Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (30 page)

Approximately a week later, Jimmy and I started hearing ridiculous stories about Stippo and us. According to these reports, Stippo was dead, we had threatened to kill him, we had hung him over the bridge, and we had stuck a gun in his daughter’s mouth. All kinds of lies were circulating around town. His own sister Mary came down to the store to tell us about them, but we’d already heard them. Mary got Stippo’s number in Florida and we called him from the store. When I told him about everything that was being said, he told me he’d be back in two weeks. I told him he had to come back soon and put these rumors to rest. When I let Jimmy know Stippo would be back in two weeks, he took the phone and said, “Get back now.” He also said we’d pay for his airline flight up and back.

Two days later, Stippo came back, without his family. Jimmy and I met him and the three of us stood in front of the liquor store for an hour, so people could drive by and see him. Then we drove up to Perkins Square and we stood out front there, talking with Stippo, so, again, people driving by could see him. We offered to give him the money for the flight back, but he said, “No, I’ve got it,” and wouldn’t take it. He went back to Florida and that, we thought, was the end of it.

However, when Stippo returned from Florida, the stories persisted. According to our friends, Julie’s sister was telling everyone that we had threatened her sister’s family. The story that got us the maddest was the one that we had stuck a gun in the little girl’s mouth. We would never harm a child. I had a son of my own. And Jimmy would never do anything like that. So Jimmy and I drove Stippo over to the Saltonstall building where his sister-in-law worked. He called her outside and basically told her to shut her mouth.

But things got even more stirred up when Julie went to her uncle, Joe Lundbohm, a Boston cop, and told him the same thing, the lies that we had threatened to kill Stippo. Yet the truth was that we had never approached Stippo; he had approached us. But Joe Lundbohm went to the FBI and John Connolly, who told Jimmy what Stippo was saying and that his wife had gone to her uncle because of the lies Stippo had told her. The one thing Stippo had not told his wife was that he had reached out to us. He did tell her, however, that he only got $67,000 when he really got $100,000. Jimmy and I never blamed Julie for any of this. She was only repeating the lies her husband had told her.

John Connolly told Joe Lundbohm that Julie and Stippo would have to get wired up. Stippo was afraid of being wired up, because he knew that when he started talking to us, he would have to lie to verify the story he had told his wife. Once he started a conversation with a lie, we would have been on our guard and would have known something wasn’t right. If he told us nonsense while he was wired, we would have said, “What are you talking about?” and it would have come out that he was a liar.

Even though John Connolly, acting yet again as the FBI agent that Jimmy was paying for information involving us, had told us what was going on with Lundbohm, we never acted on it. And we never killed Stippo because the whole incident finally died down. After things quieted down, Joe Lundbohm and his partner Bob Ryan used to hang around the liquor store trying to catch us doing something illegal. Even though he couldn’t do that, Lundbohm did manage to bring me up on charges involving the fight with the kids from Weymouth outside the liquor store.

Although I continued to run the liquor store and the situation did go away, Jimmy and I got a lot of unwanted and unnecessary notoriety because of all the inaccuracies in the press. The media played the story as if Stippo was the victim, and they were able to reach millions of readers and listeners a day with that lie. Basically, there was nothing we could do about that. How many people could we talk to in a day? There was no way we could defend ourselves against the press.

A short time later, Stippo opened a jewelry store with his wife and father-in-law on East Broadway which, unbeknownst to the two of them, was selling hot jewelry. Some of the thieves had already come down to me and asked me to sell the stuff, but I told them I had nowhere to sell it and didn’t buy it from them. So they had all gone to Stippo’s store.

Stippo’s father, James, continued to come to the liquor store every day to see me. There was no doubt he disliked his own son and blamed him for remortgaging and forcing them out of the house that he and his wife had lived in on Jenkins Street. Still, James told me how he and his wife had a meeting with their other kids and made them all promise never to do anything to Stippo so long as they were alive. Stippo’s own family hated him.

Both in 1991 and 1995, when the federal government was looking to indict Jimmy and me, Stippo got called in front of a federal grand jury. Both times, he actually told the truth about what had happened, saying that he was the one who wanted to sell the place to Jimmy and that he had asked Jimmy and me if we were interested in buying it. Unfortunately, Julie told the opposite story, the one he gave her about the gun and their kid, passing along the lie about how we had extorted Stippo. Again, it wasn’t her fault. That was the only story she knew. By then the two of them had gotten divorced and lost the jewelry store, and there was bitter infighting between them.

Ultimately, in May 1996, Stippo got indicted for five counts of perjury and two counts of obstruction of justice. He was telling the truth, but by then it was too late. Just before he went to trial on those charges, Stippo came down to the variety store, looking to borrow money off me. He said he needed it to pay $750,000 to his lawyer. This was an outright lie. But it didn’t matter. I gave him shit. If he’d told the truth to his wife in the first place, neither he nor I would have been in difficult positions then. I should have listened when members of his family had told me, “Kevin, be careful around him. You never know what he’s going to do.”

After Stippo was found guilty of perjury and he was awaiting sentencing, he made a deal with the government, cooperating against Whitey and me. This time, he told them the story he had told his wife, 99 percent of which was a lie. The only truth to his story was the fact that the gun was on the table when he was trying to shake us down for more money. Because I had put that gun on the table, the government charged me with racketeering, one of the twenty-nine charges leveled against me in my racketeering indictment in 1999. They said the presence of the gun showed we were extorting Stippo. In truth, however, he was extorting us, trying to get more money out of us.

If Stippo had originally gone in front of the grand jury and kept his mouth shut, the most they could have given him was the duration of the grand jury, minus the time it was already sitting. Being the standup kid that everyone knew him to be, he would have gotten eighteen months, but instead he decided to cooperate with the government. As it turned out, he got probation and never went to jail. I guess the eighteen months was too much for him.

So, was it extortion or not? Because the gun was put on the table, the government said yes. But knowing Stippo the way I and everyone else did, I knew he was trying to get more money out of us, and there was no way that was going to happen. Still, in the end, the media continued to portray Stippo as the poor victim. Yet if anyone was the victim, based on the lies that were told to her, it was his wife. None of us ever held her responsible for anything. Julie filed a $28.5 million civil case against us in 2002, but it was dismissed.

In the end, Stippo did get $100,000 from us for the sale, plus $8,000 of the $25,000 note. I didn’t pay him the complete $25,000 because he had lied about what he owed. But it was his other lies that the media ran with, ignoring the fact that he did not have the best reputation in town, a fact we knew from the very beginning. They also ignored the fact that we had no intention of buying a legitimate business, that we had our bar, which was enough for us. Even the maroon Dodge Caravan that Stippo bought was part of a media lie. The press said we bought him the car to get out of town, but he bought it himself with the money he got from the sale of the property.

Both of Stippo’s sisters, Trish and Mary, gave interviews to the
Boston Herald
in April 2005, concurring that Stippo was in debt over his head and had come to us for help. “Stippo couldn’t even get beer for the store,” Trish told investigators and reporters from the
Herald
. “He owed every liquor distributor in the city.” At last one paper got something right.

One other little detail should be mentioned. After all this happened, Stippo’s younger brother Joseph married my sister Karen. He’s a great guy. So much for the family being afraid of us.

ELEVEN

THE MEDIA LIES

There were a lot of things that brought out Jimmy’s violent nature, but the one that never failed to enrage us was the name Howie Carr, a piece-of-shit reporter. I called him Howie Coward because he hid behind his computer at the
Boston Herald
and the microphone of his Boston radio talk show, writing and speaking words he would never dare say in person, one-on-one, to whoever he was writing or talking about. Lots of reporters and radio hosts write and speak untrue and nasty things, but Howie never has a good word to say about anybody. His radio show attracts the same crowd as Jerry Springer. As far as I am concerned, Howie Carr and his big mouth have no journalistic value. He’s just one of those loudmouths who like to dig up dirt on people and invoke controversy.

Jimmy certainly wasn’t the only one Howie attacked with his computer. In one of his hate-filled, vindictive, venomous columns for the
Herald
, he wrote about Vinnie Mancuso, an eighteen-year-old kid from Southie whose mother was suing the city of Boston because the cop who shot her son on May 16, 1986, was drunk when he killed Vinnie. I knew Vinnie, who was a car thief but was never violent. Joe Quinn, the cop who shot him, was referred to on the street as Cuckoo Quinn. He claimed Vinnie came at him with a knife, yet somehow Vinnie ended up with a bullet in the back of his head as he tried to run away. After that Quinn retired from the police force and eventually died. In his column, Carr called Vinnie a member of the FFA (Future Felons of America). Very funny. Making fun of a dead kid.

It’s not right to take cheap shots at people in every column. If you have a problem with someone, say it to his face. But that’s not Howie Coward’s way. He prefers to creep behind closed doors and write stories in which people who understand what’s going on can see he is not even close to being on target. He should have been a writer for a supermarket tabloid. Like so many other reporters, Howie is big on using the little catchwords, like “alleged,” or “reputed,” or “sources say,” so he can get away with anything he wants to say.

His own personal life could be material for another hate radio talk show. Maybe they could talk about his first marriage and how it ended in divorce. My greatest revenge is knowing that this guy has to look in the mirror every morning and see he is a coward. And the rest of the day, he gets to live the life of a coward.

In the late 1980s, when Howie was working at Channel 56 in Boston, Jack Hynes, one of his coworkers at the television station, stopped by the liquor store. “Why doesn’t Howie ever come in here?” I asked Jack. “The coward drives by here three or four days a week just to get a look at us. You tell Howie that if he comes in, we got a fresh Dumpster out back waiting for him. Just like with Robin Benedict.” I was referring to a high-priced call girl who was killed by a college professor in 1984. Benedict’s body was disposed of in a Dumpster.

One afternoon, probably five years after that, Jimmy, Stevie, and I were standing outside the liquor store. Howie pulled up in a blue foreign sports car across the street from where the three of us were standing. The minute I spotted him, I walked between Jimmy and Stevie and started running across the street. As the blue car took off, a puff of black smoke rose out of the tailpipe.

The next day, sitting safely behind his keyboard at the
Herald
, Howie wrote an article about Jimmy standing outside the liquor store, referring to him as “the diminutive weightlifter.” Jimmy read the article and just laughed at the coward’s latest column. “He didn’t have the balls to get out of the car to face you,” he said. “And now he’s going to write about us.”

Over the years, Howie has made a career of writing about the Bulgers every chance he gets. Even if the article has nothing to with either Jimmy or Billy, he puts them in. Without this subject, he would have little to talk or write about. His hatred of Jimmy and Billy probably started with Billy, who never was the darling of the press. Jimmy told me that once when Billy was talking to an elderly lady, Howie tried to interrupt, asking him repeatedly, “Can I ask you a question, Mr. President?”

Billy, who knew exactly who Howie was, turned around and said, “Who are you?”

“I’m from the press,” Howie answered him.

“Well, do you vote in my district?” Billy asked him. When Howie said, “No,” Billy told him, “Well, you just wait until I’m through talking to my constituent. Then I’ll talk to you.”

Howie never waited.

Jimmy, however, did make some serious attempts to get together with Howie. One, in particular, was at Howie’s house in Acton. Jimmy and I staked out the house, driving by a few times to take pictures of it and to get the layout. The reason for our visit was simple: We were looking to kill him. We didn’t like him because he was a piece of shit who wrote nasty stories about people. The guy was an oxygen thief who didn’t deserve the right to breathe.

Jimmy’s first plan was to fill a basketball with C-4 and blow it up the second Howie came out of his house. His second plan was to wrap a detonation cord around a tree in front of his house when Howie was home. The cord, a quarter of an inch thick, would contain C-4. When it exploded, it would take down the tree, which would take down the house. But both plans had too much risk of killing Howie’s kids, so we had to pass on them.

My idea was just to shoot him. So, one day, I went down to his house at five in the morning and lay in the graveyard across the street. I was holding a high-powered rifle with a scope on it, waiting until he came out. Somewhere between seven and seven-thirty, Howie walked out of the house, holding the hand of his daughter, who was probably around seven or eight. There was no way I was going to kill him in front of his daughter or take a chance on hurting her, so I passed on it. I would have liked another chance to finish the job, but Jimmy got busy with some other stuff and told me to forget about him.