BOSTON So Whitey Bulger is in fed eral custody at last at the age of 81, after more than 16 years on the lam. Consider him another example of a 1960s government program run amok.
In his younger days, James J. “Whitey” Bulger was Boston’s Jimmy Cagney — the early Cagney in the Warner Bros. gangster movies, before he took the darker parts like the psychopath Cody Jarrett in “White Heat.”
As his brother Billy would say at a congressional hearing in 2003, “There was no talk then of the more terrible crimes.” And Billy was the president of the Massachusetts state Senate; at his political breakfast every St. Patrick’s Day, they’d crack mild jokes about Whitey.
As his sycophants at the Boston Globe always insisted, against all evidence to the contrary, “He kept the drugs out of Southie.”
In fact, there were plenty of drugs in South Boston. Whitey had gotten plenty dark himself — with help from the feds.
In 1961, at the behest of then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover told his agents to develop organized crime sources — but only sources who weren’t in the Mafia.
Whitey was in prison then (bank robbery). He got out in ’65, and began his rise in the ranks of organized crime. Thanks to Billy, he had visible means of support — a no-show courthouse job.
But Billy did a lot more: He was close to then-House Speaker John McCormack, who ran interference for the FBI in Congress — and in 1970, “the director” sent a memo to the Boston FBI office ordering them to recruit Whitey as an informant. He was on his way to the top.
Whitey soon owned the Boston FBI office. As he doled out his year-end payments to the G-men, he would quip, “Christmas is for cops and kids.”
The FBI gave good value. First they took his cohorts in the Winter Hill Gang off the board — race fixing. Whitey and his partner, fellow FBI rat Stevie Flemmi, were listed as “unindicted coconspirators.”
Next to go was “In Town,” the Boston Mafia. Whitey and Stevie were listed as informants on the wiretap warrants, which meant they couldn’t be prosecuted.
With the competition eliminated, Whitey began to relax. As a favor, he strangled Flemmi’s two young girlfriends. He vacationed in Provincetown, hung out at a local transvestite bar, was photographed in a Village People-like cowboy outfit.
He bought homes, paid for the burial of his fellow Alcatraz inmates. There was plenty of money — cocaine was in vogue.
Who could touch him? As one of his imprisoned rivals told the FBI: “WHITEY BULGER and STEVIE FLEMMI have a machine and the Boston Police and the FBI have a machine.”
The machines finally began to unravel in the early 1990s. Despite the Boston FBI, the Justice Department began to take notice. Bookies were flipped, then drug dealers. In December 1994, Whitey vanished.
Life went on in Boston. Billy cashed out with a $200,000 state pension. His favorite nephew was fired from his state job in a patronage scandal.
Meanwhile, all of his cohorts were convicted and shipped off to prison — all the while wondering where their pal had vanished to.
As one prosecutor asked Flemmi, “At some point, I guess, you realized Mr. Bulger wasn’t going to ride to their rescue, is that right?”
Flemmi: “I can’t say that.”
“You can’t say that? Well, he hasn’t rescued you so far, has he?”
Flemmi: “He must be working on it.”
But he wasn’t. He was living in a sunny place for shady people, as Graham Greene would have described Santa Monica, Calif.
In fact, the world learned yesterday, he’d been living in a rent-controlled apartment. For Whitey Bulger, it was a final bonus — as they say in Southie, one last “kiss in the mail.”
Howie Carr is a columnist for The Boston Herald.