Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [93]
Jimmy knew Karpis well, and he took exception to that statement. Furious that he had given money to Thompson to get his book started and that he had written all kinds of lies in it, Jimmy flew back out to Alcatraz. This time, he waited for Whitey Thompson to come around and give his tours. There was no doubt he was going to kill him. After he couldn’t find Thompson at Alcatraz, Jimmy found out that he was living in Washington, so he traveled up there to find and kill him. Thompson was just lucky that Jimmy had to stop tracking him up there and return to business in South Boston. If it weren’t for that, Jimmy, who was a hunter, would definitely have found and killed him. As it turned out, Karpis wrote two books about his experiences in Alcatraz, Public Enemy #1 and On the Rock, before he died in Spain in 1979. Thompson died on June 7, 2005. Hmm, I wonder where Jimmy was that day…
TEN
STIPPO
The story of Stippo’s Liquor Store is a classic example of how the media latches onto a false story and runs with it, never letting the true facts get in the way of a good story. This had all the elements of a terrific crime story: a hard-working, law-abiding young husband and his adoring wife, their two beautiful, innocent little daughters, a highly successful liquor store, and two ferocious mobsters who threaten the lives of this perfect family in order to seize the store. The trouble is, except for the innocent little girls, every other detail of the story is a lie and I said as much under oath. Here is the true story, the one happily ignored by the media for more than twenty years.
In the fall of 1983, Stippo, whose real name was Stephen Rakes, and his wife, Julie Miskel Rakes, were given money by his parents to buy a run-down Texaco gas station at 295 Old Colony Avenue near St. Monica’s Church. The Rakes’s plans were to turn the gas station with its two service bays into a liquor store. Shortly after that, Stippo purchased a liquor license at auction for $5,000, which he transferred to 295 Old Colony Avenue. Although he planned on opening Stippo’s Liquor Mart on Thanksgiving, it didn’t open until a week or two before Christmas.
Local liquor stores in South Boston shared an unwritten understanding that liquor would be marked up 33 percent, while wine would go up 50 percent. The prices of beer would run all the same across the board. There might be a twenty-five-cent difference here or there, but basically the prices were pretty level. However, when Stippo opened the door, he was undercutting everyone, only marking everything up 5 percent.
Shortly after he opened Stippo’s Liquor Mart, Stippo started receiving bomb and death threats. Someone was calling up the store, threatening Stippo, his wife, and his father, who was a friend of mine, saying they were going to blow the place up and kill them all. At the time, Jimmy and I had already opened our bar at F and Second streets, originally called the Old Time Tavern, which we’d renamed Court’s Inn.
Stippo’s sister Mary, who was a friend of mine and Jimmy’s, came down to the bar one Friday afternoon and asked me if Jimmy was there. When I told her he would be in shortly, she said she was supposed to meet him there. After he came in, the two of them sat down in a booth and had a conversation. Then he called me over and told Mary, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”
After Mary left, Jimmy explained to me about the death threats Stippo and his family were getting. Jimmy and I both liked Mary and her father and mother, who were good people, so we left the bar and went down to the liquor mart to talk to Stippo. His father was down there but his wife, Julie,