Whitey Bulger was born in the Depression year 1929 and grew up in the Old Harbor, one of the first public housing developments in the country. It was a dreary collection of spare brick buildings not too far from the water. Like South Boston itself, the project was a tough place to live, and, like the neighborhood, it has spawned a disproportionate number of gangsters and thugs.
Whitey was the first of seven children. Billy was the next oldest son. When they were growing up, Billy was everything that Whitey was not. Obedient, studious, Billy was nicknamed Beam for the desk light that was always on. Whitey—actually James Bulger Jr.—got his nickname for the lightness of his hair, but anyone close to him knew not to use it to his face. In person, he was always to be called Jim.
The family qualified for public housing because Whitey’s father, James Bulger Sr., had been unable to work at his job in the railroad yards after his left arm was crushed when two boxcars slammed together. For whatever reason, Whitey was a hellion from the beginning. In his early teens, he ran off to join the circus, literally—Barnum & Bailey’s, as a roustabout. He returned all mouthy, ready to take anyone on for any reason, and would beat kids up for fun. He soon fell in with a gang of young Southie toughs who called themselves the Shamrocks, and made easy money hijacking goods off the back of trucks. Whitey started in on a rap sheet at thirteen when he was arrested for larceny. Before long, he went on to grand larceny and other crimes, and finally rape. There are some claims that Whitey pimped himself out as a gay hooker when he was a teenager, but I don’t buy it. He’s into power and control, and that’s always been pretty much it.
I was born a quarter century later, in 1954, and raised in a triple-decker in Worcester. Growing up, I was an altar boy, but don’t make too much of that. I went to Catholic school, and there were plenty of altar boys. Often forgotten, Worcester is probably best known for the huge cold storage warehouse fire in 1999 that cost the lives of six firefighters. My father, John J. Foley Sr., was a firefighter, but he’d retired by then. When he was working, he chased fires during the day, then lugged beef at a meatpacking plant after hours for extra money. He’d sometimes come home with angry burns, or maybe not come home at all because he’d been hospitalized for smoke inhalation. Once, he fell through three floors of a burning house. He was all banged up, but he went to work the next day.
Public service is important in our family, and it’s a big reason why I went into law enforcement. Maybe it’s old-fashioned, but it’s all about trying to help people out.
After twelve years of parochial school, I picked up a criminology degree at Westfield State, hoping for a chance to join the State Police, which had been my dream for a while. There were no openings that year, so I applied to the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, and got assigned to MCI Walpole, the biggest and most dangerous penitentiary in the state. It’s one huge, echoing warehouse for convicts—a horrible place to be a guard, let alone a prisoner. And it was even worse to be a rookie guard, since the convicts figured they could take advantage of you, and the veteran guards hated you because they assumed that, as a college grad, you’d be their boss one day.
But the guards needed one another, because at Walpole we were locked inside a big cage with the prisoners. It was like we were doing time, too. In my section, I was in with forty-five convicts, with three levels of private cells going up one wall.
We had nothing to protect ourselves either. No gun, no knife, nothing. Any weapon we had the prisoners might grab and use on us. All we had was the key to our cell block. If we saw trouble coming, we were supposed to sprint to the door, shove the key into the lock, get out as quickly as possible, and slam the door as hard as we could. The sound would bring guards running. If I couldn’t make it, I was supposed to throw the key through the bars and up high enough in the air that when it landed it clanged on the concrete floor, and other guards would hear it and come running.
We never strayed very far from that door. But even so, we weren’t exactly safe. At any moment, an inmate could jump up and grab my key, or sneak up behind me and bury a shiv—a homemade blade of some sort—in my back. Everybody had scares. One time, an inmate came up to shoot the breeze at my desk while one of his pals way up on the third tier of cells, maybe forty feet up, positioned himself over me, lining up a big can of soup directly over my head. Then he let go. It was like a bomb coming down. By luck, I just happened to lean forward onto my desk right then, and the can slammed into the back of my chair with this terrible crack. The prisoner who’d been talking to me just walked away whistling.
It gets to you, that sort of thing. I was taking courses in a college graduate program by then, and sitting there in the classroom, I couldn’t get comfortable unless I sat with my back against the wall so I could see everything in front of me. Even so, if there was a sudden slamming of the door, I’d want to jump out of my chair.
At Walpole, you had to be alert. And that was great training for the State Police. I learned to focus, to see everything like my life depended on it. At Walpole, I was up against some of the most devious minds anywhere, many of them bent on finding ways to kill me. I learned what to watch for—the little tics, the things out of place—and I learned to depend on others. I’d watch their backs; they’d watch mine.
I didn’t get caught up in figuring out which inmate was in for what. But I knew there were a few mobsters in there. Most of them were just quietly doing their time. That’s old-school Mafia. But one of them was a scrappy kid named Ricky Costa. I didn’t know he was in the mob until he came back from the prison visiting room, and I was patting him down. The visit mustn’t have gone too well, because Ricky was in a shitty mood. A lot of prisoners wear shoes with hollowed-out heels so they can sneak in drugs. When I asked Ricky to take his shoes off so I could check them out, he screamed, “Fuck you,” and started grappling with me. Some other guards rushed over, and we hustled him off to solitary to chill out for a couple of days.
Afterward, a few of the guards came up to me and asked me if I had a death wish.
I didn’t know what they were talking about.
“Don’t you know who that is?” one of them asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s Ricky Costa.”
“But, Foley, jeez—what are you, stupid? He’s in the mob! He’s Angiulo’s godson.”
Jerry Angiulo ran the Mafia in Boston. I went silent, trying to think that one through.
They started laughing. “You’re really fucked now. Somebody’s going to come after you.”
I had nothing to say to that. If somebody was, he was. I wasn’t going to worry about it. Maybe that’s fatalistic, but to me it was just being practical. If there’s nothing to do about something, I just let it go.
Whitey got into the air force somehow, based in Montana. He was up on rape charges there when he was honorably discharged. Back home, he returned to his old ways, “tailgating,” as these truck heists were called. In one case, he attempted to steal an entire beer truck. It was a good line, since most of the thefts were inside jobs—the driver was in on the deal. At first, there was a fair amount of competition, but a lot of it faded as one thief or another was picked off by the cops, the victim of a stool pigeon no one could locate.
Whitey teamed up with a burglar from Cambridge to put together a gang of bank robbers, who knocked over a bank in Providence, then another in Boston, before hitting the road, first to Florida and then to Indiana, where they cased one bank in Hammond and hit another. Whitey was carrying two handguns when he burst in with his pals, and immediately leaped up onto the counter and screamed at everyone to get down and shut the fuck up while a confederate scooped up the money from the tellers’ cages. The haul was over $12,000. The gang split it up and then dispersed. Whitey had a girlfriend then, and they drove back to Florida and then to Boston, and then hopped about the country. To disguise himself, Whitey dyed his hair black, wore horn-rim glasses, and chomped on an unlit cigar.
By then, the FBI had already been keeping an eye on him for some time. An agent in Boston named H. Paul Rico knew all about Whitey. An “extremely dangerous character,” Rico called him, with “remarkable agility” and “reckless daring in driving vehicles.” Most noteworthy, though, were his “unstable, vicious characteristics.”
When Whitey returned to Boston in March 1956, Rico picked up a tip that he could be found in a nightclub in Revere. Some FBI agents grabbed him one night as he stepped out of the club to get his car. Whitey received a twenty-year sentence but served only nine, most of them in Leavenworth, a real hellhole back then. He was just twenty-seven when he was sentenced. In some ways he was lucky. Back in Boston, a gang war was raging between two Irish gangs, the McLaughlins and the McLeans, that could easily have been the end of him.
Still, in prison, confinement gnawed at him, and that only made the hard time harder. He spent months in solitary for fighting and mouthing off. When he was caught plotting his escape, Whitey was sent to Alcatraz, out on its solitary rock in San Francisco Bay, a prison from which no one ever gets out before it’s time. To shave a few months off his sentence, he agreed to take part in some CIA experiments with LSD. The program was called MK-ULTRA and was a test of mind-altering drugs that the agency thought might yield a truth serum. In some notes of his that were found later, Whitey complained that these drugs gave him nightmares and insomnia for years afterward. Murder, by contrast, never troubled his sleep.
The rest of the time he spent reading just about everything in the prison library. He pored over the major battles of World War II, scrutinizing them both from the viewpoint of the Allied general and from that of the Nazi commander. He was fascinated by the moves, countermoves and counter-counter moves—by the way everything could be anticipated if you thought about it hard enough. It was his graduate school, and it made him a far more disciplined criminal, teaching him that everything he did had consequences, and those consequences had consequences, too.
Even though he was a hardened ex-con when he was finally released in 1965, he came back home to live in the Old Harbor with his mother, a widow now. He took a job as a janitor at the Suffolk County Courthouse that his brother Billy had arranged. He stuck it out for a few years, and then returned to his old life, quickly creating a reputation for himself as the most frightening SOB in Boston. This time he’d be professional about it—strike with a vengeance, but be smart. Maximum impact, minimum exposure.
And he wasn’t going to waste his ammo on targets he could not take. So now, instead of giving the cops lip, he’d be respectful, suggesting they were all in the same business together, cops and criminals both, and trying to make nice. But when he struck, he struck hard. When you give somebody a beating, he once counseled a younger gangster, “don’t just knock him out. Bite his fucking ear off, bite his face off, lift his arms up and break his fucking ribs, break his ankles, hit all his spots, his nonlethal spots.” Do everything but kill him, in other words. That way, the guy remembers it, and so does everyone else.
After I’d been a screw for a while, I took another shot at the State Police exam in 1979. They only had space for a couple hundred students at the academy, but twenty thousand guys applied. Fortunately I did well enough on the test to land one of the spots. I was thrilled to get a shot at the State Police, which had been an ambition of mine since my teens. And I didn’t mind at all the thought of getting out of Walpole either.
The State Police Academy was no picnic. The training went on practically around the clock with course work, physical training, practice on the firing range, and a lot more, since police work involves a bit of everything. Believe me, when I was done at the end of the day, I was dead. But I loved it. I loved the structure, the discipline, the clarity. Every minute I was there would make me a better cop, and nothing could feel better to me than that.
When I graduated, I got stationed out near Northampton. Lots of farms and small towns along the Connecticut River, just east of the Berkshires. It’s a pretty part of the world, with some famous colleges like Amherst and Smith. I was married by then, to Marguerite Cawley, who I met in college. Her father had been a firefighter like my dad.
When you’re just starting out, you pair off with a veteran trooper and ride with him for a few months so he can show you the ropes. Every cop has a thing about his cruiser. It’s private, like his office, or maybe even his bedroom. When you’re there as a rookie cop, and you climb in, you see a lot of what is going on. You see the paperwork he’s going to need for arrests and citations, the stack of case files he’s working on, maybe even his mail. In the back, there’s probably a rifle on the gun rack over the seat. In the trunk, there’s firefighting equipment, a medical emergency kit, road markers. It is a tight fit.
Riding with a veteran, I learned things I didn’t get in the academy, key things for working the road—how to approach a stopped car, what to check for in the vehicle, bureaucratic procedures, legal stuff, what to worry about, what not to worry about.
After a few months of this, I had my own cruiser. It was a Chevy Impala, loaded up with the police package, with maybe 100,000 miles on it. It rode a little rough, but it said Massachusetts State Police in bold white letters against pale blue, and it was all mine. It was a great moment when I slid behind the wheel of that car that first time.
At first, the work was mostly patrolling the north-south highways in the western part of the state. Drivers coming up from New York and bound for a getaway in Vermont would come screaming through there at eighty or ninety miles an hour. Late one night, I was out on Route 84, when a car with New York plates came flying up from Connecticut, doing ninety, easy.
I pulled out, got the siren and the blue lights going, and tore after it. It was just that car and me for maybe five miles, but I finally got it to pull over. A Saab, dark blue. There were four guys in it, two and two, and all eyes were on me when I came to the window with my flashlight to ask for license and registration. They kept their eyes on me, but I could see they were shifting stuff around in their seats in an odd way, as if to hide something. I grabbed licenses from all of them and returned to the cruiser to call in the license numbers to the dispatcher. This was years before cruisers had laptops. After a few minutes, word came back. None of their IDs checked out.
I looked back at the car. Shit. Four of them, one of me. Now what?
I decided to play it cool, strolled back to the car, and asked them if they’d mind if I took a look in the trunk.
“No problem, officer,” the driver told me.
He came around and popped the trunk with his key. There was a big heap of laundry, and I went through it all. Shirts, pants, shoes, everything. I’d been trained to be thorough, and as I peered inside one loafer with my flashlight, I noticed a number written there under the tongue. W134506. It was a Walpole ID. As I knew well, every inmate has one, and it goes on everything he owns. I jotted it down, closed the trunk, and told the four guys to hold tight a few more minutes. I’d be right back. I returned to my cruiser, called in to the barracks, and asked the staff to call the number in to the office at Walpole. They called me back right away, It belonged to a man I’ll call Marcus Dupree. There was a federal indictment out on him for drug trafficking and intent to murder.
Normally, I’d call for backup, but I was going to make only one arrest, since I had no evidence on the others. I returned to the car and asked Marcus to step out for a moment. He was in the front passenger seat, and he acted sullen as he climbed out. As soon as Dupree shut the door behind him, I had him up against the side of the car, his hands behind his back, and cuffed. Once I had backup, we pulled the rest out of the car. We found some pills and a few bags of dope in the car. Small stuff compared with what I did later, but big to me then.
I made a lot of arrests like Dupree. But I spent plenty of time off the highway and in the towns, too, handling housebreaks, domestic cases, street crime. Small cases, you might say, but no case is ever small to the victim.
Occasionally you’d be involved in a high-profile case. One of them involved the murder of a state trooper. Horrible. I’d been working a drug case in Southbridge, a little town south of Worcester. I was in the dealer’s apartment, ripping the place apart looking for his stash, when there was a frantic call over my radio: “Trooper down! Trooper down!” That’s always a bad moment for a cop. This time it was George Hanna, one of the veterans on the force, a real good guy. He’d taken my patrol in Auburn near Worcester while we hit the Southbridge house.
We jumped into our cruisers and raced over to where George had been hit, but he’d been rushed to the hospital, and soon died there. Apparently, he’d spotted three guys getting set to knock over a liquor store on Route 20, one of the big streets through town. When he confronted them, one of them opened fire. George went down with a ton of bullets in him. He didn’t have a chance.
After the medics got George onto a gurney to take him to the ambulance, a bystander picked a wallet up off the ground and handed it to a State Police sergeant, Tom White, who’d been securing the crime scene. Figuring it was George’s, White put it aside. When he opened it up later, he found that it had no identification, only a few dollars, and a lot of papers in Spanish. It obviously wasn’t George’s. I had a Spanish-speaking kid with me to break in as a new trooper, and he translated the contents for us. One of the pieces was a ticket stub for a softball raffle at a bar in Worcester. Just the stub, but we figured the rest of the ticket would be back at the bar, and it would have the name. So another trooper and I rode over to the bar, and we explained the situation to the owner. He found the original book of tickets and matched the stub to a man named Emelio Otero, and it gave Otero’s address. Early the next morning, two troopers found Otero driving with two other passengers. I was part of the backup team, and we found a small bag on the floor by the front seat. Inside was George’s gun.
All crime is cruel, and some is savage. Regardless of its severity, I never got over how it affected the victims. That was why we did our job. And I quickly learned that most criminals aren’t geniuses. Crime is difficult—committing it, concealing it. A lot of criminals just don’t have the right mentality, and they mess up in the most obvious ways. Most of them do crime because they can’t do anything else, and they’re impulsive besides. They do the crime, but they don’t think much about what’s going to happen after they do the crime. They think they can just walk away and that’s it.
For example, two inmates busted out of the Concord jail and started sticking guns in the faces of convenience store clerks and swiping all the money from the till. A State Police detective called to tell me that he and his partner had the robbers holed up in an apartment in Fitchburg. They were set to burst in and grab them, but they needed someone in a State Police uniform to go first, so the robbers would know they were dealing with the cops. Could I help them out?
It can be scary to rip through a door not knowing what’s on the other side. But it’s a job; we’re trained for it. When doctors open you up for heart surgery, they don’t get the jumps. I’d have a shotgun—and surprise—on my side. Of course, they might, too.
“Sure,” I said. “No problem.”
I get pumped for something like that, all the same. The two detectives ripped open the door with a sledgehammer while I stood off to one side with my shotgun. As soon as the door was down, I charged inside. It’s all about speed, to get them before they can get you, but also to get them before they can dump the drugs down the toilet. The lead guy had been watching TV with his girlfriend. He sprang off the couch and dug under his pant leg for his knife, but he was too late. I had the tip of my shotgun up hard under his chin.
“Drop the knife,” I told him. “Do it!” It wouldn’t do him much good anyway. No point bringing a knife to a gunfight, right?
“Now put your hands up, or I’ll blow your head off.”
Staring down at the barrel of my gun, he didn’t have much choice, and his hands went up toward the ceiling.
Meanwhile, the detectives chased my guy’s partner up the stairs and I could hear them scrambling down the hall, the detectives’ shoes sounding heavy through the ceiling. Then silence, and then the detectives shouting, “Get the fuck out of there!”
The partner had tried to hide under a pile of dirty laundry.
That’s when it clicked in about the guy at the other end of my shotgun. Geroux! Fat, pimply guy—had to be one of the dumbest criminals ever. He simply could not stay out of prison. This was my third run-in with him, and the other two had gone just as badly for him.
Last time, I’d been in a Worcester toy store buying a Christmas present for my nephew when I noticed a guy wandering around the place like he was casing it. Next thing I knew, three guys came bursting in wearing Halloween masks. One of them had a shotgun, and he went right for the cash register. The other came around to me and demanded my wallet. I was afraid I’d left my badge in it. Now I was afraid that if the guy saw it, he’d freak out and shoot me. So I dropped the wallet onto the floor and kicked it down the aisle, hoping it would slide under one of the cases. No such luck.
The guy bent down, picked it up, and flipped it open. Then he looked at me.
No badge, thank God.
He failed to make me, but when he looked at me straight on, I made him. Because I had known him before that. From Walpole, where he’d been doing a three-year hitch for larceny. Fat, pimply Geroux. One more time.
There, in the toy store, he slid the cash out of my wallet—all I had was fifteen bucks—and shoved it into the front pocket of his jeans, and then he flipped my wallet back onto the floor. Then the robbers all scrammed. The cops caught him that night, of course. There were plenty of eyewitnesses, and it wasn’t hard to get a name. Geroux.
I testified against him. Back he went to Walpole.
Now, at the apartment in Fitchburg, I was staring at the very same Geroux, who had nearly killed me, and I pressed the tip of the shotgun against his neck a little tighter.
“Geroux, right?”
“Don’t you remember me?”
He looked blank.
“I remember you.” I didn’t say how, and he didn’t ask.
The two detectives handled the other guy, while I took Geroux to the Fitchburg PD in the back of my cruiser. I watched him in the rearview. He said nothing, just looked dead ahead, with about as unhappy a face as you’ll ever see.
“Aren’t you curious?”
“Curious what?”
“How I know you.”
“Fuck no.”
I told him anyway. First Walpole. Then that toy store.
“Shit,” he said.
Geroux. Some guys, they start to go off at the wrong angle, and then they just keep going.
By the time Whitey got out in 1965, Boston was in the midst of another of the great gang wars that surged over the city every decade or two, dropping carnage in back alleys and abandoned cars. He’d missed the McLaughlins and McLeans, but this was another pair of rival Irish gangs called the Mullens and the Killeens, and they went at it like the Hatfields and the McCoys with machine guns. The battle had begun when a Mullen and a Killeen had gotten into a scrap at a Killeen bar in Southie called the Transit, and the Killeen ended up biting off the nose of the Mullen. The Mullens charged into the Transit to seek retribution. The Killeens expressed outrage at the disrespect, and all around the city, bodies got bullets in them.
By then, Bulger had thrown in with Donald Killeen, the South Boston bookie who served as the Killeen chieftain. Bulger was his bodyguard, watching Killeen’s back. In a flash of power, Whitey blasted Mullen’s ally Buddy Roache, brother of the future Boston police commissioner, not killing him, but paralyzing him for life, and, for good measure, he knocked off Donald McGonagle, although that one may have been in error, since McGonagle hadn’t taken sides in the conflict. The Mullens took revenge by popping a Killeen loyalist named O’Sullivan. And on it went. Move and countermove. Whitey was not touched.
Things were not going well for the Killeens, and Whitey blamed Donald, who may have seemed a little soft to run a war like that, and he’d left his organization overextended. And the Mullen group of Paul McGonagle and Patrick Nee kept squeezing and squeezing. To Whitey, the choice was to protect Donald Killeen or protect himself. That one was easy.
He threw Donald Killeen over, and, caught between the Italian mob he detested for its pomp and extravagance and the vengeful Mullens who wanted to kill him, he took the third course: he joined up with the oversized Howie Winter, who ran the Irish mob operation out of a garage on Somerville’s Winter Hill. Winter was friendly with the Mullens, but not to the point of joining their war with the Killeens. And they were friendly enough with him that they didn’t kill him.
Safely in the Winter Hill camp, Whitey knew better than to wait for Donald Killeen to send out someone to slaughter him. He struck first. Donald was attending his son’s fourth birthday party at his house in Southie when he received a phone call that sent him out to his car. A man with a machine gun was watching from a nearby stand of trees. When Killeen closed his car door, the man charged toward him, his machine gun leveled. Frantic, Killeen groped for the pistol under his seat, but too late. The gunman rammed the machine gun through the window and into his face and let loose fifteen bullets that nearly ripped Donald Killeen’s head off. No one doubts that it was Bulger.
Having made his statement, Whitey was the one to end the violence a few weeks later. He was waiting in his car with three other men when Donald’s youngest brother, Kenneth, came jogging by. It was Kenneth who’d bitten the nose off the Mullen at the Transit months back, starting the war. Now he’d be the one to end it.
Bulger rolled down the window. “Hey, Kenny!” he shouted. Kenneth turned and saw Whitey’s face looming up, and a gun leveled at him at eye height.
“It’s over,” Whitey snarled. “You’re out of business. No other warnings.”
And that was it. The Killeens just ... stopped. To fend off further attacks from Whitey, the cowed Killeens offered him control of the gang. With that opening, Whitey persuaded Winter to move into the vacuum with him, and the two rounded up some other Winter Hill heavyweights and went at the Mullens harder than the Killeens ever had. Whitey took out six of them in a single two-day spree, and he’d slaughtered a full dozen by 1975. When Whitey was done, the gang landscape had changed. Now there was Jerry Angiulo’s Mafia operation based in the North End, and Howie Winter’s Winter Hill gang in Somerville, and that was pretty much it. Except that inside Winter Hill, people were starting to listen to Whitey, not Howie. He’d branched out to take personal control of all the rackets in South Boston, and he was making inroads among the bookies in the North End, too. There was nothing that Winter could say about it, even though it was cutting into Winter’s revenue so bad that, at one point in the 1970s, he had to go to Angiulo for a loan. Then, scrambling to pay the interest, he started rigging horse races, which was not his game. It cost him. Acting on a tip, the feds arrested him for race-fixing in 1979. He was sent to prison with most of the Somerville crew, except for Whitey Bulger and Steve Flemmi. They were Winter Hill now. But everyone knew which of the two called the shots.