When Karas met with her agent to discuss her next project, she expected to write another young-adult novel. Instead her agent proposed a change of pace: that Karas write the life story of an Irish mobster named Eddie “Mack” Mackenzie. Mackenzie was offering an insider’s view of Bulger’s gang, but that didn’t mean much to Karas, who’d learned most of what she new about the mob from watching The Sopranos. “I knew nothing about Whitey, or as much as anyone else. He was a crime boss.” She learned quickly.
But jotting down the escapades of cold-blooded murderers didn’t bring peace of mind. In Street Soldier, the book she and Eddie Mack published in 2003, she described how Whitey loved “all kinds of knives, although he was partial to one six-inch hunting knife,” and the useful fact that “ice picks leave very little blood but can cause hemorrhaging,” but that when it came to Whitey cutting people, “however he did it, he did it with great pleasure.” Mob writing struck her as a brutal profession. “It’s not for the squeamish,” Karas says, “and I’m squeamish.”
Karas now disavows much of Street Soldier. She says Eddie used her to write an account punctuated with fabrication and hearsay. She came to believe that Mack didn’t know Whitey well, and never saw many of the crimes he spoke of. Sources that could’ve disputed Eddie’s story were either in jail, like Weeks and Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi, or were on the lam, like Whitey, and therefore unlikely to respond. Weeks, in particular, was portrayed as a monster. In Street Soldier, Bulger, Weeks, and Flemmi stick a gun in a little girl’s mouth to extort her father into selling his Southie bar. “That never happened,” Weeks tells the B&N audience. “There were a lot of inaccuracies, to put it politely.”
After Street Soldier, Karas decided to duck out of the local limelight and take time to plot her next route. She thought she might return to People interviews and her Boston University teaching career. But just when she thought she was out, the mob pulled her back in.
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Kevin Weeks became a best-selling author not because he wanted to, but because he was being sued.
Weeks never wanted to strike a deal with the Feds, either, but in the end he didn’t have much of a choice. When it came out in the papers that Bulger had ratted out not only the competition, but members of his own gang, Weeks became a marked man. He turned himself in and quite literally showed investigators where the bodies were buried: eight of them, to be exact. He admitted to being a party to several murders carried out by Whitey and Flemmi. But he wasn’t a stool pigeon by nature, and spilling his guts for a national audience didn’t align with his sense of honor or duty.
What it came down to was this: he’s sitting in a jail cell facing civil lawsuits from five victims’ families and looking at bankruptcy. Most victims’ lawyers try to prevent the thugs from making money off their clients’ pain. But these lawyers took one look at Kevin Weeks and realized his most valuable asset was his life story. They wanted him to sell it. To milk it out of him, they decided to ask someone who had experience writing about the South Boston Irish mob: Phyllis Karas.
