‘Cadillac’ Frank’s snakebit son

Cadillac Frank Salemme was a big-time Boston gangster – even briefly the Godfather of the Mafia in New England.

His son Stephen, though – not so much.

On Monday night, Steve Salemme, age 61, was lugged by Boston cops as he stepped off a Green Line trolley on Commonwealth Avenue. They were looking for the Godfather’s son because of outstanding warrants from Woburn for, among other things, possession of Class B narcotics and “OUI Drugs – 5th Offense.”

According to the BPD report, the police asked Salemme for his name.

“Chris Patten,” Salemme lied. He then provided a date of birth of 6-28-65, which was also false, but which would have made him 59 years old.

“Salemme then stated he was 38 years old.”

The Boston police told him, no, he wasn’t Chris Patten and no, he wasn’t 38 years old.

“Fine,” he admitted. “My name is Stephen Salemme. I have a warrant.”

They checked his backpack and quickly discovered crystal meth, 35 Suboxone Sublingual film strips, two Gabapentin pills, a drug scale, a silver dagger, a black pocket knife and an ID card for “Victory Programs” – which its website says is for “individuals and families in crisis.”

In other words, if his father Frank Salemme was a D-list Vito Corleone, Stephen as a son was no Michael Corleone. In fact, he doesn’t even rise to the stature of a Fredo.

It’s tough being the son of a major organized crime figure. But most don’t end up nearly as far behind the eight ball as Steve Salemme seems to have landed.

He was arraigned Wednesday in Brighton District Court on the new charges from Monday night. He was held without bail and sent to the Plymouth House of Correction – specifically, the Mass. Alcohol and Substance Abuse Center (MASAC).

His next court date is Jan. 3.

Stephen Salemme has been in trouble his entire life. His rap sheet runs more than 30 pages, and the first entry, perhaps appropriately, is for minor in possession of alcoholic beverages. The date is Jan. 29, 1979.

He was 15 years old.

But Stephen Salemme’s problems probably date back much further. When his father was breaking into the rackets, his partner in Roxbury was one Stephen Flemmi.

I’m guessing Steve Salemme is named after “the Rifleman,” who ratted Frankie out over and over again for the FBI for a half-century, finally putting him away forever in 2017 on a murder rap.

But when Stephen Salemme was born in 1963, Stevie Flemmi was this close to Frank Salemme. I’m guessing Steve was named after Flemmi.

There was a lot of that going around back then – Johnny Martorano named his youngest son “James,” after another FBI canary by the name of Whitey Bulger.

In 1968, Stevie and Frankie put a bomb into a Mob lawyer’s Cadillac and blew him up. Before they could be arrested in early 1970, a corrupt G-man tipped them off, and they took it on the lam.

Steve Salemme hadn’t turned 7 when his father vanished. Frank Salemme wasn’t collared until 1972, and then he was imprisoned until 1989 – by which time Steve was 26 years old, and already had a record as long as his arm, mostly for minor stuff.

Or maybe the better way to describe the younger Salemme’s life of crime is that it’s not exactly the stuff of Mafia legend.

In addition to the five arrests for OUI-drugs, I counted four OUI-liquors, not to mention drinking in public. As well as the usual: resisting arrest, shoplifting, bad checks, attaching wrong license plates, trespassing, malicious destruction of property, threatening, leaving the scene, disorderly conduct, possession of burglarious tools, B&E in the nighttime, etc.

Also, assorted out-of-state beefs, in places like Salt Lake City and Boise Idaho.

After he was finally released from state prison in 1989 and began moving up the LCN ranks, Cadillac Frank was often accompanied by his older son, Frank Jr.,

He was always in the headlines. He’d fly out to Vegas. He was machine-gunned outside the IHOP in Saugus and had to miss the FBI-recorded Mafia initiation in Medford in 1989. He clipped a nightclub owner and had him buried in Providence.

Frankie even testified before a Congressional committee. It was clear how much he hated his old partner Stevie, after whom he had named his younger son. He mentioned how Stevie loved to turn on the tears – his “dog and pony show.”

He told the Congressmen that Stevie only cared about two things – “his money and his women, not necessarily in that order.”

But the other Stephen in the Godfather’s life, his own son, remained far in the background, at best. Frankie Jr. died early but somehow Stephen never filled the breach in his father’s life.

I’ve heard Stephen was a decent car mechanic when he wasn’t jammed up, which wasn’t often, obviously.

Cadillac Frank was convicted for the last time in 2017, for the murder of the nightclub owner, on Flemmi’s testimony one final time. He died in federal prison in 2022 at age 89.

One last thing: one of Cadillac Frank’s Greatest Hits, so to speak, came in 1965 when he and Stephen (Flemmi, not his son) whacked out a Charlestown wiseguy named Punchy McLaughlin at a bus stop in West Roxbury.

When he was fatally shot, Punchy was carrying a paper bag with a gun inside. As he bled out, he staggered back inside a bus and handed the bag with the revolver to a young female passenger.

On Monday night, 59 years later, the son of Punchy McLaughlin’s killer likewise had a bag with him at the T stop across the city on Com Ave.

“Salemme,” the cops wrote, “was in possession of a Star Market bag which contained various perishable food items. Salemme stated he did not want to take it and officers could leave it behind.

“A male who was passing by stated he would take custody of the bag if it was being left behind.”

A bag here, a bag there. History keeps repeating itself. As playwright Eugene O’Neill once said, “There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again – now.”

And now it has.