he was trying to shake us down for more money. What he wanted was for us to sweeten the pot. I think he figured that since we were so interested in the store, he could get more money out of us. Here we had already agreed on a selling price and he was trying, at the last moment, to get more money out of us.

But it wasn’t happening. “We agreed on this price,” Jimmy told him. “The money is here. And you’re not getting any more out of us.” With that, I took a gun out of my belt and put it on the table. His daughter, who was sitting on Jimmy’s lap, reached over and touched the handle of the gun. Jimmy pushed the gun back over to me and told me to put it away, removing Stippo’s daughter from his knee and letting her stand up on the floor.

Stippo then called his sister-in-law, who was babysitting, and told her to take the kids into the kitchen. Once the kids were gone, we started talking, and the tone wasn’t pleasant. “Listen,” Jimmy told Stippo, “we had a deal. We agreed upon a price and now you are trying to get more money out of us. You were the one who came to us to buy the store. We didn’t come to you.”

Finally, Stippo agreed and Jimmy told him to count the money. Stippo took the $100,000 and counted ten stacks of $10,000, each one made up with two stacks of $5,000 each, one by one. We counted the money, too, and then Stippo put $25,000 off to the side and put the remaining $75,000 back in the bag.

After we shook hands, we had him give us the keys to the store right then. Knowing Stippo as well as we did, we wanted those keys that night so he couldn’t go to the store and remove some of the stock before we got there the next day. Then we made arrangements to meet him there the next morning, when he would show us how to work the alarm and open the store. He had told us there was approximately $65,000 in stock in the store and that he had paid for the walk-in chest, the electrical work, and all the construction.

The next morning, we met him there, and opened for business shortly afterward, in January 1984, changing the name to Rotary Liquors. For the next three days, Stippo came down to help out, showing me how to run the place and introducing me to the salesmen who were coming in. Then he informed me that he and his wife were taking the two kids to Disney World for two weeks.

After Stippo left, I had Kevin O’Neil come down to the store and go over the stock with me, showing me which beers and wines sold and those for which there was no big demand. While he was there, I told him that I didn’t think there was really $65,000 in stock there.

“What you have to do is get the beverage journal,” Kevin told me. “Then you need to take an inventory of everything you have in the store, match it against the prices in the book and the post off, since when you buy stuff in quantities you get discounts. Then you’ll know how much stock you have.”

After I did all that, I realized there was only $35,000 to $38,000 in stock, definitely not the $65,000 Stippo had claimed. Then the bills started coming in from the liquor distributors. It appeared that Stippo hadn’t paid any of them, so the second week I was there, I had to come up with $47,000 in cash out of my pocket to pay the bills. Not only had Stippo lied about how much stock was there, he had walked out with the first three weeks’ receipts of approximately $33,000 and never replaced the stock. Next, the salesman from Lennox Martell came in, looking for payment on the walk-in chest. Shortly after that, Murphy Electric, who did the electrical work, asked for money for their work, followed by Brian Burke, who did the construction, was also looking for his money. I soon realized that Stippo hadn’t paid for much of anything except the $5,000 license for the store.