The FBI arrested notorious Top Ten fugitive James "Whitey" Bulger in California this week after nearly 16 years on the run. Bulger, the gangster who was indicted in connection with 19 murders from his many years running the Winter Hill Gang, is still a legendary figure around South Boston—some were terrified of his violent temper, while others considered him a Southie Robin Hood. Below, watch a video of South Bostonians considering an end of an era: "He was a mobster, but so what? Everybody's got an occupation."
Bulger, who was also an FBI informant for nearly 30 years, had been hiding out in Santa Monica with his long-time girlfriend Catherine Greig—and she ended up being the key to catching him. When efforts to gather new intel on Bulger failed, police decided to focus on Greig, and her narcissism turned out to be the couples undoing. It seems that Greig, a 60-year-old blue-eyed, bleach-blond former dental hygienist, made obsessive trips to beauty parlors and dental clinics, including monthly teeth cleanings and several plastic surgeries—breast implants, a nose job and a face-lift.
So police flooded TV stations in 14 cities on Monday with public service television advertisements offering rewards of $100,000 for information about her—they focused the ads on daytime shows popular with women, like "Dr. Oz" and "The View." The day after the ads ran, the FBI received a tip from a person who had seen her, and which led police to the couple. They had been living under the names Charles and Carol Gasko; inside their home, they found hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and a stash of weapons, including rifles and handguns.
Bulger, balding with a full white beard and wire-rimmed glasses, appeared with Greig in Los Angeles federal court yesterday, and was remanded to Massachusetts to face a litany of criminal charges, including those 19 counts of murder. Reactions around Boston have been mixed, as the video above shows. "A lot of people thought they were gag newspapers," local coffee shop worker Jackie Donovan told the Globe, describing customers' reactions as they looked at the rack of morning papers. "I thought they didn’t want him to get caught, to be honest,” she added.
Robert Stutman, who headed the Boston office of the Drug Enforcement Agency in the 1980s, gave the Times an impression of just how large Bulger loomed over the city: “The saying in Southie used to be that when Whitey walked down the street, the sidewalk shook. In my opinion, Whitey was more feared in Boston than John Gotti was in New York.”
