Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [98]
If Stippo had originally gone in front of the grand jury and kept his mouth shut, the most they could have given him was the duration of the grand jury, minus the time it was already sitting. Being the standup kid that everyone knew him to be, he would have gotten eighteen months, but instead he decided to cooperate with the government. As it turned out, he got probation and never went to jail. I guess the eighteen months was too much for him.
So, was it extortion or not? Because the gun was put on the table, the government said yes. But knowing Stippo the way I and everyone else did, I knew he was trying to get more money out of us, and there was no way that was going to happen. Still, in the end, the media continued to portray Stippo as the poor victim. Yet if anyone was the victim, based on the lies that were told to her, it was his wife. None of us ever held her responsible for anything. Julie filed a $28.5 million civil case against us in 2002, but it was dismissed.
In the end, Stippo did get $100,000 from us for the sale, plus $8,000 of the $25,000 note. I didn’t pay him the complete $25,000 because he had lied about what he owed. But it was his other lies that the media ran with, ignoring the fact that he did not have the best reputation in town, a fact we knew from the very beginning. They also ignored the fact that we had no intention of buying a legitimate business, that we had our bar, which was enough for us. Even the maroon Dodge Caravan that Stippo bought was part of a media lie. The press said we bought him the car to get out of town, but he bought it himself with the money he got from the sale of the property.
Both of Stippo’s sisters, Trish and Mary, gave interviews to the Boston Herald in April 2005, concurring that Stippo was in debt over his head and had come to us for help. “Stippo couldn’t even get beer for the store,” Trish told investigators and reporters from the Herald. “He owed every liquor distributor in the city.” At last one paper got something right.
One other little detail should be mentioned. After all this happened, Stippo’s younger brother Joseph married my sister Karen. He’s a great guy. So much for the family being afraid of us.
ELEVEN
THE MEDIA LIES
There were a lot of things that brought out Jimmy’s violent nature, but the one that never failed to enrage us was the name Howie Carr, a piece-of-shit reporter. I called him Howie Coward because he hid behind his computer at the Boston Herald and the microphone of his Boston radio talk show, writing and speaking words he would never dare say in person, one-on-one, to whoever he was writing or talking about. Lots of reporters and radio hosts write and speak untrue and nasty things, but Howie never has a good word to say about anybody. His radio show attracts the same crowd as Jerry Springer. As far as I am concerned, Howie Carr and his big mouth have no journalistic value. He’s just one of those loudmouths who like to dig up dirt on people and invoke controversy.
Jimmy certainly wasn’t the only one Howie attacked with his computer. In one of his hate-filled, vindictive, venomous columns for the Herald, he wrote about Vinnie Mancuso, an eighteen-year-old kid from Southie whose mother was suing the city of Boston because the cop who shot her son on May 16, 1986, was drunk when he killed Vinnie. I knew Vinnie, who was a car thief but was never violent. Joe Quinn, the cop who shot him, was referred to on the street as Cuckoo Quinn. He claimed Vinnie came at him with a knife, yet somehow Vinnie ended up with a bullet in the back of his head as he tried to run away. After that Quinn retired from the police force and eventually died. In his column, Carr called Vinnie a member of the FFA (Future Felons of America). Very funny. Making