Mr. Flemmi, are you ready for your close up?
You’d better be, Stevie, because there won’t be any retakes this time – this is the last waltz for you, you dirty perv, as you take the witness stand this morning in the trial of your old pal Cadillac Frank Salemme.
After your star turn this week in Courtroom 17, it’s back to wherever the Bureau of Prisons cages their prized rats (unlike other inmates, they’re not even listed on the BOP website). You won’t be going anywhere for the rest of your natural life, which given how long your parents lived, is probably at least another decade.
Do you think Stevie is feeling a pang or two of nostalgia this morning? I mean, he’s been informing on Salemme since 1965. That’s 53 years, 24 of which Flemmi has spent behind bars, compared to, by my calculations, approximately 25 for Salemme.
The moral of the story is, crime doesn’t pay, unless you’re a Clinton.
The defense’s plan, I would guess, is for Frank to hit Stevie with a wicked baleful stare as he takes the stand. My guess is Stevie won’t be fazed, not by bad vibes anyway.
This is a guy who killed two of his 26-year-old girlfriends, one of whom was his step daughter, machine-gunned a guy in a phone booth in Dorchester, murdered a guy named Punchy who only had one hand in front of dozens of witnesses at the bus terminal in West Roxbury, murdered a guy in the desert in Nevada, shot his boss in the head in a Roxbury garage, blew off a lawyer’s legs in Everett and used rusty pliers to pull out the teeth of any number of corpses murdered by his partner Whitey Bulger, because, you see, the Nevada cops had been able to ID the corpse in the desert because he screwed up and didn’t pull his teeth….
You think a serial killer like the Rifleman gets rattled by a dirty look?
Stevie’s job for the prosecution is to say that he happened to stop by Frank’s house in Sharon at just the moment when Frank Salemme Jr. was strangling one Steve DiSarro, a businessman. Stevie always had the worst luck – his whole life, whenever somebody got whacked, Flemmi just happened to be hanging around.
The fireworks will really start on cross-examination. I’m sure Salemme’s lawyer Steve Boozang has read Flemmi’s testimony in the Whitey Bulger trial of 2013. You really want to get Flemmi’s goat? Ask Stevie about how he pulled out his girlfriend Deb Davis’ teeth with his trusty pliers.
“I couldn’t go through with it. I started to and pulled a few teeth out, I tried to anyway.”
So Dr. Flemmi DDS copped to the extractions. But when Whitey’s lawyer asked him if he’d smashed her teeth and ground them up as the boys were throwing her nude body into the hole into the basement on East Third Street, Stevie went crazy.
“Show me where it says that I smashed her teeth up with a hammer! You said I smashed her teeth with a hammer! Show me where I said that!”
And Steve Boozang, be sure to ask him about the food in prison – how the federal rats enjoy five-star Michelin resort quality cuisine. Or so Whitey’s lawyer claimed. Stevie begged to disagree.
“You know something,” he said, “the hot dogs were burnt, the hamburgers were burnt.”
Someone call the ACLU. This is a violation of Stevie’s Eighth Amendment rights. This is cruel and unusual punishment.
“If I gave some of that food to my dog,” Stevie said in 2013, “he’d bite me.”
This is it, Stevie Flemmi on the stand, the last big witness in the last big Boston Mob trial. And seriously, here’s the one question I want Stevie to answer for sure.
“Mr. Flemmi, you told the DEA that you and Whitey had six FBI agents in the Boston office on your payroll. Who were those agents? What were their names?”
Mr. Flemmi, you may not be, but the rest of us are definitely ready for your last close up.
