Read Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob Online
Authors: Kevin Weeks; Phyllis Karas
Most of that day and evening in New York, however, Jimmy was upbeat, and seemed to treat his life as if that day was just another adventure, one he’d been planning ahead for since the early 1980s. But there was also a strange feeling, something hard to explain, but just a little bit off. I understood that I was the only one he trusted completely. When I look back at everything, I think he had some insight about Stevie, that he had a feeling how Stevie was going to react to everything. And that was why he was acting so different that day.
At the end of our dinner, he seemed more aware of everything around him. His tone was a little more serious, and there wasn’t as much joking as usual. He repeated the phrase he’d used before that a rolling stone gathers no moss, which told me that he knew he was going to be on the move again. I got the feeling then that he was resigning himself to the fact that he wasn’t coming back. Up until then, I always believed he thought there was a chance he’d beat the case. However, at that point there was something different going on with him. I didn’t fully understand all the aspects of his case. It would be another six months before it all became clearer. Yet at that moment, at that restaurant in New York, I sensed that he had moved to a new place in his mind. It was over. He’d never return to South Boston.
After dinner, the two of them walked me to Penn Station. The three of us sat in chairs and talked for over an hour as I waited for my train. When they announced my train, I got up. Jimmy walked me over to the gate where the guy took my ticket and we shook hands. He said, “I’ll be in touch.” And that was that. I walked onto the train and figured he would call. But he never called again. I think about him a lot. I figure he’s out of the country now. I hope they never catch him.
For years, I had assumed that FBI agents John Connolly and his boss, John Morris, the supervisor of the Bureau’s organized crime squad in Boston, were on the take. Jimmy and Stevie were always giving them money and gifts in exchange for information about what the law was doing. Jimmy even had three nicknames for Connolly: Elvis, because of the way he combed his hair; Neighbor, since he and Jimmy had once lived in the same building at Bay Shore Drive in Quincy; and Zip, because Jimmy and Connolly shared the same zip code.
Although I had little to do with Connolly until after Jimmy was on the run, I knew a bit about him. Eleven years younger than Jimmy, he was also a son of Irish immigrants, and had grown up in the Mary Ellen McCormack Housing Project, a few doors down from the Bulger family. I’d even heard stories about how Jimmy had once bought an eight-year-old John Connolly a vanilla ice cream cone, after convincing the little boy he wasn’t a stranger, and a few months later, had broken up a fight where Connolly was being pummeled by an older kid. Connolly, however, had apparently been more impressed with Billy Bulger and later told me that it was Billy who had convinced him to continue his education at Boston College. He’d started working for the FBI in the Organized Crime Unit in New York and came to the Boston office in 1973.
From what I saw, Connolly was a likable guy, always laughing and amiable with a nice personality. He liked nice things and owned a house up at Thomas Park in Southie, where he lived in the top two floors of the house and rented out the downstairs apartment. But there were times when I’d seen Jimmy get angry when he thought Connolly was spending too much money. Like when the FBI agent bought a boat, a 40-footer or something, with a nine-and-a-half-foot beam and twin engines. Jimmy was bullshit because he felt that Connolly was being too ostentatious, that he was flashing too much cash. How could he explain it? Connolly would say that he was single and could spend the money on himself, but Jimmy didn’t buy that answer and was always telling him to tone it down.
All I knew about FBI agent John Morris was his nickname, Vino, given to him because he liked wine. The only time he got to drink expensive wine was when Jimmy and Stevie gave it to him. Jimmy told me that one night while he and Stevie were at Morris’s house in Lexington, Morris had asked them for $5,000 to help with a problem he was having with his daughter. Jimmy and Stevie took the money out of their pockets and handed it to him. Even before Jimmy told me that story, I had known Morris was on the take.
Jimmy also told me about a brainstorm Morris had in 1975. He’d planted explosives in the car of a Revere loan shark, Eddie Miani, as part of his clever plan to scare Miani and develop him into an FBI informant. The bomb wasn’t actually hooked up to go off, but it was a real one and the Revere police considered it an attempted murder case. But Morris’s plan didn’t work out and the attempt to recruit Miani was unsuccessful.
I certainly got to know Connolly a lot better than Morris, but that didn’t happen till some years passed. The first time I met him was in 1978 at the L Street Bathhouse in Southie, a building on the beach where people used to work out, with a private area for members to sunbathe and swim in the ocean. That day, I had just finished working out with Johnny Pretzie and was walking out of the building when Connolly was heading in. I’d seen Connolly around but had never spoken to him. He stopped the two of us, Pretzie introduced us, and we shook hands and said, “Hi, how are you?”
That was pretty much all that ever passed between the two of us until six years later, in 1984, when Connolly came into the liquor store, walked over to me, and asked, “What’s going on?”
I didn’t really answer him, but when Jimmy got back to the store, I said to him, “Can you imagine that cocksucker asking me what’s going on?”
Jimmy snapped back at me, “That guy is a friend of ours. Don’t ever talk about him like that. You want him to think that’s what we say about him?” I figured he was corrupt and we were paying him for information from the FBI, and Jimmy must have just wanted me to be careful not to disturb that relationship. Of course, at that time I had no idea whatsoever of the real bond between these two men.
After Connolly had retired from the FBI in 1990, Jimmy told me about a trip the two of them had taken years earlier, to Mexico, most probably to get out of town during the Blizzard of ’78. Apparently Jimmy had been driving and they had had an accident. He didn’t get hurt, but Connolly ended up with a black eye. Wonder if that might have made anyone look twice. Here was an FBI agent and Boston’s most notorious criminal vacationing together.
While Jimmy and Connolly always appeared to have an amicable relationship, Jimmy had reason to be mad enough to take care of Morris. In 1988, four
Globe
reporters, Gerry O’Neill, Dick Lehr, Christine Chin-lund, and Kevin Cullen, published a four-part series on the Bulger brothers, with one installment devoted to the “special relationship” between Whitey and the FBI. It got back to Jimmy later that during an interview with Gerry O’Neill at Venezia’s restaurant in Dorchester Bay, Morris had told the
Globe
reporter that Jimmy was an informant and said how dangerous he was, adding that Connolly and Bulger were close, perhaps too close. Morris had also described a dinner at Stevie’s mother’s house with Billy Bulger, Jimmy, Morris, and Connolly.
Although the word “informant” wasn’t used in the actual
Globe
series, it was implied by the mention of “special relationship” in the sentence: “And the Federal Bureau of Investigation has for years had a special relationship with Bulger that has divided law enforcement bitterly and poisoned relations among many investigators…” When Jimmy read the published article in the
Globe
in September 1988, he was bullshit. But no one believed the story, and we figured it was probably just another way of getting back at Billy Bulger through his brother; smearing Billy’s reputation by proximity after a recent probe of a downtown office development deal at 75 State Street. I certainly did not believe it because I knew the FBI was giving us information and telling us everything that was going on. The idea that Jimmy or Stevie would be giving them information was unthinkable. After all, we were the ones paying them.
Years later, it wasn’t hard to figure out why Morris would leak such information. He had been corrupted by Jimmy and Stevie and compromised as an FBI agent and handler. He was also so terrified of Jimmy’s violence that he feared for his own life. Afraid that he was in over his head, Morris was worried that someone in organized crime was planning to kill him. Jimmy felt that Morris had put out the information that Jimmy was an informant in the hopes that someone would now try and kill Jimmy and Morris’s problems would be over. Eventually, Morris admitted to the agency that he had leaked the information and was given a two-week suspension after the article appeared in the
Globe
.
Jimmy had always known that Morris was afraid of him. He also knew that Morris was jealous of Connolly. Years earlier, Connolly had gotten some sort of a grant to attend a special program at Harvard, and Morris had felt slighted that he had been passed over for the privilege. But Jimmy’s wrath at learning that Morris had told stories about him to the
Globe
was huge.
But it was typical of Jimmy not to act on his anger right away. Rather than show his hand to a weak weasel like Morris, he filed the information away for future use. Never forgetting that Morris was the leak, seven years later, Jimmy put it on him. In October 1995, while he was on the lam, Jimmy called from out of the state to tell me exactly what he had done. He had spent a little time calling around and had finally located Morris at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. When he first tried to call him there, an operator at Quantico told him that Morris was busy. “Tell him Mr. White called,” he told the operator, certain Morris would get the reference to “Whitey.” “Tell him I’ll call back.”
An hour later, Jimmy called back, and this time he got Morris on the phone. “You started this fucking thing,” he told him. “Use your Machiavellian mind and straighten this out. Because if I go down, I’m taking you down with me.”
It had to terrify Morris that Jimmy, on the run, had found out exactly where he was. Morris, of all people, knew what a dangerous man Jimmy was. And now he knew that Jimmy Bulger could find him no matter where he was. When I told Connolly about the conversation, he laughed and said, “He had a heart attack a couple of days ago. He died twice on the table. It must have been some phone call.” But instead of retracting the
Globe
story or dying on the table, Morris recovered enough to seek immunity from prosecution and, years later, went on to testify against John Connolly.
As for my relationship with Connolly, things changed drastically between the two of us in 1996. Two years earlier, in December 1994, Connolly had come to the liquor store to tell me that Jimmy and Stevie were about to be indicted. But once Stevie was in jail and Jimmy was gone, I saw a great deal more of Connolly. Our frequent meetings, which probably numbered more than three dozen, began in 1996 and continued until I got pinched in November 1999. The first meeting took place in Harvard Square when Stevie, who was locked up in Plymouth, gave me the number to call to reach out to Connolly. Stevie wanted me to find out what was going on with the investigation, what the state police and DEA were doing. Connolly informed me that the DEA and state police, who were working together, were not getting along with the FBI, that cooperation was at the lowest point ever. He said he’d try and find out more and would let me know. The next time I visited Stevie at Plymouth, I gave him that information.
At our next two meetings, which were at a restaurant/bar in Cambridge called Finnigan’s Wake, John and I were basically talking about witnesses and the case they had against Jimmy and Stevie. He kept telling me that the feds had a weak case, that they had nothing there, that the case was going to fall apart. We also discussed witnesses, their health and which ones had already died. When I wanted to set up a meeting or speak to Connolly, I would call his office and say it was Chico calling. If he wanted to get in touch with me, he would call a relative of mine, who would call me up and tell me that my girlfriend was looking for me. That was my relative’s way of joking with me.
After our first few meetings in Cambridge, the rest of my meetings with Connolly were held in the evenings at the Top of the Hub restaurant on the fifty-second floor of the Prudential Building, where Boston Edison had its business offices. We’d meet around five-thirty, eat, and talk. At each meeting, he continued to keep me informed about the different witnesses. Chico Krantz’s health was failing. Another bookmaker, Eddie Lewis, was also in bad health. George Kaufman had already died of natural causes. Frankie Salemme Jr. had also died. The only thing Jimmy Katz had said was that he believed the money he gave to George Kaufman was going to Whitey and Stevie, which wasn’t a really damaging statement. More and more, we continued to hear that the case was falling apart.
One fall day in 1996 while I was visiting Stevie, he wrote down a number and held it up to the window for me to write it down. “Call the number,” he told me. “Get ahold of Eric. Ask for Dick. Say you’re a friend of Paul’s.” That night, I followed his instructions and set up a meeting with Dick for the following Thursday night at the old Braintree Drive-In. That night, Dick walked out of a small blue foreign car with his rottweiler. About five-ten, in his mid-sixties, he was heavyset, with silver hair, glasses, and a pudgy round face. “Are you Dick?” I asked him.
“You must be the infamous Kevin Weeks,” he answered.
“I don’t know about that,” I said, “but I am Kevin Weeks.”
This Dick was the man Stevie had always referred to as Eric, but I had never known his real name. Stevie spoke about Eric a lot, about how he was a state police officer and was tipping him off about the joint state police, DEA, and FBI investigation. In actuality, he might have been more important to Stevie than John Connolly. Jimmy had several other sources in the FBI, but Dick was the only one connected to the state police.