Read Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob Online
Authors: Kevin Weeks; Phyllis Karas
He is not that different in personality than when he was our little baby brother, still affable, still with a quick smile and a quip, still with an alertness and an inquisitiveness to everything around him. He has tamped down the violent side, keeping his hands in his pockets and not making fists as readily as before.
But I wouldn’t suggest that you get in his face. You can only expect him to be so nice!
For the more than twenty years that I was associated with James “Whitey” Bulger, despite the fact that we were together nearly every day for hours at a time, I was unaware that he was leading a dual existence. While I knew he was paying FBI agents for information, I had no idea that he was also an FBI informant, that he was giving the agency information it could use to take other players off the street. It shocked and infuriated me, along with everyone else in the South Boston mob, when I learned this fact in the spring of 1997, more than two years after Jimmy was already on the lam. While I’ve never had the chance to discuss the situation with Jimmy, I have my own theory about why he became an FBI informant.
Jimmy returned to the streets from his nine-year prison sentence in 1965, at age thirty-six. Nine years after that, around the time when I began to work with him, he had already made his arrangement with the FBI. His informant file was officially opened on September 30, 1975. His handler was FBI agent John Connolly, who grew up in the South Boston housing projects a few doors down from the Bulger family. Stevie Flemmi, who Jimmy had teamed up with in 1974 and had immediately become involved in serious crimes with, had been enlisted as an informant in the mid-1960s. Stevie’s FBI handler was H. Paul Rico, who had kept him out of jail for a 1968 car bombing. I have never felt that it was a coincidence that Jimmy became an informant a year after he started working with Stevie. I don’t think Jimmy had a choice. I believe he was given an ultimatum: Either you cooperate or you’re going down for crimes committed.
However, the fact that I didn’t know, and never even suspected, that Jimmy was an informant is yet another indication of the man’s brilliance. John Connolly might have been a good checkers player, but Jimmy was a master at chess and outplayed Connolly at every move. A master of manipulating people and turning them to his way of thinking, Jimmy turned out to be the one in control of the informant–handler relationship.
Looking back at the years I spent with Jimmy, unaware that he was an informant, I can now see that there were mysteries I did not comprehend, scenes I did not notice. But it is important to note, when reading my story, that many pieces did not fall into place for me until after I finally learned the truth about my closest associate.
KEVIN WEEKS
Boston, Massachusetts
March 2006
By South Boston standards, my childhood was surprisingly normal. I grew up in the Old Colony Housing Project, the fifth in a family of six kids, with two older brothers, two older sisters, and one younger sister. The odds were good with a family of six in Southie that one would run afoul of the law. I was that one.
Our apartment on 8 Pilsudski Way, apartment 554, was about 1,200 square feet, with four small bedrooms, a parlor, and a kitchen. My parents were in one bedroom; we three boys were in the other. My older sister Maureen had her own bedroom, and Patty and Karen shared theirs. I was born on March 21, 1956, and, at fifty, am two years older than Karen, who is the youngest of the six of us. Billy, at fifty-eight, is the oldest. All eight of us ate dinner together in the kitchen. While I never saw my mother without the crutches her arthritis made necessary, she made sure there was more than enough food for all of us to eat. Our clothes might not have been brand-new, but they looked fine. I never remember wanting for anything.
My father, John, changed tires for a living and later worked for the Boston Housing Authority. The most he ever brought home was $160 a week. He grew up in Brooklyn, joined the army as an infantryman during World War II, and was a professional boxer, a middleweight. He had been pretty good at it. A throwback, a big puncher, he was the type of guy who would take two of your punches just to land one of his. He’d also trained boxers. He was twenty-six when he married my mother, Margaret, who was from Boston. My maternal grandparents came to Boston from Ireland, while my father was Welsh and Irish.
My father had a real bad temper and was always in a bad mood. He ran our house strictly. We all went to bed early and got up early. He was very physical with all of us. He’d slap the girls, but he’d punch the boys. He was quick with his hands, but you never knew why or where they would strike. He could hit you on the head for no reason at all, saying, “That’s for nothing. Now do something.” Or he would give you a crack, saying, “That’s in case you did something and you got away with it.” Not only did he hit his kids, you never knew when you would see him in the street fighting a neighbor. With us, he was a strict disciplinarian who often went over the line in his forms of discipline. By today’s standards, he might be arrested for the way he handled his six kids. As a result of the beatings I got from him, I never touched my own sons when I became a father.
My mother had a hard life. She was in constant pain from her severe arthritis and had numerous back and knee operations. Both my parents were voracious readers, and books and school were important parts of our lives. Until grade four, I went to the Michael J. Perkins School, right in the Old Colony projects, at the top of my street. For grades five and six, I ventured a little bit farther, to the John Andrew School in Andrew Square. For the next two years I was at the Patrick F. Gavin School on Dorchester Street. All of these were public schools.
Our family was a close one, and every Sunday all six of us kids went to nine o’clock Mass at St. Augustine’s. Jack, whom we all called Johnny while we were growing up, is four years older than me. He was an altar boy. I wasn’t cut out for that. Back then, Mass was still in Latin, and that had no appeal for me. When we got home, we had to tell our father what the sermon was about and the color of the priest’s vestment. He wasn’t religious, but he made us go. My mother stayed home, and the priest used to come to the house once a week to give her communion.
But even more than books and religion, my father made sure that boxing ruled our family life. From as far back as I can remember, I boxed. Whether we wanted to or not, my brothers and I boxed. Every night we would move the furniture in the parlor and the three of us boys would box in the living room. My gloves were hand-me-downs from my brothers and were practically bigger than me. My brothers wouldn’t seriously bang on me till we were older, but Johnny and I always boxed in our bedroom, as well as in the parlor. From the time I was eight and he was twelve, right up until he left for Harvard, Johnny would be Muhammed Ali and I would be George Chuvalo. Chuvalo was the Canadian heavyweight champ who used to take a lot of punches but would never quit. That was why I liked him. And when I boxed with Johnny, I would take a lot of punches from Muhammed Ali, but like Chuvalo, I would never quit.
As a kid, when I wasn’t boxing, I was on the swim team, traveling to meets all over New England, or playing basketball or Ping-Pong. It was fun to get out of the house to travel to swim meets. In high school, I was a diver for the swim team. I enjoyed the exercise, but, like with every sport I did, I always tried to win.
Every summer, from ages seven to seventeen, I left the city and went to Boys Club camps down the Cape or all over New England. I was usually sent for two weeks, but most summers I wanted to stay for a longer period of time so I’d get some kind of a job there, teaching swimming, or working as a counselor or lifeguard, or whatever I could do to extend my time in the country. But I was also happy living in the city. Southie was a great community to grow up in. I had a nice group of friends in the Old Colony projects, and we all played street hockey, football, and baseball together. We always stuck up for one another. In the fall, we’d make huge piles of leaves and jump in them for hours at a time. In the winter, we made giant igloos out of snow and ice. Before forced busing and the integration of the housing projects, Southie was a safe, happy place to raise a family. We never locked our doors, and the most serious crime was a fistfight. Or a parking ticket, which most likely got thrown out when you went down to the courthouse. After all, they were all working people and a ticket was a day’s pay. The neighborhood police had walking beats and walked the streets and knew everyone. Families like the McCormicks, the Faiths, the Holmeses, the Naves, and the Kuzmichs all knew one another, too, and watched out for each others’ kids. It was a different world then. Everyone had two parents at home. Single parents were unheard of.
Sure, some kids had run-ins with the law, but in the end nearly all of them turned out to be legitimate people. I wouldn’t have traded my childhood in Southie for anything. I believe we got a better sense of life there than we would have received in the suburbs. We learned to appreciate the simple things in life, like a broomstick and a pimple ball, one with semiround bumps on it, for when we played what we called half-ball. There were few black kids at the Old Colony projects and maybe one at South Boston High. Growing up, I did have one black friend, Mikey Blackimore, who lived in the D Street Projects. He was a good kid, but all my other friends were white. Southie was predominantly Irish, probably 50 percent then, with 25 percent Italian, and the Polish and Lithuanians splitting the other 25 percent. There were a lot of Irish-Italian married couples. They made beautiful babies. But not too many years after I grew up there, forced housing integration changed everything, as did the demand for the waterfront, which pushed up the prices and the large influx of drugs, like OxyContin and heroin.
Growing up, I never drank or did drugs. Nor did my friends. We’d known one another all our lives and had our fights and stuff, but we’d get over them quickly, even if our parents didn’t. They wouldn’t speak to each other for months after we’d solved our problem. If one of us did something wrong, all another parent needed to say was, “I’m going to tell your mother,” and immediately we’d say, “I’m sorry.” Today that same kid would say, “Go fuck yourself, lady.” And grab her purse at the same time.
But I knew from early on that there were a lot of tough kids in Southie. And I learned that you didn’t always have to win when you fought there, but you had to stand up and be counted. You didn’t have to be the toughest, but you needed to be able to protect yourself if you were challenged. We all fought. We never thought about it. We just did it. There were lots of nice kids out on the street who were tough with their hands. There were good people who worked hard and played sports and were happy-go-lucky, but that didn’t make them any less tough to fight.
There are tunnels that lead from one area of the project to the next. My father didn’t like kids to hang out in them and make noise, so whenever he heard them in the tunnel, he’d send one of us boys down. He’d always send the one closest in age to the kids making the noise. That way if there was a fight, it would be fair.
There was never a day, however, that my father would spare the rod. One day when I was seven, I talked back to him and then raced into the bedroom. In the room, Johnny and I had bunk beds, with me sleeping on the bottom bunk and Billy on a folding cot. When I dove under the bunk bed, my father went down on his knees and stuck his arm in to grab me. I was always doing things with my tool box, which I kept under my bed. I opened it, grabbed my small claw hammer, and smashed it hard on his hands. I broke two of his fingers and split them open. My father went berserk and threw over the entire bunk bed, both mattresses and box springs and all. He was a brute, with huge shoulders and arms. He dragged me out and beat me.
Afterward, my mother came in and said, “What were you thinking?”
“I knew he was going to beat me,” I told her. “So I got him first.” I knew even then that I didn’t have to win every fight, but I had to try.
For no reason, one Saturday afternoon when I was eight, my father told me to go into my room. “You ain’t going out,” he said.
“I didn’t feel like going out,” I told him, and went into the room. I was in there playing when my sister Patty, who was two years older, walked in.
“How come you don’t want to go out?” she said.
“I’m using child psychology on him,” I told her. I’m sure it didn’t work that day, but it was worth a try.
While my brother Billy was always calm in the way he handled things, I was more like our father. When something happened to me, the first thing I thought of was punching. Like with our parakeets, Salt and Pepper. One morning when I was nine, we found Pepper lying dead on the bottom of their cage. The two birds were always fighting, so we figured that Salt had killed Pepper during the night. The next morning I came walking out of the shower, and hadn’t realized that Salt had gotten out of the cage. All I knew was that an object was coming at my head. I threw a left hook and killed Salt in midair. My mother was bull because Salt was her pet. I felt bad because we had all liked the bird, but that was just the way I reacted to things.
A few years later, when I was eleven, I was in the house playing cowboys and Indians with guns. My father was playing against us kids. Since I was still small, I could put my feet on both sides of the hallway wall and climb up to the ceiling. My father walked by and didn’t know I was there. I shot him with a toy pistol, yelling, “Bang, bang, you’re dead.”
He was using a baseball bat as a rifle, and when I jumped down, he flicked the bat at me. “Don’t ever shoot your father in the back,” he told me. When I walked into the bedroom, Johnny started yelling when he saw my face. My father’s bat had hit me above the left eye, as well as just below it. I ended up going to Boston City Hospital and getting thirty-one stitches, fourteen below the eye and seventeen above it. My sister Maureen was working as a nurse in the Emergency Room at the time. Johnny Woods, a black man who was Billy’s boxing trainer, was also at the hospital, working as a security officer. Johnny knew my father well and put me on a gurney and wheeled me right into the ER.