Whitey's Payback (26 page)

In the end, Fitzpatrick’s reputation within the Bureau as a potential whistleblower and general “pain in the ass” began to wear him down. It took a personal toll on him and his wife. Fitzpatrick began to get the sense that Bulger and his gangster partner Steve Flemmi, who was also a longtime FBI informant, were more important to the local office than he was. “Apparently, Bulger and Flemmi were the FBI’s ‘guys’ while I, somehow, wasn’t,” writes Fitzpatrick. “While busting [the Mafia] remained every bit a top priority in Washington, my efforts and accomplishments were being demeaned by a group-think mentality that led to a scenario of ‘us versus them,’ with me inexplicably linked with ‘them.’ ”

When Fitzpatrick, frustrated and disillusioned, resigned from the Bureau in 1987, the full dimensions of Bulger’s partnership with the FBI was not yet known, even to the agent. It wasn’t until the late-1990s, when Bulger went on the lam allegedly after being tipped off by his FBI contacts that he was about to be arrested, that the truth started to come out. In a series of hearings and depositions, the Bulger cohorts who were left behind turned “rat” and testified in court. In a groundbreaking hearing presided over by federal judge Mark Wolf, Fitzpatrick testified, and for the first time the story of his efforts to rectify the Bureau’s sinister alliance with Bulger began to take shape.

In January 2000, after Whitey’s right-hand man provided details on a series of murders, including where the bodies were buried, Fitzpatrick stood in the rain alongside Dorchester gully as the remains of John McIntyre, his one-time informant, were dug up. “As I stood on that embankment,” writes Fitzpatrick, “steaming over confirmation of what I’d suspected ever since John McIntyre had disappeared in 1984, I never imagined I was looking at the means to achieve my long sought vindication.”

Fitzpatrick’s vindication would come in court, where he testified as part of a civil lawsuit brought by the McIntyre family—and other families of Bulger’s victims—against the FBI and the U.S. government for having underwritten Bulger’s murderous criminal career. In 2006, the McIntyre family was awarded $3.1 million in damages. All told, litigation from cases related to the Bulger debacle would result in damages more than $20 million.

Betrayal
provides the most complete overview to date of the culture of corruption that made Bulger possible. Fitzpatrick names names and offers an appendix filled with FBI memos, letters, and excerpts from depositions and court proceedings. The cumulative effect is a devastating reaffirmation of the findings of a U.S. congressional committee that declared the Bulger-FBI relationship to represent “one of the greatest failures in the history of federal law enforcement.”

The final chapter on Bulger has not yet been written. Whitey is scheduled to stand trial sometime in 2012, and Fitzpatrick will likely be called to testify.

In this sordid saga of homicidal gangsters and dirty federal agents, Fitzpatrick’s perspective—and his book—offers a rare beacon of light.

You can hardly hear the voice of Catherine Greig, sixty, longtime paramour of notorious gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, as she stands before a federal judge and says the words, “Guilty, your honor.”

Dressed in blue prison fatigues over a long-sleeved white T-shirt, her gray hair cropped short, Greig is a figment of her former self. An attractive woman who once lavished money on various surgical procedures to further enhance her beauty, Greig’s vanities have been punctured—if not decimated—by nine months of maximum-security incarceration. The permanent tan she acquired after sixteen years on the lam with Bulger in such sunny climes as the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Santa Monica, California—where she and the Most Wanted gangster were apprehended in June—is long gone now, replaced by the permanent gray pallor of a convict.

As had been leaked to the media earlier in the week, Greig is in U.S. District Court in Boston to plead guilty to charges of conspiracy to harbor a fugitive, conspiracy to commit identity fraud, and identity fraud. By signing a statement that she “engaged in conduct that was intended to help Bulger avoid detection from law enforcement and to provide him with support and assistance during his flight from law enforcement,” Greig avoids a trial and any further charges U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz may have been planning on bringing against her.

Bulger, currently in prison at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility, faces nineteen counts of murder stemming from his twenty-year reign as the Mob boss of Boston. After being indicted on racketeering charges and fleeing with Greig in January 1995, it was revealed that Bulger also had been a confidential FBI informant since 1975.

Last June, when Bulger and Greig were arrested in Santa Monica—after a tip from a woman who had spotted Greig at a local beauty parlor—federal agents found an arsenal of weapons on the premises, along with more than $800,000 in cash hidden in the wall of their apartment.

Known as a bright but subservient woman, Greig is believed to have had little involvement in Bulger’s life as a racketeer. She enjoyed the financial largesse of his criminal pursuits without having to partake of his crimes, until they set out together on the lam. For sixteen years, Bulger and Greig lived as con artists, opening bank accounts and making medical appointments and purchases under false identities, using stolen birth certificates and Social Security numbers to create fraudulent identities.

Wednesday, at the Moakley Courthouse in Boston, Greig was brought into court in handcuffs, which were removed once she was seated at the defense table. The hearing lasted just over one hour. Greig showed emotion only once, when Judge Douglas Woodlock asked her a series of routine questions about her health.

“Have you ever sought or been through psychiatric evaluation or therapy?” asked the judge.

“One time,” said Greig. She attempted to explain that she sought therapy following the suicide of a family member but was too overcome with emotion to finish her sentence. As Greig wept openly, her attorney, Kevin Reddington, seated beside her at the defense table, patted her on her shoulder.

Greig regained her composure and listened without emotion as prosecutor Jack Pirozzolo outlined details of the charges against her. Later, after it was explained to Greig that she could still be called to testify in a criminal proceeding against Bulger, and that her sentencing would be determined by the judge irrespective of the guilty plea, Judge Woodlock asked, “Do you understand that?”

“I do, Your Honor,” responded Greig.

After Greig entered her plea and the hearing ended, she was again handcuffed by a court officer. On the way out of court, she waved to her twin sister, Margaret McCusker, who had observed the proceeding from the front row of the spectators’ gallery.

Outside the courtroom, family members of victims of Bulger’s many alleged murders vented their frustration. Steve Davis, brother of Debra Davis, who, at the age of twenty-six, was allegedly strangled to death by Bulger, called Greig “a monster.” In an exclusive interview with the
Daily Beast
, Davis said, “For thirty years, my family has been waiting for justice to prevail. That woman helped keep a mass murderer at large. She knew exactly what she was doing. She doesn’t deserve a break.”

U.S. Attorney Ortiz, speaking to the press following the hearing, denied that Greig had received any kind of “sweetheart deal.” Said Ortiz, “We believe that bringing this to a swift conviction is in the best interest of justice.”

Ortiz noted that Greig faces a maximum charge of five years on each count to which she pleaded guilty. The sentences, however, would run concurrently, meaning that even if she receives the maximum sentence, Greig is unlikely to receive more than thirty-two months, of which she has already served nine.

Says Steve Davis, “For sixteen years, the families been paying for her actions, suffering, not knowing. For what? So Catherine Greig can be back on the street in two years? It ain’t fair.”

Greig is due back in Judge Woodlock’s courtroom to be sentenced on June 12.

When Catherine Greig, girlfriend and fugitive partner of gangster James “Whitey” Bulger walks into U.S. District Court in Boston this week, she will face her moment of reckoning. After sixteen years on the lam with Bulger, most of those years spent living in an apartment in Santa Monica, California, under assumed names and false identities, Greig, age sixty, pleaded guilty three months ago to charges of identity fraud and harboring a fugitive. She is expected to receive a sentence somewhere between three and five years. Having already served one year in prison, she could walk free in thirty-three months. Not bad, considering that some of the women who entered the realm of Bulger and his gangster partner, Steve Flemmi, were strangled to death and buried in a shallow grave.

When twenty-six-year-old Debra Davis sought to end her relationship with Flemmi, she was lured to an apartment on Third Street in South Boston and strangled in the basement, allegedly by Bulger. Four years later, a similar fate befell Deborah Hussey, also twenty-six, Flemmi’s stepdaughter from a relationship with his common-law wife, Marion Hussey. When Deborah Hussey openly accused Flemmi of having sexually molested her as a teenager, she wound up garroted by Bulger, her teeth extracted, and her body dumped in a grave not far from Whitey’s condominium in Quincy, Massachusetts.

The killings are disturbing enough, but for the women who circulated in the orbit of Bulger and Flemmi, there were other costs. Appearing in U.S. District Court for her guilty plea, Greig seemed fragile and traumatized. Her voice rarely rose above a whisper. When asked by the judge if she had ever sought psychiatric counseling, Greig wept openly.

At least two other women who had relationships with Bulger and Flemmi can identify with the state of post-traumatic stress that Greig might be experiencing. To them, her story is a cautionary tale. These women also could have wound up dead, or on the run with a murderous gangster and psychotic control freak, or in prison awaiting sentencing. Instead, they are alive and free, though, like Greig, they carry with them a lifetime’s worth of psychological baggage from their years of deceit and paranoia as the girlfriends of underworld criminals.

For nearly twenty years, Teresa Stanley has endured a checkered legacy as “the other woman” in the Whitey Bulger saga. Her feelings about this are mixed. On one hand, she regrets that she was ever any kind of woman to Whitey Bulger, a man who romanced, dominated, and then betrayed her. On the other hand, she resents being known as a second-class paramour when, in fact, she lived with Bulger for thirty years. If anything, Stanley believes it was Catherine Greig who was the other woman.

“It’s hard to live with,” says Stanley. “Not only did I share my life with a man who is now accused of these terrible things. But he deceived and betrayed me by having this other life with Catherine. He humiliated me in the eyes of the town.”

In the media, Stanley is often portrayed as Whitey’s attractive but dumb common-law wife. At age seventy, her fresh, girl-next-door good looks have faded, but she is certainly not dumb. In two separate interview sessions, Stanley—who rarely talks to the media—was thoughtful and reflective, as she looked back over her thirty-year relationship with a man whose criminal history, and upcoming trial, has riveted the city.

“To me, he was just Jimmy, the man I lived with,” she says. “I never thought of him the way other people do.”

Bulger and Stanley are both products of Southie, a close-knit, mostly Irish Catholic enclave nestled along the Boston waterfront at Castle Island. When Stanley first met Bulger, in 1966, she was a twenty-six-year-old woman with four children. Bulger had recently returned to Boston from a stint in prison on armed robbery charges. Stanley had no idea that he’d also once been charged with rape, in Montana, during a stint in the air force in the 1950s. Bulger was not rich at the time or the mobster of legend that he would later become. To her, he was a strong male figure offering to play a significant and much-needed role in her life as a protector and father figure to her children.

“There was a strong physical attraction,” says Stanley. “He was very handsome. And he was classy, always looked sharp, everything in place. He liked quality. He used to brag about the value of things he owned, a watch or shoes or whatever. And he was smart. He could intimidate people with his intelligence. He used big words, spoke in complete sentences with proper grammar. You couldn’t win an argument with Jimmy; he was too smart. When I watched him with other people, he stood out. He was a leader. I thought,
Gosh, maybe some of that will rub off on me
.”

Bulger told Stanley, “With me, you will never have to work a day in your life. I will take care of you. I will be a father to your children. I will provide for your every need.” In return, Bulger had Stanley learn to cook, “though I never really liked it.” He set her up in a home in Southie and made sure she kept it spotless. He turned her into the woman he wanted her to be.

Stanley knew her boyfriend was some type of criminal. Southie had a long tradition of gangsters and racketeers going back to the Prohibition era, when illegal booze was off-loaded at Carson Beach. She believed he made his money from illegal gambling and maybe loan-sharking. She heard stories that he had killed people during the Boston gang wars of the early-1960s. This did not dissuade her.