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The judge interrupted him, saying, “I know what USC stands for, son.” Then he turned to me and said, “What do you want to do, Mr. Weeks?”

“It doesn’t matter to me,” I said. “I work for myself, so I can’t get fired.” I wasn’t going to be the one to end this thing. It didn’t bother me one way or the other.

The judge looked at the kids and said, “Well, the choice is yours. What do you want to do?”

“We’ll drop the charges,” one of them said, and they all nodded in agreement.

There were numerous times, of course, when Stevie took matters into his own hands and handled the situation by himself. One afternoon Stevie was heading to the escalator at the Prudential Center when he bumped into a kid in his twenties. Stevie said, “Excuse me,” and the kid said something smart to him, concluding with “Fuck you.” With a crowd watching, Stevie then proceeded to beat the shit out of the kid. Right afterward, when Jimmy and I met Stevie, who was easily twice as old as the kid, he looked just fine. Not the least bit disheveled, he didn’t have a scratch on him. The three of us took a ride back to the Prudential, looking for the kid and his friends. Lucky for them, we didn’t find them.

A couple of other guys got off lucky, too. Especially when they got into situations they didn’t expect involving the three of us. One night in February 1984, about a year after Jimmy, Stevie, and I bought the liquor store, the three of us were in the store when two black kids pulled up in their car, walked into the store, looked around, and then walked out. Once they were outside, they got into their car, turned it around so it was facing out, and bent the license plate so no one could read it. At the time, Stevie and I were talking in the front of the store and Jimmy was upstairs in the office.

When we saw what the two kids were doing, Stevie asked me if I had a pistol. I said, “Yeah, I have a forty-five on me and a forty-four Bulldog under the counter.”

When I was giving the .44 to Stevie, Jimmy walked downstairs and said, “What’s going on?” We told him the two black kids had come in, then turned their car around and bent the plate. He nodded and walked back up to the second floor and the office.

A few minutes later, the two kids came back in and walked down the middle aisle of the store. One of them had his hands in his coat pocket and I could see the point of a pistol pushing out of his pocket. I was standing next to the counter and Stevie was by the door. Both of us had our pistols behind our backs.

When the two kids came up front, they looked at us and I pulled the hammer back on the pistol behind my back. At the same time, upstairs, Jimmy slid open the sliding glass window, which was a two-way mirror, and stuck the mini-Ruger 14, with a thirty-round clip in it, out the window. A few seconds later, he snapped the bolt and was looking down the barrel at the kids. When they turned around, they looked up at the gun pointing out the window, right at the two of them. Then they looked at me and Stevie, who was starting to laugh. Finally, they looked at each other and one of them said, “I guess we be going,” and without another word, they were out the door, in their car, and driving away.

Jimmy came down and the three of us were laughing about the whole scene. When we started talking about it, I said, “How would I have explained this since the three weapons were all registered to me? I mean, they got shot from the right with the forty-five, from the left with the forty-four, and from above with the mini Ruger.”

“You were fast,” Jimmy said. “Real fast.”

Right up until the last time I ever saw Stevie, I never knew exactly what was going on in his mind. Smart, fearless, good-natured, funny, violent, dangerous—he was all of those things. But there was a piece to the puzzle that was Stevie that I didn’t fit into the whole picture until the spring of 1997, when I learned about his real relationship with the FBI. Then he became a bit clearer. Or as clear as Stevie Flemmi could ever be to another person.

SEVEN

DRUGS

1980–1990

One afternoon in 1980,