They Finally Got Whitey!

Here I am, just returned from my reconnaissance mission in Italy to find Whitey Bulger - I even checked out Taormina, Sicily where Whitey and his gun moll were purportedly seen in 2007 - and he turns up stateside. Wouldn't ya know it? All I brought back from Italy was a bad cold I caught from some Mexican beggar I kicked in the butt outside a church in Naples.

It was clever of the FBI to shift the search to his girlfriend, Catherine Greig. After all, since she was a lot younger than Whitey - and not herself the fugitive - she would have been the one out and about, doing chores, getting her hair done and her face lifted, making friends and whatnot. They say Ms. Greig, a former dental hygienist, liked to get her teeth cleaned once a month. I mean, how many folks do that? The FBI arrested the pair at the Princess Eugenia apartment complex in Santa Monica where, true to form, 81-year old Whitey had stashed "weapons and a large amount of cash". Not that he was up for a gun battle. They say he's in ill health, which means he's been arrested just in time to get his medical care paid for by the state of Massachusetts. The big question now is what Whitey knows - and whom he's going to be willing to finger. John Connolly probably wasn't the only G-man who had a good thing going with Whitey. Not to mention the Boston police and the local politicians. What about Whitey's brother Billy - sort of the Griffin Dunne character to Whitey's Micheal Keaton in the Johnny Dangerously-style tale of the Bulger boys? Billy had to resign from the presidency of U.Mass. in 2003, but I'll bet what Whitey knows about him could get him into deeper shit than that. The scuttlebutt is that most Bostonians remember Whitey with disgust, and are glad he's been caught. But no doubt there are a few of them who are little nervous. As for the FBI, I guess they're high-fiving each other all over the place right now - but probably not all of them.

One annoying thing about the reports - maybe because the epicenter of the story is L.A. - is how Whitey was the model for the Jack Nicholson character in The Departed. Puhleeze! Nicholson was the worst thing in the movie. He didn't even attempt a Boston accent. He just played Jack Nicholson with devil's horns. And Whitey sure as hell was never fat and self-indulgent like Jack - the real Whitey was a paranoid, teetotaling workout freak. He was anything but flamboyant. He was quiet and deadly, like a snake. I remember that much from fixing his PC before he went on the lam. I sure as hell hope he doesn't remember me.

(This couple photographed in Taormina, Sicily in 2007 are thought by some to have been Bulger and Greig.)





Fugitive Boston mobster arrested on Westside (LA Times)
Whitey Bulger arrested (Boston Globe)
Fugitive mobster Whitey Bulger busted in Santa Monica (Santa Monica Daily Press)
FBI arrests mob boss Whitey Bulger in Calif. (Salon)