Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (39 page)

They listened and the only comment they made to me was, “Kevin, it is what it is.”

Several agents commented that my stories never changed. That’s because I was there to tell the truth. And the good thing about telling the truth is that your story never changes. You don’t have to remember what you said to one person or the next. It’s when you make up one lie that they can tear you apart. At that point in my life, it was either the truth or nothing.

In July 2000, I received three letters of immunity: from Suffolk County, Massachusetts; Dade County, Florida; and Tulsa, Oklahoma. I wasn’t involved in the murders in Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Dade County, Florida, but I wanted to be sure that I couldn’t be held culpable in those crimes after the fact. Once I had my immunity taken care of, I was able to work on my plea agreement, which took seven months to negotiate. They ended up adding five murders to my charges on the superseding indictment. When I was initially indicted in November 1999, my offense level came in at level 43. Your offense level goes from 0 to 43, while your criminal history level goes from 1 to 6. The more arrests and convictions you have, the higher your criminal history level. When my additional charges came in, I was enhanced one point for each murder, including Bucky Barrett, John McIntyre, Deborah Hussey, Brian Halloran, and Michael Donahue, with a total of five points, and four more points for managerial position, which brought it from 43 to level 52. But because of my plea agreement, my offense level was brought back to level 43. Still, it was overkill. Level 43 is as high as the guidelines go, even though your level can be enhanced a few more points. But any way you look at it, I was facing life imprisonment.

The agents kept on interviewing me, and in October 2000, I led them to three more bodies. I knew where one was, but as for the other two, I told them I had only a 50–50 chance of finding them. The 50–50 chance referred to the location, which was the spot Jimmy used to look at with his binoculars from his bay window. I had been around him so long that I knew him well enough to understand he was only looking at that spot for two reasons: he was either looking for a place to put somebody or he was looking at a place where somebody was already buried. As it turned out, someone was already buried there: Tommy King. Johnny Martorano had killed Tommy in Jimmy’s car in 1975, after Tommy and Jimmy had had words at Triple O’s.

“But Tommy King was buried in a marshy area,” one of the guys kept saying.

“Tommy King got killed up the street,” I told him. “And if you walk over there, you’ll see the marshy area. There’s a fifty–fifty chance he will be there.” Two weeks later they found his body.

A few weeks before they found Tommy King, they found Paulie McGonigle. That location I had no problem with, since Jimmy had told me Paulie was buried on Tenean Beach in Dorchester.

The third body was Debra Davis. They had info that she was near Tommy King’s body, so they gave me credit for discovering her body, too. But she had been buried at low tide, so they had to wait for the tide to go out before they could find her along the Neponset River, a few weeks after they found Tommy.

Even though Davis’s family and the family lawyer had been informed that I had no involvement in Debra’s death, that I had never met her, and if it wasn’t for me her remains would never have been found, the family lawyer still came after me civilly. They were trying to blame me for her murder, even though they knew I had nothing to do with it, and sued me for wrongful death. Like everything, it all comes down to money. That’s all they wanted.

As of the writing of this book, the suit has been stayed by my bankruptcy case.

The only arguments the agents and I ever had in the entire process of my cooperation concerned Stippo. Basically, there was one agent who believed Stippo and what he had to say, while the rest of the agents disagreed with him. Those agents had their doubts about Stippo all along. We went back and forth about the true facts of what happened, and everything I had told them and what his family had told them. Finally the agents said, “Kevin is admitting to murder and to extortion and to crimes far exceeding this one. Why would he be arguing about the circumstances of this one crime when he pled guilty to more severe crimes?” Subsequently, based on their investigation and what his family and others said, everything was ultimately corroborated and the situation resolved itself. Stippo had lied.

When I gave up information in 2000, the state police had suspected but didn’t know any of the specific details. They knew details based on eyewitness accounts, but they didn’t know the inside stories about the Halloran murder or the weapons arsenal. They hadn’t known of my involvement in these crimes, but still, they never reacted when I related my accounts.

This was the first time since I was a kid that I didn’t have control over my own life. I’d reached a point where my freedom was in other people’s hands—in these agents’ hands. But during all that time, I never caught them in a lie and was never lied to about anything. It was obvious they all had a hate thing for Stevie. What they detested so much were the women. Stevie had killed a lot of people, but it was the deaths of his girlfriend and his stepdaughter that made him so hated. As for me, I didn’t need anyone to hold my hand. I had gotten into this myself. From me, the investigators wanted the connection to the FBI and the state police. They wanted Jimmy and Stevie, the only ones on a large scale who I was involved with, along with Schneiderhan and Connolly, who had become a focus of the investigation before I was arrested. For these investigators, it was the first time they had someone directly involved in all these crimes and the workings of the organization provide testimony.

And I continued to give them every crime I had been involved in over the course of twenty-five years, every single one, the shootings, stabbings, extortions, murders, my involvement with drugs, with loan-sharking, with gambling, with everything. Before I had been arrested, when I was still on the street, the police had once come to me, given me my rights, and advised me I was the prime suspect in three other murders. Now people were still trying, unsuccessfully, to make a case in those three murders.

The one thing I never did during all my testimony was lie. If I had been caught in even one lie, my credibility would have been gone, my deal would have been gone, and I would have ended up with a life sentence. All I needed to do was tell them exactly what had happened. This was basically the best thing I ever did because now the investigators knew the answers to all their questions. And I knew the information they had received based on their informants. When I was being debriefed, I was given a list of 163 names who were allegedly informants or were allegedly cooperating with law enforcement, and was asked if I recognized any of those names. I did recognize some of them. I knew about the street people who were already arrested, the people who were charged in other crimes, those who had made deals to save their own asses, those who had already given me up. There are people who are on the street now who are walking around like they are standup guys, but in fact I know who they are and what they said. They can fool people around them, but they can’t fool me. I know exactly what was said and what was done and who they are.

In May 2002, I was driven to Boston from Allenwood for a few days of testimony in John Connolly’s trial for giving the tip-off of the indictments coming down that led to Jimmy fleeing. He’d been named in a five-count federal indictment a month after I was arrested, including falsifying reports about Stevie and Jimmy and funneling $7,000 in payoffs from them to John Morris. He’d been indicted just as the five-year statute of limitations on the tip-off to Jimmy in December 1994 was about to run out. I stayed in a cell at the courthouse for the three days that I was in Boston. During that time, I didn’t speak to any lawyers or investigators about the case. No one coached me or told me what to say. I had already been interviewed about Connolly over the course of time. There was no need for me to try to remember any particular details. All I had to do was tell the truth. The two days in the courtroom, there were no surprises for me. I just told them exactly what happened. Each day, I saw Connolly, and as far as I was concerned, he was looking out for himself, as was everybody else. He ended up being convicted of racketeering and sentenced to ten years and one month. Three years later, in Florida, he was indicted for first-degree murder and conspiracy for allegedly providing information that prosecutors said led to John Callahan’s death.

I was also brought back to Boston for Schneiderhan’s and Michael Flemmi’s trials; sometimes I was driven up and other times I was flown there. Schneiderhan was convicted in March 2003 of trying to warn Billy Bulger that his phone was tapped. Six months later, he was sentenced to eighteen months in federal prison for obstruction of justice. Michael Flemmi had been arrested in 2000 and charged with obstruction of justice and perjury, possession of unregistered weapons, and transfer and possession of machine guns, for helping to move the arsenal of weapons from the shed in his parents’ backyard. In September 2002, he was sentenced to ten years in prison. Finally, in October 2003, Stevie, then sixty-nine, cooperated with authorities and pled out to ten murders in exchange for a recommended sentence of life in prison to avoid the death penalty for two of the murders, one in Florida and the other in Oklahoma. If Stevie rendered substantial assistance about his own criminal activity and others in a timely fashion, his brother Michael could possibly receive a reduction in sentence.

One of Stevie’s sons, Billy Hussey, changed his name to William St. Croix. I think that was a grandparent’s name. He testified against his own uncle, Michael Flemmi and, when faced with the possibility of charges against himself, was prepared to testify against his own father. When Stevie pled out, his son did not have to testify against him.

Most of the time, however, the same people I had been with before, the prosecutors, U.S. Attorneys, agents, and members of the Department of Justice Task Force, came to Allenwood to talk to me. I continued to meet with all of them until Stevie pled out guilty to the ten murders.

During one of the flights that I took between Boston and Pennsylvania, the federal marshals brought me to the airport handcuffed and shackled. Of course, the chains limit your movements. You can’t scratch your nose or go to the men’s room alone. But when the federal marshals marched me on the plane, the flight attendant met us at the door and said, “You can’t bring him on like that.”

The federal marshals were a little upset and tried to object to removing my shackles and handcuffs, but in the end they had to do it. So they said, “Kevin, do you promise you won’t do anything?”

“Yeah,” I said, and they removed the handcuffs, waist chains, and shackles. I walked to my seat and went to sleep.

On March 22, 2004, in Boston Federal Court, U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns sentenced me. When I walked into the courtroom, I had no idea what he would give me. All I knew was that it could be anywhere from five to twenty years.

U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan wanted me to do fifteen years and considered my sentence one of the most distasteful things he had to do. But he did state that you have to deal with violent criminals to get more violent criminals. However, the agents who had been involved with me all that time, along with U.S. Attorneys Brian Kelly, who prosecuted me, and Fred Wyshak, who had worked with me, believed, based on my cooperation, that I deserved less than fifteen years. Kelly and Wyshak spoke on my behalf and kept their word to me, as did Agents Steve Johnson and Dan Doherty.

That day at least twenty agents and prosecutors from Washington and Connecticut and other states came in on my behalf. In the courtroom, they stated that my cooperation was unprecedented, unparalleled in Massachusetts history. All along they had not promised me anything, except that when it came to my sentencing, they would do their best for me. They all kept their word. John Durham from the Justice Department Strike Force, who had prosecuted the case against John Connolly and Richard Schneiderhan, along with Lenny Boyle, another prosecutor, also spoke on my behalf, stating that my cooperation was extraordinary.

There was no victim impact statement, but the lawyer for Michael Donahue’s two sons tried to bring up the civil suit. Judge Stearns said that his courtroom wasn’t the venue for that case, which would be settled in another court by another judge. He cited that I had given up three bodies with no agreement in place, with no safety net, and, charged with those crimes, I had put myself at peril and placed my faith in the justice system. He also cited that he had seen me testify, that I was very candid and truthful, and that I hadn’t hesitated to answer any question posed to me.

I was expecting the worst, but in the end, the judge gave me seventy-two months, including time served. He spoke to me then, saying, “Mr. Weeks, good luck, and I hope I’ve done the right thing.” He also said that the sentence was “one of the most difficult that I have faced as a judge.” The whole procedure took about twenty-five minutes.

I spent that night in a holding cell at the courthouse and was driven back to Allenwood the next day. Since they give you fifty-four days a year for good behavior, you usually end up doing 85 percent of your time. I ended up serving a total of sixty-three months.

At Allenwood, I had been put in a prison inside a prison, in the federal inmate witness protection program called WITSEC, a high-security unit for people who were cooperating on cases. Gerald Shur, a federal marshal and one of the original founders of the WITSEC program in 1967, was quoted as saying in front of Congress that doing one day in WITSEC was equivalent to doing three days in regular prison. That’s because a WITSEC unit was more confined and there was less to do in it. It housed approximately seventy prisoners, a lot of them involved in high-profile cases from Mafia underbosses down to gangbangers from the Crips and the Bloods.

In our unit, we had Nazi Lowriders, Dirty White Boys, Latin Kings, and traditional organized crime Irish and Italian guys. Occasionally there were fistfights, but it wasn’t like being in a regular federal prison in the sense that the chances for violent confrontation were a lot less. Things never really got out of control. Ninety-five percent of the guys who were in there had a chance to get out at some time in their lives, while the other 5 percent were doing life bids and were never getting out.