Their tempestuous affair spanned nearly 40 years from when Hussey met the mobster as a teen mom in 1959 to the arrest in 1995 on multiple murder charges that put him behind bars for life.
So cold-blooded was Flemmi, he wouldn’t let Hussey name him as the father of their three children on their birth certificates, she said, admitting she falsified the documents by putting down her ex-husband’s name instead.
One day in 1982, Hussey said she came home from her job at a bank to find Flemmi with Deborah Hussey, her drug-addled daughter from a short-lived marriage, “slapping her around.”
“I said to him, ‘You’ve got to get her out of here.’ That’s when she said something about (giving Flemmi oral sex). She said, ‘I’ve been doing it for years.’ ”
Four years after she ordered Flemmi out of their Milton manse for carrying on with Deborah, Hussey encountered the partner of South Boston crime lord James “Whitey” Bulger at a hospital, where their son, Stephen Hussey, was in critical condition from a head-on car crash.
It was 1986, and the remains of Deborah, whose heart stopped beating just shy of her 27th birthday when Flemmi helped Bulger strangle her to death, had already been buried in a South Boston basement for a year, sans the teeth they pulled out of her head so she couldn’t be identified.
Hussey waited 15 years for her daughter to be found.
The woman who has held funerals for most of her six children returns to the witness stand today in the wrongful-death case she and the families of victims Debra Davis and Louis Litif brought against the FBI for letting Bulger and Flemmi run amok in return for their cooperation as informants.