Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [2]
He led the good life, in the style of Goodfellas—money, street respect (all that really counted), and the knowledge that everyone knew who you were, knew the power you held, and understood the consequences of crossing you.
Pretty heady for a young man. Hell, it would be heady for any man who was raised knowing that the streets were what counted. In terms of the street, he was a success.
One day in the late 1980s I was in a board of directors’ meeting at the company I worked for. One of the directors asked another if he saw the article about Weeks on the front page of the newspaper over the weekend. He replied that he had and another gentleman also said that he had read the article. As they spoke they realized that they had each seen a different paper and the Weeks in each of the three articles was a different brother, Jack in the Worcester Telegram for a political campaign that he was heading up, Kevin in the Boston Herald regarding a difference of views with law enforcement, and myself in the Middlesex News for taking a proactive stance on sewers for areas of the town for which I was a selectman. The first director looked at the other two and then turned to me and said, “I guess you all come from a family of high achievers, no matter what you’re into.” Kevin was a very high achiever in a field that does not tolerate failure very well.
Kev is sorry for only a few things in his life. He loves his sons mightily and rues the things that he did that lost him his wife Pam. He followed the rules of the streets all the way, and it cost him almost everything. Sure, he enjoyed the fruits of his labor, but at the end he was almost relieved when the law was finally able to put a stop to it all. He never complained about the time he spent in prison. It seemed to actually give him the time he needed to assess his life and contemplate his future. Not his next career or where he would live, but what was meaningful in life and how he wanted to interact with those who mattered most to him.
He is not that different in personality than when he was our little baby brother, still affable, still with a quick smile and a quip, still with an alertness and an inquisitiveness to everything around him. He has tamped down the violent side, keeping his hands in his pockets and not making fists as readily as before.
But I wouldn’t suggest that you get in his face. You can only expect him to be so nice!
AUTHOR’S NOTE
For the more than twenty years that I was associated with James “Whitey” Bulger, despite the fact that we were together nearly every day for hours at a time, I was unaware that he was leading a dual existence. While I knew he was paying FBI agents for information, I had no idea that he was also an FBI informant, that he was giving the agency information it could use to take other players off the street. It shocked and infuriated me, along with everyone else in the South Boston mob, when I learned this fact in the spring of 1997, more than two years after Jimmy was already on the lam. While I’ve never had the chance to discuss the situation with Jimmy, I have my own theory about why he became an FBI informant.
Jimmy returned to the streets from his nine-year prison sentence in 1965, at age thirty-six. Nine years after that, around the time when I began to work with him, he had already made his arrangement with the FBI. His informant file was officially opened on September 30, 1975. His handler was FBI agent John Connolly, who grew up