On March 18, 1990, two thieves stole over a half billion dollars worth of artwork from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Today this remain’s the world largest unsolved art robbery.
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For twenty years, Whitey Bulger terrorized Boston with the full collusion of the FBI. On the run for sixteen years, he was eventually arrested on June 22, 2011.
Litif got off with this stern warning but then made the mistake of telling Bulger that he was going to murder his bookmaker partner, a last straw. On April, he was invited to the Triple O’s where Bulger stabbed him repeatedly with an ice pick and Steve Flemmi shot him in the head. His body was found in the trunk of his car, in garbage bags, abandoned on a South End street. In another example of his macabre sense of humor Whitey explained to associates afterwards that Litif, known as a flashy dresser, was wearing green underwear after they stripped his body. Therefore, they made sure that they used green garbage bags, so that Louis would be found, color coordinated.
Only a few months later, a Southie criminal named Brian Halloran tried to extricate himself from some serious criminal charges by going to the FBI, with details tying Bulger and Flemmi to the murders of Louie Litif and Roger Wheeler, even claiming to be an eye witness in both cases. Although Halloran was at least embellishing if not outright lying about his presence at the Wheeler slaying, he was close enough to Callahan to be able to secretly record potentially incriminating conversations. He pleaded to be allowed into the witness protection program and the agent handling his case figured he would run that by supervisor John Morris, to see what he thought. Morris immediately told Connolly who told Whitey Bulger.
With two bodies now buried in its basement, Whitey Bulger began referring to the Nee house as the Haunty. The cellar would have another permanent guest, Deborah Hussey, Steve Flemmi’s quasi-stepdaughter. Although he and Marion Hussey never married, he lived within the Hussey household and was perceived as the father in the family. That is, until Deborah Hussey revealed that Flemmi had molested her sexually, beginning when she was a young teenager. As an adult, Debbie developed a serious drug addiction and resorted to prostitution to feed her habit. Arrested on numerous occasions, she frequently named dropped both Flemmi and Bulger to the police. She also took to hanging around the Triple O’s and demanding drinks from the customers or hitting up Southie dope dealers for freebies, bragging that she had connections to Whitey, another big red flag. Bulger believed her to be a dangerous loose cannon and began pushing Flemmi to do something about it. In early January, 1985, Flemmi did. He got her to meet him by feigning guilt over what had happened between them and the general situation with her mother. He asked to make it up to her by taking her clothes shopping and telling her he was thinking of buying her her own place. Why don’t we drop by and take a look and see if you like it? The house in question was The Haunty.
Ambitious, Connolly was fully aware that for the FBI, the American Mafia to the exclusion of all other organized crime entities was the paramount target of Federal law enforcement. Aware that Steve Flemmi already had provided information, Connolly set his sights on forming the same relationship with Whitey Bulger. Thus far in his brief FBI career in New York, Connolly received high praise during his ongoing evaluations with the stipulation that he had not developed any confidential informants. The agent, knowing Whitey from the old neighborhood and willing to cut ethical and professional corners, understood that developing Whitey as a Top echelon informant could be, within the bureau, a career maker.
In the cat and mouse game of criminal informant, it quickly became clear that the lines were being blurred as to who was the cat and who was the mouse. John Connolly introduced Bulger and Flemmi to his newly installed supervisor within the FBI’s Boston Organized Crime Unit, John Morris. Connolly also arranged for regular dinners at Morris’ home in Lexington, Mass, dinners that included Whitey showing up with cases of very expensive wine, that always got left behind. Morris was blown away by Connolly’s ability to gain access to two such high level informants and was also manipulated by Whitey’s slick Robin Hood façade of claiming to abhor drugs, detesting the Mafia and keeping his neighborhood free from hard drugs like cocaine and heroin and the junkies and pushers who came with such pestilence. All of these claims were either ultimately self-serving or outright lies, but Morris was taken in.
In the late afternoon of June 22, 2011, in Santa Monica, California a property manager name Josh Bond was sitting in his office at the Embassy Hotel. Picking up the phone, Bond punched in the number of tenants from another property across the street, the Princess Eugenia Apartments at 1012 3rd Street, only blocks from the Pacific Ocean.
Whitey also made the most crucial connection of his criminal career when he began to interact with Stephen Flemmi, a member of the Winter Hill Gang who had ambitions of bigger and better things. Nicknamed “The Rifleman,” based on two Army tours of duty in Korea, in which he earned both a Bronze and Silver Star, Flemmi also had an ongoing relationship with longtime Boston FBI agent Paul Rico who specialized in developing informants in the New England criminal underworld.
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For twenty years, Whitey Bulger terrorized Boston with the full collusion of the FBI. On the run for sixteen years, he was eventually arrested on June 22, 2011.
Whitey did not limit himself geographically to South Boston. No longer able to access Marshall Motors because a jailed, cash strapped Howie Winter’s family needed to rent it out, in early 1980, in a location owned by confederate George Kaufman, he set up another headquarters at a garage on Lancaster Street, only blocks away from Jerry Angiulo’s North End office in a restaurant on Prince Street. Here Bulger routinely met with Ilario “Larry” Zannino, Angiulo’s number two man, among other bookies and criminals. An initially strategic spot for such interactions, the Lancaster location set off a law enforcement reaction that was practically a keystone cop imitation. When the Boston State Police received a tip that the garage was actually a chop shop, two investigators began surveillance from across the street. Stunned when they observed the entrance and exit of some of Boston’s most notorious mobsters, they realized bugging the garage would probably provide a mother lode of indictments. Jack O’Donovan, the head of the organized crime unit for the Massachusetts State Police had long suspected that the FBI was colluding with Bulger, and O’Donovan was intent on investigating and arresting Bulger himself.
When Charley Gasko emerged from the elevator into the rear area of the apartment building he would not be meeting up with Josh Bond. Instead, he would be confronted by a half dozen FBI agents and various other law enforcement officials, guns drawn. They ordered him to get on the ground, but despite his age and relative frailty, his response underlined that this was not your typical 81 year old senior citizen, in fact it was not Charlie Gasko at all. It was America’s Most Wanted criminal, James J. (Whitey) Bulger.
Minutes later he called his longtime companion, the alleged Carol Gasko, who was in fact Bulger’s longtime girlfriend and fellow fugitive, Catherine Grieg, his accomplice during Whitey’s 16 year odyssey. He told her that he had been arrested, that she should stay in the apartment and minutes later she was also brought down to the garage, both fugitives now in handcuffs.
Bond, who also managed the Princess Eugenia, needed to reach Charles or Carol Gasko, the elderly, childless couple that occupied the northeast third floor corner apartment, #304. The property manager actually knew the Gaskos’ quite well, his own apartment was next door to theirs and he interacted with Charlie Gasko quite frequently. Bond heard the phone ringing in his earpiece but there was no answer. He hung up, not sure what to do. The reason for his call was that the Gasko’s storage unit at the rear of the building was broken into and he needed to know how the couple wanted to handle the situation. Come down and meet him, Josh, in the back of the building or just have Josh notify the police.
On the evening of October 29, Bulger arrived at the US Penitentiary in Hazelton, West Virginia. A high security prison where two inmates were murdered in the previous six weeks, unfortunately it also housed at least two individuals who made it completely unsuitable for Bulger. One was Fotios (Freddy) Geas, serving a life sentence for the murder of two underworld criminals. Although of Greek ethnicity, Geas was a hitman who operated in Springfield, Mass and was affiliated with the Mafia’s Genovese crime family. In fact, he was arrested as part of the FBI’s investigation of organized crime in the Western Massachusetts area, an investigation that eventually involved the administration of Mayor Michael Albano. Paul DeCologero was also a Northeastern Massachusetts organized crime figure, serving a lengthy sentence for murder. On the morning of October 30, only minutes after Whitey Bulger’s prison cell door was unlocked at 6 AM, close circuit cameras showed Geas and DeCologero entering Bulger’s cell. They left seven minutes later. Whitey Bulger was discovered dead at approximately 8:20 AM,
The Bulger family was not aware of his transfer to West Virginia and Jackie Bulger found out about his brother’s death from the media. However, it seems that many inmates knew of Whitey’s impending transfer, Sean McKinnon, Geas’ cellmate, and the third man eventually indicted for his murder was recorded on a prison line telling his mother in advance that Whitey was on his way.
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The books used for this podcast included:
“Black Mass,” by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Connell.
“Whitey: The Life of America’s Most Notorious Crime Boss,” by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Connell.
“Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster,” by Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy.
“Pursuing Whitey Bulger,” by Thomas J. Foley.
“Whitey On Trial,” by Margaret McClean.”
The music included in this podcast included:
“Jungle,” by Aakash Gandhi (Part One, intro, Part Three, outro)
“Backwoods BBQ,” by Chris Haugen (Part One, outro)
“Ginormous Robots,” by Nathan Moore ( Part Two, outro, Part Three, intro)
