This time around, Karas was excited. “Besides Whitey, it doesn’t get any higher up [than Weeks]” she says. She felt Weeks could unlock a deeper truth than what she’d written in Street Soldier. This time she would get the story from Whitey’s closest associate, a man who’d seen his old boss at least five times since Bulger was added to the FBI’s most wanted list, at No. 2, right after Osama Bin Laden.
Karas knew she had an uphill battle. Not only was Weeks a reluctant author who’d avoided the media all his life, but Street Soldier had depicted him as a monster. “I had no idea how he would feel working with me,” she says.
For over a year and a half she tried to contact Weeks in jail, to no avail. During his three years in prison, Weeks had restricted visitation, and severe back problems that eventually led him to the operating table. He was practically unreachable. He never even met the families’ lawyers who had set up this loathed book deal in the first place. Not until that Tuesday night following his release did Karas meet her subject and begin her course in what she calls “Crime 101.”
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For the next six months, Karas and Weeks communicated only by speakerphone, Kevin sitting in his home (neither will reveal where Weeks lives; he refused witness protection), and Karas in her Marblehead abode. She called him at 9 p.m. nearly every night. “Sometimes he’d answer my questions. Sometimes he wouldn’t,” she says. Weeks jokes that he remembers thinking, “I’d rather be in jail than write this book.”
“I honestly think neither one of us liked each other very much,” Karas chuckles. “He was frustrated with me. I was angry that I wasn’t getting the whole story. He always said he was only telling me 20 percent. And I believed him.” The sessions took a personal toll on Karas. “The stories were brutal. What does he mean by ‘This is all I’m giving you?’ It was late at night. I’m not a night-owl person,” she recalls.
The potential consequences of the book never escaped her mind. She knew the stakes were high. “One wrong word could send someone on the street to jail. It could send him back to jail. I couldn’t write something if he hadn’t [already] confessed to it,” says Karas. (She also had a journalistic reason for focusing on crimes Weeks had already confessed to. Wary of getting burned again, she was counting on court testimony to corroborate Weeks’ account.)
It was tedious for Weeks, after 25 years as a mob enforcer, to explain the ins and outs of burying a body in the basement, or threatening a debtor at gunpoint in the back of Whitey’s car. “I think if a man had written his book it probably would have been a lot easier for Kevin,” says Karas. “But because he had to explain every detail of loan sharking, money laundering, and extortion to a woman who had no admitted knowledge of the mob, the average reader can pick it up and understand it.” In the process, the two say they’re setting the record straight. Weeks now jokes, “We were originally going to name the book The Redemption of Phyllis Karas.”
