You know this Mob thug from Springfield, Fotios “Freddy” Geas, the main suspect in the murder of Whitey Bulger?
I sent $100 to his Bureau of Prisons (BOP) canteen fund yesterday.
I don’t know, I just felt a need to… help out. You know, support prisoners’ rights and all that good ACLU stuff.
Actually, it was at the suggestion of Tommy Donahue, the son of Michael Donahue, one of Whitey’s victims back in 1982 on Northern Avenue.
It just seemed like the right thing to do yesterday.
I mean, it was Halloween, and I was thinking about Whitey’s Greatest Hits, and I do mean hits.
Halloween was the date of one of Whitey’s more macabre stunts, of which there were many. They’d been burying bodies in a house in Southie belonging to a brother of one of the gang members, and the guy, who had no idea what was going on, decided to sell the house.
This was during the 1980s, when Whitey and his partner Stevie Flemmi were sometimes making $1 million when Joe Murray would bring a boatload of marijuana into Boston Harbor. (Whitey provided his own particular brand of “protection,” which consisted of not calling the cops.)
You’d think the boys would have been willing to spring for a couple of hundred thousand dollars just to buy the little house they were using as a cemetery. But no, they had a different solution to the sale.
They would dig up the bodies, or what remained of them. And they would move them to what was then the vacant lot across Hallet Street from Florian Hall in Dorchester. It was Halloween – perfect time for dirty work, or so Whitey decreed.
Whitey had his minions Pat Nee and Kevin Weeks dig up the three bodies that were in the cellar. It was hard work, sifting through the dirt in the dark, trying to make sure they collected all the little bones.
Finally they finished. Nee was sent on his way – Whitey didn’t trust him, didn’t want him to know where the bodies were to be actually stashed. Nee could always use that against them, that was the way Whitey thought, because that’s what he would have done.
Whitey had already dug the hole on Hallet Street. The sun was already down when they arrived. They gave the dim-witted Weeks a machinegun. His nickname then was “Kevin Squeaks.” When he was arrested, and became a chirping stool pigeon within a fortnight, it became “Two Weeks,” for how long he stood up.
The two serial killers were hard at work, reinterring the bones when suddenly a car pulled up in the parking lot. The three murderers all fell to the ground. A guy tipsily got out of his car and proceeded to relieve himself. He’d obviously been at a Halloween party. He finished, zipped up, got back in his car and drove away. Whitey jumped up, ran over to Weeks and grabbed the gun.
“Why didn’t you shoot him?” he yelled at Weeks. “We had plenty of room in the hole!”
Trick or treat, everybody!
Now it’s on to Christmas, and that reminds of another old Whitey story. Speaking of murders and burying people in basements, or public land – and why did Whitey always want to drop the bodies on public, state-owned property? – the gang had a veritable murder assembly line going.
Whitey did the actual hit, and one of Stevie’s guys, Phil Costa, brought over lime to speed up the decomposition of the flesh. Weeks was the grave digger and Stevie Flemmi handled the dental extractions.
He’d learned the hard way about pulling teeth. He’d once capped a guy named Peter Poulos in the Nevada desert, and when they found the corpse, even though the coyotes and vultures had eaten most everything, the cops were still able to identify Poulos’ skeleton through his teeth.
Well, Stevie learned from his mistakes. From then on he made sure he always pulled the bum’s teeth. So one year, it was getting close to Christmas, and Stevie noticed, his trusty pliers were getting rusty. Plus, they’d gotten into killing young women, and their mouths tended to be smaller. Bottom line, Stevie needed a newer, smaller tool.
Whitey’s girlfriend, Catherine Greig, who is still in prison (and I’m not sending anything to her canteen fund), was a dental hygienist. Whitey told her to bring home the catalogue her boss used to order his equipment from.
That Christmas, Whitey gave his dear buddy Stevie a very special gift – a state-of-the-art tooth extractor.
Whitey used to say, as he stuffed envelopes full of cash for his crooked feds and local police, “Christmas is for cops and kids.”
And for Stevie the Rifleman.
Whitey is gone, so it’ll be on Santa this year to make sure the Rifleman isn’t forgotten. It’s on Santa, because I’m not sending anything to Stevie’s canteen fund either, even if I knew where he was locked up. Freddy Geas is enough responsibility for me.