Read Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob Online
Authors: Kevin Weeks; Phyllis Karas
But if guys got into too many fights, they did get thrown out of the WITSEC unit. While I was there, three guys were thrown out. These guys end up in segregated prison units, where they are locked down twenty-four hours a day, except for three times a week when they’re let out for exercise.
While I was there, I had a couple of workout partners, one from Massachusetts and one from Philly, who were real nice guys. Even though you always referred to each other by your first name and last initial, eventually you got to know everybody’s name, as well as their background and case. The workout partner I was the closest to was Billy N., who was called “the Hater” by the staff because he didn’t associate with a lot of people. He’d been in prison a long time and he could figure out and read people pretty well. My second workout partner, Tommy R., used to cook using the couple of microwaves inside the unit and the three of us would eat together.
I was also close to a few other people in there, guys I would consider friends, fellows from Philly, along with some blacks from DC and New York, and some Spanish guys from Mexico and New York. People ran in different circles and I didn’t get along with everyone in there. There were a lot of people you just ignored. They didn’t want to be around you and you didn’t want to be around them.
While I was there, I read a lot, which was one of the best things you could do there. I received four or five books a week from my brothers, books by Lee Child, Stuart Woods, Lawrence Block, Jack Higgins, Tess Gerritsen, James Patterson, and Steven Ambrose. I’d read them as soon as they arrived and passed them on to other inmates when I finished them.
I exercised five days a week, lifting weights in the weight room from 9:30 to 10:45
A.M
., and on weekends I’d work out with the pull-up bar outside. At night, at six, I’d run on the treadmill for an hour, seven nights a week. And the rest of the time I’d read. Basically, my four years and five months at Allenwood were uneventful. I just read a lot, worked out, and ran.
Time passed pretty quickly as long as you stayed busy. The only thing about being in these WITSEC units was that they didn’t have the facilities other prisons had. All they had was a very small yard and no outdoor activities to speak of. There wasn’t much for the inmates to do besides reading, working out, and watching TV. No education was available, except for the inmates who were required to get their GED. Since it was too great a security risk to bring in teachers, there were no college courses, no computer classes, no teachers whatsoever. Any time anyone from outside came in to do work, they would put us back in the unit and lock us down. The one big thing that you did have in the WITSEC unit, and which compensated for everything you didn’t have, was that eventually, based on seniority, you got a single cell. It took me two and a half years, but I did get my own cell, along with a TV.
We were allowed three hundred minutes a month of phone calls, which was equivalent to twenty fifteen-minute phone calls. In any prison, no one can call you, so you make all the calls. Basically, in WITSEC, you are isolated from everybody. They allow a small list of visitors who have to get clearance from Washington to be on your visiting list. At the beginning, I had visitors, but then I told people not to come. Even my lawyer never came up. I felt it was too long a trip for my family to drive more than seven hours each way just for a visit, but I talked to family and friends once a week. I kept in touch with some good friends on the street who stayed loyal to me, including some people I was involved with when I was out there. They all understood that after it came out that Jimmy and Stevie were informants, nobody would blame me or anyone else involved in the case for cooperating.
There were two staff members who would go out of their way to help inmates out. Mr. Stork would help an inmate with whatever job he had, while Mr. Fink was the type of guy who would joke with the inmates all day to keep it lighthearted. As long as everything ran smoothly, the unit manager, Mr. Moyer, didn’t go out of his way to hassle the inmates. There were a few guards, but not many, who would go out of their way to give you a hard time.
One of my two workout partners and closest friends is still in there. He received a thirteen-year sentence and still has six more to do. My other workout partner was getting out a month or two after me. After my release, there were restrictions on my associations and travel. I have five years of supervised release, which means I can’t travel outside the district without permission or associate with any known felons.
Now that I am out, my life is very quiet, with no stress. Coming back, it was strange being around people and adjusting to the freedom of walking into a store and buying something to eat or some clothes for myself. In prison, you’re wearing khakis, prison-issued clothes, all the time. When I first got out and came back, I saw that a lot had changed, including the whole dynamics of the city. I don’t live in Boston anymore, but I did go back to South Boston and saw family and friends and the people I was involved with. They all understood that I hadn’t hurt anyone on the street. To the person, they all came up to me, shook hands, hugged me, and said, “Whatever we can help you with, we will.”
The government never gave me any money or anything, so I had to start all over from scratch, except for the support of these friends and family. The one thing the government did do for me was to keep its word and give me my life back.
On February 4, 2005, my oldest brother, Billy, drove down to Allen-wood to bring me home. It was a beautiful winter day. We left at eight in the morning and got to Massachusetts at three in the afternoon. When we got to Billy’s house, I didn’t want a beer or a steak dinner. All I wanted was to go for a walk someplace where there were no walls. I got out of the car and went, by myself, for a long walk.
STEVIE FLEMMI
Pled out to ten murders in February 2004 and was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole.
JOHN CONNOLLY
Convicted in 2002 of one count of racketeering, two counts of obstruction of justice, and one count of making a false statement to the FBI and sentenced to 121 months. Now facing first-degree murder and conspiracy charges in Florida for allegedly providing information that led to the death of former World Jai Alai president John Callahan.
JOHNNY MARTORANO
Sentenced to fourteen years in 2004. He’ll be out with time served in 2007.
RICHIE SCHNEIDERHAN:
Sentenced to eighteen months in 2003 for obstruction of justice and conspiracy.
FORMER FBI AGENT PAUL RICO:
Died in an Oklahoma jail in January 2004, at age seventy-eight, while awaiting trial for Roger Wheeler’s murder.
FORMER FBI AGENT JOHN MORRIS
Retired from the FBI.
KEVIN O’NEIL
Home with his family after he did eleven months for racketeering, extortion, and money laundering. Back working in developing and selling real estate.
FRANKIE SALEMME
Got out before me but was rearrested on obstruction of justice charge in November 2004.
JIM BULGER
Still fine and soaking up the sun.
KEVIN WEEKS
Happy to have a second chance in life.
In the year since
Brutal
was published I’ve been in the news more than I expected and certainly more than I wanted. But I wasn’t alone. There has been a good deal of news about Jimmy Bulger and the men who were involved with him. Sometimes it seems as if no matter how many questions were answered in
Brutal
, more keep getting asked. Jimmy’s still on the run, but for those he left behind, both the living and the dead, the story never dies.
THE JOHN MCINTYRE TRIAL
Seventeen civil suits were brought against the federal government by alleged victims of Whitey Bulger. Ten were dismissed on grounds they were filed too late. In June 2006, the first of these went to trial. This $50 million wrongful death suit was brought by the family of John McIntyre—his brother Christopher and his seventy-seven year old mother Emily. McIntyre had been thirty-two when Jimmy and Stevie Flemmi killed him on November 30, 1984 at 799 East Third Street. I had led the authorities to his grave in January 2000.
The focus of this eighteen-day civil suit, heard in front of U.S. District Judge Reginald C. Lindsay, not in front of a jury, was then-FBI agent John Connolly’s ties to Jimmy. The McIntyres were trying to prove that their relative was killed because Connolly leaked it to Jimmy that McIntyre was cooperating against him. Stevie, who had struck a deal with the government sparing him the death penalty and is now serving a life sentence with no chance of parole, had already admitted to killing McIntyre, as well as nine other people. Stevie was the first witness and he was on the stand for four days. He testified that Connolly warned Jimmy that someone had implicated the two of them in the unsuccessful plot to ship weapons to the IRA aboard the Gloucester-based
Valhalla
in September 1984.
At the trial, I saw Flemmi for the first time since my last visit to him in the Plymouth jail in 1999. This time it certainly didn’t qualify as a visit. Before I testified, I was walked by the courtroom while Stevie was on the stand. I looked through the windows on the courtroom door and saw him clearly. He looked the same, maybe a little grayer, and was wearing a suit. By the time I got into the courtroom, however, they had already taken him back to his cell. I’m sure they had no intentions of letting the two of us speak to one another. I don’t think there were any words for us to exchange. What could we possibly say to one another at this point? Everything had already played out. It was just hard to look at the guy I had trusted for twenty-five years and realize I didn’t know the true person he was.
I was on the stand one day for a couple of hours. During that time, I independently corroborated Stevie’s testimony. I also told the court that Connolly had warned Jimmy that one of the two people who were stopped coming off the
Valhalla
was cooperating. I testified that a day or two after the crew had returned safely to Boston on the
Valhalla,
McIntyre and the ship’s captain went to inspect the damage the boat had received when encountering a storm crossing the Atlantic. Since these two men were stopped and questioned by U.S. Customs agents when leaving the boat, it wasn’t hard for Jimmy to realize who the informant was. He was 90 percent sure it was McIntyre.
While I was on the stand, the McIntyre family’s lawyer, Steven Gordon from New Hampshire, kept challenging my testimony that I was involved in only “some” crimes with Jimmy and Stevie. At one point, he said, “You caught up pretty quickly,” and I answered, “No. You could never catch up to them. I don’t think many people could. Besides, they were committing crimes long before I teamed up with them.”
Although neither McIntyre’s mother nor brother ever came to the courtroom when Stevie or I were testifying, Emily McIntyre was a convincing witness herself, showing photos of her son. He had apparently joined the Army but hadn’t gone to Vietnam and received a medical discharge. She also talked about how he used to make her hand-carved wooden gifts, saying, “I treasure them so much,” and discussing the science awards he won in high school and how he liked to sail.
When the Justice Department lawyer, a woman named Bridget Bailey Lipscomb, asked how much time Emily spent with her son, whether he liked to read books about Adolf Hitler, and whether schizophrenia ran in her family, she screamed back, “You should have questioned how my son was tortured.” When the lawyer said she was only doing her job, Emily said, “Your job is justice. Your type of justice destroyed my life.” When she was instructed to look at a document, she screamed, “You have to forgive me, but all I see is a cut-out tongue.” I can say for certain that McIntyre was never physically tortured.
Lipscomb tried to show that informants like Jimmy and Stevie had to be allowed to terrorize or they wouldn’t have been any use to the FBI in those roles. But Judge Lindsay asked her, “When I leave this courthouse this afternoon, do I need to worry that some informant is going to shoot me because the FBI is not watching them?”
Three months later, in September 2006, Judge Lindsay found that the FBI’s mishandling of Jimmy and Stevie as informants had caused McIntyre’s murder and ordered the government to pay more than $3 million to McIntyre’s mother and brother. Of course, this ruling raised the hopes of the families with similar suits pending and was hailed as a “spectacular victory” by some of them. Obviously, the judge hadn’t bought the government’s defense that John Connolly wasn’t acting in his official role as an FBI agent when he leaked the info that led to McIntyre being fingered as an informant or, as Stevie testified, when Connolly accepted approximately $200,000 in payoffs from Jimmy and Stevie over the course of twenty years.
One of the things that Lindsay wrote in his ruling was that “the truth is, however, that the FBI was not pounding the pavement looking for evidence that could ‘stick.’” In his 110-page decision, the judge found that, for decades, the FBI failed to properly supervise Connolly or to investigate numerous allegations that Bulger and Flemmi were involved in drug trafficking, murder, and other crimes. “The FBI stuck its head in the sand when it came to the criminal activities of Bulger and Flemmi,” he wrote. “For decades preceding the McIntyre murder, agents of the FBI protected Bulger and Flemmi as informants by shielding them from prosecution for crimes they had committed.”
Lindsay ordered the federal government to pay $3 million to McIntyre’s mother for the conscious suffering he endured before his murder, $100,000 for the loss of her son’s company, and $1,876 for funeral and burial costs. Emily McIntyre said she was thankful for the judge’s ruling but was not yet satisfied. She would still like to see others whom she considers responsible for her son’s death brought to justice.