Goodfella..
own lobster boat.
His mother was, by his own account, a drug-addicted prostitute who beat him unconscious, knocked his teeth out and fed him a crack pipe when she had no food available.
“She was a deeply flawed and disturbed individual,” he says with Irish understatement.
He believes his father, by an illicit fling, was Bill Winter, whose younger brother Howie founded the Winter Hill Gang. Hicks, a granite-faced redhead who grew into 5ft 10in of hard muscle, says: “I didn’t want to be a mailman or a priest and definitely not a cop. I wanted the respect the mob got, though only later did I realise that was fear.”
Released from his last prison stint in 2020, Hicks has been working as a mob consultant to Hollywood movies and laughs that movies often get it wrong.
“You’d never have a victim dig his own grave – it would take too long, and the only place you’d bury a body is under concrete, or in the bottom of a new grave that’s about to have a stranger buried on top of it,” he says.
“Dissolving a body in a barrel of acid only leaves you with a nasty mush to dispose of. A pig farm is OK but it can take 25 pigs to consume a body overnight and you have to pull all the victim’s teeth to avoid identification.
“You really want to eliminate all trace of the victim. You can wrap a body with 12 feet of chain-link fence and a couple of padlocks and sink it in deep ocean. A friendly crematorium or industrial furnace will also do the job... or so I’m told.”
Hicks also says Hollywood gets bank robberies wrong.
“After a job you’d never speed away drawing attention to yourself; a good getaway car drives the speed limit,” he says.
“And Hollywood shoot-outs are usually fantasies, gangsters shooting people in the head.
“In reality it’s total chaos, a deafening roar of gunfire, the adrenaline’s raging, cordite’s burning your nose, bullets flying everywhere and nobody can hit anything.
“If you’re wearing a mask for a robbery it screws with your vision and when the bullets fly you hyperventilate – I found that out the hard way.”
Divorces
In addition to losing two decades behind bars, Hicks also went through two divorces and lost custody of his three daughters and son. Only his second daughter, Asia, still talks to him.
But in 2022 he wed third wife Charlene, who says: “I married the man Sean is today, not who he once was.”
He also has the love of his bulldog Loki, aged six, rescued from a dog-fighting ring, whose bites gave Hicks 17 stitches before coming to trust him. “I saw something broken in him and kind of saw myself in this dog,” he says.
Whitey Bulger was ultimately exposed as a long-time FBI informer.“I felt betrayed,” says Hicks. “I’d have killed him if I could.”
Indicted in 1996 for racketeering, Bulger went on the run, eventually captured 16 years later hiding with a girlfriend in Santa Monica, California.
In prison in 2018, aged 89, he was bludgeoned to death, his eyes gouged out and tongue cut off. “Half the inmate population wanted him dead,” says Hicks.