Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [96]
After Stippo left, I had Kevin O’Neil come down to the store and go over the stock with me, showing me which beers and wines sold and those for which there was no big demand. While he was there, I told him that I didn’t think there was really $65,000 in stock there.
“What you have to do is get the beverage journal,” Kevin told me. “Then you need to take an inventory of everything you have in the store, match it against the prices in the book and the post off, since when you buy stuff in quantities you get discounts. Then you’ll know how much stock you have.”
After I did all that, I realized there was only $35,000 to $38,000 in stock, definitely not the $65,000 Stippo had claimed. Then the bills started coming in from the liquor distributors. It appeared that Stippo hadn’t paid any of them, so the second week I was there, I had to come up with $47,000 in cash out of my pocket to pay the bills. Not only had Stippo lied about how much stock was there, he had walked out with the first three weeks’ receipts of approximately $33,000 and never replaced the stock. Next, the salesman from Lennox Martell came in, looking for payment on the walk-in chest. Shortly after that, Murphy Electric, who did the electrical work, asked for money for their work, followed by Brian Burke, who did the construction, was also looking for his money. I soon realized that Stippo hadn’t paid for much of anything except the $5,000 license for the store.
Approximately a week later, Jimmy and I started hearing ridiculous stories about Stippo and us. According to these reports, Stippo was dead, we had threatened to kill him, we had hung him over the bridge, and we had stuck a gun in his daughter’s mouth. All kinds of lies were circulating around town. His own sister Mary came down to the store to tell us about them, but we’d already heard them. Mary got Stippo’s number in Florida and we called him from the store. When I told him about everything that was being said, he told me he’d be back in two weeks. I told him he had to come back soon and put these rumors to rest. When I let Jimmy know Stippo would be back in two weeks, he took the phone and said, “Get back now.” He also said we’d pay for his airline flight up and back.
Two days later, Stippo came back, without his family. Jimmy and I met him and the three of us stood in front of the liquor store for an hour, so people could drive by and see him. Then we drove up to Perkins Square and we stood out front there, talking with Stippo, so, again, people driving by could see him. We offered to give him the money for the flight back, but he said, “No, I’ve got it,” and wouldn’t take it. He went back to Florida and that, we thought, was the end of it.
However, when Stippo returned from Florida, the stories persisted. According to our friends, Julie’s sister was telling everyone that we had threatened her sister’s family. The story that got us the maddest was the one that we had stuck a gun in the little girl’s mouth. We would never harm a child. I had a son of my own. And Jimmy would never do anything like that. So Jimmy and I drove Stippo over to the Saltonstall building where his sister-in-law worked. He called her outside and basically told her to shut her mouth.
But things got even more stirred up when Julie went to her uncle, Joe Lundbohm, a Boston cop, and told him the same thing, the lies that we had threatened to kill Stippo. Yet the truth was that we had never approached Stippo; he had approached us. But Joe Lundbohm went to the FBI and John Connolly, who told Jimmy what Stippo was saying and that his wife had gone to her uncle because of the lies Stippo had told her. The one thing Stippo had not told his wife was that he had reached out to us. He did tell her, however, that he only got $67,000 when he really got $100,000. Jimmy and I never blamed