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By Root 1058 0

the whole story. “The Mafia was going against Jimmy and Stevie,” he said. “So Jimmy and Stevie went against them.” He had a three-inch-thick leather case with him, filled with the 302 reports the field agents filed regularly that he had written up on Jimmy and Stevie. Obviously, since he had retired from the FBI seven years earlier, he had made copies of the reports for his own personal files. There were lots and lots of them, but he took out all the papers and I started going through them. The reports discussed things about the Mafia, but there was also stuff about friends of ours, about Irish guys, members of Winter Hill, guys Jimmy and Stevie had given up.

I looked at Connolly and said, “They were giving up everybody.”

“No, they weren’t,” he said, pointing out some letters on the pages I was holding. “Look at the bottom of each report. See? ‘Not to be disseminated without case agent’s approval.’ No one could see them without me. I had to approve anyone looking at these reports.”

But I knew that was bullshit because some of those people had already been arrested for the same exact crimes that were listed in the reports.

“There’s nothing in there about you,” Connolly told me as I continued, incredulous, to read over hundreds of reports. Again, those words didn’t mean anything to me because everything I had done, I had done with Jimmy and Stevie. There was nothing they could say about me without incriminating themselves.

As I read over the files at the Top of the Hub that night, Connolly kept telling me that 90 percent of the information in the files came from Stevie. Certainly, Jimmy hadn’t been around the Mafia the way Stevie had. But, Connolly told me, he had to put Jimmy’s name on the files to keep his file active. As long as Jimmy was an active informant, Connolly said, he could justify meeting with Jimmy to give him valuable information. Even after he retired, Connolly still had friends in the FBI, and he and Jimmy kept meeting to let each other know what was going on. I listened to all that, but now I also understood that even though he was retired, Connolly was still getting information, as well as money, from Jimmy. As I continued to read, I could see that a lot of the reports were not just against the Italians. There were more and more names of Polish and Irish guys, of people we had done business with, of friends of mine. Whenever I came across the name of someone I knew, I would read exactly what it said about that person. I would see, over and over, that some of these people had been arrested for crimes that were mentioned in these reports.

It didn’t take me long to realize again that it had been bullshit when Connolly had told me that the files hadn’t been disseminated, that they had been for his own personal use. He had been an employee of the FBI. He hadn’t worked for himself. If there was an investigation going on and his supervisor said, “Let me take a look at that,” what was Connolly going to say? He had to give it up. And he obviously had.

I thought about what Jimmy had always said. “You can lie to your wife and to your girlfriends, but not to your friends. Not to anyone we were in business with.” Maybe Jimmy and Stevie hadn’t lied to me. But they sure hadn’t been telling me everything.

Soon after that, Stevie actually mentioned my name at his hearing in front of Judge Wolf. When he took the stand, he was asked, “How are you corresponding with John Connolly now?”

He answered, “Through Kevin Weeks.”

When I read it in the paper, I was bullshit. It was the first time my name had been brought up in the courtroom. Nice of him to put another fucking bull’s-eye on my back when I was out there helping him. I had no choice but to continue to help Stevie because if he flipped on me, I was gone. I was getting life. I was hostage to him, walking a thin line because I had to placate Stevie in what he was doing in his case, while on the street I had to distance myself from him. But after that day in the courtroom, I realized Stevie didn’t give a fuck about me. All Stevie was worried about was Stevie.

A short