Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [118]
“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.
Dick was in a sensitive position where a lot of information on the investigation and its budget approval went directly across his desk. At our first meeting, I talked to him about the investigation and what was going on with the state police. After he put the dog back in the car, the two of us stood outside in the cool fall night and continued to talk. I hadn’t been afraid of the dog. I had a pistol with me and would have shot him if there had been any problem.
That night, Dick reaffirmed what Connolly had told me, that the FBI and state police were at their lowest point of cooperation. He said he would find out what he could and get back to me. I met with him about a dozen times, usually in the same place. He told me he had a counterpart in the Rhode Island State Police, as well as some other sources, and he was going to see what he could find out about the investigation. I told Stevie whatever he told me and repeated the information to Jimmy whenever he called.
But with each new meeting, I got the feeling that Dick didn’t know much and was jerking me around. It seemed to be a waste of time to meet with him, but Stevie wanted me to continue. One night, Dick and I were talking about books and I told him I was reading a book by Vinny Teresa called My Life in the Mafia, and he told me he was in the book. I went home that night and finished the book. In it, the only mention of anybody in the state police was a Richard Schneiderhan, so now I knew Dick’s and Eric’s real name.
After our twelfth meeting, I decided the meetings were a waste of time. Dick was giving me bits and pieces, but for the most part I felt he was trying to distance himself from the whole thing. He’d gotten a lot of money over the years from Stevie but now, with Stevie in jail and Jimmy on the run, there was nothing they could do financially for him. He was just placating them with lip service and nothing more. Jimmy used to brag that he could ask six FBI agents to jump into his car with machine guns, but Schneiderhan was Stevie’s one state police connection. Eventually Schneiderhan was arrested and convicted. His final stay was recently denied and he’s going to have to go to jail now for eighteen months.
However, in the spring of 1997, less than a year after I had started to meet with Connolly, I got some news that literally shattered my world. One night while I was home reading a book and watching the ten o’clock news on Channel 56, I heard that Stevie Flemmi had gotten up on the stand at the evidentiary hearings in front of Judge Wolf and announced that he and Jimmy were FBI informants and had been given immunity from prosecution, that they had been told they could commit any crime short of murder. I dropped the book I had in my hands, put my feet down on the floor, and leaned forward, yelling, “What the fuck?!” Stunned, there was nothing I could do except sit there on my couch, flipping the channels and waiting until the eleven o’clock news to make sure I had heard it right. When that broadcast repeated the news, I kept shaking my head in disbelief as I got up to grab a beer and kept flipping some more, waiting for the two o’clock news and any reruns I might get. All I kept thinking was, Did I get it right? How could that be possible? After the two o’clock news, I turned off the TV, still unable to believe that I had heard it right, unable to understand the whole thing. It made no sense. We killed guys because they were informants. And now I was learning that Jimmy and Stevie were informants themselves.
The