Hitman (49 page)

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.