“Sure, sure … I get into Vegas late tonight. Call me tomorrow. I’ll be glad to talk to you about boxing. And I got lots of Boston boxers who’ll talk, too.” The speaker was Petey Welch, the Ultimate Fighter TV show’s boxing coach and longtime Boston habitué, still making his home in Boston—Southie, to be exact. “That the kind of angle you’re looking for, yeah?”
“Well, actually I wanted to talk to you about Kevin Weeks.”
It was great. Especially if by “great” you mean like what happens when the needle scratches across a record right before the party’s over.
“Um, so you want me to talk about Kevin …?” This whole road had been leading up to this whole moment because my contact, also from Boston, hadn’t been able to bring himself to tell Petey what I wanted because all of sudden we were all speaking a local dialect far removed from the klieg lights and spokesmodels and celebrities ringside, and one that had everything to do with exactly the ways in which you … DO … NOT … FUCK … AROUND.
So it hung there before it had to be spelled out, quickly and more than directly: I had just gotten back from talking to Kevin Weeks myself and he was in no way opposed to us talking about his past as a Golden Gloves boxer, his years boxing afterward, his bouncing in the busing stab-a-Negro-with-an-American-flag-busing-in-Boston of the mid to late ’70s, as well as his martial arts competitions and that my interest began and ended there. He paused. “Okay. Call me tomorrow. We can talk then.”
And there it was: we had gone from fun and games to not so much fun and not so many games because, you see, in case you didn’t know, Kevin Weeks had just (well, February 4, 2005, to be exact) gotten out of the penitentiary, where he had served six years of his debt to humanity. A debt that had been paid as a result of him pleading out from murder in the first degree, extortion, and a bunch of RICO statute shit to the very simple aiding and of murder (and not actually committing any of the eight he’s on record for) along with an agreement to speak truth to power—or rat on the rats, depending on who you talk to—about Whitey Bulger, crime boss, FBI informant, and now most-wanted-list fugitive from justice. Not fun, not games, but ample and sobering reason for Petey’s stall because, you see, Petey still lives in Southie, and really, who needs this kind of action at home?
But screw being at home, visiting Southie, you get the sense that this is not the kind of action anyone needs. The place doesn’t have the stink of the usual urban necropolis circa mid to late ’70s NY with its almost Hollywood backlot blocks and blocks of burned-out buildings and abandoned lots full of garbage. It doesn’t seem to draw its power from any sort of public-works theory of ruin. Rather, I notice as I walk down its streets, 6′1 ½″, 230 pounds, as I am the day when I do, and have to step out of the way of a much smaller seventy-two-year-old man who radiated “not giving a fuck” until he saw me with Kevin, its power is one of association. Who you know. Who the FUCK you know. And walking with Weeks it becomes abundantly clear that he IS someone to know.
What I know: what he tells me. From a family of boxers, won the Boys Club boxing championship at six years old, the South Boston Baby Gloves tournament at seven, and before he was sixteen he’d also win the Silver Mittens and fought in the Golden Gloves and the Junior Olympics. Seventy-eight fights in the ring and two losses.
Nice.
And despite a family pedigree that included older brothers at Harvard, Kevin took the road less traveled straight into the heart of Boston’s whole experience with busing, settling as a security guard in Southie high schools that were fucked to the highest by some integration-mad bureaucrat’s disregard for regional politics (pitting the working-class poor against the working-class poor) and then a later move that’d change his life: straight into bouncing. That is, the active application of force in creating an environment ultimately conducive to you drinking yourself into an angry stupor without teetering over into non-drinking assholishness. And for those doing the teetering over: usually a beating.
“Me and some friends of mine went over to this bar,” says Kevin. As I am a Brooklyn native, it takes me a bit for my ears to calibrate to his accent, not Boston tweed but something much harder. “And they were looking for bouncers and so we said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it.’ But they took one look at me and said, ‘Bar back.’ I didn’t weigh so much then. But like my first night there I was hauling ice or something and something breaks out at the door and so I jump over the bar and guys are going this way and that and I fucking crack this guy. Jab, cross, hook, and he’s out. After that no more bar back.”
No more bar back and on more than one occasion a clear-headed brutality that was noted and noticed by Jimmy “Whitey” Bulger, the reigning head of the Boston Irish “mafia,” in quotes here because everything about it bespeaks its complete Irishness: less ornate than the Italian mob, and much more uncontrollable. And as these things tend to happen, “notice” turned into “worked with” and an association that spanned a lot of bullets, a lot of unmarked graves, and a lot of, um, force projection.
“You got to understand something about how we worked. If you didn’t fuck up, you didn’t see us,” said the now-210-pound Weeks. “And if you did see us and you hadn’t fucked up you had nothing to worry about.”
But what constituted a fuckup? Wearing a belt and suspenders? What?
“It could be anything,” Weeks said. “Usually somebody thinking they were tougher than they are.”
A common bouncing work-related annoyance that was apparently translatable to organized crime.
But Petey calls back finally: “I gotta talk to Kevin before I can talk to you. You know?”
And I do, and say so, and so he talks to Kevin.
“Okay. Kevin says you’re okay. I don’t know if you knew this but I grew up in the same projects as Kevin. I fought the same fights. That annual St. Patty’s Day show goes back like seventy years. Fathers would bring their sons, you’d train for it for like eight weeks beforehand and if you weren’t in it, well, you might as well have been wearing a skirt. Or been very good at running.”
But by the time Petey had started his climb through the same stops—Baby Gloves, Junior Olympics, Golden Gloves—Kevin was “already the man.”
“One of my favorite Kevin stories is of him slapping this kid for something and knocking him out cold with an open-hand shot and then on the way down the kid starts pissing his own pants.” Petey and I both laugh, but he goes on to explain, “Nothing gets done that’s unjustified, though. He wasn’t a bully, because bullies wouldn’t last long. Somebody would turn on him. So I’d say he probably never did it without a reason.”
And one thing is exceedingly clear in my dealings with the fifty-year-old Weeks and that’s that there’s a certain clarity to his approach to the world that made sense. Occam’s-razor sense. “When I loaned money to someone the first thing I’d ask them is how much they made. I ain’t lending four grand to a guy who makes four hundred a week. I know he can’t pay. But I’d loan something smaller and nobody ever got hurt if they came and explained to me why they had a problem paying me back that week. But a guy gets …”
Chesty?
“Yeah. Well, then, you know … I’d have to let him know … knock him in the mouth, or something.”
And the murders?
“Well, that was Jimmy’s thing. They seemed to relax him. I got stuck with the cleanup. I remember once pulling the pickaxe up out of this guy’s sternum and his whole abdominal cavity came with it. Now THAT was disgusting. Took three days to get the smell out of my nose after that.” And he gives the gas face and leaves me wondering if that kind of clarity, that sangfroid, was natural or just nurtured.
“In the ring, it was all about control. Strategy and so on.” We’ve moved from Kevin’s girlfriend’s car, a relatively new, gray, conservative-model American something or other, to his spot at Rotary Variety on a block in Southie that he “used to own all the businesses on until the families of the victims wanted to take me to civil court, and so …
“But in the ring there were refs, but most of my time in there I was emotionless. I mean, I wasn’t ANGRY with the guy I was fighting. In fact I couldn’t afford to be angry since that meant I wasn’t fighting clear-headed. Outside the ring, though, well, anything could happen, and I was prepared for that too. And you know what most people didn’t realize: even though I was hanging out at a bar I wasn’t DRINKING at the bar. I mean I’d have a drink in my hand but it wouldn’t be booze. And I was stone-cold sober. Because I wanted to know what was going on the whole time. Because you never know.”
And Petey echoes this, though at thirty-five and successful with his on-camera career it rolls off of his tongue with a certain brio that bespeaks a real joy connected to this chaotic never-knowing. “Nothing beats it, man. Because there’s no greater power than being able to walk into the bar, or a club, with your boys, and if a beef breaks out, if someone’s mean-mugging you … that you could just electrocute guys. I mean, I was 160 pounds when I was seventeen. At 5′11″. But knowing that I could lay out a larger guy, have him thinking he’s at home taking a bubble bath when he’s laying on the floor, well that was great. A coach of mine once said, ‘You got guys that want to be known as fighters. And then you got fighters.’ Fighting was a tradition in Southie. But that Southie is gone.”
Gone. Grabbed by the gentry that’s aiming to turn everything into something cute that serves coffee. The old neighborhood character, for better or for ill, is changing. Boxing as a neighborhood mainstay, its underworld taint still sticking, is changing too. “It’s a shadow of what it once was,” says Petey. “I hate to see it all washed away but this is like the evolution of fight sports. And I’m a boxing guy so I sort of hate to say it but the reality of it is that the mixed martial artists today train a lot harder and are a lot tougher than some of the boxers were.” So the race, and the survival thereof, is going to the fittest, the toughest? Maybe.
“I’m much more dangerous now than when I was a kid,” says Weeks, hunched down over his Keno card. “I’m fifty. And while I’m not looking for anything other than a job, I’m also not going to take anything from anybody for any reason.”
But with the position gone, presumably the money, Jimmy “Whitey” Bulger’s weight, and the looming specter of one-way car trips to “We-ain’t-seen-him,” it seems like it’d be a prime setup for taking everything from everybody.
And Kevin just laughs. “You know they brought Leonardo DiCaprio in to see me. He was doing some research for this movie The Departed. So he’s hanging out two, maybe two and a half hours, and asking all kinds of questions. Nice kid. And not so short, either. Wide shoulders. But he’s asking about everything. Some of it even made it in the movie, but toward the end of the interview he started getting into character and he says some shit like ‘When you were an informant …’ And I lost it. I mean the regular person, well it takes them some time to get from zero to sixty. It usually took LESS than that time for Jimmy [Whitey] to get to six hundred. I wasn’t as bad as all that, but I was hot. Because I never was an informant. What I told never hurt nobody but me. But the agents who were there were trying to calm me down.” He chuckles again. “The kid apologized and said, ‘I’ll never make THAT mistake again, sir.’
“My point though is that not only do you not unlearn things but some of these things are with you forever, and so when I see these guys on the news, like Andrew Dice Clay or Michael Richards or something, crying and rushing off to rehab and regretting their whole lives, I have to laugh. I regret some things. It’s human. I regret I didn’t spend more time with my kids. And my ex-wife. But you’ll never see me crying on TV for nothing else I did. Fuck that. I can’t change history. That’s why you never hear me making a big deal out of only aiding and abetting those murders. If Jimmy had asked me to, I’d have done it. Now, it’s not like I didn’t learn anything, I did. But I also know that regret doesn’t do any good.”
Well, what did you learn, say, about fighting? That might help me.
“You know, when we started working on my book [Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger’s Irish Mob] I had some crazy meetings. This one woman suggested that at first I make it a HOW TO guide. Like how to extort people,” he exhales, all comedic contempt. “Then I kind of suggested that we should probably just make it a comedy, and she’s like ‘Yeah yeah,’ before I pulled the plug on that. But if you’re going to ask me I’ll tell you because it’s like just what you did when you were a bouncer [almost].
1. Don’t drink. In public. I always needed to know what’s going on.
2. Jimmy [Whitey] always put himself in the back so he could watch the whole room.
3. When the hitting starts, I’d just always hit with everything I got right out the box. I remember hitting this guy who had like a motorcycle helmet on and I hit him so hard I cracked the helmet. A right cross. I mean I didn’t like the idea of having to roll around on the ground with some guy bigger than me. And …
4. If I’m about to be done, I’m going out screaming, kicking, fighting, jumping out of windows because at least then you have a chance.
“That’s about it.”
Almost, or, not nearly. What he doesn’t talk about is not even how far could you go, but how far WOULD you go? It dawns on me, that this is the true brand differentiator. If it’s not what makes a man start fires, it’s probably what makes you afraid of the one who does, and that’s his willing and willful ideation of a world where no one fucks with you because you, if called upon to do so, will stop them in the most critical way possible: completely.
And when we drive back across town to where I’m staying, he drives that way. Cars in Boston traffic more like middle-fingered missiles of angry intent, whipping around us, and capably and almost … regally, Kevin, not having lost the habits of days being tailed by feds, drives, not breaking any laws, ignoring the beeping and talking about everything at a measured clip until we pull up to the curb. We shake hands. His hands are heavy like the hands of a man larger than his 5′11″. There are unasked and unanswered questions regarding who, how, and what’s next for him, but it largely seems like these questions are only mine. Which just about says it all.
THE PUNCH LINE & HOW TO GET IT
Robert Mitchum’s got his hand splayed out in front of him. The flick is The Night of the Hunter, and Mitchum’s killer preacher, cloaked in holy cloth and bad intention, explains how the hand that’s tattooed LOVE gives, and the one whose knuckles were tattooed HATE, takes away.
“Would you like me to tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand? The story of good and evil? H-A-T-E! It was with this left hand that old brother Cain struck the blow that laid his brother low. L-O-V-E! You see these fingers, dear hearts? These fingers has veins that run straight to the soul of man. The right hand, friends, the hand of love. Now watch, and I’ll show you the story of life. Those fingers, dear hearts, is always a-warring and a-tugging, one agin t’other. Now watch ’em!”
The point is, as he curled his hand into firm fists (and I am reminded here of now-dead comedian Sam Kinison saying he knew what turned Mr. Hand into Mr. Fist), the total import of our species brand-differentiator was driven home: while we can’t run for shit (think: man vs. squirrel), our teeth are not worth a damn (think: the Appalachians, the British Isles), the average chimp is three times as strong as the average man (think: Lance Link), and our much-vaunted brains are not worth much more when weighed in the balance against nature’s great hunters (think: the common house cat), we can, if given the proper incentives and know-how, beat each other’s asses quite thoroughly.
Forthwith the basic punches, and since most people throw whatever punch they throw, incorrectly, here’s a thumbnail cheat sheet: a punch is less of a push (ignore Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movies as a guide as he throws some of the worst on-screen punches ever) and much more of a throw (think: Nolan Ryan).
Now knuckle up.
JAB: The lead arm (largely determined by which foot is more forward than the other; if you’re right-handed it’ll be your left foot, if you’re left-handed, or southpaw, it’ll be your right foot) extends directly toward the sucker fool enough to still be standing there. This punch should snap and is used usually to set up something else—a cross (see opposite page, top), or a kick, or a takedown, if you’re a grappler.
CROSS: This is the grandstand of punches. It’s the one you usually see in the movies and it’s the one in the knockout reel if you’re a sports fan. The whole body moves in behind this rear-hand punch as it twists up from the rear leg, with the arm, shoulders, hips, and legs all working to drive the point home in the only way you know how: with a friggin’ exclamation point.
HOOK: Like the Captain. This is a relatively wide looping punch that rotates off of the hip and is most often seen at the scene of a knockout as it’s haaaarrddd to defend against. You bend the elbow while bringing the arm parallel to the ground, and, twisting your abs, swing past the soon-to-be-napping opponent with your fist following. Psychic. Powerful.
UPPERCUT: Remember seeing Mike Tyson, before he joined the lost tribe of ex-boxers, shooting in on another fighter and bringing with him, up the front of his body, and buoyed by the body, a punch that invariably hit the nose or jaw, clicking it shut and with it the fighter whom it belonged to? No? Neither does anyone who got hit with one of these.
BACKFIST: Most effectively and frequently delivered off of a spin (then called the SPINNING BACKFIST), the backfist is a traditional martial arts punch that uses the back of the fist, usually the largest two knuckles, against the temple, nose or eyes.
OVERHAND: UFC Light heavyweight champ Chuck Liddell uses this to great effect more than anybody fighting him would really like. Sort of like the hook but it’s all death-from-above time as the fighter delivering it either leans left or right and brings this punch over the top. When Liddell uses it he usually catches them square on the cheek, and though some think it lacks power, not many on the business end of one of Liddell’s strikes would concur with that assessment.
HAYMAKER: This is the TV Punch of all punches. And like other shit you see on TV, it’s probably most often going to be used by people who learn all of what they know from TV. Which is probably the last place in the world that you want to learn about fighting. It’s the textbook definition of the wild punch, which finds its variants in other sports as wild pitches and Hail Marys. It is a move that stinks of desperation and, with its windup, a move telegraphed from blocks away, sets the thrower up for any number of vicious counterattacks. The only thing worse than being caught throwing one is being knocked out by one. IF, by some chance, you are knocked out by one, just leave town. Forever. Since that’s how long it’ll take for nearly everyone to forget that you got taken out by a punch made popular by Captain Kirk.
THE OL’ ONE-TWO PUNCH: The first one is the con. It’s the slow, stupid punch that gets you to move, dodge, shift your guard, or buy the highly unlikelihood that your opponent is a wash, a bum, a patsy. The Two Punch? That’s the one that shows, in no uncertain terms, that you … have … been … PLAYED. Faster, better, stronger, if you don’t know this one is ALWAYS coming, then you have no business in this business.
