January 5th, 2000. A federal holding cell in Plymouth, Massachusetts, 13 days into custody, Kevin Weekes sat across from two FBI agents and one Massachusetts state police trooper. And he said the words that would unear six bodies and the South Boston Code of Silence and put his mentor on the run for 12 more years.
He said, “I can show you where they’re buried.” The agents leaned forward. Weeks didn’t blink. He’d been arrested on November 17th, 1999. He flipped before the month was out. Two weeks. That’s all it took. Inside the bureau, they started calling him two weeks. The nickname stuck. It would follow him into the witness stand, into the books, into the courtroom in 2013, where the man he once woripped would mouth two words at him across a federal courtroom.
FU and Kevin would mouth them right back. This wasn’t some peripheral figure. Kevin Weekes was the kid from the projects who became the right hand of the most dangerous gangster in American history. He started as a bouncer at the South Boston Boys and Girls Club. He ended as the man who dug up three corpses with his bare hands and rearied them so the FBI wouldn’t find them.
James Whitey Bulier called him surrogate son. Steven the rifleman Flemmy called him reliable. The federal government called him a cooperating witness. Hollywood called him Mr. Arnold French. In Black Mass, Ray Winstone plays him as a quiet, watchful enforcer. The real Kevin Weekes was quieter and far more useful. This is the story of how a 19-year-old club bouncer became the gravedigger for the Winter Hill gang.
How he watched men die in basements and kitchens and back rooms. how he buried Bucky Barrett, John McIntyre, and Deborah Hussie in a dirt floor across the street from his own childhood neighborhood. And how when the FBI finally closed in, he gave them everything. The bodies, the names, the boss. Here’s what the documentaries never quite explain.
Kevin Weeks didn’t flip because he was weak. He flipped because Whitey Bulier had already broken the only rule that ever mattered to him. the rule that said you don’t talk to cops. And once Kevin found out his mentor had been an FBI informant the whole time, the loyalty died. What replaced it was something colder, something patient, something that took 14 years to finish.
Kevin Patrick Weeks was born March 21st, 1956 in the Old Colony housing project in South Boston, sixth of six children. His father, John Weekes, was a tough Irish disciplinarian who worked the docks and ran a tight house. His mother kept the kids fed on a budget that left no room for mistakes. Kevin was small as a kid, quiet, watchful.
He learned to box at the local gym. Because in Souy, you either learn to fight or you learn to run. And Kevin wasn’t built for running. By the time he was a teenager, he was a Golden Gloves competitor with a left hook that left grown men on the canvas. He worked the door at Triple O’s Lounge on West Broadway. Triple O’s was a bulier hangout. Everyone in Souy knew that.
Kevin took the job in 1975. He was 19 years old. The boss noticed him the first week. Whitey Bulier walked in, looked Kevin up and down, and asked the manager who the kid was. The manager said, “That’s John Weekes’s son. He boxes.” Bulier said, “Good. Keep an eye on him.” That’s how it started. Not a meeting, not a ceremony.
A nod across a barroom. Within months, Kevin was running errands. Within a year, he was carrying messages. Within two, he was in the room when the heaviest decisions in South Boston got made. Whitey Bulier was 45 years old in 1975. He’d already served time in Alcatraz. He’d already aligned with the Winter Hill gang in Somerville.
And he was already secretly a top echelon informant for the FBI. Kevin didn’t know that. Nobody did, not even Flemmy for years. You have to understand what Souy was in those years. It was a fortress. The Irish neighborhood circled the wagons against the busing crisis, against the Italians from the north end, against the FBI, against everyone.
Whitey Bulier wasn’t just a gangster. He was a folk hero. He kept heroin out of the neighborhood. He gave turkeys away at Thanksgiving. He walked the streets without a bodyguard because nobody, and I mean nobody, would dare lift a hand against him. And Kevin Weekes watched all of it. He learned by watching.
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By 1979, Kevin had quit Triple O’s and gone full-time with the crew. He was 23 years old. He was driving Whitey. He was carrying his gun. He was sitting in the back of Rotary Variety, the little corner store at 295 Old Colony Avenue, where the most important meetings in organized crime in New England got conducted over coffee and the morning paper.
Kevin’s job was simple. Watch the door. Watch the street. Watch everything. Here’s where it gets dark. On July 26th, 1983, a man named Arthur Bucky Barrett walked into a house at 799 East 3rd Street in South Boston. Barrett was a professional safe cracker. He just pulled the depositor’s trust bank job in Medford, scoring $1.
5 million in cash and jewels. Word got back to Whitey. Whitey wanted the money. So Barrett got a phone call. Come to the house. We’ve got business. Kevin was already inside when Barrett arrived. So was Whitey. So was Flemmy. Barrett walked in and the door closed behind him. Whitey put a gun to his head. Sit down, Bucky.
We’re going to talk about your money. They chained him to a chair in the basement. They squeezed him for 6 hours. Barrett gave up bank accounts, cash stashes, names, every dime he had. They drained him for over a million dollars. And when Whitey was satisfied there was nothing left, he walked Barrett up the basement stairs into the kitchen and said the words Kevin would never forget.
Bucky, you’re going downstairs to lie down for a while. Then Whitey put a single round through the back of Barrett’s head. The body hit the kitchen floor. Kevin Weeks stood there and watched. 27 years old. This was his initiation. Whitey looked at him and said, “Get the shovels.” Kevin and Flemmy dragged the body downstairs to the dirt basement floor.
They buried Bucky Barrett under the foundation of 799 East 3rd. They washed the kitchen. They went out for sandwiches. Kevin would later testify that he didn’t sleep for 3 days after. But he didn’t leave. He couldn’t leave. Watty Bulier wasn’t a boss you walked away from. Walking away meant joining Bucky in the dirt.
So Kevin stayed and he kept watching. 6 months later, November 5th, 1983, John McIntyre, a fisherman from Quincy. He’d been part of the Valhalla gun operation trying to smuggle seven tons of weapons to the IRA. The boat got busted. McIntyre got scared. He started talking to the DEA. Word got back to Whitey through his FBI handler, John Connelly. the same house, 799 East 3rd.
They chained McIntyre to the same chair Bucky Barrett had sat in. Whitey tried to strangle him with a rope. The rope was too thick. McIntyre choked but wouldn’t die. So Whitey looked at him and said, “Do you want one in the head?” McIntyre, gasping, said, “Yes, please.” Whitey pulled the trigger. Then he pulled the teeth out of the corpse with pliers so dental records couldn’t identify the body.
Kevin Weeks helped bury McIntyre in the same basement 3 ft from Barrett. Then came January 26th, 1985. Deborah Hussie, 26 years old, Steven Fleming’s stepdaughter. She’d grown up in his house. She was struggling with addiction and had started telling people that Flemmy had molested her as a teenager. Flammy told Whitey.
Whitey said she had to go. They lured her to the house at 799 East 3rd. Whitey stood behind the door. As soon as Deborah walked in, he grabbed her by the throat and strangled her with his bare hands. She fought, she kicked, she tried to scream. It took several minutes. Then Whitey laid her body on the floor and Flemmy, her own stepfather, knelt down and pulled out her teeth with pliers.
Kevin Weekes dug the third grave. Three bodies under one house. Two adult men, one young woman, all buried in dirt in a basement in South Boston. Kevin was 29 years old. Now, here’s the strategic shift. In 1985, the family that owned 799 East decided to sell the house. Whitey panicked.
If new owners renovated that basement, the bodies would surface. Kevin came up with the solution. There was a piece of land across from Florian Hall, the firefighters union hall, off Howlet Street in Dorchester. A quiet gully, wooded, no street lights. They’d move the bodies. October 13th, 1985, 3:00 in the morning, Kevin Weekes, Whitey Bulier, and Flemmy drove a van to 799 East 3rd.
They went into the basement with shovels and body bags. They exumed Bucky Barrett, John McIntyre, and Deborah Hussie. The bodies had been in the dirt for years. Kevin would later describe the smell as something he could not, even decades later, get out of his memory. Decomposition, lime, wet earth. They loaded the remains into the van.
They drove across town. They dug a new pit in the gully across from Florian Hall. They reeried all three together. They paved memory over them with leaves and dirt and pine needles, and they drove away. Kevin Weekes went home that morning, took a shower, and drove his kids to school. This is the part the movies don’t show you, the mundane horror, the way evil doesn’t look like evil when you live inside it.
Kevin coached youth boxing. He paid his taxes. He had two sons. He lived a normal suburban life in Quincy. and the bodies of three human beings sat in a pit half a mile away, marked by nothing, mourned by no one. Through the late 80s and into the 90s, Kevin’s role expanded. He became the consigier of the Winter Hill gang, the number three man behind Whitey and Flemmy. He handled the dayto-day.
He collected from bookies. He shook down drug dealers for rent. He delivered cash bribes to FBI agent John Connelly, who was Whitey’s protector inside the bureau. Kevin would later testify that he personally delivered over $200,000 in cash to Connelly across the years. Cases of expensive wine, a diamond ring, an envelope at Christmas.
The crew made millions, cocaine, gambling, extortion, lone sharking. Kevin estimated their take in his testimony at somewhere north of $25 million across two decades. He never had a job. He never paid taxes on the income. He bought a house in Quincy. He raised his sons. He told his wife he worked in construction.
The peak came in 1991. Whitey, Flemmy, and Kevin pulled the Massachusetts state lottery scam. They learned a winning lottery ticket worth $14 million had been sold at a liquor store Whitey controlled. They strongarmed the actual winner, a man named Michael Linsky, into adding their names to the ticket. They split 14 million four ways.
White he took his cut for 20 years in installments. The lottery commission didn’t catch on for almost a decade. Kevin took his envelope tax-free forever. Then everything started cracking. January 1995, a federal indictment dropped. Whitey Bulier, Steven Flemmy, and several others charged with racketeering, extortion, and murder.
Whitey had been tipped off by John Connelly 24 hours before the warrant was served. He vanished. He went on the run with his girlfriend, Katherine Greg. He took $800,000 in cash and a bag of fake IDs. He would not be seen again for 16 years. Fleming got caught. He was arrested at his Quincy home. He sat in federal lockup and over the next two years, his lawyers fought a motion to suppress on the grounds that the FBI had promised him immunity for being an informant.
That motion is what blew the lid off everything. The motion forced into open court the secret Whitey had kept for 25 years. Bulier had been an FBI informant. Flemmy had been an FBI informant. The entire Winter Hill gang prosecution had been protected from the inside. Kevin Weekes read the court filings.
He read the testimony. And the man he’d considered his surrogate father, the man he’d killed for, the man he’d buried three bodies for, the man he’d taken an oath of silence to, that man had been a rat the whole time. Kevin kept the operation running anyway. He moved cash to Whitey on the run through intermediaries in Florida and Louisiana.
He met with FBI handlers who Bulier trusted. He held the empire together. But something had broken. November 17th, 1999. The FBI and DEA hit Kevin Weekes at his Quincy home. He was charged with 18 counts of raketeering, extortion, and aiding and abetting murder. He was 43 years old.
He was facing life in federal prison. Two weeks. That’s all it took. Inside the bureau, Agent Charles Giant Turko walked into the interview room on November 30th, sat down across from Kevin, and laid out the deal. Cooperate. Give us the bodies. Give us Connelly. Give us Whitey when we find him, and you’ll walk in 5 years.
Kevin asked one question. Did Whitey Bulier inform on me? The agents pulled the file. They showed him the documents. Yes. White. He had given Kevin’s name to the FBI multiple times across the years. Kevin nodded once. He said, “Where do you want me to start?” They drove him to Dorchester to the gully across from Florian Hall off Howlet Street.
Kevin walked into the wooded patch on a freezing January morning, January 13th, 2000. He pointed at the ground. He said, “Barretts on top, McIntyre’s in the middle, Hussies on the bottom. Excavators arrived. The dig took two days. The FBI recovered three sets of remains. The bones still had the pliers marks on the jaws.
” Kevin then led them to a beach in Tennian where the body of Tommy King was buried. Then to another location near the Neponet River where Paulie McGonagal had been put in the ground in 1974. Six bodies in total. Kevin Weekes gave the FBI six graves in three months. He pleaded guilty in 2000. He got five years.
He served his sentence and walked out in 2005, 49 years old, free. Whitey Bulier spent those years on the run. Top 10 most wanted, $2 million reward. He lived in apartments in Santa Monica under the name Charles Gasco. He fed stray cats. He watched television. He stayed off the phone. He thought he’d outlast it. He didn’t. June 22nd, 2011. FBI agents knocked on the door of 301 Princess Apartments on Third Street in Santa Monica. Katherine Greg answered.
They asked for Charlie. Whitey walked out of the bedroom. He was 81 years old. They cuffed him in the hallway. Inside the apartment, they found $822,000 in cash hidden in the walls and 30 firearms. He came back to Boston in chains. The trial started June 12th, 2013 in federal court in South Boston. Judge Denise Casper presiding.
Whitey Bulier faced 32 counts of racketeering and 19 murders. The government star witness was Kevin Weekes. Kevin took the stand on July 8th, 2013. He was 57 years old. He wore a dark suit. He walked past the defense table on his way to the witness chair. Whitey Bulier looked up at him.
The two men locked eyes for the first time in 14 years. Witnesses in the courtroom described it later in their interviews and depositions. Bulier mouthed two words at weeks. F you. Without missing a step, Kevin mouthed it back. F you. He took the stand. He raised his right hand. and he testified for three days straight. He told the jury about Bucky Barrett.
He told them about John McIntyre. He told them about Deborah Hussie. He told them about the basement. He told them about the move to Florian Hall. He told them about the bribes to Connelly. He told them about the lottery scam. He told them about the day Whitey strangled Deborah Hussie and her own stepfather knelt down and pulled out her teeth.
The defense tried to break him. Bulier’s attorney, Jay Carney, asked him on cross-examination if he wasn’t just a rat trying to save his own skin. Kevin looked at him and said, “We’re all rats.” I’m a rat. Whitey was a rat. Flemy was a rat. They were rats before me. That’s the truth. The jury deliberated for 5 days. On August 12th, 2013, they convicted James Whitey Bulier on 31 of 32 counts, finding him responsible for 11 murders.
He was sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus 5 years. He was 84 years old. October 30th, 2018, Whitey Bulier was transferred to a federal prison in Hazelton, West Virginia. He arrived in the morning. By the next day, October 31st, he was dead. beaten to death in his wheelchair by inmates with connections to the Genevese crime family. He was 89.
He was killed by men he’d never met in a prison he’d been in for less than 24 hours on Halloween morning. Kevin Weekes was a free man. He still is. He wrote a book in 2006 called Brutal. He’s done dozens of interviews. He’s appeared in documentaries. He runs A Quiet Life in the Boston area. He says he doesn’t regret cooperating.
He says he regrets the years he spent loyal to a man who was selling him out the whole time. He says the worst day of his life wasn’t the day he buried Bucky Barrett. It was the day he found out his boss had been an informant from the start. Steven Fleming pleaded guilty in 2003 to 10 murders.
He’s serving life without parole. He’s still alive in federal custody. John Connelly, the FBI agent who protected Bulier for two decades, was convicted of rakateeering in 2002 and seconddegree murder in 2008. He’s serving 40 years in Florida State Prison. The remains of Bucky Barrett, John McIntyre, and Deborah Hussie were returned to their families in 2000.
They were buried in proper graves with headstones, with names. After 17 years in the ground across from a firefighter hall in Dorchester, this is the real story of Mr. Arnold French. The character Ray Winstone played for 90 quiet minutes in Black Mass, was a man who buried six human beings, watched his mentor strangle a woman in a kitchen, paid bribes to a corrupt federal agent for 20 years, and then when the walls finally closed in, walked the FBI to every grave he’d dug. He served 5 years.
He outlived his boss. He told the story, “The lesson of Kevin Weekes isn’t about loyalty. It isn’t about betrayal. It’s about the cost of believing in someone whose loyalty was always a lie.” Whitey Bulier sold his crew to the FBI for 25 years while preaching Omar to a kid from the projects who took it seriously.
Kevin Weeks paid that bill in nightmares for four decades. The boss who taught him the rules had broken every one of them first. And when Kevin finally figured that out, he didn’t get angry. He got even. The slowest, quietest revenge in the history of organized crime. Two weeks in a federal cell. Six bodies pointed out in the dirt.
One conviction. One life sentence. One dead boss in West Virginia. One man still walking around Boston. Who knows where every shovel mark was made? If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Drop a comment. What mafia figure should we cover
