Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [130]
When I gave up information in 2000, the state police had suspected but didn’t know any of the specific details. They knew details based on eyewitness accounts, but they didn’t know the inside stories about the Halloran murder or the weapons arsenal. They hadn’t known of my involvement in these crimes, but still, they never reacted when I related my accounts.
This was the first time since I was a kid that I didn’t have control over my own life. I’d reached a point where my freedom was in other people’s hands—in these agents’ hands. But during all that time, I never caught them in a lie and was never lied to about anything. It was obvious they all had a hate thing for Stevie. What they detested so much were the women. Stevie had killed a lot of people, but it was the deaths of his girlfriend and his stepdaughter that made him so hated. As for me, I didn’t need anyone to hold my hand. I had gotten into this myself. From me, the investigators wanted the connection to the FBI and the state police. They wanted Jimmy and Stevie, the only ones on a large scale who I was involved with, along with Schneiderhan and Connolly, who had become a focus of the investigation before I was arrested. For these investigators, it was the first time they had someone directly involved in all these crimes and the workings of the organization provide testimony.
And I continued to give them every crime I had been involved in over the course of twenty-five years, every single one, the shootings, stabbings, extortions, murders, my involvement with drugs, with loan-sharking, with gambling, with everything. Before I had been arrested, when I was still on the street, the police had once come to me, given me my rights, and advised me I was the prime suspect in three other murders. Now people were still trying, unsuccessfully, to make a case in those three murders.
The one thing I never did during all my testimony was lie. If I had been caught in even one lie, my credibility would have been gone, my deal would have been gone, and I would have ended up with a life sentence. All I needed to do was tell them exactly what had happened. This was basically the best thing I ever did because now the investigators knew the answers to all their questions. And I knew the information they had received based on their informants. When I was being debriefed, I was given a list of 163 names who were allegedly informants or were allegedly cooperating with law enforcement, and was asked if I recognized any of those names. I did recognize some of them. I knew about the street people who were already arrested, the people who were charged in other crimes, those who had made deals to save their own asses, those who had already given me up. There are people who are on the street now who are walking around like they are standup guys, but in fact I know who they are and what they said. They can fool people around them, but they can’t fool me. I know exactly what was said and what was done and who they are.
In May 2002, I was driven to Boston from Allenwood for a few days of testimony in John Connolly’s trial for giving the tip-off of the indictments coming down that led to Jimmy fleeing. He’d been named in a five-count federal indictment a month after I was arrested, including falsifying reports about Stevie and Jimmy and funneling $7,000 in payoffs from them to John Morris. He’d been indicted just as the five-year statute of limitations on the tip-off to Jimmy in December 1994 was about to run out. I stayed in a cell at the courthouse for the three days that I was in Boston. During that time, I didn’t speak to any lawyers or investigators about the case. No one coached me or told me what to say. I had already been