Appearing on ESPN’s ‘The Herd’ UFC President Dana White re-told a story familiar to some hard core fans of how he was forced to leave Boston after being shaken down for money by Whitey Bulger’s famous South Boston crew:
“My partner and I, Peter (Welch), we ran a ‘get kids off the street’ program back there and we used to teach boxing classes, however we could make money, we made money. So one day I was teaching a class in one of the big clubs in South Boston and these two guys walked into the class and said ‘hey we need to talk to you.’ At first I’m thinking ‘does this guy own the club?’ and when he asked me ‘do you know who I am?’ that was when I realized what was going on.”
“He basically said ‘you owe us money’. It was like $2500, which was like $25,000 to me back then and said ‘you owe us money.’ It was actually a guy named Kevin Weeks, who if you saw the trial he’s Whitey’s right hand man. I’m sure he’s very prominent in the movie, but yeah basically said I owed him some money, and I didn’t pay him. This went on for a while and one day I was at my place and I got a call and they said ‘you owe us the money tomorrow by 1 o’clock’. I literally hung up the phone, picked up the phone and called Delta and bought a ticket to Vegas.”
