Arrest and Imprisonment
In December 1994, Connelly informed Bulger and Flemmi that several imprisoned Jewish-American bookmakers had agreed to testify to paying them protection money. As a result, sealed indictments had come from the Department of Justice and the FBI was due to make arrests during the Christmas season. In response, Bulger fled Boston on December 23, 1994, accompanied by his common law wife, Catherine Greig.
According to Kevin Weeks,
| “ | In 1993 and 1994, before the pinches came down, Jimmy and Stevie were traveling on the French and Italian Riviera. The two of them traveled all over Europe, sometimes separating for a while. Sometimes they took girls, sometimes just the two of them went. They would rent cars and travel all through Europe. It was more preparation than anything, getting ready for another life. They didn't ask me to go, not that I would have wanted to. Jimmy had prepared for the run for years. He'd established a whole other person, Thomas Baxter, with a complete ID and credit cards in that name. He'd even joined associations in Baxter's name, building an entire portfolio for the guy. He'd always said you had to be ready to take off on short notice. And he was. | ” |
Flemmi, however, chose to remain in Boston and was swiftly taken into custody and incarcerated at the Plymouth County House of Correction. He believed he had protection, but not immunity.
With his lawyer, Flemmi planned to prove through the testimony of his self and others, that he had indeed had protection from the FBI, such that Judge Wolf would have no choice but to throw out the entire indictment. Stephen's problem was that he couldn't really come clean. Without immunity, he couldn't admit to killings he hadn't been charged with. And by the time Stephen took the stand, in August 1998, John Martorano had already started outlining the details of almost twenty murders he'd committed. Many of his murders had been done at the direction of Bulger and Stephen, who had paid him more than $1 million during his years as a wanted fugitive between 1978 and 1995. To many questions about the murders Flemmi was involved in, he pled the Fifth Amendment.
In 1999 Mary Flemmi died, and two of Stephen's illegitimate sons, born by Marion Hussey, decided to case the Winter Hill Gang's old headquarters on East Third Street. They discovered $500,000 in cash, which they spent over a period of a six-month shopping spree, as one of them later testified. The families of John McIntyre, Debra Davis, Brian Halloran, and Wimpy and Walter Bennett all filed civil suits against the U.S. Government, claiming that the FBI's protection of Bulger and Flemmi had resulted in the murders of their loved ones. In January 2003, Flemmi's brother Michael, then a retired Boston Police officer, pleaded guilty to selling a load of Stephen's stolen jewellery for $40,000.
The major witness against Flemmi was William St. Croix, formerly known as William Hussey, Stephen's illegitimate son born to his common-law wife Marion Hussey. St. Croix had turned against his father after learning that Flemmi and Bulger had strangled his half-sister, Deborah Hussey. In October 2003, Flemmi pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Boston to 10 counts of murder. He made the decision as a part of a deal to reduce the sentence for his brother, Michael Flemmi.
In November, Flemmi's friend Frank Salemme led police to the Hopkinton's Sportsmen's Club in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, where he said he and Flemmi had buried the bodies of Wimpy and Walter Bennett in 1967. After days of digging, the police abandoned the search, claiming that the topography of the area had been changed by the dumping of millions of tons of dirt from the Big Dig, the $15 billion public works project in downtown Boston.
On the same day that Kevin O'Neil and Kevin Weeks were arrested in Boston, Flemmi pleaded guilty in Tulsa, Oklahoma state court to the 1981 murder of business tycoon Roger Wheeler.
In April 2005, Flemmi was deposed in New York City by a group of lawyers representing the families of his and Bulger's victims, who are currently suing the federal government. Among other things, he testified that he and Bulger had been paying off six FBI agents in the Boston office. Those who could be reached issued denials. Flemmi also named Patrick Nee as the other gunman, along with Bulger, in the 1982 murders of informant Edward Brian Halloran and his friend Michael Donahue. Nee responded to The Boston Globe by calling Flemmi a "punk" and saying that "He should do his time like the rest of us." He was also questioned at length about the 1985 murder of his stepdaughter, Deborah Hussey, but declined to comment from the advice of his lawyer.
According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, he is not in federal custody as of 2011 and his release date is unknown.
Read more about this topic: Stephen Flemmi
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