Posted on 07/02/2013 10:34:41 AM PDT by raccoonradio
Howie thread for the first half of July starting with his Tue 7/2/13 column. Remember he has trial updates etc on twitter @howiecarrshow
Carr: Whitey Bulger peddled big myth
Drug dealer tells how Whitey took over
Tuesday, July 2, 2013 By: Howie Carr
So much for keeping the drugs out of Southie.
“I gotta admit, it was ground floor,” Joseph E. Tower was explaining of his initiation into Whitey Bulger’s gang. “They didn’t know anything about that part of the business. Prices, customers, quality — but I taught ’em.
Joe Tower (of Babble) is 59 now, living in Florida, that sunny place for shady people. He makes guitars. When he began his story on the witness stand yesterday, he was in a rock band. That lasted about 30 seconds. Then he was a drug dealer — cocaine and marijuana. The marijuana lasted about as long as his rock band.
“I had a pretty extensive cocaine business, extending north, south, east, west, all directions.”
Business was good, but Tower had a problem — Tommy Nee.
“I understood he was a very bad person, a murderer, and if you crossed him you were in trouble.”
Nee was so “capable” he later handled hits for Whitey and Stevie Flemmi. One night near the Pen Tavern he made the mistake of bringing his fists to a gunfight. Stevie reports Whitey was quite pleased to hear that Nee would not be coming down for breakfast.
A meeting was arranged with Mr. Bulger. Kevin O’Neil made the introductions. “He called my house. He said wait for the car to appear.”
The prosecutor, Brian Kelly, asked Tower what he meant by “the car.”
“Blue Malibu, wire wheels, white vinyl top. It was well-known in South Boston as Mr. Bulger’s car.”
It was at this point that Kelly asked him if he recognized Mr. Bulger in the courtroom. Tower looked quizzically around the room, then suddenly pointed his finger at the geriatric gangster sitting no more than eight feet away.
“How ya doin’ Jim? Right here!”
Uh oh, Tower had just violated another of those ’80s Southie rules. He’d named the Man. But now even Whitey had to smile. Back to their first meeting:
“I explained the situation. I said I got a problem. He said you definitely have a problem.”
The deal was, Whitey made sure nobody bothered Tower, and in return he taught them the biz, you know, how to cut the bleep, because “it gains weight and weight is money.”
Later Tower and Billy Shea would meet and then Whitey would come by for “his end.” Kelly asked him what “his end” meant.
“I imagine his end of the money.”
Kelly: “You don’t imagine, it is his money.”
Tower: “Positively!”
Finally in 1983 Tower got busted. He got a “Concord five,” got out, was paid a grand a week until they were sure Billy Shea had it down. Then Tower got a call from Pat Linskey to come down to the variety store.
“He told me I was out of the business. He says, this is orders from the other guy. The other guy says it’s over.”
Tower had no illusions about going into business for himself.
“They don’t fool around. You’d get hurt.”
- See more at: column
Yes...I saw a Globe at work last night and saw a Jeff Jacoby piece saying Billy was a bit of slime, and last night on news they had those phone conversations between Billy Jr and Whitey. IIRC Howie’s resident veterinarian Dr John DeJung ran against Billy Jr and I think Lynch wound up with the seat eventually, right? (state sen.)
Can’t get to the article at the moment due to Globe paywall but it starts “PAUL CELLUCCI deserved better than to have his memorial service sullied by William Bulger.”
Carr: He quit Whitey’s gang and almost didn’t live to tell
Wednesday, July 3, 2013 By: Howie Carr
Billy Shea is the hood who got away — from prison, from the cops and, most of all, from Whitey Bulger.
Or maybe Whitey Bulger is the guy who got away from Billy Shea.
The two gangsters met yesterday for the first time in almost 30 years, the 74-year-old Shea on the witness stand just a few feet away from his old boss, to whom he often addressed his answers, starting with, “Jim ...”
Shea was a self-described paranoid ex-con when he met Bulger in 1977. Less than a decade later, he was running Whitey’s multimillion-dollar drug operation. But then Shea wanted out, and relations deteriorated to the point where he found Whitey, Stevie Flemmi and Kevin Weeks knocking on his front door at 262 E Street.
“This is the first time I’ve ever talked to Jim with someone else around, and now he’s got Stevie Fleming — that was his street name — who’s just as dangerous as Jim. I ran upstairs and got a gun.”
Whitey suggested they go for a ride.
The four mobsters arrived at some abandoned public housing project. Whitey suggested he and Shea take a walk down the stairs of a demolished building. “I’m thinking to myself, he took me down there to frighten me or whack me. So I’m watching his hands. He usually has a knife, and his hands are high, so I’m watching for Stevie’s head at the top of the steps.”
He looked again at Whitey. “That was basically the thought at the time, Jimmy. If I see Stevie, you’re going with me. He kept mentioning ‘trust.’ I pointed out to him, I’d taken a fall in ’83 and nobody’s gotten hurt. He relaxed, the tension went out of his face. He said, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’”
It was the end of a beautiful friendship that started when Shea got out of Walpole at age 38 after doing seven years for armed robbery. But Billy Shea saw the future clearly.
“I noticed there were guys now walking around with rolls of bills large enough to choke a horse. I went to Jim and told him, they don’t seem to have protection.”
Soon, Shea was cruising Southie with Fred Weichel, now doing life for murder, beside him in the front, and in the back seat, a stone killer named Tommy Nee. They’d pull up alongside a young dealer and invite him into their car.
“I was the diplomat,” he recalled. “If they wouldn’t get in, I’d explain this is daylight, and the next time we come around, it’s gonna be night. I don’t recall anyone not capitulating.”
First it was marijuana, then cocaine. Shea ran the operations for years, made millions for himself and Whitey, but finally had enough money and wanted out. Relations with Whitey went from bad to worse.
“I assured him I didn’t want a pension,” Shea recalled, but he was summoned anyway to a meeting upstairs at Triple O’s. “All these years working with him, and suddenly he’s threatening to whack me.”
Shea went home somewhere last night — the feds wouldn’t say where. Whitey went home, too — to jail.
Actually, John Forbes Kerry was for the Muslim Brotherhood before he was against the Muslim Brotherhood.
And how do we know he wasn’t on Brant Point on a cellphone yesterday, asking, “Can I get me a military coup there?”
Sure, we sent the jihad-crazed Islamists in Cairo billions of dollars and all those F-16s. It was a botched joke, OK?
But let’s be truthful. Would you truly want America’s Gigolo “reporting for duty” for anything more serious than scratching his chin at The Chanticleer Inn while puzzling over that eternal question of his pampered life: Chardonnay or Chablis?
As his predecessor once so famously said, “What difference at this point does it make?”
I mean, it’s not like Susan Rice isn’t still around to go out in front of the cameras and blame everything on a YouTube video made by a Coptic Christian.
Liveshot has a TV set, for goodness’ sake. He was amazed at the size of those crowds in Tahrir Square. It was the most people he’d seen in one place since the last time he saw the Packers play at Lambert Field.
Of course Kerry also heard the reports of the women being sexually assaulted. It sounded a lot like a traditional Kennedy family Easter weekend. But the secretary, he had other things on his mind yesterday — like supervising his chefs grilling the venison loin from that 24-point buck he bagged on the Cape.
“Lovey, pass the Grey Poupon, s’il vous plait.”
Look on the bright side — at least in the photo yesterday, he wasn’t sipping a pina colada from a penis straw with a bunch of tipsy coeds. Nobody asked him about the Pats, so he didn’t mix up Carlos Ortiz with his favorite Red Sox player, Manny Ortiz.
Liveshot never misses Independence Day on Nantucket. Not since he married the widow Heinz and moved out of that Chrysler LeBaron convertible Bob Brest comped him and into that $9.2 million mansion bought by his second wife’s first husband’s trust fund.
Yesterday, the Navy turned Old Ironsides around in the harbor like it does every Independence Day. Well, Liveshot does the same thing with the Isabel, his 76-foot, $7 million yacht. He always pilots the Isabel into Rhode Island waters, so he can claim he doesn’t have to pay the annual $70,000 excise tax from the town of Nantucket.
And where exactly would you want him to be “shuttling”? To Syria? You do know he was also for Basher al-Assad before he was against Basher al-Assad. Now we’re backing those nice “rebels” who chopped off the head of a Franciscan priest last week and posted a video on YouTube.
Oddly, no riots engulfed the Muslim world after that atrocity. No stern denunciations from the Rose Garden of that celebration of diversity.
If only they had windsurfing on the Nile. Would that it were, Lovey. Would that it were.
I don't know if liveshot.cc is still up, probably not, but the bit about the Kerry homes was reproduced in this page on snopes.com--raccoonradio live from Pittsburgh
Our least Treasured asset runs again
Sunday, July 14, 2013 By: Howie Carr
They have some mighty small shoes to fill, all these pols who want to succeed Gov. Deval Patrick.
The 2014 race officially began yesterday, as Democrats gathered in Lowell at their state issues convention — just reading those words, the eyes glaze over.
Speaking of which, state Treasurer Steve Grossman announced his candidacy, following in the footsteps of his predecessors Joe Malone, Shannon O’Brien and Tim Cahill, all of whom also ran, and were also-rans.
Sometimes the best bet is to stay where you are, but there’s no fool like an old fool, and Grossman will be 68 when the primary is held, notwithstanding his hair.
In the only poll done so far, two months ago, Public Policy Polling had ex-U.S. Sen. Scott Brown running ahead of Grossman, 46-34. Brown’s favorable-unfavorable numbers were 53-35, with only 11 percent of the sample expressing no opinion.
Grossman’s numbers were 20-14-66. In other words, two-thirds of the people didn’t know who he was. The Unclaimed Money List ain’t what it used to be.
Of course the PPP poll was flawed by the fact that they didn’t throw Attorney General Marsha Coakley in the mix. Foolishly, they apparently took Marsha at her word when she said last winter she had no interest in running for the Corner Office.
If she runs, of course, the Democratic nomination is hers. The gubernatorial field is shaping up as almost a carbon copy of the 2009-10 primary after Ted Kennedy’s death. If several men and one woman run, the woman wins. There’s even another Steve Pag-liuca rich guy — Sen. Dan Wolf, as well as two minor candidates vying for the Alan Khazei Mr. Congeniality Award.
Obviously, Marsha knows that she can beat 2010 GOP candidate for governor Charlie Baker. But I wonder if she relishes a rematch with Scott Brown, especially in an off-year, without the infusion of the million EBT-card-carrying low-information voters who put Granny Warren over the top last year.
I spent some time last weekend on the Cape with Scott Brown, and I got the feeling that he thinks he missed an opportunity when he passed up the chance to run against Son of a Milkman.
Back when Brown decided not to run in this latest special election, it seemed like the right decision. But now, not so much, not if all Ed Markey could manage was 55 percent of the vote against a weak rookie candidate. Brown didn’t say anything directly, but he gave off a slight vibe of regret, a grimace whenever anyone told him he should have been in the fight.
Brown is in an awkward spot politically — when you’re ousted from office, you’re in one-and-done territory. One more defeat and your career is over. So it’s natural to be cautious. But if you wait too long the parade passes you by.
The Democrats are cocky right now, and maybe they should be. If they can elect candidates as flawed as Granny Warren and Son of a Milkman, apparently anybody they put up can win. They have so far but ...
They say you can’t beat somebody with nobody. Whatever else he is, Scott Brown is Somebody. Is Marsha Coakley, four years later?
Carr: PC sentiment is the real injustice
‘Racist’ claim shows double standard
By: Howie Carr
Hey, all you Trayvon demonstrators, get over it. Justice has prevailed. The jury has spoken. It was a jury of George Zimmerman’s peers, not Travyon Martin’s — as the Rev. Jesse Jackson mistakenly claimed.
Do you remember when O.J. Simpson was let go after killing two people? If you questioned that verdict, or the racial makeup of the jury — you were a racist.
Now a jury lets off a “white Hispanic,” and if you’re not out on the street complaining about it — you’re a racist.
Would this have even been a national story if the perp was black and the victim was white? Of course not.
Here’s a name you’ve never heard on national TV — Joshua Heath Chellew, a 36-year-old white man from Cobb County, Ga. A few days ago he got in a beef with four youths at a gas station and, according to the Marietta Daily Journal, was “backed into a highway ... where he was knocked unconscious. They then walked away from Chellew, ‘leaving him helpless,’ and he was eventually hit by a car.”
The four youths charged are Jekari Oshay Strozier, Kemonta Bonds, Antonio Shantwan Pass and Johnathan Donald Anthony. They were reportedly members of a street gang.
Nothing to see here folks, move along.
Here’s another name you’ve never heard — Chrishaun Moten. He was a teenager from Council Bluffs, Iowa. He was in a vehicle that was hit by a truck speeding in the wrong direction and driven by a “Nashville man” named Hilberto Velasquez-Ramirez. No driver’s license, no insurance, he blew a .178 on the Breathalyzer. Oh, and they’ve put an immigration detainer on the “Nashville man.” You want local outrage? How about the “Milford man” who ran over an American motorcyclist while drunk, and now the judge is alibiing for this illegal because as a South American Indian, he allegedly lacks an “enzyme” to break down the alcohol he was drinking the day he killed a tax-paying citizen.
At least more people are defying the PC Posse and speaking up about the double standard here. Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Law professor, said Sunday that if anybody needs to be charged with civil rights violations by the Department of Justice, it’s the state prosecutors down in Sanford.
Remember when Jesse Jackson described how he feels when he hears footsteps behind him on the street, then turns around and realizes he’s been followed by a white person?
He “feels relieved.” Sometimes the truth is politically incorrect.
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