January 6th, 1998. Quincy, Massachusetts. A cold New England morning. The kind where your breath hangs in the air like smoke. Kevin Weekes walked out of his house, glanced at the street, and saw the cars unmarked. Government plates. He didn’t run. He didn’t fight. He just stood there as the FBI agents stepped out, hands near their hips, and told him he was under arrest.
Federal racketeering, murder, extortion, the whole menu. Weeks looked at the agent in charge and said five words that would echo through South Boston for the next decade. You took your time, fellas. Then they put him in cuffs. Kevin Weekes was 38 years old, a former Golden Gloves boxer, a bouncer at a souy bar called Triple O’s, the right hand of James Whitey Bulier, the most feared gangster in Boston history.
He knew where the bodies were buried, literally. He had dug some of the graves himself. He had pulled teeth from corpses with pliers so the dental records wouldn’t match. He had watched Whitey strangle people in a basement on East Third Street while he stood there holding a body bag. This is the story of the kid from the projects who became a monsters monster.
The man they called two weeks because if you crossed him that’s about how long you had to live. This is the story of how Kevin Weekes watched, learned, killed, and buried for the Winter Hill Gang. And then when the walls finally closed in, he became the one thing the Boston underworld swore never to produce.
A rat, a talker, a witness for the government. But here’s what makes this story different. Weeks wasn’t a coward. He wasn’t broken. He was something stranger. He was a man with a conscience that had been buried for 20 years. And when it finally cracked open, it didn’t just bury Whitey Bulier. It dug up the FBI itself. Kevin Patrick Weekes was born March 21st, 1956, South Boston, Old Colony Housing Project, the sixth of six kids.
His father was a Korean War veteran who worked as a janitor at MIT and used his fists at home. His mother held the family together with rosaries and rage. In Souy back then, you didn’t grow up so much as survive. The neighborhood was Irish, workingass, fiercely loyal, and walled off from the rest of Boston by an unwritten code.
You didn’t talk to outsiders. You didn’t talk to cops. And you sure as hell didn’t talk to the FBI. Weeks was a fighter by age 12. Not by choice, by necessity. His older brothers boxed at the local gym. He followed. He had quick hands, a flat nose by 15, and the kind of cold blue stare that made grown men step back.
He went to South Boston High School during the busing riots of 1974 when the neighborhood erupted in violence over court-ordered integration. He watched cops beat his friends. He watched his friends beat back. He learned early that authority was just another gang. The only difference was the uniform. By 1978, Weeks was working the door at Triple O’s Lounge on West Broadway.
228 West Broadway to be exact. A dive bar with sticky floors, cheap beer, and a back room where deals got made and beatings got delivered. He was 22 years old, 6 feet tall, 210 lb, and he could put a man through a plate glass window without spilling his drink. The owners loved him. The wise guys noticed him.
And one night, a man in a Red Sox cap walked in, ordered a club soda, and watched Kevin Weeks toss three Marines into the street in under a minute. That man was James Bulier, whitey, 49 years old, silver hair, ice blue eyes, a body kept lean by daily push-ups in a basement gym. He had done nine years in Alcatraz for bank robbery.
He had come home in 1965 and quietly, methodically built an empire of drugs, extortion, and murder across South Boston. By the late 70s, he ran the Winter Hill gang, and he ran it with a secret weapon that nobody in the neighborhood knew about. Whitey Bulier was a top echelon informant for the FBI. He had been ratting out the Italian mafia to a corrupt agent named John Connelly since 1975.
The FBI protected him. He killed whoever he wanted and nobody, not the cops, not the state police, not the DEA could touch him. Weeks didn’t know any of that. All he saw was a polite, soft-spoken older man who tipped well and watched everything. Whitey started coming in regularly. He’d nod at Kevin. Sometimes he’d ask a question.
How’s your mother? How’s the door tonight? Small things. Then one afternoon in 1979, Whitey pulled him aside and said, “Kid, you ever want to make some real money? Come see me.” That was the recruitment. No oath, no ceremony, just an invitation from the devil himself. Within a year, Kevin Weekes was Whitey Bulger’s shadow.
He drove the car, he carried the gun, he collected the envelopes. He stood at Whitey’s shoulder during sitdowns with bookmakers, drug dealers, lone sharks, and every other parasite who paid tribute to the Winter Hill gang. He learned the business from the inside. And the business, he discovered, was simple. Whitey didn’t sell drugs. He sold permission.
Every cocaine dealer in South Boston paid Whitey a tax. Every bookmaker paid rent. Every lone shark picked up a percentage. If you didn’t pay, you got a beating. If you didn’t pay after the beating, you disappeared. Here’s how the rent system worked. A mid-level Coke dealer in Souy might move 2 kilos a week.
At 1985 prices, that’s roughly $60,000 in gross revenue. Whitey’s crew would show up, sit the guy down, and explain the math. You owe us $3,000 a week cash every Friday. In return, nobody robs you, nobody muscles you, nobody touches you, the dealer paid. Multiply that by 40 dealers across the neighborhood, and Whitey was pulling in over $120,000 a week in pure tribute, tax-free cash.
And Kevin Weekes was the man who carried the bag. But the rent was only the first scheme. The second was extortion. South Boston in the 80s was full of legitimate businessmen who had a dirty secret. A girlfriend on the side, a gambling problem, an IRS issue. Why he would find out? He always found out.
He had cops on the payroll, FBI agents feeding him intel, and a network of informants that stretched from the docks to city hall. Once he had leverage, he’d send weeks to deliver the message. Pay us or we tell. Pay us or we burn down your warehouse. Pay us or your kid doesn’t come home from school. They paid. They always paid.
The third scheme was the one that made the millions. Drug importation. Despite Whitey’s carefully cultivated image as a man who kept drugs out of Souy, the truth was the opposite. He flooded the neighborhood with cocaine and marijuana. He partnered with a crew out of Charles Town to move multi-tonon shipments of pot through the Boston Harbor.
One shipment in 1983, cenamed the Valhalla operation, involved 7 tons of marijuana on a fishing boat headed for Ireland to arm the IRA. The boat got seized. The investigation should have buried Whitey. Instead, his FBI handler tipped him off and Whitey walked away clean. Kevin Weekes watched it happen. He learned the lesson.
The rules didn’t apply to them. By 1981, Weeks had been promoted. He wasn’t just a driver anymore. He was a killer. And the place where he learned that trade was a small brick house at 799 East 3rd Street, South Boston. From the outside, it looked like every other triple- decker on the block. Inside, it was a slaughterhouse.
The basement had a concrete floor, a workbench, a roll of plastic sheeting, and a length of nylon rope. This was the death house. And between 1981 and 1985, at least three people were murdered in that basement, while Kevin Weekes stood guard upstairs. The first one he witnessed up close was Arthur Bucky Barrett. May 24th, 1983.
Barrett was a master safecracker who had pulled off the depositor’s trust bank job in Medford two years earlier. He’d made off with over a million dollars in cash and jewelry. Whitey heard about it. Whitey wanted his cut. Barrett was lured to the East Third Street house under the pretense of a business meeting.
The moment he walked in, Whitey put a gun to his head and said, “Bucky, you’re caught.” For the next several hours, they chained him to a chair in the basement and bled him dry. bank accounts, safe deposit boxes, cash, every dollar Barrett had ever earned or stolen. When there was nothing left to take, Whitey walked behind him and put a bullet in the back of his head.
Steve, the rifleman, Flemmy, Whitey’s partner, knelt down with a pair of dental pliers and began pulling Barrett’s teeth out one by one. Kevin Weekes helped wrap the body. Then he helped dig the grave in the dirt basement floor. Weeks would later testify in chilling matter-of-act language that the whole thing felt routine. You get used to it, he said.
After the first one, the second one is easier. After the second one, you stop thinking about it. That was the psychological transformation. The kid from the projects who used to defend his friends in the schoolyard was now a man who pulled teeth from corpses and slept fine afterward.
The second body in that basement was John McIntyre. November 1984. McIntyre was a Quincy fisherman who had been involved in the Valhalla gununn operation. He got picked up by Canadian authorities panicked and started talking to the DEA. Whitey’s FBI handler, John Connelly, passed the warning. McIntyre had to go. They brought him to East Third Street.
They chained him to a chair. Whitey questioned him for hours, calm as a priest, hearing confession. Then he tried to shoot him. The gun jammed. So Whitey wrapped a rope around McIntyre’s neck and strangled him. It took several minutes. McIntyre was a strong man. He fought weeks, stood in the doorway. He didn’t look away.
When it was over, Whitey reportedly turned to him, breathing hard, and asked if he wanted a glass of water. The third was Deborah Hussie, 1985. She was the stepdaughter of Steve Flemmy, 26 years old, a heroin addict. Beautiful, broken, and dangerous because she was starting to talk about being molested by Flemmy as a child. They couldn’t have that.
They lured her to East Third Street. Whitey strangled her in the kitchen with his bare hands while Flemmy watched. And then, in a detail so dark it borders on incomprehensible, Flemmy knelt down next to his dead stepdaughter and pulled her teeth out himself. Kevin Weeks was 28 years old. He helped carry her body to the basement. He helped dig the hole.
You have to understand something about Kevin Weekes at this point in his life. He wasn’t a sadist. He didn’t enjoy it. By every account, including his own, he was a man who had walked step by step into a world he could no longer leave. Whitey was his father figure, his mentor, his protector.
The man who had given him status, money, and meaning. To question Whitey was to die. So Weeks did what he was told. He buried the bodies. He kept the secrets. and he watched year after year as the corpses piled up. By the late 1980s, Whitey decided the East Third Street house was getting too hot, so they moved the bodies.
On Halloween night 1985, Weeks and Flemmy dug up Barrett, McIntyre, and Hussie from the basement floor, loaded them into garbage bags, drove them across town, and rearied them in a wooded gully across from Florian Hall on Hall Street near the Neponet River in Dorchester. Weeks remembered the address. He remembered the trees.
He remembered exactly how deep they dug. That memory would matter more than a decade later when he finally decided to talk. The peak of the Winter Hill gang came around 1990. Whitey was untouchable. He had over $20 million stashed in safe deposit boxes from Boston to Dublin. He owned a liquor store, a real estate office, and a piece of the Massachusetts state lottery.
In 1991, a couple of Whitey’s bookies hit a $14 million mass millions jackpot. Whitey muscled in, claimed he had been a partner in the winning ticket, and walked away with a share of the prize. The state paid him quarterly for years. That was the audacity of it. He was a serial killer, cashing lottery checks from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
But pressure was building. The DEA had been trying to nail Whitey for a decade. They knew about the drugs. They knew about the murders. But every time they got close, the case fell apart. Witnesses disappeared. Wiretaps came up empty. It was as if Whitey could read their minds. And he could because John Connelly was telling him everything.
Then in 1994, a new federal prosecutor named Fred Weaack arrived in Boston. He didn’t care about Whitey’s reputation. He didn’t trust the FBI. He built a case from outside the bureau using the DEA and the state police. On December 23rd, 1994, the indictment came down. Racketeering, extortion, money laundering.
Whitey got a phone call from Connelly. The FBI agent who had spent 20 years protecting him gave him one last gift. He told him to run and Whitey ran. He disappeared on December 23rd, 1994, and stayed gone for 16 years. Kevin Weekes didn’t run. He stayed in South Boston. He kept Whitey’s operation going. He moved money. He passed messages.
He met Whitey in secret locations across the country whenever the boss came back to collect cash. New York, Chicago, New Orleans. Weeks would drive the money in suitcases, hand it over, and drive home. He was the lifeline. He was the bridge. And then in 1999, the bridge collapsed. On November 17th, 1999, Kevin Weekes was indicted on federal racketeering charges.
He sat in a cell at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility and did the math. Whitey was gone. Fleming was already in custody and refusing to cooperate. The FBI’s protection had vanished. The other made guys were lining up to testify against each other. And Kevin Weekes, the loyal soldier, was looking at multiple life sentences for crimes he had committed for a man who had abandoned him.
He flipped quietly without drama. He sat down with prosecutor Fred Weaack and federal agents and he said, “I’ll tell you everything.” And he did. He told them about the rent system, about the extortions, about John Connelly and the FBI corruption. And then he told them about the bodies, the ones still in the ground. January 13th, 2000.
A cold, gray morning. Kevin Weekes led federal agents to a wooded patch of land off Howlet Street in Dorchester. He pointed at a spot near a chainlink fence. He said, “Dig here.” The agents dug. Six feet down. They found bones. Then a second set. Then a third. Bucky Barrett, John McIntyre, Deborah Hussie. 15 years in the dirt, their teeth long gone, identified eventually by DNA and the scraps of clothing still clinging to their skeletons.
Weeks stood there as they were exumed. He didn’t cry. He didn’t speak. He just watched. The discovery shattered Boston. Three families finally got their loved ones back. And the FBI, the institution that had protected Whiteidy Bulier for two decades, was exposed as one of the most corrupt outfits in the history of American law enforcement.
John Connelly was indicted, convicted, and sent to prison. Other agents lost their careers. The Boston FBI field office became a national disgrace. Kevin Weekes had not just turned on his boss. He had detonated a bomb under the federal government. Weeks pleaded guilty. He cooperated fully. In 2004, after serving roughly 5 years, he was released.
5 years for a man who had participated in five murders and buried three of them. The deal was that brutal, that necessary, because without Kevin Weekes, prosecutors had nothing. With him, they had everything. He came home to South Boston. The neighborhood didn’t kill him. They could have, but there was a quiet understanding.
Whitey had betrayed them all. The man who had cloaked himself in souy loyalty had been an FBI snitch the whole time, weeks at least, had told the truth. At the end, he wrote a book, brutal, published in 2006. He gave interviews. He sat across from reporters and described in flat, unsparing pros what he had done. No excuses, no glory, just the facts.
In 2011, the FBI finally caught Whitey Bulier in Santa Monica, California. 81 years old, living in a rent controlled apartment with his girlfriend, $800,000 in cash and 30 guns hidden in the walls. They flew him back to Boston for trial. And the star witness against him was Kevin Weekes.
He took the stand in July 2013. He looked across the courtroom at the man who had been his father, his mentor, his master, and he told the jury everything, the murders, the graves, the lies. Whitey stared back, cold, silent. The line that defined Kevin Weekes’s testimony, the one that ran on every news broadcast in America, came when a reporter asked him to describe what kind of man Whitey Bulier really was.
Weeks didn’t pause. He said he was a stone cold killer. He could be talking to you about gardening one minute asking about your roses and the next minute he’d be strangling a woman in front of you and then he’d go right back to talking about the roses. That was the truth of it. That was the horror.
Whitey Bulier was convicted on August 12th, 2013. 11 murders, racketeering, extortion. He got two consecutive life sentences plus 5 years. He was sent to a federal prison in West Virginia on October 30th, 2018 at age 89. He was beaten to death in his cell by other inmates within 12 hours of arriving.
No witnesses, no surveillance footage. The murder remains officially unsolved. Steve Flemmy pleaded guilty to 10 murders and is serving life in federal prison. John Connelly is serving 40 years for seconddegree murder in Florida. related to a hit Whitey ordered. The Boston FBI office was overhauled. The top echelon informant program was reformed.
Every protection Whitey had built crumbled the moment Kevin Weekes decided to talk. And Weeks himself, he lives quietly in the Boston area. He’s been out of prison for over 20 years. He still gets recognized in Souy. Some people nod, some people cross the street. He has said in interviews that he doesn’t sleep well, that he sees the faces, that the basement on East Third Street is still with him every night in the dark.
Here’s what Kevin Weekes understood that nobody else did. Whitey Bulier wasn’t a movie villain. He wasn’t a Shakespearean monster. He was a man who could chat about roses and strangle a woman in the same hour and feel nothing about either. The horror wasn’t the violence. The horror was the normaly around the violence.
The horror was that for 20 years Kevin Weekes, a boxer from the projects, helped him do it and slept through the night. This is the real story of organized crime. Not the suits, not the steakouses, not the loyalty. It’s a basement on East Third Street. Three bodies in a hole near a fence in Dorchester. and a man who finally after 20 years of digging graves decided to tell the truth.
Kevin Weekes was the bouncer who became the bagman who became the gravedigger who became the witness. He buried the dead and then he dug them back up. He was right hand and in the end he was the hand that pointed. If you found this story as haunting as we did, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week and tell us in the comments.
