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Weeks recounts plots to kill columnist Is interviewed by '60 Minutes' By Ralph Ranalli, Globe Staff, 3/10/2006 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 [sic] 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.'' Weeks has also given the Globe his first print media interview and will participate in a live Boston.com chat Monday when the story is published. 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.'' Weeks was arrested in 1999 and served about five years in prison for racketeering, conspiracy, extortion, and money laundering, after agreeing to cooperate with prosecutors. Bulger is a fugitive on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. 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.'' Paul Kelly, a Boston lawyer who deposed Weeks for a civil lawsuit filed against the FBI by a South Boston man, said last night that he was skeptical of the aborted-assassination story. ''The way he cast himself in the depositions was that he was never a triggerman, just that he was always around [Bulger] and available to assist and dig a grave or two,'' Kelly said. ''The notion that he was sitting across the street with a high-powered rifle runs completely 180 degrees from what he's testified to.'' This story ran on page B2 of the Boston Globe on 3/10/2006. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.