Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (39 page)

Stanley knew nothing of the arrangement as she stepped out of the black sedan that still had a new-car smell. She was standing in the parking lot of a Chili’s, less than a mile from her daughter’s house in a suburb south of Boston. Their farewell, the ending of what was essentially a thirty-year common-law marriage, was anticlimactic. “See ya,” Whitey said. “See ya,” Stanley replied.
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Whitey was soon back on the highway, navigating the twenty-minute drive to a scruffy stretch of sand in Dorchester known locally, without irony, as Malibu Beach. It was about halfway between the South Boston Liquor Mart and the hidden graves. Whitey would wait for Cathy there; Greig was now Whitey’s No. 1 woman.

Everything had been choreographed. It was almost as if they were eloping. Weeks pulled up just as Greig was descending the stairs that ran down from Thomas Park in Southie. It was 7:30 p.m., cold and dark, and Greig was right on time. Her twin sister, Margaret, had dropped her off and had given Greig her own driver’s license. Greig had already entrusted to Margaret the only things she cared about as much as Whitey: her two French poodles, Nikki and Gigi. If Greig thought she was heading out for a long time, she hadn’t packed for it. She had a small weekend bag slung over her shoulder. She told her sister she’d only be gone for a few months.
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Weeks drove around for an hour before he picked up Greig to make sure he wasn’t being tailed. He repeated the routine before driving over to Malibu Beach. Weeks and Greig were walking toward the prearranged meeting spot on the Savin Hill side of the beach when Whitey appeared out of the shadows. He looked like a cowboy: a Stetson hat, black leather jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots. Greig almost ran to him, throwing herself into his arms. They held the embrace. Weeks stood to the side awkwardly. “It was like something out of
Casablanca
,” Weeks recalled.
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Greig was glowing as they walked to Whitey’s Mercury Grand Marquis. He had chosen her; when it came down to it, he had chosen her. And he had married her. Not in real life, but in the lives they were about to assume. They weren’t Whitey Bulger and Cathy Greig anymore. They were Tom and Helen Baxter, from Selden, New York. They had just retired and were off on a cross-country adventure.

When you follow Route 1
in Louisiana through the bayous to its southernmost tip, you cross a long drawbridge to a small resort island called Grand Isle. Grand Isle calls itself the Cajun Bahamas and the Sportsman’s Paradise. Louisiana’s only inhabited barrier island boasts sandy beaches, saltwater marshes, and tracts of oak-hackberry forests where thousands of migratory birds stop for a brief respite during their annual north-south journeys. Modest vacation homes and rental cottages built on pilings above the flood line dot the flat coastline. Most of Grand Isle’s thirteen hundred year-round residents earn their living shrimping or working on offshore oil rigs. Its population swells to more than six thousand in the summer. It is a place to come if you want to fish, lured by the promise of some 280 species, to swim, bird-watch, or just watch the sun sink over the Gulf of Mexico. Or, in Whitey’s case, if you want to disappear. Most of the houses were built for vacationers and in the off-season were vacant. There were only a couple of small supermarkets, and two restaurants still open, on the quiet day when Whitey and Greig—calling themselves Tom and Helen Baxter—arrived, during the off-season, in early 1995. There wasn’t even a bank on the island. But that was fine by Whitey. He had his own bank in a pouch slung around his waist: rolls of hundred-dollar bills that he peeled off whenever he needed to buy something. Greig went to the hair salon run by the police chief’s daughter to have her hair cut and colored. She brought her own hair coloring, alternating between L’Oreal Light Ash Blonde and the extra light platinum blonde.

Whitey fell in love with the place and the people, the peace and quiet. He and Greig thought about living there permanently.
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But their first visit was brief; they left for a cross-country tour that took them from Long Island to Wyoming. They went back in the fall of 1995, staying a few days at the modest wood-shingled Wateredge Beach Resort on Route 1.

They were out for a drive one day not long after arriving back in town when they came across a brush fire on the island and saw a woman standing outside her house watching it. The woman had two black Labrador retrievers with her, so Whitey grabbed a bag of dog biscuits that Greig kept in the trunk just for such occasions. “Those are some beautiful dogs you’ve got there,” he said, feeding the dogs as Greig knelt down and patted them.
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Penny Gautreaux, a twenty-nine-year-old meter reader for the town, smiled at the two strangers. She liked dog lovers, so she liked them. Whitey said that they were looking for a place to rent, and Penny pointed them toward a beachfront duplex called It’s Our Dream. It was a modest cottage on stilts overlooking the Gulf, a bargain at four hundred dollars a month. They stayed for two months.

One day soon after they took up residence in the duplex, Whitey stopped by the Gautreaux house as Penny was cooking for her husband, Glenn, and their four kids. The smell of Cajun spices hung pungent in the air. “Do you have enough for us?” Whitey asked amiably. And, as abruptly as that, Penny and Glenn Gautreaux had new best friends: Tom and Helen Baxter. Tom told them he’d made his money in the real estate business and was retired. Helen was a dog groomer but had put that aside to travel with her husband. The Baxters had a knack for neighborly relations and never showed up empty-handed. They would arrive laden down with groceries, and they ate with the Gautreauxs every night for weeks on end. Whitey raved about Penny Gautreaux’s fried potatoes, and, at his insistence, Penny taught Greig how to make them. Whitey and Greig would leave the island for weeks and even months at a time, but they’d always come back to Grand Isle and they’d always come back to the Gautreauxs.

Whitey cherished this nightly ritual of a sit-down dinner. The Gautreaux household replaced the one he had had to leave behind at Stanley’s home in Southie. As in Southie, he took charge of the table as if it were his own, insisting that the meal be a formal occasion, with everyone, adults and children, gathered round. Everyone heeded what Whitey, the autocrat of the dinner table, had to say. He chided Penny when she grabbed a plate and sat on the sofa, watching TV. He lectured the Gautreaux kids the same way he had lectured Stanley’s kids on the importance of doing homework, of eating well, of staying in shape. Once, Penny started crying when Whitey was stern with her kids, but she swiftly forgave him. He was just trying to get through to them, his strictness just a sign of how much he cared.
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Whitey, in particular, was all over Glenn, telling him he needed to be more ambitious, more energetic. He bought him tools so he could start his own carpentry business. “Get off your lazy butt,” Whitey told Glenn. “You’ve got beautiful kids. You need to make something out of your life.”
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Penny marveled at how her husband would jump when Whitey told him to.

And Whitey was as generous with gifts as he was free with advice. Over the months, he replaced all of the Gautreauxs’ kitchen appliances. He bought them a stove, a refrigerator, and a freezer, and he paid for a fence around their property to keep the dogs from straying. When two of the Gautreaux children came home from school with a note saying they needed glasses, Whitey and Greig took them to an optometrist at the closest Walmart and paid for it. He peeled off hundred-dollar bills from his wad and bought the kids clothes, toys, and books. He bought eighteen-year-old Glenn Jr. a hunting knife that was considerably bigger than the pearl-handled switchblade Whitey always carried.

The kids couldn’t have known it, but their company was good cover. Whitey and Greig did their own errands and shopping at the Walmart in the middle of Cajun country with what appeared to be their grandchildren—hardly the profile of a pair of fugitives from Boston. Once, however, Whitey’s mask slipped. When the checkout line at the Walmart moved too slowly for his liking, he made a scene. “Do you know how much money I spend in here?” he boomed. He stormed out of the store. Greig followed with the kids, calming him down in the parking lot.
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The children started calling them Uncle Tom and Aunt Helen, and as fond as they seemed of the kids, there was one place where Uncle Tom drew a line. Whenever Penny or Glenn tried to take a photograph, Whitey said no. Greig thought it was harmless and was about to pose with the kids one day when Whitey put his foot down. “No pictures,” he growled. The Gautreauxs shrugged, chalking it up to Tom’s sometimes quirky personality—quirky and sometimes, as in the Walmart checkout line, alarmingly hot-tempered. One night, Whitey treated the Gautreauxs to dinner at Anthony’s, an upscale restaurant on the mainland. The hostess led them to a table, and Whitey turned and said, “It’s too noisy.” He pointed to a table in the corner.

“Oh, sir, I’m sorry,” the hostess said brightly, “but you have to sit here.”

Whitey glared at her. “No I don’t,” he said.

Whitey insisted on the table in the corner, and he got it.
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Except for the occasional outburst, he was compelling company, and oddly thoughtful. He had a soft side and wasn’t afraid to show it. Once, when one in a litter of new black Lab puppies got ill, the Gautreauxs brought it to a veterinarian. The puppy was in great pain, and the vet recommended that they put the dog down. When the Gautreauxs told Whitey, he was adamant that the dog should not be given a lethal injection. He insisted that shooting the dog was more humane because it would suffer less. But he couldn’t watch. When Glenn Gautreaux leveled his gun at the back of the puppy’s head, Whitey turned away. As the shot echoed across the water, Whitey Bulger wept.
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Whitey and Greig eventually left the island but returned in the spring of 1996. Things had changed at the Gautreaux house in their absence. Glenn’s in-laws from his previous marriage, Thomas “Black” Rudolph and his wife, Mary, had moved in. Whitey seemed to resent the imposition more than the Gautreauxs; the newcomers upset the domestic routine he had spent months carefully cultivating. He didn’t like that Black Rudolph saw no reason to defer to him. “He had this attitude like he was the boss,” Black Rudolph said of Whitey. Whitey liked to point out his relative sophistication to Black, who, in Whitey’s view, was just a country bumpkin. Whitey bragged about traveling the world, saying that he had made enough money to retire early and that he was in better shape than men half his age.

That last one got to Black Rudolph. “I’m in better shape than you,” said Black, who, at sixty-two, was four years younger than Whitey. Black got up from the dinner table, dropped to the floor, and performed three one-handed push-ups. “I’ll do a one-hand for every two-hand you can do,” Black said. Whitey declined the challenge. “I’m a lot older than you,” he said. Black Rudolph slapped his driver’s license on the table. “Let’s see yours,” he said. Whitey waved him off.

In July 1996, Tom and Helen Baxter left Grand Isle and never came back. They said they were headed to San Diego. It was a lie. The truth was that their cover had been blown, and by someone very close to Whitey. They made a hasty escape, heading for Chicago.
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The local police chief, Roscoe Besson Jr., found out later that the man he knew as Tom Baxter had a bounty of two hundred fifty thousand dollars on his head. He recalled one morning that he’d been directing traffic outside the island’s elementary school when Whitey stood at the curb, waiting to cross. “I stopped the traffic and let two hundred fifty thousand dollars get across the street,” the chief said.
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Whitey hadn’t forgotten about Teresa Stanley.
During one of his prearranged phone calls with Weeks, he asked about her. Weeks told him she had taken up with Alan Thistle, a dubious character from Southie whose criminal record dated back to his teen years and who had, in recent years, been making like Whitey: informing for the FBI. In May of 1996, Whitey bought five twenty-dollar calling cards in a country store in Okemah, Oklahoma. He used one of them to call a friend of an elderly aunt of Stanley’s. “Tell her to stay away from that piece of shit Thistle,” Whitey hissed.
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Whitey didn’t like Thistle, and if he had only known the half of it, it is unlikely Alan Thistle would have been alive to romance Teresa Stanley after Whitey took off. Thistle worked initially as an informant for two Boston police detectives, Frank Dewan and Jimmy Carr, who had been trying to take Whitey down. Then, in the early 1990s, he became an informant for John Gamel, the FBI agent who was part of the squad investigating Whitey. One of Thistle’s greatest accomplishments was helping the FBI plant a bug inside one of Whitey’s hangouts, the Rotary Variety Store in South Boston. One morning he’d duped the woman who opened the store for Whitey at dawn each day by flattening a tire on her car and offering to take it to a nearby shop to get it fixed. She gave him her set of keys—which included the one to the store—and FBI agents quickly made a duplicate while Thistle had the tire repaired. Agents, who had been unable to bypass the store’s elaborate alarm system, were able to open the door with their own key in 1994 and install a bug. But Whitey always assumed his hangouts were bugged and acted accordingly; the bugs only picked up idle chatter.

Thistle met Stanley at a friend’s house in February 1996 while both were working as banquet waiters at the Boston Convention Center. They started dating and fell “crazy in love.”
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He moved in with Stanley, started driving the white Grand Marquis that Whitey had bought for her, and worked out in the gym Whitey had built in her home. Thistle insisted he would have made a move on Stanley even if she hadn’t been Whitey’s girlfriend, but he also secretly hoped that she would lead him to Whitey and that they could share the reward for his capture. Gamel wrote Stanley a letter a year after Whitey had fled, telling her that her life was in danger because she knew too much. She showed the letter to Thistle, who persuaded her to talk to the FBI. He called his old handler, and a meeting was arranged for April 29, 1996.