Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (38 page)

Two days later, on November 20, I was picked up in Rhode Island and driven to the wake at the O’Brien Funeral Home in South Boston. I was shackled and handcuffed as the marshals led me inside. They had already blocked off traffic so no one else could drive into the street. I was alone with the casket for about ten minutes with the marshals right beside me, along with Jackie O’Brien, the funeral home director. Then I was led back to the car and driven back to Rhode Island. Here, I was in a five-man cell with two guys from the Dominican Republic, one from Colombia, and another from Venezuela. They were all very respectful and kept asking if there was anything they could do for me.

That night, I rolled over and went to sleep, but I didn’t sleep great. The next day, I was brought to a bail hearing at the federal courthouse in Boston, where I was bound over without bail. Whenever I went into Boston for a hearing, I was awakened at 4:00
A.M
. and driven up to the courthouse, where I would sit in a holding cell until my turn before the magistrate. Then I would be driven back the same day. Back in Rhode Island, I had visits from my brothers and my wife, Pam.

A couple of weeks after I was arrested, my lawyer got me a copy of Judge Wolf’s 661-page ruling that he had released on September 15. It was a shock to see everything there, to see exactly what Jimmy and Stevie had been doing over the years. I’d seen Connolly’s reports that he had written on Jimmy and Stevie, but I hadn’t known exactly how many years those two guys had been informants, Stevie since 1965, Jimmy since 1975.

One day after a visit in Wyatt, I was walking downstairs waiting to be brought out of the visiting room when an inmate asked me, “Are you Kevin Weeks?”

“Yeah,” I told him.

He introduced himself and then I knew he was a made guy from Rhode Island. “Kid, what are you doing?” he asked me. “Are you going to take it up the ass for these guys? Remember, you can’t rat on a rat. Those guys have been giving up everyone for thirty years.”

At the time, I was still thinking things over. At forty-three, I was looking to make a plea for fifteen years. Later on, my attorney, Richie Eg-bert, came up to see me. “Hi, Richie, how you doing?” I said as we shook hands and went into the little room where lawyers can visit their clients.

Right away, he said, “Kev, I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Well, how does it look, Richie?”

“Not good,” he said. “We can beat half these charges, but every charge they find you guilty on, they’re going to give you the max. They’re so mad at the other two, at Whitey and Stevie, and with Whitey gone, they’re going to look to give you the max on whatever they can. The maximum sentence.”

“What are we talking about?” I asked him. “How many years, Richie?”

“You don’t want to know,” he said.

“Just tell me, Richie,” I said. “What are we talking about—for years?”

“You’re gone,” he said. “It’s over. If I was you, I’d do some thinking. I’m not telling you what to do, but it’s over.” Then he informed me he might have a conflict of interest with another client who was involved in the case and he wasn’t sure he could represent me.

Soon after that, I met with another attorney, Charlie Rankin. He came up to Wyatt on a Friday and we sat around for a while and talked about the case. He basically told me the same thing Richie had said. On every charge, they would give me the maximum. “For me to represent you, by Monday, you’ll have to give me one hundred and twenty thousand dollars for the bail hearing,” he told me. “Then it will be twenty thousand dollars a week for the case. And you’ll pay all expenses, for transcripts and appeals, for everything like that.”

Right then, I was thinking,
He’s talking appeals.
This guy thinks we’re going to lose. “How long will the trial last?” I asked him.

“Four to six months,” he told me.

“So you’re talking around six hundred thousand dollars,” I said. “For that, what are you guaranteeing me?”

“No guarantees,” he told me.

“What about time?” I said. “I’m going to give you six hundred thousand dollars and you can’t even tell me what to expect out of this?”

“No guarantees,” he said again.

That Monday, they brought me to Boston to the bail hearing at the federal courthouse. When I was sitting in the holding cell, I looked over and caught a glimpse of Bobby DeLuca, dressed nicely in a suit, sitting in the cell next to me. Bobby was one of the original people who got indicted in 1995, along with Jimmy and Stevie and Frank Salemme and Jimmy and Johnny Martorano. He was Stevie’s codefendant in the case. I had gotten to know him when I was visiting Stevie at Plymouth and had always found him to be a real nice and honorable person. Out of everybody who got indicted at that time, he was one of the only ones who didn’t cooperate. He went and did his time. That day, he was pleading out guilty and getting sentenced, taking a ten-year sentence on top of the five he already had.

Anyhow, while we were in adjacent cells, he called out, “How you doing?” and the two of us shook hands through the bars. We couldn’t see each other well, but we talked for a couple of hours. Right away, Bobby said, “Stevie is a selfish bastard. He don’t give a shit about anybody but himself. That day he mentioned your name in court, we all told him, ‘What the fuck are you doing mentioning Kevin’s name? He’s the only guy out there helping you. And you just put a bull’s-eye on his back.’”

As it turned out that day, my bail hearing got postponed, so nothing happened and I was brought back to Wyatt. Charlie Rankin later informed me he was going to put the bail hearing off.

I did receive some good news, however, when I learned that my case and bail hearing had been assigned to Judge Harrington. That pleased me because I knew the judge was good friends with John Connolly and that Jimmy knew him. If I had a shot with any judge, he was it. When I was in the courtroom that day, along with Kevin O’Neil, waiting for Judge Harrington to enter, Tom Duffy and Steve Johnson from the state police served me a piece of paper. I noticed that the agents all had smiles on their faces when I was given the paper. I looked at it and read that Judge Harrington had recused himself.

Back at Wyatt a few days later, I received a letter from Stevie. The last time I had seen him was during my last visit to Plymouth the end of October or beginning of November 1999. He had sent the letter to a family member of mine who had forwarded it to me. At the bottom of the handwritten note, Stevie had written, “My case is going good and good luck with yours.” In other words, “You’re on your own.” I didn’t expect anything from him, but I hadn’t expected that. He had certainly chosen his words poorly.

In the meantime, there was news about Johnny Martorano, who had been in Plymouth with Stevie and Salemme and Bobby DeLuca. As codefendants in the case, it had been advantageous to have both Johnny and Stevie in Plymouth so they could go over everything about their case, which they had been planning to fight together. But everything changed after Johnny learned what Jimmy and Stevie had been doing, which was probably a little before I heard about it on television. After that, Johnny had weighed his options. One option had been to kill Stevie right there in the cell block, which he was certainly both mad enough and capable enough to do easily. Another option was to cooperate. I bet it was a hard choice, but Johnny came to the same decision I eventually did: What am I protecting them for? These two have been giving everyone up right along. What am I going to do? Go to prison for life just to be able to say I am a standup guy? Johnny ended up cooperating, admitting he killed twenty people and implicating Jimmy and Stevie in multiple murders, in exchange for a fourteen-year sentence.

Although I’d only met Johnny Martorano a few times, I’d been brought up on the stories about him during the gang wars of the 1960s and 1970s up through the early 1980s. All I knew is that if you were going to go after Johnny Martorano, you’d better be in a tank. Now, here was this guy who was a legend in Boston, who had been involved in twenty murders with Jimmy and Stevie, and he had decided to cooperate against them.

A few years later, in June 2004, I ended up writing a letter to Judge Wolf on Johnny’s behalf before his sentencing, explaining that when a man of Johnny’s stature decided to cooperate against Jimmy and Stevie, it made my choice a lot easier. “After the life I led, trying to tell right from wrong, good guys from bad guys was very confusing. Then I realized that John Martorano seemed to know what to do. If it was right for him then it was right for me.”

But when I was still trying to decide what to do for myself, I learned that Frankie Salemme was trying to make a deal. I did a lot of thinking and talking it over with my family. I also spoke to Kevin O’Neil, who also ended up cooperating. “Listen, I’m gone,” I told Kevin. “It’s over.”

“And we don’t owe them a thing,” he said.

By late December 1999, I had decided to make a deal, to cooperate. In January 2000, I was brought up to Boston for an interview. By then the government had appointed me a new lawyer, Dennis Kelly, who was very articulate and knowledgeable. He’d been a federal prosecutor and knew his way around the federal system. We talked about some of the crimes I might or might not have been involved with and if maybe we might be able to find some bodies. At the second meeting, the agents and prosecutors said that before they made a deal with me, they wanted me, as an act of good faith, to go out and recover some of those bodies. At the time, I didn’t have any plea agreement or anything, but Dennis told me I should do it.

“If I give these people these bodies,” I told him, “they can use these bodies against me. I have nothing to sign now.”

“Kevin,” Dennis told me, “they have dealt with people before who have lied and double-crossed them. This time they want to make sure you can deliver what you are telling them before they make a deal with you.”

So on January 13, 2000, I showed them three bodies. That day, I had them bring me back to the place where, fifteen years earlier, on Halloween night, Jimmy, Stevie, and I had reburied Bucky Barrett, Johnny McIntyre, and Deborah Hussey. When we got there that cold January day, the snow-covered area was being prepared for a building, for a credit union of some sort, and all the landmarks were gone. The woods and the bushes were bulldozed down and everything was barren around where they were going to put the new building.

I laid down in the snow, just as I had done when I had been lying in the same spot with the machine gun in 1985. I figured out from the angle of the front door of Florian Hall the exact spot a few feet away where Jimmy, Stevie, and I had put the bodies. After I told the law enforcement where to dig, I was driven back to my cell in Rockingham County, New Hampshire, where I’d been transferred from Rhode Island a short time earlier.

That night, I was looking out my cell window at the TV in the common area and all of a sudden I saw my picture on the news. They showed scenes of the agents recovering the bodies. I went and sat down on my bunk and said to myself, “What the fuck have I done?”

About a half-hour later, the guards took me out of my cell to the pay phone. Tom Duffy from the state police was on the phone. “Kevin?” he said.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“You hit the ball out of the park,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We went down with the backhoe to exactly where you said the bodies would be,” he told me. “And that’s exactly where they were. Now we believe you. Now we can talk.”

The next day when the door opened and I came out of my cell, not one person said a word to me except, “Hey, how you doing?” and they had all seen it on TV. The night before I’d figured I was going to have a problem when I came out of my cell because it was all over the news that I was cooperating, but it turned out that there was no problem at all.

Over the course of time, now that my credibility had been established, agents and investigators from all over the country kept calling me in and interviewing me. I met with agents from the Joint Task Force, Violent Fugitive Task Force, DEA, state police, IRS, and Justice Department, along with investigators from Oklahoma and Dade County, Florida. Initially they didn’t want the FBI included because of corruption considerations, but when the Justice Department got involved, they brought in FBI agents, not from Boston, but from out of state. Now that they had the bodies, the agents and investigators wanted to know how they got killed and exactly what crimes I was involved in.

I was kept in Rockingham County Jail in New Hampshire from January 2000 to April 2000. In April, they moved me to Stafford, County, New Hampshire, where I stayed until September 21. On that day, I was moved to Allenwood, Pennsylvania, where I would serve the remainder of my sentence. In the beginning, I was brought to the federal courthouses in Boston and Worcester for interviews, and then returned to my cell in New Hampshire. From January 2000 until July of that year, I was taken down at least once a month to be interviewed. And when I left for Allenwood, I continued to be interviewed, sometimes being brought back to Boston, but most times I had agents coming down there to see me.

The deal I would be offered would be based on whatever information I gave. While my court-appointed lawyer, Dennis Kelly, was there for the initial meeting, he did not accompany me to my interviews. The investigators wanted to know my criminal history. Of course, I had no notes and everything I had done was in my head. The agents were always professional, writing down everything I said. People on the street might have thought I ratted about anything and everything, but the focus was on Jimmy and Stevie and their connections in law enforcement. All I talked about were the crimes I was involved in. The police asked me about a lot of other murders and I’d say they might have occurred, but I wasn’t there. I didn’t hurt anyone who was still out on the street. All I could tell the agents was what I, not anyone else, was involved in.

Dan Doherty from the DEA and Steve Johnson from the Massachusetts State Police were the agents in charge of me the whole time. Always respectful, professional, and businesslike, they never lied about the sentencing and never made any promises or anything. Although I did not know what was ultimately going to happen, we talked about crimes and things they had heard. Most often they had heard different stories, but I said, “No, this is what happened. I’m not going to lie or embellish.”