Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (42 page)

He also indirectly benefited, at least initially, from the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States by Al Qaeda. Two of the planes used in the 9/11 attacks had taken off from Boston’s Logan International Airport, and every agent in the FBI’s Boston office was assigned to the terrorism investigation. A couple of weeks later, the Bulger Task Force was the first team to go back to its regular duties, chasing what turned out to be another Whitey look-alike in South America. But the FBI, as an institution, was suddenly preoccupied with terrorism. While technically Whitey’s status as a Top Ten fugitive meant he was a top priority, the post-9/11 reality meant that, outside the task force, he was not.

The FBI fielded some two thousand leads on Whitey in 2001—more than during any year since he had fled.
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Many came from overseas. A balding, elderly man in Barcelona bore such a striking resemblance to Whitey that he could only be ruled out through fingerprints. It turned out he was a priest. Agents pursued another Whitey look-alike on a wild chase through the streets of Rio de Janeiro only to discover that he was a Portuguese national wanted for money laundering. In 2002, a British businessman called the FBI with the most promising tip since Greig had had her hair colored in the Fountain Valley salon. He said he had spotted Whitey Bulger strolling alone down a busy street near Piccadilly Circus in London. “He was freshly tanned,” said the man, insisting he immediately recognized Whitey as the US tourist he had befriended in 1994 while working out at a health club inside Le Meridien Piccadilly hotel in London.
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During that earlier visit, the man said, he had sat at the hotel bar with Whitey, eating a sandwich and drinking a beer as the elderly American talked about his life—including his stint at Alcatraz.
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The Bulger Task Force was convinced the tip was credible because Stanley had previously told agents that she had stayed at Le Meridien Piccadilly with Whitey during their whirlwind trip through Europe months before he became a fugitive.
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Stanley had also revealed years earlier that Whitey had a safe deposit box at a London bank, but the FBI had been unable to find it even after dispatching an agent overseas. The Whitey sighting brought new intensity to the search, and inspectors from New Scotland Yard located the safe deposit box. They also made the startling discovery that when Whitey opened the box in 1992, he listed his brother Bill, then the Massachusetts senate president, as the contact person on bank records.
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When the London bank relocated its offices to another building while Whitey was on the run, a bank official called Bill Bulger’s South Boston home to report that the box was being moved. The unidentified person who took the 1997 call advised the bank that James Bulger could not be located. Later, Bill Bulger told a congressional committee that neither he nor anyone in his family recalled getting the call. The safe deposit box contained fifty thousand dollars in assorted currency. The FBI located more safe deposit boxes belonging to Whitey in London, Dublin, and Montreal and launched a media campaign overseas, trying to elevate his profile in Europe. The task force appeared on the BBC show
Crimewatch UK
to appeal for the public’s help, but after pursuing fewer than a third of the one hundred leads viewers called in after the show, the Boston investigators returned home. Whitey had taken a backseat because British authorities who had been working with the Bulger Task Force were diverted to more urgent cases: apartment raids of suspected terrorists, homemade bombs in a flat near Gatwick Airport, and a scare involving the deadly poison ricin.
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And for all the promise of the original tip from the British businessman, the trail there was ice cold. Whitey had not returned to London since he’d gone on the run. In fact, he later confessed that, after that European swing with Stanley, he only left the country for his brief forays into Mexico to buy cheap prescription drugs.

The devastation Whitey had left behind
in his hometown wasn’t limited to his criminal conspirators and his corrupted friends in law enforcement but enveloped those closest to him. His family and friends took the heat for his absence. Loyalty came at a cost, especially to Whitey’s brothers. Not long after Whitey took off, federal grand juries were convened to force those who knew him best to cooperate in the probe. The Bulger Task Force traced calling cards to Whitey and Greig and identified dozens of homes and businesses they had called in the Boston area in the summer of 1996, when the gangster was scrambling to obtain new identities. The two people closest to Greig—her twin sister, Margaret McCusker, and her loyal friend Kathleen McDonough—were convicted of lying about phone calls they received from Greig. They were sentenced to six months of house arrest, followed by probation, and each fined two thousand dollars.
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McCusker, who had been reluctantly caring for Greig’s beloved French poodles, Nikki and Gigi, realized her sister wasn’t coming back anytime soon. Being stuck in the house with the dogs steeled her resolve: She had them euthanized.
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The FBI then cleverly announced on
America’s Most Wanted
that the dogs had been put down, hoping it might trigger some slip-up by Greig. It almost worked. One of McCusker’s neighbors received a frantic call from Greig in early 1999, pleading, “What happened to my dogs?” The frightened neighbor hung up without responding.
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The Bulger Task Force also put pen registers, or traces, on the telephones of Whitey’s brothers, Bill and Jack, which allowed all numbers dialed from their South Boston homes to be tracked. But Flemmi’s corrupt state police friend Dick Schneiderhan sent a message through Weeks alerting the Bulgers to the scrutiny.
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What the government couldn’t accomplish on its own, Whitey did unwittingly, by using phone cards to call his brothers, which put them in compromising positions. For someone who seemed so sophisticated at eluding surveillance, electronic and otherwise, Whitey’s not knowing that the phone cards could be traced seems uncharacteristically naïve. But he admitted his ignorance, as well as his regret that so many got in legal trouble because of his calls home.
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“I put the heat on people” by phoning Boston, Whitey acknowledged. “My brother Jack was trapped.” The same thing happened to Greig’s sister and her friend, who were indicted, leading Whitey to stop calling friends and family.
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Bill Bulger paid an especially heavy price for his devotion to his older brother, both in reputation and position. He was well into a new phase of his career, having stepped down as president of the state senate at the beginning of 1996 to assume the presidency of the University of Massachusetts, when he was summoned before the federal grand jury looking into Whitey’s disappearance. He admitted during the secret proceeding that he had spoken to his brother while he was on the run, and that he felt no obligation to help in his capture. Bill Bulger, his wife, and their children had been repeatedly questioned over the years about Whitey’s whereabouts, and they had always insisted that they knew nothing. His new testimony, revealed in 2003 in the pages of the
Boston Globe
, triggered a political firestorm. The Massachusetts attorney general accused him of putting his fugitive brother’s interests over those of the state’s higher education system and called for his resignation. Bulger refused to step down. “Changing the course of my brother’s life is something I tried to effectuate for many years—that I was not successful is a matter of great personal pain,” he said. “I have done everything one could possibly do to influence the course of another person’s life.”
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But it was his appearance in Washington before the House Committee on Government Reform, which was investigating the FBI’s relationship with Whitey, Flemmi, and other informants, that sealed Bill Bulger’s fate, ending his public life. He was humiliated and, at one point, unusually for him, speechless. When first called before the committee in December 2002, he refused to testify, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. He looked like he was hiding something, but he wasn’t about to give it up. The committee granted him immunity, and six months later Bill Bulger sat in front of his wife, Mary, and five of their nine children, staring at a table of congressmen. It was an inquisition that lasted for five hours. Always so comfortable, even cocksure, in public, Bulger looked anything but. He was evasive, sometimes annoyed. Some of the congressmen were equally irked that Bulger, a man of self-conscious learning who could recite long passages of the classics from memory, kept saying he didn’t remember. One of them wondered aloud why Bulger needed immunity to say he didn’t remember anything. Congressman Stephen Lynch of South Boston, who, before coming to Washington, had held Bulger’s former state senate seat, might have been expected to be gentle with Bulger, but he was not. When Lynch asked Bulger if he had ever accepted money from Whitey or his criminal associates, Mary Bulger and two of her sons looked at each other in horror and then shook their heads in disgust. Bill Bulger merely said, “No.” When another congressman asked if he wanted his fugitive brother to give himself up, the normally loquacious Bulger sat for several moments, unable to speak. He opened and closed his mouth several times, but nothing came out. The hearing was televised live, and back in Boston people waited for what seemed an eternity for Bill Bulger to answer a simple question.

“Do I want him to?” Bill Bulger repeated, before adding, “I hope he does what is the right thing.” But the right thing for him, he insisted, did not include aiding in the capture of his brother. That answer gave Bulger’s political enemies what they finally needed. Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney accused him of giving purposely evasive answers and pushed for his resignation as university president. Bill Bulger still had powerful supporters—including US senator Edward M. Kennedy, who, in the years since their testy dealings during the school desegregation imbroglio, had grown to be a friend—but he nevertheless resigned in August 2003. He consoled himself by leaving with a state pension of about two hundred thousand dollars a year. The following month, on Whitey’s seventy-fourth birthday, September 3, 2003, Jack Bulger was sentenced to six months in prison and six months of house arrest for lying to two grand juries and thwarting efforts to catch his brother. He was stripped of his pension as the clerk magistrate of Boston Juvenile Court. Loyalty to Whitey had cost him his freedom and his income, and it cost Bill Bulger his job and, in the eyes of many, his good name. It was an outsize price to pay for a principle—family above all, including the law.

Bill Bulger’s forced retirement from the public arena signaled an end to an extraordinary political career and to his extraordinary patronage network. Many friends, relatives, and constituents had landed in government jobs over four decades because of Bill Bulger. There were bus drivers and train operators who owed their job to him. The running joke was that MBTA, the acronym for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, stood for Mr. Bulger’s Transit Authority. But the benign view of political patronage, not to mention the iron-fisted approach he brought to leadership, left with him.

Whitey’s abrupt exit, meanwhile, had altered the underworld landscape, especially in Southie. An East Broadway tavern owner recalls that a fringe player in Whitey’s organization showed up at his newly opened bar shortly after Whitey fled, demanding payment for protection. The tavern owner, an Irish immigrant, told the would-be extortionist to get lost.
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Whitey was gone, as was the specter of his power. The Mafia, wrecked by the long series of prosecutions, was a shell by the 1990s. At the dawn of a new millennium, a few dozen Mafiosi struggled to make a living off sports gambling, while the Irish mob had disappeared entirely.
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New ethnic groups, from Dominicans to Cape Verdeans, occupied the lower rungs that the Irish and Italians had clung to a century before. They changed the texture of the city, and their gangs became the major focus of law enforcement.

The ethnic neighborhoods that had been home to the most prominent of the city’s organized crime groups—the Irish in Southie and Charlestown, the Italians in the North End—were gentrified throughout the 1980s and especially the 1990s. Young professionals took over the North End apartments that had been homes to successive generations of immigrants. In Charlestown, the native-born Townies took to calling the new arrivals in their neighborhood “Toonies,” an irreverent reference to the natives’ penchant for stealing high-end stereos from the BMWs and Saabs that suddenly flooded the narrow, hilly streets.

Southie was the last of those ethnic neighborhoods to be truly gentrified. Throughout the 1990s, its signature three-deckers were converted into condominiums. By 1999, condos accounted for 66 percent of all residential sales in Southie, triple the citywide average.
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Many of those condos were bought by people who didn’t grow up in Southie and replaced apartments occupied by those who did. Along Broadway, the dark, dingy taverns where bookies sat at the bar all day and night were replaced by bright, airy bar-restaurants with exposed brick walls and French doors that showcased the young, trendy crowd. Even Triple O’s, Whitey’s old hangout, was transformed into an upscale bar; the images of the Seven Dwarfs on the walls were painted over. If people wanted to gamble, they did so legally. The bookies were gone, replaced by state lottery machines.

But it wasn’t just Southie that was changing. The city of Boston, with a population of 589,000, became majority minority in the 1990s, with nonwhites outnumbering whites for the first time. In that decade, nearly 50,000 whites left the city, replaced by an equal number of immigrants.
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More minorities moved into Southie, especially after the housing projects, including the one in which Whitey had grown up, were integrated beginning in the late 1980s. Southie was 98 percent white in 1970; by 2000 it was 84 percent white, and by 2010 it was 79 percent white.
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The Southie that Whitey had left behind looked very different ten years after he’d fled.