Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Snitches Get Stitches, Except This One Guy in South Boston

2026-Jan-11

A new type of book to be reviewed on the blog is upon us. Behold! This time the genre is true-crime. Organized crime, that is. The book I read is not about some creepy nobody stabbing helpless women in the night at random. No, this kind of true crime is the kind populated by racketeers working together. This true-crime story is about career criminals working together in citywide conspiracies, teetering on the edge of legitimacy. The true-crime documented in this book was the highest type of crime that can be reached when working outside of the law.

In the book Where The Bodies Were Buried by T.J. English, we have a case of somebody able to operate on a higher criminal plane than what he should have. James ‘Whitey’ Bulger was able to play outside of his Boston hoodlum league because he could do something no other mobster could do. That is, he could perform his dirty work and keep it inside the law.

By law, I mean having federal cops having his back any time state or local police investigations implicated Whitey in his nefarious acts. Many times those being murder, administered personally. Perhaps he could have risen to his rank without unofficial legal assistance. It cannot be argued though that once he had a FBI protection enchantment cast upon him, he felt he could perform whatever act he thought necessary to further his criminal enterprise.

Unless Whitey Bulger got himself a capital fund, he had reached the highest echelon of crime he and his Boston gangser buddies could dream of. A mob boss that used the FBI as a resource. Not only having impunity towards police investigation, he could manipulate the direction of police investigations by feeding the appropriate names of rival criminal organizations. Namely, The Mafia, for which he was hired by the feds to help prosecute.

As the blog readers would know, I have read a bunch of books about dirty cops in the 1940-60s, almost exclusively ones written by James Ellroy. The novelty of a ‘boss’ level gangster who are either themselves a US federal asset or have well paid (and loyal) friends at the highest reaches of judicial agencies is long gone. Jaded as I am with corruption in law enforcement at all levels of the United States of America, there was some novelty to be found about this particular telling of a federal police agency using one or several criminals in pursuit of another criminal.

My first encounter with the Whitey Bulger legend was the 2006 movie The Departed. The working class Irish mob boss of Boston, played by Jack Nicholson, is revealed to be a rat to the FBI, compromising the Massachusetts state police undercover investigation the movie was anchored around. At the time, I was naive enough to be confused why the target being an FBI asset would matter. Back then I had a malformed idea that all cops know about each other’s official investigations. That movie was so slick and rife with Rolling Stones music that I looked past my confusion about the bureaucratic intricacies of who worked for what department. It was slick to me because that movie had oodles of tough talking gangsters, rather than heady discussion about jurisprudence.

That novelty I encountered with his book was the courtroom setting. The author fills in the backstory as to why Bulger was being prosecuted for dozens of charges in a federal court in 2013. Also the publication history of all the people involved in the case. The meat of the story is two court appointed lawyers trying to prove that their client cannot be charged with crimes by an organization complicit with the crimes.

The defense tried to enter into the court record all the evidence and testimony they could find that chronicled the wild corruption engaged by an arm of the FBI in pursuit of La Cosa Nostra aka The Mafia. (And by Mafia, I mean the one that controlled Boston, yet was headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island. A New England confederacy of Italian gangsters I guess is the ‘Mafia’ in this book’s case.) The courtroom setting of two legal teams entering evidence to be scrutinized made this an official story of corruption. Not just gossip about famous names being corrupt, uttered in the terse tough talking dialogue among those Ellroy novels I’ve read. This book recorded the efforts of Bulger’s legal counsel to not defend Bulger himself, but prove to the court that he was part of a dirty system run by a glob of federal law enforcement officials, yet known among other members of the law enforcement community.

Whitey was a career criminal at the get go of adulthood. For him, that started in the late 50s. The career in crime came to an early halt by a federal arrest, giving him a few years of federal prison in the spring of his criminal career. His time in prison brings a sidestory almost worth its own book. This guy volunteered for some MK-ULTRA funded experiments with LSD. In agreement to these daily dosings of acid, his prison sentence was reduced. Whitey reported having only adverse effects from the process. Mentioning nightmares to his end of days. I wonder how much those changed him for the better or worse.

I have heard of people not responding well to LSD, especially when it is consumed involuntarily. This was not exactly involuntary but definitely a coerced act. Had Whitey Bulger been out and about in the civilian world, out of prison, I do not think he would be interested in a drug that would promise to peer deep into his mind. Not to belittle this guy’s mind. He seemed to use his mind to great effect by maintaining a huge criminal enterprise. I’m just saying that at his point in life when that doctor administered LSD to him in prison for days in a row, he was very much a working class Boston type of guy. I wonder if the LSD at least gave him the ambition to reach for the stars of criminal acts? Was Whitey always destined to end up where he would and this haunting experiment is a footnote that has not larger effect?

Whitey was released from federal prison after a few years, then enjoyed decades of steady upward mobility in the Boston criminal underworld throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s. A monster you could say that grew to take the size of the Mafia he was informing on, officially in documents that turned out to be hard to find at the time of his trial. At some point in the middle of that rise through the Boston criminal ranks, he began working in some cooperation with the FBI.

This cadre of FBI agents had already been working with several other criminal elements in the New England area, hoping to officially nab Raymond Petrarca, who I would describe as the biggest guy in that Mafia. And ‘The Mafia’ was what the FBI really really wanted to bust in the 60s and 70s. A question I also want to explore further is what was J. Edgar Hoover up to before he made ‘The Mafia’ the target of investigation. Before he got so hot on booking Italian mobsters, Hoover was denying their organization even existed. The few times Hoover has a speaking part in those Ellroy novels, he does not get enough lines to paint him as anything more than a micro-managing paranoid chief of state police. Hoover himself only plays a small role in this book, yet a necessary one since this is a story about the FBI in the 20th century. The FBI and Hoover are the same thing in his tenure as the director.

The G-men tasked with arresting this godfather of Providence got transfixed with the idea of turning underlings into informants. It was a proven method that brought in convictions. The agents were not wrong to pursue if they wanted good stats. Before Bulger came along to be a partner in the curious exchange of legal protection for underworld intelligence reports, there was Joseph ‘The Animal’ Barboza. A gangster that could never become a full-blooded member of that Providence Mafia. The government (FBI, US Attorney, etc.) used him all over their schedule to inform against them in court testimony. Informing on whoever he could rightfully implicate. Or deceitfully sometimes. And implicating some innocent people along the way.

These bogus court outcomes became lies that everybody involved just had to live with. That includes the government officials and criminals involved, and it includes the next FBI informants who would participate in this program, and any lawyer that had to mention these events in court. Usually members of the government’s side of a defense trial would ignore it. Bulger’s attorneys were among the few who tried to talk about the informant system in open court.

That is not to say I interpreted this book as a legal drama about bold civil attorneys fighting for the rights of the criminally accused. What I do is applaud the professionalism of the court appointed lawyers trying to present the history that goes along with the thirty something charges levied against their client. I am not too sure how they were compensated for this theoretically possible, yet unlikely to succeed defense case. If they were compensated below their normal rate, then their actions do sound commendable. If they got rewarded more than usual, then they deserve no more than praise for their legal gamemanship.

There does not need to be a ‘bad guy’ to point to in this book. It was a story about criminals that use murder as often as they would negotiate. Had the prosecution asked me if I felt safer if these people were locked up, I suppose I would say yes. The villains I could find in this cast of characters were the attorneys prosecuting the case against Bulger. They made sure the trial only mentioned Bulger’s involvement in each criminal act, and nothing that precipitated the crimes themselves. They want to throw Bulger away, and hope the legends of corruption go away with him.