Howie Carr Read Free Page B

false alarm. By January 5, almost two weeks had passed since Whitey had been warned about the indictments, and still nothing had happened. Whitey told Theresa they were going home.
    That night Stevie Flemmi pulled away from Schooner’s, his son’s new restaurant in Quincy Market, with his latest girlfriend, an attractive Asian thirty-five years his junior. Two Crown Vics cut Flemmi’s car off and blocked its escape.
    A DEA agent dragged Stevie out of the car and put a gun to his head.
    “What is this?” Stevie said in disgust. “A grandstand play?” A few minutes later, Stevie’s younger brother, Michael, a Boston cop, walked quickly into the L Street Tavern, which would soon become famous in the movie
Good Will Hunting.
Officer Flemmi saw Kevin Weeks playing cards at a table and asked him if he could have a word with him outside. Weeks threw in his hand, grabbed his coat, and walked outside with Flemmi. The cop told him about his brother’s arrest, and Weeks quickly paged Whitey. As usual, Whitey was one step ahead.
    “I just heard it on the radio,” Whitey said. “I’m turning around.”
    This time they drove back to Manhattan, where he and Theresa checked into a hotel and Whitey spent the night thinking things over. In the morning they headed west, driving aimlessly—the Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, San Francisco—two aging tourists with an old-fashioned reliance on cash, rather than credit cards. Two weeks later Theresa Stanley told Whitey she’d had enough. She wanted to go home. Or so she testified later.
    Whitey drove to Clearwater, Florida, withdrew his “Tom Baxter” documents from yet another safe-deposit box, and drove back to Selden. There “Tom Baxter” traded in his old Grand Marquis for a new one. He needed a new traveling companion too, and he had one in mind. Her name was Catherine Greig, age forty-two, and he’d had her on the string for close to twenty years. She was a twin, divorced from a Boston fire-fighter, an old-time Southie broad like Theresa who knew better than to ask questions, even about her ex-brother-in-law, whom Whitey had murdered twenty years earlier and buried on Tenean Beach in Dorchester.
    The feds knew who Catherine Greig was. They’d tapped her phone at least once. They had surveillance shots of her and Whitey, walking her two black miniature poodles, Nikki and Gigi. Whitey was always complaining about those damn dogs, even though he had taken them to obedience school in Clearwater. Kevin Weeks had made it clear to her that she could not bring them along. Not on this trip.
    But “Tom Baxter” and Theresa would spend one final night together. On their way back to Boston, they checked into a hotel in downtown Manhattan, and in the room, Whitey turned on one of his favorite shows—
America’s Most Wanted
. He watched, silently, as John Walsh introduced him as the Fugitive of the Week, and ran the blurry 1991 surveillance video of himself at the Massachusetts State Lottery Commission headquarters in Braintree.
    The pictures were almost four years old now. Whitey was wearing sunglasses and a white Red Sox cap as he claimed his “share” of a $14.3 million Mass Millions ticket that he had received under murky circumstances.
    At the time, strolling into Lottery headquarters had seemed like a lark, but now Whitey saw it for the hubris that it was. For the first time, the cops had video of him. Not that it would matter much—during the next nine years,
America’s Most Wanted
would feature Whitey twelve times, to no avail.
    The next day, Whitey and Theresa returned to Massachusetts. Just after dark, he pulled into a restaurant parking lot in Hingham.
    As Theresa got out of the car, Whitey told her he was headed for Fields Corner in Dorchester, to meet Kevin Weeks. In fact he was about to drive to Malibu Beach, where Kevin Weeks would deliver Catherine Greig to him.
    As for Theresa, she had some nice diamond jewelry she could hock, if times got tough. Or she could go