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.