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