Book Review: "Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt that ...," by Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy, W. W. Norton & Company, February 11, 2013, reviewed by Eamon Loingsigh.

NOTE: The jury in the federal racketeering trial of convicted mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger, 83, found him guilty today on 31 of 32 counts -- including involvement in 11 murders. Sentencing is scheduled for November 13. The verdicts could bring a sentence of up to life in prison.

When a reader is treated with a strong image in the beginning of a book, it tends to linger. And so it is with the picture in the front of a relatively new biography of arch-Irish-American gangster Whitey Bulger, titled "Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt that ...." The book presents a handcuffed 81-year-old Bulger looking out a police cruiser at the South Boston waterfront neighborhood that had changed so much since his day as king of the rackets.

“He no longer really belonged in this place,” the authors proclaim in the opening paragraph of the book’s prologue. “The city’s history had outrun him, even as his own had caught up with him.”

South Boston and the grimy, rundown buildings and bars of the waterfront and the Old Harbor housing project neighborhood that Bulger grew up in had changed drastically by 2011, when he was finally captured in California. Where once the underworld thrived in the ghetto’s seedy, dilapidated slums, the old gang’s hangouts were replaced with “sprawling restaurants, gleaming bars, and high-rise hotels that catered to the young and the moneyed.”

The federal courthouse, where Bulger was being frog-marched, had even been moved from downtown to the waterfront area, a culturally symbolic change that showed on the sad, stubborn stare of a cuffed gangster from another era.

Award-winning journalists Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy, who reported on Bulger for decades for The Boston Globe, have authored a detailed look at a man so cunning that he played the system from within in order prolong the old world. Shockingly, and what most will always remember about the story of Whitey Bulger (Right, in a mug shot from 2011) is how he and his partner Steve Flemmi manipulated the FBI to cover up his own murders, often blaming them on the North Boston Italian mafia. Or, in one scenario, blaming a murder he committed on another man Whitey also killed.

In a time when “rats” were considered the lowest of the low in the old South Boston neighborhoods, Bulger and Flemmi secretly became informants for the FBI, though often times they gave misleading information. And other times, James Connolly, their FBI handler, helped cover up murders in order to protect Bulger, who Connolly always looked up to in South Boston’s Old Harbor, working-class neighborhood.

As in all great stories, there are great contradictions. Gangsters have always hated informants, yet the greatest gangster of the mid-to-late 20th Century was himself a “nark,” or as they would say in Boston, “na’k.”

“Yeah, it bothers me,” Kevin Weeks, Bulger’s protege answered recently on the witness stand about the murders he helped commit for Bulger and Flemmi (left: in a Boston police mug shot from 2005). “Because we killed people that were rats, and I had the two biggest rats right next to me.”

Bulger, sitting next to his lawyer and Weeks, still on the witness stand then exchanged F- bombs and threats. If that weren’t a wild enough turn of events for a courtroom, it was Bulger’s lawyer who then provided the next ironic turn when he asked Weeks if he felt he was now also a rat, sitting on the witness stand against his old boss.

‘The good bad guy’

There have been far too many trashy documentaries on the life of gangsters, which have so muddled the real lives they lead, certainly - including some books written by former Bulger soldiers on this very topic. But, in contrast, Cullen and Murphy have created a book that is a very sterile, technical account filled with the inverted triangle of fact-based journalese and is distant in its presentation of quite exciting and (what could have been) tension-filled stories.

Certainly sticking to facts is important, and never more important to working reporters like Cullen and Murphy, but their account would have benefitted from a finely placed adjective or a description of the fear Whitey put in his enemies. Maybe even the sound of gunshots in the air would help.

The reader doesn’t get much description or opinion, unless it comes at their protagonist’s expense, like this:

“He (Whitey) considered himself more paternal than pathological, nothing like the other bad guys. Yes, he was a criminal, but to hear him tell it he only hurt those who threatened his business.”

Here, and peppered throughout, Cullen and Murphy do their best to crush Whitey’s own legend as “the good bad guy.” While Cullen and Murphy work hard to produce the facts and interview quotations, and excerpts from police and prison records, the limited times that they do bring forth an opinion is to dispense of Whitey’s own legend-creating tale of the “benevolent gangster.”

(Right: Mug shot of Whitey Bulger from Alcatraz prison, November 1959.)

It is true that, as political correctness dictates, he should not be seen as such. There are too many victims and families of victims. But what the book truly misses is how a “Whitey Bulger” emerged in that time and place.

We are left to come up with that perspective. Whitey grew up poor, in Old Harbor’s projects, while other groups of people, mostly Protestant neighborhoods in Massachusetts, had a plethora of opportunities to succeed. True, it may not be a non-fiction writer’s job to speculate on how it feels to grow up in these circumstances and the feelings it creates of jealousy and frustration, but taking the time to pull rank on moral high ground apparently is.

What is also missing is America’s fascination for the gangster. Specifically, the Irish-American gangster. This topic and the national enthrallment it draws is apparently what has gotten the Boston Globe and its writers loads of attention here.

(Left: An FBI surveillance photograph of James J. Bulger (r.) and Stephen Flemmi taken in Boston in the 1980s.)

Cullen and Murphy’s book is written so dryly, and from the perspective of the Massachusetts WASP, that I found myself rooting for Whitey and the old neighborhood mentality to prevail and make that final getaway. Then you realize that both authors have the typical Irish surname of the South Boston gangstersm and a reader may conclude that these must be some of the Lace Curtain Irish that pander to the Massachusetts “Brahmins” as they are called in the book, the offspring of the original Puritan settlers of state and a reader feels Whitey’s sense of betrayal (comically, Whitey proclaims to have helped Ms. Murphy’s father in the old days, which she doubts).

Cullen, Murphy score an ‘incomplete’

Are we asking for sensationalism? No. Are we asking for entertainment? Yeah, a little. Still, this account must be considered the book of record on the topic. What Cullen and Murphy have compiled here is a vast and thoroughly accountable detailing of America’s most fascinating living gangster.

From records of his attempt to cut time off his prison sentence in the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program, which experimented in mind-controlling drugs such as LSD in the Atlanta Penitentiary during the 1950s, to his time spent in Alcatraz, his active disagreement with desegregation in his neighborhoods, the history of the gang wars of South Boston, and the details of how Bulger and the Winter Hill Gang created their underground empire is riveting, and the amount of elaborate information is stunningly impressive.

The authors’ journey took them across many state lines, exploring his early bank-robbing days in Indiana and elsewhere, his stint in the Air Force, and time in Florida where a Winter Hill gang associate skimmed from within the World Jai-Alai company in Miami, to a murder ordered by Whitey in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and, of course, information culled from California, where Whitey was locked up in Alcatraz and from Santa Monica, where he was eventually arrested.

(Right, a retouched photo of James Joseph Bulger Jr., used on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitive list in 2004.)

Cullen and Murphy even take the reader across the Atlantic to Ireland. There they gathered information about Bulger’s organization of arms shipments to the Irish Republican Army, via a drug-running boat, and all the men within the Winter Hill Gang involved and as well, the characters inside the IRA leadership at the time.

Most importantly, we are given information about the rogue FBI agent who was so manipulated by Whitey and the manipulated reports within the FBI gifts. This arrangement with his former South Boston buddy arguably allowed Whitey to prolong a street-styled mob law in his neighborhoods well after the heyday of mobsters and gangsters had passed.

In the end, however, the picture of Whitey Bulger is subtly lacking. In Cullen and Murphy's telling, Bulger's character and motives are fuzzy. Not for lack of information, but for lack of connecting the information to the motives of a man whose ego was, one could assume through the facts, so large that he killed, maimed, intimidated and lied in order to keep his power. WG

Eamon Loingsigh’s historical novel “Light of the Diddicoy,” about the Brooklyn, Irish-American White Hand Gang is due out St. Patrick’s Day 2014. Visit http://artofneed.wordpress.com to learn more.

(c) Eamon Loingsigh 2013