Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [132]
There was no victim impact statement, but the lawyer for Michael Donahue’s two sons tried to bring up the civil suit. Judge Stearns said that his courtroom wasn’t the venue for that case, which would be settled in another court by another judge. He cited that I had given up three bodies with no agreement in place, with no safety net, and, charged with those crimes, I had put myself at peril and placed my faith in the justice system. He also cited that he had seen me testify, that I was very candid and truthful, and that I hadn’t hesitated to answer any question posed to me.
I was expecting the worst, but in the end, the judge gave me seventy-two months, including time served. He spoke to me then, saying, “Mr. Weeks, good luck, and I hope I’ve done the right thing.” He also said that the sentence was “one of the most difficult that I have faced as a judge.” The whole procedure took about twenty-five minutes.
I spent that night in a holding cell at the courthouse and was driven back to Allenwood the next day. Since they give you fifty-four days a year for good behavior, you usually end up doing 85 percent of your time. I ended up serving a total of sixty-three months.
At Allenwood, I had been put in a prison inside a prison, in the federal inmate witness protection program called WITSEC, a high-security unit for people who were cooperating on cases. Gerald Shur, a federal marshal and one of the original founders of the WITSEC program in 1967, was quoted as saying in front of Congress that doing one day in WITSEC was equivalent to doing three days in regular prison. That’s because a WITSEC unit was more confined and there was less to do in it. It housed approximately seventy prisoners, a lot of them involved in high-profile cases from Mafia underbosses down to gangbangers from the Crips and the Bloods.
In our unit, we had Nazi Lowriders, Dirty White Boys, Latin Kings, and traditional organized crime Irish and Italian guys. Occasionally there were fistfights, but it wasn’t like being in a regular federal prison in the sense that the chances for violent confrontation were a lot less. Things never really got out of control. Ninety-five percent of the guys who were in there had a chance to get out at some time in their lives, while the other 5 percent were doing life bids and were never getting out.
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,