1. Stephen Joseph Flemmi was born on June 9,1934 and is an American gangster and convicted murderer and was a close associate of Winter Hill Gang boss Whitey Bulger.
34 Facts About Stephen Flemmi
1. 2.
Stephen Flemmi was ultimately brought up on charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and pleaded guilty in return for a sentence of life in prison.
3.
Stephen Joseph Flemmi was the eldest of three sons born to Italian American parents Giovanni "John" Flemmi, an immigrant from Bari, Apulia, and Mary Irene Flemmi, who was born in Massachusetts to a family from Ceccano, Lazio.
4.
Stephen Flemmi was raised in the Orchard Park tenement located at 25 Ambrose Street in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.
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Stephen Flemmi's father was a bricklayer and veteran of the Royal Italian Army during World War I, and his mother was a full-time homemaker.
6.
Stephen Flemmi was first arrested at the age of 15 on a charge of "carnal abuse", and he later served time in a juvenile detention facility for assault.
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Stephen Flemmi enlisted in the Army in 1951 at the age of 17 and served two tours of duty in Korea with the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team.
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Stephen Flemmi was awarded the Silver Star and Bronze Star Medal decorations for valor and honorably discharged in 1955.
9.
Stephen Flemmi formed a partnership with his childhood friend Salemme, and the duo became enforcers, bookmakers and loan sharks for the Patriarca crime family in Boston's North End.
10.
Stephen Flemmi was recruited as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the mid-1960s, adopting the code name "Jack from South Boston".
11.
Unlike Salemme, Stephen Flemmi ultimately resisted the family's attempts to recruit him as he did not trust the Mafia and felt he had sufficient protection as an FBI informant.
12.
In September 1969, Stephen Flemmi was indicted by clandestine grand juries in two Massachusetts counties.
13.
Stephen Flemmi was charged in Suffolk County with the murder of William Bennett, and, along with Salemme, in Middlesex County with the attempted murder of Fitzgerald.
14.
Stephen Flemmi spent four-and-a-half years as a fugitive, firstly in New York City and then in Montreal, where he worked as a printer at a newspaper.
15.
The charges against Stephen Flemmi were ultimately dropped after key witnesses recanted their testimony, and Stephen Flemmi returned to Boston in May 1974.
16.
Stephen Flemmi has insisted that he did not know at the time that Bulger was an informant.
17.
Stephen Flemmi considers it too much of a coincidence that Bulger became an informant a year after becoming Flemmi's partner.
18.
Stephen Flemmi has written of his belief that Flemmi had probably helped to build a Federal case against him.
19.
In 1997, shortly after The Boston Globe disclosed that Bulger and Stephen Flemmi had been informants, former Bulger confidant Kevin Weeks met with John Connolly, who showed him a photocopy of Bulger's FBI informant file.
20.
Stephen Flemmi met Debra Davis at a jewelry store after his return to Boston in 1974, and the couple dated for more than seven years.
21.
Stephen Flemmi pulled out Davis' teeth and cut off her hands to complicate identifying the body, and she was buried at Tenean Beach on the Neponset River in North Quincy.
22.
Stephen Flemmi misled Davis' mother Olga into thinking her daughter had moved to Texas.
23.
Stephen Flemmi was all business, going about the task of cleaning up and pulling teeth.
24.
Stephen Flemmi chose to remain in Boston and was swiftly taken into custody and incarcerated at the Plymouth County House of Correction on January 5,1995.
25.
Stephen Flemmi believed that as a result, he had protection from the FBI, but not immunity.
26.
Stephen Flemmi initially planned to prove through his own testimony and that of others that he was being prosecuted for crimes that were effectively authorized by the FBI.
27.
Stephen Flemmi believed that as a result, Judge Mark L Wolf would have no choice but to throw out the entire indictment.
28.
Stephen Flemmi's problem was that, without immunity, he could not admit to killings he had not been charged with.
29.
Many of his murders had been done at the direction of Bulger and Stephen Flemmi, who had paid him more than $1 million during his years as a wanted fugitive between 1978 and 1995.
30.
Stephen Flemmi was convicted in 2002 and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
31.
Salemme and several others had joined Weeks in turning informer, and had disclosed enough information to ensure Stephen Flemmi would die in prison.
32.
Stephen Flemmi faced possible execution for murders in Florida and Oklahoma.
33.
Stephen Flemmi testified against Connolly at the latter's trial for the murder of John Callahan, the former president of World Jai Alai.
34.
Stephen Flemmi testified against Bulger in the latter's 2013 trial for murder and racketeering, at which Bulger was sentenced to life plus five years.