Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [64]
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.
When we met, Stevie was living with Marion Hussey in Milton, near Curry College, in a house that once belonged to his parents. But he was still legally married to Jeannette, the woman he’d married in the 1950s, when he was a paratrooper. He’d had a couple of girls with Jeannette, and he and Marion had two sons together. I only met Jeannette a few times, once in the early 1980s, at Stevie’s mother’s house. Her blonde hair done up in a bun, she was around five-four, of medium build and very pleasant. Jimmy, Stevie, and I were in the house when she came in to say hi to Stevie’s mother, Mary. We chatted for a few minutes about nothing special and when the three of us left, she stayed at the house to spend some more time with her mother-in-law. I’m pretty sure that a few years later, Stevie did go to Haiti for a quick divorce, but he never married Marion.
Stevie and Jeannette were still married at the time of the wedding of their daughter Jeannette to Al Benedetti in 1983. It was an expensive wedding, done up right, with the reception at