• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

John Connolly told Joe Lundbohm that Julie and Stippo would have to get wired up. Stippo was afraid of being wired up, because he knew that when he started talking to us, he would have to lie to verify the story he had told his wife. Once he started a conversation with a lie, we would have been on our guard and would have known something wasn’t right. If he told us nonsense while he was wired, we would have said, “What are you talking about?” and it would have come out that he was a liar.

Even though John Connolly, acting yet again as the FBI agent that Jimmy was paying for information involving us, had told us what was going on with Lundbohm, we never acted on it. And we never killed Stippo because the whole incident finally died down. After things quieted down, Joe Lundbohm and his partner Bob Ryan used to hang around the liquor store trying to catch us doing something illegal. Even though he couldn’t do that, Lundbohm did manage to bring me up on charges involving the fight with the kids from Weymouth outside the liquor store.

Although I continued to run the liquor store and the situation did go away, Jimmy and I got a lot of unwanted and unnecessary notoriety because of all the inaccuracies in the press. The media played the story as if Stippo was the victim, and they were able to reach millions of readers and listeners a day with that lie. Basically, there was nothing we could do about that. How many people could we talk to in a day? There was no way we could defend ourselves against the press.

A short time later, Stippo opened a jewelry store with his wife and father-in-law on East Broadway which, unbeknownst to the two of them, was selling hot jewelry. Some of the thieves had already come down to me and asked me to sell the stuff, but I told them I had nowhere to sell it and didn’t buy it from them. So they had all gone to Stippo’s store.

Stippo’s father, James, continued to come to the liquor store every day to see me. There was no doubt he disliked his own son and blamed him for remortgaging and forcing them out of the house that he and his wife had lived in on Jenkins Street. Still, James told me how he and his wife had a meeting with their other kids and made them all promise never to do anything to Stippo so long as they were alive. Stippo’s own family hated him.

Both in 1991 and 1995, when the federal government was looking to indict Jimmy and me, Stippo got called in front of a federal grand jury. Both times, he actually told the truth about what had happened, saying that he was the one who wanted to sell the place to Jimmy and that he had asked Jimmy and me if we were interested in buying it. Unfortunately, Julie told the opposite story, the one he gave her about the gun and their kid, passing along the lie about how we had extorted Stippo. Again, it wasn’t her fault. That was the only story she knew. By then the two of them had gotten divorced and lost the jewelry store, and there was bitter infighting between them.

Ultimately, in May 1996, Stippo got indicted for five counts of perjury and two counts of obstruction of justice. He was telling the truth, but by then it was too late. Just before he went to trial on those charges, Stippo came down to the variety store, looking to borrow money off me. He said he needed it to pay $750,000 to his lawyer. This was an outright lie. But it didn’t matter. I gave him shit. If he’d told the truth to his wife in the first place, neither he nor I would have been in difficult positions then. I should have listened when members of his family had told me, “Kevin, be careful around him. You never know what he’s going to do.”

After Stippo was found guilty of perjury and he was awaiting sentencing, he made a deal with the government, cooperating against Whitey and me. This time, he told them the story he had told his wife, 99 percent of which was a lie. The only truth to his story was the fact that the gun was on the table when he was trying to shake us down for more money. Because I had