Read Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob Online
Authors: Kevin Weeks; Phyllis Karas
At one of our meetings at the Top of the Hub, Connolly showed me a letter he had drafted on a legal pad to U.S. District Court Judge Mark Wolf. Wolf’s hearings in the racketeering case against Jimmy and Stevie were still going on, but Stevie’s lawyers were not making any headway in their attempts to set up a pretrial hearing in front of the judge. They were getting nowhere in their attempts to get the charges dropped against Jimmy and Stevie and to get their cases thrown out. In Connolly’s letter, the source—three unnamed Boston police officers—falsely accused retired Detective Sergeant Frank Dewan of fabricating evidence against Bulger and Flemmi. Dewan had been a zealot, obsessed with getting Stevie and Jimmy. Everything that happened in the town, Dewan blamed on us. And 99 percent of the time he was wrong. But if he saw someone talking to us, that guy was automatically an associate. If a cop from the neighborhood waved to us, he was corrupt. If someone got killed, we did it or we ordered it. He saw Jimmy’s handprints on everything that happened, and that just wasn’t true.
Connolly’s letter included examples of how the government had corrupted its case by planting evidence to get us. He included the story of John Morris planting a bomb under Eddie Miani’s car in 1975. John gave me the letter to read over to see if I had any ideas or anything else to put into it, and I added a few things to it. I added the story of David Lindholm, a known drug dealer we had shaken down whose nickname on the street was Little Lies because he was known not to tell the truth.
Connolly typed the phony letter on his computer on the Boston Police Department stationery that I got for him from a source I had there. The three-and-a-half-page letter succeeded in convincing Judge Wolf that the government was using illegal evidence to get us. At the time of the letter, there were only two or three days left before the judge had to make his ruling, and the letter prompted him to grant Stevie a pretrial hearing right away.
Eventually, Connolly was convicted of obstruction of justice in writing the letter to the judge, but at the time it did succeed in convincing the judge to allow the hearing. The whole scene makes me wonder how things work when the situation is reversed and law enforcement uses the media to leak stories so they can create talk on the street. That way they can gather evidence even though the initial evidence they put out is blatantly false. When the law does that type of planting, it is not considered illegal, but, rather, a tactic, a tool of the investigation. When someone like Connolly does it, it is merely illegal.
Jimmy had told me stories about FBI agents, but in all these stories, they were the ones giving us information. In one such story, FBI agent Dennis Condon had set up Edward “Punchy” McLaughlin, one of the three Charlestown McLaughlin brothers, during the Winter Hill-McLaughlin gang war. In October 1965, Condon approached McLaughlin and told him, “Tell your brother to calm down.”
McLaughlin turned around and said, “Worry about your own brother, the fucking drunk.”
A night or two later, Condon called up Stevie and told him exactly where McLaughlin got the bus every morning. The next day, Stevie showed up at that bus stop, holding a paper bag from which he pulled out a gun, walked across the street, and shot and killed him. That night, Condon called up Stevie and said, “Nice shooting.” Frank Salemme later testified that FBI agent Paul Rico, who was Condon’s partner, had also given him and Stevie information about McLaughlin’s whereabouts.
Rico helped Stevie many more times, but he had been especially helpful in 1968 when Stevie had been on the lam for the Fitzgerald car bombing, letting Stevie know when it was safe for him to return to Boston in 1974.
Years later, in the early 1990s, federal prosecutor Jeremiah O’Sullivan was leading an investigation against Jimmy and Stevie and Winter Hill. Jimmy told me how John Connolly ran into O’Sullivan one day in Post Office Square. O’Sullivan said to Connolly, “There is an investigation going on with your boys.”
John turned around and said, “They already know that.”
“How could Jimmy know that?” O’Sullivan asked. “It was funded by my office.” Obviously, O’Sullivan didn’t know about Connolly’s two-way relationship with Jimmy. But the truth was that O’Sullivan was tipping off Connolly about the investigation. During the Wolf hearings, when O’Sullivan was scheduled to testify about his role in the investigation, the federal prosecutor suffered a heart attack, which couldn’t have come at a better time for him. After the hearings were over, he made a speedy recovery.
During these hearings, Stevie testified that John Morris had given him a tape recording in the 1980s. He felt that the fact that Morris gave him this tape would help support his claim that he was working with the FBI, that, in fact, he was listening to tapes with the FBI agent. Stevie was also blaming everything on Morris, testifying that Morris gave him the tip-off about the imminent arrest, which, of course, wasn’t true. He was trying to keep Connolly’s identity in the tip-off secret when in fact Connolly was the one who told me about the coming indictments. When I was meeting Connolly at the Top of the Hub, he gave me the tape that Morris had left behind, which I then gave to Stevie’s attorney. In fact, if Stevie had just told the truth about Connolly in the first place, it would have helped his case instead of hurting it.
Of course, Stevie had expected Connolly to say something to help his case. Perhaps that was why he was trying to protect him about the tip-off. However, on April 30, 1998, during one of his two courtroom appearances during the Wolf hearings, Connolly, afraid of incriminating himself and being charged with crimes, had invoked the Fifth Amendment after every question he was asked. He refused to bolster Stevie’s contention that the FBI assured him and Jimmy that they could commit crimes short of murder, so long as they provided information on the Mafia.
Lehr and O’Neill, the
Globe
reporters who had written the four-part series on the Bulger brothers, went on to write a book,
Black Mass
, based on the Wolf hearings. In their book, maybe 50 percent of the facts came out, and a lot of times they were taken out of context. These so-called experts didn’t know anything that really happened with Jimmy and Stevie and me, but they still said certain things about me. I’d love to give these guys the opportunity to say these things to my face, like a man, but that will never happen. Dick Lehr is a professor at Boston University. I’d like to meet him one-on-one with no one else around besides the two of us. Then he could tell me what he thinks of me and I could show him what I think of him. I’ve always believed that if you have a problem with someone, you knock on his door and say, “You have something to say to me? Okay, now what do you want to do about it?”
Even today, it’s hard to try and figure out what happened between Jimmy and Connolly. Connolly was an affable guy, but Jimmy had exposed his dark side and their roles had become reversed. Instead of Connolly being the handler and Jimmy the informant, Jimmy had become the master and made Connolly his puppet. I had seen so little of Connolly before Stevie got arrested in early 1995. But then, until I learned the truth about Jimmy and Connolly, I had assumed he was just a corrupt FBI agent taking money to look out for Jimmy’s interests. Once I understood their true relationship, FBI handler and FBI informant, I saw the power Jimmy had over him and understood how deeply Jimmy had corrupted him.
But my days of meeting Connolly and visiting Stevie to help him with his case were coming to an end. I would soon have my own case to take care of, and the three of us would no longer have anything to discuss. If I had known earlier what the real relationship had been between the two of them, I would have gone my own way a lot sooner. But even knowing the truth about Jimmy, I couldn’t hate him. Though I had been shocked and furious over what I learned about him, it’s still hard to be around someone for twenty-five years and not like him. Besides, you had to admire Jimmy. He beat them at their own game.
On November 17, 1999, around three in the afternoon, I was walking down N and Sixth streets, heading to my car to go down to the variety store, when agents from the DEA and state police called out, “Kevin.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Have you got a minute?” one of them said. “We want to talk to you.”
“I’m heading down the store to get a cup of coffee,” I told him. “I’ll meet you down there.”
“No, we want to talk to you here,” the agent said. I could see other agents in cars around the street, as well as some walking around. They were all over the place.
“Am I under arrest?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“Then I’ll meet you down the store,” I said.
As I started to walk away, he got on the radio and talked to someone else. Then he turned around and called out my name again. This time, he said, “Kevin, you’re under arrest.”
When he handcuffed me, he asked me if I had any weapons.
“I have a knife in my back pocket,” I told him.
“Thanks,” he said, and reached in and took it out. Two agents from the DEA and State Police Task Force then put me in a car as other official cars drove by. A few minutes later, Dan Doherty from the DEA and Tom Duffy from the state police, acting as professionally as the other two agents, took me out of that car and put me in the back seat of their car. They drove me over to the DEA headquarters in a building over by City Hall, where they seated me in a room.
It wasn’t a surprise that I was being arrested. The night before, on November 16, I had been at the Teamster’s Pub for a billiards league. When I came out of the building with a friend of mine, we got in my car on Third Street. I took a left on D Street, and was driving up D Street when a van came through the lot where the gas station was. I could see that the driver of the van was burning me, looking at me hard. Immediately, I recognized him as Dave Lazarus from the IRS. He had been all over town lately, asking questions about me and giving everybody he talked to his card. He drove down the street behind me and I saw him making a U-turn. I had my scanner on and could hear him and his fellow agents talking about me. Then I spotted two or three other cars all converge and begin to follow me. At the time, I had two pistols on me. After I ran the red light through the intersection of Broadway, I took a left on Fourth Street, floored the car, and, without stopping for traffic, headed across Dorchester Street. As I took a right onto G Street, I could hear them saying on the police scanner that they had lost me. I went down the street and dropped off the friend who was with me, handing him the two pistols I had on me. He jumped into his car and took off with no problem. They weren’t following him. They were following me. Later on, I parked my car and walked back to my house. That was it for the night.
When I came out of my house the next afternoon, they were waiting. At the DEA headquarters, they gave me the twenty-nine-count indictment. That also didn’t surprise me. I had heard that they had grabbed Kevin Hayes, and they were trying to get him to cooperate against me. I had talked to a friend of mine who knew Hayes well and he had told me, “Don’t worry. He’ll never cooperate. He’ll never say a thing.”
“Are you sure?” I had asked my friend. “Because this guy can put me away.” I was prepared to take Hayes out, but my friend told me he was friends with Hayes’s wife.
“Don’t worry,” my friend said again. “He’ll never say a word against you.” It turned out that Kevin Hayes did give the DEA and the state police the Predicate Act in the last five years, meaning he told them about a criminal act that had occurred in the last five years, with which they were able to indict me on a RICO charge. They said I had kidnapped Hayes, which was not true. He had come in of his own will. Besides, the guy weighed 400 pounds. There was no way I could have kidnapped him. Hayes also told them that there had been two Igloo coolers in the room, the kind you use for sandwiches and cold drinks, and that I was going to put him in the coolers after I chopped him up. If I had ever chopped up his 400-pound body, I would have needed a freezer truck for all the pieces.
I was kept at DEA headquarters for about three hours. At first the agents tried to make a deal with me, telling me, “Kevin, you don’t have to go away. You can work with us.”
“You have nothing,” I told them.
Finally they said, “Bring in the other guy,” and brought in Kevin O’Neil. I had heard all along that they were going to indict me and Kevin, but I felt bad for Kevin. He had nothing to do with anything Jimmy, Stevie, or I were doing. For him, it was guilt by association. Eventually he pleaded guilty in October 2000 to a superseding indictment charging him with racketeering, extortion, and money laundering. He was sentenced in September 2004 to a year and a day in prison. He also had to pay a $10,000 fine and $25,000 in restitution to Ray Slinger, the guy who lied about the body bag.
A couple of years earlier I had spent a weekend in jail, so this wasn’t my first time in jail. I wasn’t that concerned about what they had on me. When I carefully read the indictment, which included racketeering, extortion, money laundering, conspiracy to distribute drugs, and two charges of using a firearm in commission of a crime, I knew half the charges were bullshit ones that I could beat, and that a lot of them were repetitive.
That night, Kevin O’Neil and I were taken to the state police barracks at Logan Airport, where they locked us up in separate cells. There was no need to call my family. People who knew I had been arrested had certainly called them already.
The next day, on November 18, I was taken to the Federal Court in Boston, where I was arraigned. Then Kevin and I, along with some other prisoners, were put in a van and driven to Wyatt Federal Prison, a federal holding facility in Rhode Island. The feds didn’t want me in Plymouth because that’s where Stevie was. Once we got to Wyatt, we got processed and put in a cell block. I made my first call to my sister, who told me my mother had just died that day. I had known she was sick but I hadn’t thought she was near death.