Howie Carr (23 page)

CHAPTER 13

F
OR A
S
OUTHIE GUY
, Steven “Stippo” Rakes had a head for numbers, and he didn’t mind working. From an early age he was buying and selling real estate. For a while he owned a sub shop, after which he bought a liquor store. By 1983, Stippo had sold his interest in the package store, and had his eye on a new location, on Old Colony Avenue, at the rotary, right between the two public housing projects.

Keeping his plans for the site to himself, Stippo took a $500-a-month lease on the property with an option to buy. Next, he took his wife, Julie, to an auction at City Hall, and she won a bid for a liquor license that had once belonged to a package store on Essex Street in the city’s adult entertainment district, the Combat Zone.

The priest at the nearby church was opposed to the transfer, but Stippo knew a city councilor. The license transfer was approved by the Licensing Board on a 3–0 vote.

There were eleven liquor stores in Southie, and none of them had any parking. Just the fact that Stippo had nine parking spaces in front of his store would give him a huge advantage over his competition. Ditto, his location on the rotary, between the two housing projects. He would name it Stippo’s Rotary Discount. Soon Stippo was in for about $80,000—he installed signs, an alarm system, and new plate glass windows with steel rolltop grates, a wise precaution, considering the neighborhood. He didn’t know it at the time, but every night that summer, after he went home, Whitey and the boys had been checking out his progress.

Stippo’s Rotary Discount finally opened just before Christmas 1983. In the first four days, Stippo’s did $25,000 worth of business. Every other liquor store in Southie was down, some as much as 20 percent, during what was normally one of the busiest weeks of the year. And so the calls started—death threats. The first one came when Julie was behind the counter.

“Listen,” the caller said, “we like you. But we’re gonna blow the place up.” Click.

Julie immediately called Stippo, who was home at their second-floor apartment on East Fourth Street, baby-sitting their two daughters, two-year-old Nicole and one-year-old Meredith. She told him what had happened.

He was speechless in disbelief. “I thought this shit only happened in movies,” he said later.

It was about seven o’clock on the fifth day the store was open. Stippo was baby-sitting again, and Julie was down at the store. The doorbell rang and Stippo reflexively buzzed his visitors in. Moments later, he heard a rapping on the door. Stippo opened it and saw in the hallway his old South Boston High classmate Kevin Weeks and, beside him, a fifty-something guy, about five foot nine, in a leather three-quarters-length coat. No introductions were necessary. Whitey’s reputation preceded him. And like everyone else in Southie, Stippo knew that Weeks had become, next to Stevie, Whitey’s closest associate.

“We need to talk to you,” Weeks said, as Whitey looked on. “You got a problem.”

Realizing he had no choice in the matter, Stippo motioned them inside. He had a leg of lamb in the oven. His two baby daughters were ready for bed, running around in snug baby pajamas with padded feet. The three men sat down at the kitchen table, and Whitey began with what was becoming his traditional shakedown refrain, with bar owners, bookies, and real estate agents, among others.

“Listen,” he said, “all these other guys want us to kill you.” Stippo was stunned. He had thought he’d hit the Lottery when he opened the store. Now, he was being told it could cost him his life.

“You got a problem,” Whitey went on. “But we’re gonna do something else. We’re gonna buy the liquor store.”

“It’s not for sale,” Stippo said.

“You don’t understand,” Whitey said, pronouncing every syllable slowly, clearly. “We’ll just kill you and take it.” He stood up, and Weeks did the same. “We’ll be back later to talk to you.”

About three hours later, Stippo’s doorbell rang again. His heart pounding, Stippo buzzed them in. If he didn’t, he knew they’d get to him the next time he left the house, or worse, they’d get to his family. When he opened the door this time, he saw three of them—Whitey, Weeks, and now Stevie Flemmi. He led them into the kitchen. Weeks sat directly across from him, Whitey on his right, Stevie on his left. Stevie sat down and pulled a .38-caliber revolver out of his coat and slapped it on the table. Whitey’s hands were under the table. Every few seconds, from under the table, Stippo would hear a rapid click-click, followed by a pause. Then again. Click-click.

They went over the same ground. Whitey said they were buying. Click-click. Stippo said I’m not selling. Click-click.

At that point, one-year-old Meredith wandered into the kitchen. Stevie leaned over, picked her up, and put her on his lap. She reached over for the shiny object on the table—the revolver. Stevie smiled down at the little towhead, and then looked sadly over at Stippo.

“It’d be a sin for this child to grow up without a father.” Stevie put Meredith back on the floor, and for the second time the three gangsters filed out of the apartment. Stippo called Julie at the liquor store and told her what had happened.

“We’re going to have to do something,” she said.

“We’ll do nothing,” Stippo said. “If we do, they’ll come back and kill us. Not me, us.”

She wanted to reach out to her uncle, a Boston cop named Joe Lundbohm. Stippo couldn’t believe it. He did not trust Uncle Joe, never had.

“No,” said Julie. They could trust him. “Uncle Joe is a good man.”

The next day, Friday, they received more anonymous death threats at the store. Julie relieved Stippo around four, as always, and when he arrived home, the phone was ringing. It was Kevin Weeks, saying that they “needed” to talk to him. They arrived around 9:30, the same three, and the same scenario was played out again. The only difference was, this time Weeks was carrying a brown paper bag in his hand. As they sat around the kitchen table, Stippo heard the sound again. Click-click. Click-click.

Weeks handed the paper bag to Bulger. Then the baby Meredith came in again. Flemmi picked her up, just as he had twenty-four hours earlier.

“What beautiful blond hair,” he said, mussing her locks. “You know what would be a sin—”

“Please,” Stippo said, “just put my kid down. Please.” Flemmi stared at Stippo for a moment, then smiled, and lowered Meredith back onto the floor. Whitey pushed the bag across the table.

“Here’s for your trouble. It’s sixty-seven thousand. Now we own the liquor store.”

“Yeah,” said Stevie. “Now we own the liquor store.”

“And we’ll give you another twenty-five thousand,” Weeks said.

Stippo called Julie and told her to close the store and come home. When she arrived, Stippo grabbed the paper bag with the $67,000 in cash and met her at the curb where she rolled down the window of the car.

He passed her the bag of cash and told her to take it to her mother’s, a few blocks away. He went upstairs and called his father-in-law, a streetwise retiree from Roxbury, who immediately told him not to call the cops.

“Those guys got a line right into the cops,” his father-in-law said.

“I just don’t wanna get killed,” Stippo said. “Then don’t call the cops.”

Every morning, Stippo would get a call. Kevin Weeks would tell him to come down to the store, for one thing or another. On Saturday, they just wanted him to “hang out,” apparently to reassure any customers who might be taken aback by suddenly seeing local gangsters behind the counter.

On Sunday, with the store closed, Weeks had a different demand. This time he wanted Stippo to bring the “paperwork” down.

Stippo asked Weeks what he meant when he said “paperwork.”

“You know, the paperwork.”

“You gotta be more specific,” Stippo said. “What do you mean, the paperwork?”

“I mean the paperwork.”

Then Stippo heard a new voice in the background. It was Kevin O’Neil, the gang’s money man, who kept the books for Whitey’s semilegitimate enterprises, like Triple O’s and the appliance store on West Broadway. Now, apparently, he would also manage Stippo’s liquor store.

A few minutes later, as Stippo walked in the front door of his store, he decided it was time to get the $25,000 they still owed him. As soon as Stippo saw Weeks, he told him that he had come for his money.

Weeks pointed over across the store, where Whitey was screaming at the hulking O’Neil about something.

“You want your money?” Weeks whispered to Stippo, pointing at Whitey. “Get it from him.”

Stippo decided to forget about the $25,000.

On Monday, the scene was repeated. Whitey was loudly berating O’Neil, this time about the deed. Where was the god-damn deed?

O’Neil spotted Stippo first and told Whitey to ask him. Whitey demanded the deed to the property.

“I don’t have a deed,” Stippo said. “It’s a lease option.”

“A lease option? What the fuck is a lease option?”

They had stolen his store, but now they didn’t have a clue how to operate it. Stippo drove home, told his wife to take $10,000 from the bag at her mother’s and buy a minivan. She came home a couple of hours later with the new vehicle, and Stippo packed everyone into it and started driving. He didn’t stop, except to eat and sleep, until he reached Disney World, where he checked into the Polynesian Village, on the monorail. He had no plans to return anytime soon. But on his third day, when he returned from the Magic Kingdom, Stippo had a phone message from Kevin Weeks, asking Stippo to call him in Boston. Stippo ignored the message. The next day, Weeks called the hotel again, and missed Stippo once more. On Weeks’s third call to the Polynesian Village, Stippo finally picked up the phone and heard the voice of his old high school classmate.

“You need to come back here,” Weeks said.

“Fuck you,” Stippo replied, secure enough thirteen hundred miles away from South Boston to finally express his true feelings.

“It’s an emergency,” Weeks said, ignoring Stippo’s anger. “What’s the emergency?”

“You gotta come back ’cause everyone thinks we whacked you. Please. You come back and I’ll pay your way.”

What choice did he have? Sooner or later they would have to return to South Boston. He left Julie and the kids at Disney World and caught the next plane back to Logan. They’d offered to pick him up, but he wasn’t getting into a car with any of them. The next morning, Weeks told him to appear at Dorchester Street and Broadway—the center of Southie—and just stand around.

“You called me back from Florida to hang out?” Stippo asked Weeks.

But he did as he was told and showed up at the corner. He was standing next to Weeks when suddenly he felt someone nudge him.

“Hi, Steve,” said Whitey, using his first name for the first time. “How you doin’?”

They stood there for an hour, waving at any cars that went by. If the drivers honked back in recognition, Whitey would motion them over to the side, and they’d double-park long enough for Whitey to introduce them to Steve. By the end of the hour hundreds of witnesses had seen Stippo alive, in the flesh, with his two close friends, Whitey Bulger and Kevin Weeks. The next day, it was the same thing, only they did it in the afternoon, so they could be seen by different drivers. Finally, after about an hour, Weeks pulled an envelope out of his pocket and gave it to Whitey, who then handed it to Stippo.

“Here’s the money for your airfare,” Whitey said.

Two months later, Julie told her uncle Joe what had happened. She hadn’t cleared it with Stippo. Within hours, Stippo was sitting at home, by himself, when Whitey and Weeks stopped by.

“You think you’re smart,” Whitey said. “Going to the fuckin’ cops?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Bad fuckin’ move,” Whitey said, but after a while, they decided he was telling the truth. Someone had obviously told Lundbohm what had gone down, but it wasn’t Stippo, and watching him, near tears, shaking, denying everything, Whitey decided he was no threat. And by then it would have been very difficult to eliminate Stippo, with all the rumors circulating, the most colorful of which was that they had hung him upside down off one of the railroad bridges and threatened to drop him into the path of an Amtrak train if he didn’t sign the liquor store over to the gang.

They told Stippo to keep his mouth shut, and then they left. A couple of hours later when Julie returned, he asked her if she’d told anyone.

“Only Uncle Joe,” she said. “He’s going to help us.”

“Help us?” he said. “Help us? Bulger and Weeks were just here.” He started crying, and he couldn’t stop. A few years later, Uncle Joe was convicted in federal court of aiding two illegal gambling businesses and sentenced to six months in prison.

Whitey renamed Stippo’s the South Boston Liquor Mart. They sprayed the cinder blocks white, then painted a giant green shamrock over it. In the front window, favored politicians were allowed to place their signs. Peggy Davis Mullen, the city councilor and former Senate aide to Billy, always had one of hers prominently displayed. On warm days, Whitey and Stevie would stand outside, on the sidewalk, right at the rotary, with all the cars circling around them. They didn’t have to worry about bugs recording their conversations—there was too much noise. Their friends would honk, and they’d wave back, just like the two days with Stippo. Soon some of the bars in Southie received visits from Whitey’s crew. The owners were told in no uncertain terms that they would now have to buy their booze from the Liquor Mart. The fact that retailers were forbidden under Massachusetts state law from selling to bars didn’t seem to faze the “salesmen” in the least.

Stippo kept his mouth shut. He even refused to tell the truth about what had happened when he was twice called before grand juries. Eventually he would be convicted of perjury, and sentenced to probation. His wife, Julie, left him, and one of his brothers married one of Kevin Weeks’s sisters. It was a nightmare he just couldn’t seem to wake up from.

A few months after Whitey grabbed the liquor store, a photographer for the
Globe
was driving by one morning when he noticed a city public works truck in front of the store. The workers were installing guardrails in front of the building. By then it was common knowledge who owned the store, and so the photographer circled behind the store, got out, and quickly snapped a few shots. He was pleased with his work, but it never made the paper, despite the obvious news value—a city work crew, doing a private job for a gangster, whose brother was the most powerful politician in the state. The photographer eventually forgot about his photos until he ran into an FBI agent three years later, in 1987.