JakeTheSnake630 wrote: ↑Tue Jun 25, 2024 4:09 pm
Wish the globe didn't have a paywall. People in the area have been talking about this clown Hicks for months. Complete and total fraud. All he had to do was label his book a novel or say its fiction and nobody would have cared.
‘He’s lying about everything’: Author’s claim about ‘Whitey’ Bulger and Gardner heist dubbed a fantasy
‘He’s just a complete fraud,’ former Winter Hill Gang member said of Sean Scott Hicks
A new memoir by Sean Scott Hicks is being promoted by a well-known publishing house as “the incredible true story” of a South Boston native who was “running jobs for the Irish mob before his voice changed.”
Hicks describes himself as the nephew of the late Winter Hill Gang leader Howie Winter. He brags of being recruited as a teenager by notorious crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger, who would later finger him as a suspect in the world’s largest art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
Only none of that is true, according to former law enforcement officials and actual associates of Bulger and Winter.
Bulger, a longtime FBI informant who was beaten to death in a federal prison in West Virginia in 2018, never implicated Hicks or anyone else in the 1990 theft of $500 million worth of artwork, according to investigators who worked on the case. And prior to his death four years ago, Winter denied being related to Hicks.
The publication of those and other easily debunked claims has dumbfounded investigators and former gangsters from Boston’s underworld, who question how Hicks’s account was picked up by Blackstone Publishing, which describes itself as one of America’s fastest-growing and respected publishing houses, under the guise of true crime.
“Nobody in South Boston knows him. He’s lying about everything,” said Kevin Weeks, Bulger’s former top lieutenant.
“You have fantasy sports and this is like fantasy crime,” said Brian T. Kelly, a former federal prosecutor who was part of the Bulger prosecution team and spent years overseeing the investigation into the Gardner heist.
Blackstone, an Oregon-based independent publishing house that released Hicks’s autobiography, “The Devil to Pay: A Mobster’s Road to Perdition,” in March, declined to comment on allegations that it is largely fictitious.
But, Hicks, 52, who lives in Western Massachusetts, said, “I stand by my story 100 percent.”
“Whatever I said is the truth as I know it and I defend that wholeheartedly,” Hicks said recently. He claimed he has sold the movie rights to his story but declined to provide details. To date, just over 200 hardcover copies of the book have been purchased, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks sales for publishing companies.
In the same interview, Hicks admitted he was not a South Boston native and never even lived there. He said he was raised in Quincy, other South Shore towns, and several other states.
Hicks spent years in prison for dozens of offenses, including smashing a glass over his ex-wife’s head, scams, and larceny. None of the charges involved Winter, Bulger, or the Irish mob, according to court records.
When confronted with that finding, Hicks said, “I chalk that up to luck of the Irish.”
He has made other suspicious claims outside his book. In a civil suit Hicks filed a decade ago, he claimed to be a “five-star general” in the Bloods, a predominantly Black street gang.
Hicks also told two local media outlets he spent years in prison for the stabbing of former Celtics star Paul Pierce at a Boston nightclub in 2000. It’s not true. Three other men were charged with that assault.
“He’s just a complete fraud,” said James Martorano, a former member of Somerville’s Winter Hill Gang and the brother of John Martorano, a hit man-turned-government witness who killed 20 people. The gang was decimated in 1979 — when Hicks was 8 — after most of its members were indicted in a federal horse race fixing case that sent them to prison.
In March, a lawyer representing Winter’s widow, Ellen Brogna, as well as Weeks, the Martorano brothers, art thief Myles Connor, and Patrick Nee, a convicted gun-runner, sent a letter to Blackstone warning that Hicks was making “false and defamatory claims” while plugging his book on podcasts.
“It would appear that Mr. Hicks has gathered information about organized crime in Boston, which is readily available to anyone with an internet connection or a library card and has interjected himself into these stories as a sort of Walter Mitty,” attorney Thomas Fothergill wrote, referring to the fictional character who daydreams of his own triumphs. Fothergill warned that Blackstone could face civil claims if the book included false and defamatory claims against his clients.
Blackstone’s attorney, Paul Chin, wrote back that his firm conducted a thorough review of the book and concluded it didn’t defame any of Fothergill’s clients, who, with the exception of Brogna, were well-known criminals.
“We take these claims seriously and made sure there were not any defamatory remarks in the book,” Chin said in an interview. He referred questions about the accuracy of Hicks’s book to the publishing company officials, who declined to comment.
The book has been derided by “Beanshooter” podcaster Mike Lee, of Lowell, who first reported that Hicks fabricated his criminal history.
“I just couldn’t believe nobody vetted him,” said Lee, an ex-convict who now runs sober houses. “He’s not who he says he is.”
Lee said he was hesitant to draw attention to Hicks’s book but decided it was important to expose him.
Hicks claims an unidentified state Department of Correction employee gave him a copy of an internal document that said Bulger told the FBI that Hicks was involved in the Gardner heist during an interview after Bulger’s 2011 arrest. However, Hicks said, he and his lawyer later burned it because they didn’t want the employee to get in trouble.
Not true, said those familiar with Bulger’s interactions with the FBI.
“It’s delusional,” said Michael Kradolfer, a retired investigator for the Department of Correction who said the internal document described by Hicks never existed.
Retired FBI agent Richard Teahan, one of the few agents who spoke with Bulger after his arrest, said he never mentioned Hicks or the Gardner heist.
In claiming to be Winter’s nephew, Hicks said that his mother had an affair with one of Winter’s brothers, who he believes was his biological father.
Anthony Amore, the Gardner museum’s security director, who has been working with the FBI for more than 18 years to try to recover the stolen artwork, said he asked Winter about Hicks, after Hicks began peddling a media project about the theft of the museum’s artwork and claimed to be Winter’s nephew.
In claiming to be Winter’s nephew, Hicks said that his mother had an affair with one of Winter’s brothers, who he believes was his biological father.
Anthony Amore, the Gardner museum’s security director, who has been working with the FBI for more than 18 years to try to recover the stolen artwork, said he asked Winter about Hicks, after Hicks began peddling a media project about the theft of the museum’s artwork and claimed to be Winter’s nephew.
Winter said “the name means nothing to me,” according to Amore.
Winter also told the Globe in 2018 that Hicks was not related to him, after Hicks made the claim to a reporter while waiting in line for a casting call for a movie being filmed in Boston.
In the book, Hicks describes being summoned by Bulger to the gangster’s liquor store in 1989 when he was about 18 and ushered into a back room, where “a large old billiard chandelier” hung over a table.
Hicks claims he was called upon by Bulger to carry out “the brutally violent jobs.”
Weeks, who ran the liquor store and was convicted of being an accessory to five murders, called Hicks’s account laughable. Even his description of the store was fabricated. “There was a beer chest. No chandelier,” he said.
During the interview, Hicks said he had difficulty remembering details of some of the events described in his book because he has “memory issues” after suffering a head injury and also had “been drinking heavily” at times.
Hicks said he never met Weeks and other members of Bulger’s crew, because he was part of a separate “Quincy crew” that secretly worked for the gangster.
“This sounds like a totally fictitious story,” said retired DEA agent Daniel Doherty, part of the team that built the case that led to Bulger’s conviction for 11 murders.
Doherty and other investigators kept Bulger under constant surveillance in the 1980s and 1990s. No separate Quincy crew existed, they said. Hicks’s name never surfaced.
