WHO NEEDS THE SOPRANOS? THE BOSTON MOB IN REAL TIME

MURDER SCENE IN SOUTH BOSTON 1973

WHITEY BULGER

RALPH RANALLI, BOSTON GLOBE - A former top lieutenant to South Boston crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger said he had Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr in the sights of a high-powered rifle but didn't shoot because Carr came out of his house hand-in-hand with his young daughter.

"I was down at his house . . . about 5:30 in the morning, across the street in a cemetery with a rifle, waiting for him to come out," Bulger henchman Kevin Weeks told the television show "60 Minutes" in an interview. "And he come out . . . between 7:15, 7:30, and he had his daughter with him."

"I assume it was his daughter, young girl," Weeks told correspondent Ed Bradley, according to a press release issued by CBS yesterday. "He was holding her by the hand, going to his car. So I had to pass on it. I didn't want to kill him in front of his daughter."

The interview is scheduled to air Sunday.

Weeks, who said he had been watching Carr from the cemetery, gave the interview as part of a publicity push for his forthcoming book, "Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob. . .

Carr, who also hosts a talk show on WRKO-AM, has been a frequent and acerbic critic of Bulger and his family, especially Whitey's brother, William, then president of the state Senate. Carr, who recently released his own book, "The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized and Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century," could not be reached for comment yesterday.

According to the press release, Carr acknowledged living across the street from a cemetery in Acton and allowed that Weeks could have been there. He told the news program, though, that he believes Weeks probably lacked the fortitude to go through with the crime.

"It doesn't seem like Kevin would have the stones to do it," he told Bradley. "If he said Whitey was there, well, you wouldn't be interviewing me, because I'd be dead."

Weeks said that he and Bulger also came up with a plan to kill Carr by stuffing a basketball full of the military-grade explosive C4 and leaving it in his driveway. That plan, Weeks said, was abandoned because too many other people could have been hurt.

Yesterday afternoon, on his radio show, Carr was more dismissive of Weeks's assassination story, suggesting that it had been entirely fabricated. At least one of his callers suggested that the ball idea had been stolen from the 1994 movie "Death Wish 5.". . . Elsewhere in the interview, he told Bradley that Bulger, a longtime member of the FBI's ultrasecret Top Echelon informant program, betrayed his underlings and no longer deserves loyalty. He said Bulger's henchmen believed the crime boss was bribing law enforcement for information. "We had sources in law enforcement. So as far as we were concerned, the relationship was one-way," he said. "Now we find out he's giving information."

BOSTON GLOBE - Among members of the Boston underworld, no one was closer to "Whitey" Bulger than Kevin Weeks, a South Boston native and loyal tough guy who Bulger groomed as his successor and treated like a son. During the 1980s, Weeks operated several of the Southie convenience stores and liquor marts that served as fronts for the Bulger organization. Weeks received "rent" payments from loan sharks and bookmakers, insulating Bulger from the transactions, and also helped shake down local crooks and businessmen behind on their debts to the gang.

Following Bulger's disappearance in 1995, Weeks acted as "operational chief" of the Bulger organization, taking orders from the fugitive gangster over the phone and keeping Bulger well-funded by funnelling thousands of dollars into his bank account.

Once Bulger and Flemmi were outed as FBI snitches, Weeks became the target of local mobsters who had been ratted out by the pair. He also grew increasingly bitter toward his former bosses. In 1999, he was arrested and charged in a federal racketeering indictment. Facing the prospect of charges that could send him to prison for life, and with no financial or legal assistance forthcoming from Bulger's ruined organization, Weeks agreed to cooperate against his old boss. In 2000 he led police to the bodies of eight alleged Bulger victims buried in various locations around Boston.

JEFF DONN, ASSOCIATED PRESS, 2002 - For more than 20 years, FBI headquarters knew that its Boston agents were using hit men and mob leaders as informers and shielding them from prosecution for serious crimes, including murder, The Associated Press has learned. Until now, the still-unraveling Boston FBI scandal has been portrayed largely as the work of a handful of local agents, mavericks willing to deal with the devil to bring down a Mafia family.

But documents obtained by the AP directly connect FBI headquarters in Washington to a pattern of collusion with notorious killers. The AP found 20 memos from Boston agents to the FBI director's office, along with six replies, showing that headquarters was told of the abuses and condoned them.

Written between 1964 and 1987, the memos made it clear to Washington that the informers had killed and were likely to kill again, describing one of them as "the most dangerous individual known" in the Boston area. The memos also alerted headquarters that two of the informers were crime bosses, active "at the policy-making level" of criminal enterprises in Boston.

Headquarters also knew that its Boston agents were shielding the informers from other investigative agencies. It knew that one informer who masterminded a murder was allowed to go free as four innocent men were sent to prison in his place.

J. Edgar Hoover, William Sessions and William Webster headed the FBI in the years when the memos were written. Hoover is dead; Webster and Sessions declined to be interviewed. It is unknown if any of them read the memos.

HOWIE CARR SITE

HOWIE CARR'S 'WHITEY WATCH'
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SIXTY MINUTES INTERVIEW