Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [125]
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.
Two days later, on November 20, I was picked up in Rhode Island and driven to the wake at the O’Brien Funeral Home in South Boston. I was shackled and handcuffed as the marshals led me inside. They had already blocked off traffic so no one else could drive into the street. I was alone with the casket for about ten minutes with the marshals right beside me, along with Jackie O’Brien, the funeral home director. Then I was led back to the car and driven back to Rhode Island. Here, I was in a five-man cell with two guys from the Dominican Republic, one from Colombia, and another from Venezuela. They were all very respectful and kept asking if there was anything they could do for me.
That night, I rolled over and went to sleep, but I didn’t sleep great. The next day, I was brought to a bail hearing at the federal courthouse in Boston, where I was bound over without bail. Whenever I went into Boston for a hearing, I was awakened at 4:00 A.M. and driven up to the courthouse, where I would sit in a holding cell until my turn before the magistrate. Then I would be driven back the same day. Back in Rhode Island, I had visits from my brothers and my wife, Pam.
A couple of weeks after I was arrested, my lawyer got me a copy of Judge Wolf’s 661-page ruling that he had released on September 15. It was a shock to see everything there, to see exactly what Jimmy and Stevie had been doing over the years. I’d seen Connolly’s reports that he had written on Jimmy and Stevie, but I hadn’t known exactly how many years those two guys had been informants, Stevie since 1965, Jimmy since 1975.
One day after a visit in Wyatt, I was walking downstairs waiting to be brought out of the visiting room when an inmate asked me, “Are you Kevin Weeks?”
“Yeah,” I told him.
He introduced himself and then I knew he was a made guy from Rhode Island. “Kid, what are you doing?” he asked me. “Are you going to take it up the ass for these guys? Remember, you can’t rat on a rat. Those guys have been giving up everyone for thirty years.”
At the time, I was still thinking things over. At forty-three, I was looking to make a plea for fifteen years. Later on, my attorney, Richie Eg-bert, came up to see me. “Hi, Richie, how you doing?” I said as we shook hands and went into the little room where lawyers can visit their clients.
Right away, he said, “Kev, I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Well, how does it look, Richie?”
“Not good,” he said. “We can beat half these charges, but every charge they find you guilty on, they’re going to give you the max. They’re so mad at the other two, at Whitey and Stevie, and with