Black Mass

The writer James Carroll, winner of the National Book Award and a regular columnist for the Boston Globe, identified a “moral blindness” at work when it came to the Bulger brothers in a column written in late 1999.

For many years, large parts of the Massachusetts political establishment willingly winked at the savage behavior of James Bulger, and that succession of winks eventually became a pervasive moral blindness. The explicitly expressed tolerance for James Bulger polluted not only law enforcement but government itself, fueling public cynicism, spreading fear, and turning the public sector into a murderer’s accomplice.

Obviously all of this is tied to the role of James Bulger’s brother William Bulger, the former Senate president. No one can lay the crimes of James Bulger at his brother’s feet, and no one can fault William Bulger for his expressions of brotherly love despite everything. But the former Senate president went much further than that. It was his winking at the exploits of James Bulger that sponsored everyone else’s.

“In the magical curl of William Bulger’s wit,” wrote Carroll, “James Bulger emerged as a figure of fun.”

Carroll singled out the annual St. Patrick’s Day breakfasts that Billy hosted, in particular the one in 1995—just two months after Whitey got an FBI tip and hit the road—when then-governor Weld sang a “ditty” he had composed to the gathering of public leaders that included both U.S. senators from Massachusetts and the city’s mayor. “Weld’s song was to the tune of ‘Charlie on the MTA,’” Carroll reported, “and once again it was about the killer. ‘Will he ever return?’ Weld sang. ‘No, he’ll never return. No, he’ll never come back this way. I just got a call from the Kendall Square Station. He’s with Charlie on the MTA!’ The gang loved it, but imagine how pleased James Bulger’s tipster must have been.”

Weld, in these instances, provides a measure of the depth of this corruption. He had served, after all, as a U.S. attorney, with direct knowledge of James Bulger’s crimes. A wink from him could make even the most compromised FBI agent relax, and it could enable so many others to stifle their misgivings and sign on to this deadly arrangement.

James Bulger, still at large, is an embarrassment to the FBI. He is a danger to the public. And in the way in which his fate became entangled with his brother’s and in the way they then used each other to advance their separate agendas, the entire story remains a mark on the soul of the Commonwealth.

STEVIE FLEMMI, meanwhile, continued to keep his own counsel in cellblock H-3 of the Plymouth County Correctional Facility. Over time the crime boss had developed a twitch in one eye. There were times when his arm would jerk involuntarily. He seemed to fidget. The facial tic and spasms had not gone unnoticed.

“It’s the Devil eating his body,” Salemme told others.

Flemmi was moved out the cellblock early in the new year amid growing concerns for his safety.

Whitey continues to elude investigators. Since his indictment in 1995, he’s been spotted in New York, Louisiana, Wyoming, Mississippi, even in his old neighborhood, Southie. He’s been added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List and featured on the television show of the same name. But no amount of FBI talk about how hard it was trying to capture Bulger could overcome the public’s impression that the FBI didn’t really want to.

New Orleans? Dublin? Southie?

By the end of 1999 the dark history of the FBI and Bulger may have been revealed. It was all there in 17,000 pages of sworn testimony, Judge Mark L. Wolf’s 661-page ruling, and a fresh round of sensational criminal indictments. But none of those historic records contained the one answer a bedeviled city was still dying to know:

Where’s Whitey?