Where the Bodies Were Buried (38 page)

Weeks knew Stippo well; they were close in age and had grown up together in Southie. Furthermore, Stippo's sister Mary was a dealer in the Bulger organization's drug business. She was the one who had first approached Bulger and Weeks with the proposition that they purchase Stippo's store.

Weeks did not like Stippo Rakes. He made that clear in his direct testimony, calling Rakes “a piece of garbage.” But if they could get the store at a reasonable price, it was a smart proposition.

Bulger and Weeks met with Rakes, who showed them the paperwork and bookkeeping for the store. Together, they arrived at a price of $100,000 for the store and its entire inventory. The deal was done. The following night, Bulger and Weeks sat at the kitchen table of the house Whitey shared with Teresa Stanley and counted out $100,000 in cash. They put the money in a paper bag and headed over to Stippo's house on Fourth Street in Southie. Weeks described what happened next: “We gave Stippo the money and told him to take it out and count it. And he had I think it was two little girls. They were running around. So Jim Bulger was playing with one of the girls. He had her on his lap and was bouncing the girl, playing with her. She was a beautiful little girl. And Stippo started talking. He says, ‘Well, you know, my wife, she don't want to sell now. You know, the money. I mean, it's worth a lot more.' He wanted more money from us. We had an agreement with him for one hundred thousand, and now, all of a sudden, at the last minute, he's backing out and he's blaming his wife for it.

“He was looking to shake us down, and that wasn't going to happen. So I pulled a gun out. I had it in my waistband. I put it on the table and said, ‘Stippo, we had a deal.' And then the little girl that was on Jim Bulger's lap, she reached for the gun. Jim pushed the gun away, back over towards me, and said, ‘Put it away.' I put it away.

“And then Jim started with Stippo, you know, ‘We had a deal. You ain't backing out. You gave us your word.'”

Rakes came to his senses. He took the money. But he wasn't happy about it. According to Weeks, Stippo began spreading rumors all over Southie about how the deal went down. “The worst rumor was that we stuck a gun in his daughter's mouth. . . . Oh, we tortured him, he was hung off a bridge. There was all kinds of crazy stuff going around.”

When Rakes took the money from the sale and went on a vacation to Florida with his family, a story spread that Bulger and Weeks had killed Stippo and his entire family. “So we called him up and had him come back to Boston. . . . We had him stand in front of his store with us—it's a main drag—so people going by could see him, that he was alive. And then we went to Perkins Square, which is another main intersection of South Boston. And we stood there [with Stippo] so everybody would know he was alive and we didn't kill him.”

Carney introduced the Stippo Rakes narrative into his cross-examination by focusing on what happened when Weeks first cut his deal with Fred Wyshak. During one of his first depositions regarding the Rakes matter, when asked if he and Bulger had extorted Weeks to get his store, he said absolutely not. The prosecutors had to explain to Weeks that since he had used a gun in his negotiation with Rakes, it constituted extortion. Weeks reluctantly agreed that the extortion of Rakes had taken place; from that point onward, it would be one of the crimes to which he pleaded guilty in order to secure his deal with the government. But it had always stuck in Weeks's craw. “He came to us,” Kevin repeated often. In his heart, he didn't believe they had extorted Rakes. And the insistence by Rakes that he had been extorted, which he used effectively to elicit sympathy and attention from people in the media, was, to Weeks, a further example that Stippo Rakes was a devious lowlife.

“Do you agree that you extorted Rakes?” asked Carney.

The question touched off a vigorous exchange, with Weeks and Carney talking over one another. Weeks snapped, “Are you going to let me talk, or are you going to keep interrupting me?”

Carney paused. The anger in Kevin's voice suggested that the interrogator was moving closer to his goal, which seemed to be to get the witness to reveal his infamous temper and explode in the courtroom. “I'm going to ask you questions,” said Carney, “because that is the rule of the court.”

“Really? Well, let me talk after you ask a question.”

Carney spoke as if he were a man determined to hold on to his dignity, no matter how personal this ruffian on the stand tried to make it. “Rakes said that you had taken out a gun when you were at his home and put it on the table, right?”

“Rakes told people we took the gun and stuck it in his daughter's mouth.”

“Were you truthful when you pleaded guilty [to the extortion of Rakes]?”

“Yes.”

“But when you had earlier spoken to the investigators, you denied extorting Rakes, correct?”

“Stippo Rakes lied about what happened and how it went down. . . . He told stories all over town. He lied. So I didn't like Stippo Rakes. I think I
made it perfectly clear with you, okay. So I didn't feel any compunction to help him at all.”

“So you lied?”

“I lied. I told them, you know, we didn't extort him.”

“You told the investigators a lie because you didn't like Stippo Rakes, right?”

“Correct.”

“So when you told me a moment ago that you never lied to the investigators, that was a lie?”

Weeks shouted, “I've been lying my whole life! I'm a criminal!”

For a moment, Carney seemed stunned. It was a statement more blunt than a lawyer is accustomed to hearing in court.

The questioning continued. Weeks's exasperation turned to surliness, as if he might explode at any minute. Carney kept looking for an opening. He asked Weeks many questions about Pat Nee, especially whether or not Nee was the man in the backseat during the Halloran-Donahue murder. Weeks answered that he didn't know. In fact, the morning after that murder he was approached in a diner by Jimmy Mantville, a former Mullen gang member who, years earlier, had pulled off one of the Boston underworld's most famous hits, the killing of Donald Killeen outside his home in Framingham. In reference to the Halloran murder, Mantville said to Weeks, “Hey, we finally got him.” Mantville's enthusiasm led Weeks to believe that maybe he was the man in the backseat.

The insinuating nature of Carney's questions rankled the witness, but he mostly kept his emotions in check until Carney arrived at the subject he'd been working toward throughout the afternoon.

“Now, when you were making a decision to provide information against Jim Bulger, you were concerned that you would be viewed as a rat, weren't you?”

“To a degree.”

“Well, didn't you start using a phrase when you would—”

Weeks didn't wait for Carney to finish his sentence: “You can't rat on a rat.”

“What was the expression you started using?”

“You can't rat on a rat.”

The subject of being a rat had become the emotional core of the trial: Bulger was denying that he had ever been a rat. The witnesses—Martorano, Weeks, and likely Flemmi still to come—all had rationalizations for why they made their deals with the government. No one wanted to be seen as a rat. Carney was suggesting that Weeks had a guilty conscience, but the witness made it clear that he walked with his head high and is not looked down upon in Southie or anywhere else in Boston.

“So no one calls you a rat?” said Carney.

“No one. . . . Maybe they don't have the balls to say it to my face. They might say it behind my back, but no one's ever said it to me.”

“Because what would you do if they said it to you?”

“Well, we'd have a problem.”

“What kind of problem?”

“I'd go after them.”

“In what way?”

“Physically.”

“What would you do?”

There was a twinkle in Weeks's eye, not one of mirth but of menace. “Why don't you call me one outside when it's just me and you and see what I would do.”

“No, I'd like to hear you say in front of this jury what you would do.”

“You just did.”

Carney seemed uncertain whether he should show his pleasure or not. The cross-examination of Weeks was like a bout of rough sex, bracing and in-your-face. The lawyer waited a beat, and then asked, “Was prison a very reforming experience for you, Mr. Weeks?”

It was a witty non sequitur: some in the spectators' gallery laughed. Even Weeks chuckled. “Yeah,” he said. “Actually, I met some nice guys in there. Got to read a lot of books.”

Parry and jab, jab and parry. Weeks was channeling his time as an amateur boxer; his time on the stand was like a fifteen-rounder. Of course, the rules of the court dictated that it was not exactly a fair fight: the witness sat on the stand with his hands tied behind his back, and Carney kept probing with body blows and the occasional haymaker upside the head. Late in the day, he seemed to find the opening he'd been looking for.

“You played the system like a pro, Mr. Weeks, didn't you?”

“Objection,” said Kelly, loudly. “Argumentative.”

“Sustained as to form,” ruled Judge Casper.

Carney rephrased the question. “You knew how the system would work, didn't you?”

“No. I hadn't been in the system. . . . This was my first arrest. I had no experience with the system.”

“But you learned pretty fast.”

“My lawyer was a good lawyer. I'll recommend him to you.”

“You won five years”—the length of time Weeks spent in jail.

The witness seemed stunned by the suggestion. “Five people are dead,” he said, repeating, “Five people are dead.”

“Does that bother you at all?”

Now Weeks was truly ready to take a swing at Carney. “Yeah, it bothers me.”

“How does it bother you?”

Kevin shouted, “Because we killed people that were rats, and I had the two biggest rats right next to me! That's why it—”

He didn't get to finish his sentence. From the defense table, it was the defendant, Whitey, who spat out the words, “You suck.” This wasn't like when Bulger had cursed at Morris and very few heard it: everybody heard this one. YOU SUCK.

Kevin reacted immediately: “Fuck you, okay?” he shouted at Bulger.

“Fuck you, too!” shouted Whitey.

Said Weeks tauntingly, “What do you wanna do?” He gripped the railing and banged his knees against the witness stand; he was trying to rise and go after the defendant.

The armed marshals moved in, and spectators reacted with astonishment. It seemed as though pandemonium was about to ensue, a throw-down right in the courtroom. Judge Casper stood and exclaimed, “Hey, Mr. Bulger, Mr. Bulger. Let your attorneys speak in this court for you. . . . Mr. Weeks, here's how this works: You answer the questions, okay?” The judge waited for the murmuring and rustling to settle and said, “Mr. Carney, you can finish your questioning.”

The cross-examination, re-direct, and re-cross continued for another
hour, but nobody would remember any of it. The testimony had peaked, with an emotional exchange between the mob boss and his prize underling—his surrogate son—that would go down in the annals of Boston mob lore.

I SAW KEVIN
Weeks a few days later. He invited me over to his house on Ticknor Street to talk about his time on the stand. It was a Sunday morning, and Kevin's girlfriend had set out tea and an assortment of pastries and bagels. Using fine china cups and saucers, we sipped tea, and Kevin ruminated. He seemed very relaxed, pensive, as if his testimony had been a kind of catharsis. I asked him what it had been like seeing Bulger for the first time since he last secretly met with Whitey while he was on the lam, seventeen years ago.

“It was sad,” said Kevin. “That was not the way I remembered him. His eyes were blank, like he was not all there. I wonder if he's losing his mind. It was a shock, the way he's aged.”

Weeks admitted that Carney got under his skin, primarily because he felt that during his direct testimony, he had gone easy on Bulger. “I was playing nice. I could have buried him. But I made it clear that I didn't know if he did the Debbie Davis murder, and I repeated what he had always told me, that he was against the killing of Roger Wheeler. I could have backed up the other testimony and destroyed him on those points, but I didn't.” Given that, Weeks was annoyed that Bulger's defense lawyer seemed determined to attack his motives.

I said to Kevin, “I was worried that you were going to go after Bulger there at the end.”

“Yeah,” said Weeks. “It got emotional. He bared his teeth and scowled, ‘You suck.'” Kevin reflected on it and said, “You know, the hardest thing is those being the last words we'll probably ever say to one another. It's a strange way to leave things after all that time we spent together.”

There was one detail I found vexing: the murders of the women. Weeks had not been present for the murder of Debbie Davis. Though it was his belief that Flemmi had likely done the strangling on that occasion, as for the murder of Deborah Hussey, he reiterated what he had said on the stand: “I saw it with my own eyes.”

I asked him, “Okay, but don't you find that strange? Bulger had never murdered a female before. Hussey was Stevie's problem. Isn't it out of character for him to have done that?”

Weeks pondered the question, pausing to sip his tea, and then he spoke. “I think, over time, there developed a competition between Jimmy and Stevie. They did a lot of murders together, and they were always trying to one-up each other. Stevie killed Debbie Davis, then Jimmy had to show he could do it, too. They were always testing each other. It was a sick game they played.”

We talked some more about Kevin's testimony, recollections of beatings, extortions, murders, and burials. From somewhere outside, likely at nearby Gate of Heaven Church, a bell sounded. It was a fine Sunday morning in South Boston.