Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [95]
I set up another meeting with him for the next night, when I would go over the books with him. When I went to his house for the second meeting, he showed me the books. Then I met him again, this time with Kevin O’Neil, who was in the liquor business. Even though I had a bar, Kevin had been in the business much longer than I had.
On my fourth visit, Jimmy and I went to Stippo’s house and the three of us agreed on a price of $100,000 for the store, along with a note Stippo would carry for $25,000 to make it look legit. The $100,000 was cash, the $25,000 on paper. When Jimmy and I were leaving Stippo’s house that night, Jimmy said, “You know Stevie is going to want a part of this.”
“I have no problem with that,” I told him.
The night we were going to give Stippo the money, I brought $30,000 in cash to Theresa’s house, all one-hundred-dollar bills. Jimmy took the $30,000 in hundreds downstairs and came back up with $30,000 in twenties and tens, having replaced my money with his. Obviously, he wanted to keep the hundreds for himself. Then he took $70,000 from him and Stevie and put that in a brown paper bag, along with my $30,000, and we went to Stippo’s. I don’t have a clear recollection as to whether or not Stevie was with us that night. But when we got to the house, Stippo let us in and we sat down at the dining room table. Stippo’s two little girls were running around the house, and when one came over to us, Jimmy picked her up and put her on his knee, commenting on how pretty she was. As soon as the money was on the table, Jimmy told Stippo to count it.
At that point, Stippo turned around and said, “I don’t know about this. My wife doesn’t really want to sell.” He started hemming and hawing, but knowing Stippo the way I did, it seemed clear to me that he was trying to shake us down for more money. What he wanted was for us to sweeten the pot. I think he figured that since we were so interested in the store, he could get more money out of us. Here we had already agreed on a selling price and he was trying, at the last moment, to get more money out of us.
But it wasn’t happening. “We agreed on this price,” Jimmy told him. “The money is here. And you’re not getting any more out of us.” With that, I took a gun out of my belt and put it on the table. His daughter, who was sitting on Jimmy’s lap, reached over and touched the handle of the gun. Jimmy pushed the gun back over to me and told me to put it away, removing Stippo’s daughter from his knee and letting her stand up on the floor.
Stippo then called his sister-in-law, who was babysitting, and told her to take the kids into the kitchen. Once the kids were gone, we started talking, and the tone wasn’t pleasant. “Listen,” Jimmy told Stippo, “we had a deal. We agreed upon a price and now you are trying to get more money out of us. You were the one who came to us to buy the store. We didn’t come to you.”
Finally, Stippo agreed and Jimmy told him to count the money. Stippo took the $100,000 and counted ten stacks of $10,000, each one made up with two stacks of $5,000 each, one by one. We counted the money, too, and then Stippo put $25,000 off to the side and put the remaining $75,000 back in the bag.
After we shook hands, we had him give us the keys to the store right then. Knowing Stippo as well as we did, we wanted those keys that night so he couldn’t go to the store and remove some of the stock before we got there the next day. Then we made arrangements to meet him there the next morning, when he would show us how to work the alarm and open the store. He had told us there was approximately $65,000 in stock in the store and that he had paid for the walk-in chest, the electrical work, and all the construction.
The next morning, we met him there, and opened for business shortly afterward, in January 1984, changing the name to