Whitey Bulger

James Joseph "Whitey" Bulger, Jr. (born September 3, 1929) is a former crime boss who led the Winter Hill Gang based in Somerville, Massachusetts, in the United States. He also served as a top echelon informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a controversial arrangement that allowed him to continue his criminal activities. The disclosure by The Boston Globe and in various court cases of the corruption and illegal activities of federal agents involved with Bulger was a major embarrassment for the agency.

After being tipped off to a pending indictment, Bulger fled the Boston area and went into hiding in December of 1994. Bulger was the number one fugitive on the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. He was wanted for racketeering (under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO)), 19 counts of murder, extortion, money laundering, conspiracy and narcotics distribution.

On June 22, 2011, he was arrested at the apartment he had lived in for fifteen years in Santa Monica, California, along with his girlfriend Catherine Greig. He was 81 years old at the time of his arrest, and supposedly in poor health.

Bulger and Greig were quickly extradited back to Massachusetts and were brought under heavy guard to the waterfront federal courthouse in Boston, necessitating the closing of part of Boston Harbor. Greig was arraigned in the federal District Court of the First Circuit in Boston on charges of harboring a fugitive and is currently seeking release on bail. He remains in custody at the Plymouth County House of Correction in Plymouth Massachusetts.

Early life

Bulger's father, James Joseph Bulger, was the son of parents from Newfoundland, now part of Canada. His father married Jane Veronica McCarthy, a first generation Irish-American, after he settled in Boston, Massachusetts. Their first child, James Jr., was born in 1929.

The elder Bulger worked as a laborer and occasional longshoreman. However, he lost his arm in an industrial accident, and the family was reduced to poverty. In May 1938, the Old Harbor Village public housing project (later known as Mary Ellen McCormack Housing) was opened in South Boston. The Bulger family moved into it and the children grew up there. Young James preferred the streets, but his younger brothers (Billy and Jackie), excelled at school.

Jimmy Bulger was arrested in 1943 at the age of 14 and charged with larceny.[citation needed] He by then had joined a juvenile gang known as the "Shamrocks" and would eventually be arrested for assault, battery and armed robbery and was sentenced to a juvenile reformatory. Shortly after his release in April 1948, he joined the United States Air Force.After his basic training, he was stationed first at the Smoky Hill Air Force Base in Salina, Kansas, and later in Idaho. Hardly a model airman, he was sentenced to the stockade for several assaults. He was also arrested in 1950 for going absent without leave. Nevertheless, he received an honorable discharge in 1952 and returned home to Massachusetts.

Early criminal career

Prison

In the 1950s Bulger was first in federal custody at Atlanta Penitentiary (1956–1959) for armed robbery and hijacking. There, according to mobster Kevin Weeks, he was involved in the MK-ULTRA program, the goal of which was to research mind-control drugs for the Central Intelligence Agency, headed by CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb. For eighteen months, Bulger and eighteen other inmates who had volunteered to lessen their sentences were given LSD and other drugs. Bulger later complained that he and the other inmates had been "recruited by deception," and that they were told that they were helping to find "a cure for schizophrenia".

He was then transferred from Atlanta to Alcatraz Island, arriving on November 2, 1959, as prisoner #AZ1428. He became a close friend of fellow inmate Clarence Carnes, alias "The Choctaw Kid". In November 1962, he was transferred to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary (1962–1963), and in the following year to Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary (1963–1965). He was released after serving nine years in prison.

The Killeen Gang

After his release, Bulger worked as a janitor prior to becoming an enforcer for Donald Killeen, the boss of the dominant crime family in South Boston. In 1971, Killeen's younger brother allegedly bit off the nose of Michael Dwyer, a member of the rival Mullen Gang. A gangland war soon resulted, leading to a string of killings throughout Boston and the surrounding suburbs. The Killeens quickly found themselves outgunned and outmaneuvered by the younger Mullens.

According to Kevin Weeks,

"One day while the gang war was still going on, Jimmy was driving down Seventh Street in South Boston when he saw Paulie (Paul McGonagle) driving toward him. Jimmy pulled up beside him, window to window, nose to nose, and called his name. As Paulie looked over, Jimmy shot him right between the eyes. Only at that moment, just as he pulled the trigger, Jimmy realized it wasn't Paulie. It was Donald, the most likable of the McGonagle brothers, the only one who wasn't involved in anything. Jimmy drove straight to William "Billy" O'Sullivan's house on Savin Hill Avenue and told O'Sullivan, who was at the stove cooking, 'I shot the wrong one. I shot Donald.' Billy looked up from the stove and said, 'Don't worry about it. He wasn't healthy anyway. He smoked. He would have gotten lung cancer. How do you want your pork chops?'"

According to former Mullen boss Patrick Nee, Paul McGonagle was enraged by the murder of his brother. Certain that Billy O'Sullivan was responsible, McGonagle ambushed and murdered Bulger's mentor. The end of the war has usually been related as follows. Bulger, realizing that he was on the losing side, secretly approached Howie Winter, the leader of the Winter Hill Gang. He allegedly told Winter that he could end the fighting in South Boston by murdering the leaders of the Killeen gang. Shortly thereafter, Donald Killeen was gunned down outside his home in the suburb of Framingham. Former Mullen Gang boss Patrick Nee disputes this claim. According to Nee, the slaying of Donald Killeen on May 13, 1972, was carried out not by Bulger but by Mullen Gang enforcers James Mantville and Tommy King.

Also according to Nee, Bulger and the Killeens fled the city in the aftermath of their boss's murder, fearing that they would be next. Instead of murdering Bulger, however, Patrick Nee arranged for the dispute to be mediated by Howie Winter and Patriarca crime family captain Joseph Russo. After a sit-down at Chandler's restaurant in the South End, Boston, the two gangs joined forces, with Winter as overall boss.

Nee stated,

Nobody talked fault, although at first it was tense while we ran down the 'who killed who' list. Whitey was a defeated warrior looking to keep as much honor as possible. He knew the Mullens had courageous, fierce men willing to die for theirs, and he was perceptive. Deep down, Whitey knew that he couldn't take over for the Killeens without cutting the Mullens in on their bookmaking and loansharking. Tommy King and I felt victorious, but we didn't want to gloat. The meeting lasted for six hours. We ate good steaks, chasing them down with nothing stronger than ginger ale. It was business, and contrary to media stereotype, we weren't a bunch of lowlifes who sat around drinking beer all day and all night.

According to Nee,

The balance of the meeting was spent forming an alliance, and by far the hardest part was deciding whom to protect. After a war, each side usually gets to protect so many people from harm. Those who aren't protected are fair game for retribution and 'shake-downs.' Everything was split down the middle. All the horses, dogs, bookmaking, and loansharking were now going to be under our mutual control. This was the beginning of our relationship. Whitey and I were now officially partners and nobody at that table could ever have possibly imagined how this treacherous fuck would treat his partners.

The Winter Hill Gang

Journalist and radio personality Howie Carr argues that Bulger rapidly became Howie Winter's man in South Boston by helping the Winter Hill Gang shake down the bookmakers in Boston's North End. To do this, they had to remove the Notarangeli crew, headed by "Indian Joe" Notarangeli. Bulger allegedly played an important role in the Winter Hill Gang's victory and subsequent domination of organized crime in the Irish-American neighborhoods of Boston. It has been alleged that he was involved in the shooting of two members of the Notarangeli crew that killed Al Plummer and wounded Hugh Shields. Because of this, he became an influential member of the Winter Hill Gang. This has never been confirmed, however.

By 1973, Bulger and Nee were in control of the rackets in South Boston. FBI Special Agent Condon noted in his log in September 1973, that Bulger had been heavily shaking down the bookmakers in the area. After the gangland war ended, Bulger began to use his influence to remove opposition by persuading Howie Winter to sanction the killings of those whom he viewed as having "stepped out of line". These included Mullen Gang veterans Spike O'Toole, Paulie McGonagle and Tommy King. It is also alleged that he had direct involvement in the murders of Eddie Connors and Buddy Leonard in November 1975. After 1975, he also began to use his FBI deal to send his rivals to prison.

In 1979, Howie Winter was arrested, along with many members of his inner circle, on charges of fixing horse races. Bulger and Stephen Flemmi, who were left out of the indictments, stepped into the vacuum and took over the leadership of the gang. They transferred its headquarters to the Lancaster Street Garage in Boston near the Boston Garden in the North End.

FBI informant

In 1971, the FBI, searching for reliable information in their battle against the Patriarca crime family, approached Bulger and attempted to recruit him as an informant. FBI Special Agent Dennis Condon was assigned to make the pitch. Although some information is alleged to have been passed on, Condon noted that Bulger was too concerned about his own safety to start working with the FBI.

In 1974, Bulger became partners with Stephen Flemmi, who had been an FBI informant since 1965. Although it is a documented fact that Bulger soon followed Flemmi's example, exactly how and why continues to be debated. Special Agent John Connolly frequently boasted to his fellow agents about how he had recruited Bulger at a late night meeting at Wollaston Beach inside an FBI issue car. Author Howie Carr alleges that Bulger had been an off-the-books informant since his teenage years. Carr further claims that, like Flemmi, Bulger had been recruited by Special Agent H. Paul Rico. Carr argues that "the Boston FBI office 'didn't need Whitey nearly as much as they needed his brother Billy' — and the favors that Billy could dispense on those who took care of his interests, including Whitey. Kevin Weeks considers it more likely that Flemmi had helped build a Federal case against Bulger. He writes of his belief that Bulger was caught between a rock and a hard place: supply information to the FBI or return to prison. Flemmi later remarked of his and Bulger's tenure as FBI informants: "Me and Whitey gave  shit, and they gave us gold."

In 1997, shortly after The Boston Globe disclosed that Bulger and Flemmi had been informants, Weeks met with retired Agent John Connolly, who showed him a photocopy of Bulger's FBI informant file. In order to explain Bulger and Flemmi's status as informants, Connolly said, "The Mafia was going against Jimmy and Stevie, so Jimmy and Stevie went against them.

According to Weeks,

As I read over the files at the Top of the Hub [restaurant] that night, Connolly kept telling me that 90 percent of the information in the files came from Stevie. Certainly Jimmy hadn't been around the Mafia the way Stevie had. But, Connolly told me, he had to put Jimmy's name on the files to keep his file active. As long as Jimmy was an active informant, Connolly said, he could justify meeting with Jimmy and giving him valuable information. Even after he retired, Connolly still had friends in the FBI, and he and Jimmy kept meeting to let each other know what was going on. I listened to all that, but now I understood that even though he was retired, Connolly was still getting information, as well as money, from Jimmy. As I continued to read, I could see that a lot of the reports were not just against the Italians. There were more and more names of Polish and Irish guys, of people we had done business with, of friends of mine. Whenever I came across the name of someone I knew, I would read exactly what it said about that person. I would see, over and over again, that some of these people had been arrested for crimes that were mentioned in these reports. It didn't take long for me to realize that it had been bullshit when Connolly told me that the files hadn't been disseminated, that they had been for his own personal use. He had been an employee of the FBI. He hadn't worked for himself. If there was some investigation going on and his supervisor said, 'Let me take a look at that,' what was Connolly going to do? He had to give it up. And he obviously had. I thought about what Jimmy had always said, 'You can lie to your wife and to your girlfriends, but not to your friends. Not to anyone we're in business with.' Maybe Jimmy and Stevie hadn't lied to me. But they sure hadn't been telling me everything.

A U.S. District Court judge found on September 5, 2006, that the mishandling of Bulger and his associate Stephen Flemmi caused the murder in 1984 of John McIntyre in a lawsuit brought by the victim's family who will receive more than $3 million from the U.S. government. The judge stated the FBI failed to properly supervise their own agent John Connolly (convicted and jailed in 2002) and also failed to investigate numerous allegations that Bulger and Flemmi were involved in drug trafficking, murder, and other crimes over decades.