Biblical Figure: Whitey Bulger In The Gospels Of Saint David

Whitey Bulger may have inspired the author of one of our greatest Bibles of postmodernism. The latest saint of American literature, David Foster Wallace, known to his acolytes Yahweh-ishly by the acronym "DFW", spent time in the Boston demimonde in the late eighties, where he first encountered the legend of Whitey Bulger. When he began his immortal opus, Infinite Jest, he could not resist including Whitey, however transmogrified, as the bookie, Whitey Sorkin. To quote his own words, "I don't think Whitey Sorkin's supposed to be an isomorphically unique mapping of Whitey Bulger, but when I was in Boston, there were rumors that Whitey had it fixed so that his people won the lottery. I mean, at least in the parts of Boston in which I was moving, Whitey was a creature of myth." It is curious that he chose to give his Whitey the surname "Sorkin". Had he met the playwright and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin during the New York lit-party days of his early career - and, perhaps, not liked him? It wounds some of us here in the shamrockier precincts of Greater Boston that DFW had not chosen to retain the Irish flavor of the original, but a great artist does what a great artist wants. At least he kept the "Whitey", although he seemed reluctant to explain satisfactorily why his "Whitey" should have that name. In fact, in the novel itself, the only attempt to explain (or, indeed, anti-explain) the moniker that DFW offers is the following: "It was never clear to Gately why Whitey Sorkin was called Whitey, because he spent a huge amount of time under ultraviolet lamps as part of an esoteric cluster-headache-treatment regimen and so was the constant shiny color of a sort of like dark soap, with almost the same color and coin-of-the-realm classic profile as the cheery young Pakistani M.D. who'd told Gately at Our Lady of Solace Hospital in Beverly how Teddibly Soddy he was that Mrs. G.'s cirrhosis and cirrhotic stroke had left her roughly at the neurologic level of a Brussels sprout and then given him public-transportation directions to the L.T.I..."

In real life, as we all know, Whitey was called that because of his light blond hair (although he could really be called that now, based on the color of what hair he has left). Nobody ever called him that to his face though. He apparently preferred "Jimmy". Very prosaic, I know, but great gangsters can prefer what they want. We know Whitey likes to read, and will probably even have the time now to read Infinite Jest in its entirety - but how he's likely to respond to even a non-"isomorphically unique mapping" of himself is anyone's guess. The best thing that we can say about Whitey's appearance in The Gospels of Saint David is that it has given him immortality among the Highbrows.

Approaching infinity (Boston Globe Interview with DFW)
"Whitey Sorkin" Search Results in Infinite Jest (Google Books)

Vigilante Justice, Mob Style

Pictured are Anthony Clemente and his son Damian at their arraignment in December 1995, just a few weeks after they allegedly murdered four local mobsters at the 99 Restaurant in Charlestown. They did the hit at lunchtime, inside a popular eatery full of potential witnesses - including two off-duty Boston cops, who arrested the pair as soon as they left the restaurant, with the help of two other cops who were "on foot patrol at the Bunker Hill Mall". Clever lads, those Clemente fellas. The police commissioner at the time dismissed the notion that the shooting had anything to do with organized crime, saying, "If it was a hit, it was a very sloppy hit in broad daylight in a very crowded restaurant." Sources reported later on that the victims - members of the Luisi and Sarro families - were figures with a local reputation for extreme violence who had threatened and even shared blows with the younger Clemente. When Damian encountered the victims at the restaurant, he called up his father and asked him to come over with the words, "They're here, all of them." When the elder Clemente arrived at the restaurant and confronted the victims in their booth, one of them apparently reached for a weapon in his "fanny pack" (a most unmanly place to be packin' a rod, if you ask me), and Clemente had no choice but to open fire. Or so he claimed, during an abortive 2008 appeal of the Clemente murder convictions.

I don't know. The whole thing smells "Mob" to me.

The Luisi family was unquestionably connected to the Boston Mafia. According to one article, one victim, Bobby Luisi "had been implicated in the recent beating of a reputed Mafia associate, Joseph (Joe Black) Lamattina" and that "law enforcement sources described Bobby Luisi as a former associate of the Angiulo brothers, who ran the local Mafia until their arrests in 1983." He also had dealings with the Salemme family, a local offshoot of the Patriarca mob in Providence. His son, Roman, with whom Damian Clemente had tussled, was no angel either, having been "acquitted of murder in the shooting deaths of two men in a nightclub in Los Angeles, where he worked as a bouncer." Mmmm... As for the hapless Damian Clemente, he "was described by sources as 'a wannabe wiseguy,' a chubby young man with an earring and an attitude."

I guess, for some with mob pretensions, revenge is not always "a dish best served cold."

Father and son who killed four in 1995 Charlestown massacre to remain behind bars, court says (Boston Globe)
Gunmen Kill Four in Front of Stunned Customers at a Boston Restaurant (New York Times)
2 convicted in '95 Charlestown killings ask SJC for new trial (Boston Globe)
4 SLAIN IN CHARLESTOWN RESTAURANT; SHOTS FOLLOW ARGUMENT; 2 MEN CHASED, HELD (Boston Globe)
Mobster confesses to murder, sings to feds on Philly Mafia. (Boston Herald)
Greatest hits: The 99 Restaurant & Pub Massacre (Boston Globe)

Boston Mob Tours

True crime is big business in the Bay State. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Boston TV & Movie Sites Bus Tour is raking in the bucks taking tourists from the heartland into the dark heart of the Boston underworld. The tours swing by sites featured in The Departed, The Town, Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River. The cost appears to be about $40 per adult and the tours start at 11:00 AM on Saturdays from September through May, and on Sundays from April through August. During the summer, the tours only run on Sundays, which seems odd to me - considering summer's the peak tourist season hereabouts - but what the freak do I know? The bus tours run about three hours, including a stop for drinks at the Southie tavern where Will Hunting lubricated his gray matter. There are also walking tours that cost around 20 bucks. These start at 2:30 PM, last an hour and a half, and are available on Saturdays and Sundays in April and May, on Fridays through Sundays in June through August, and on Saturdays only in September and October. Sounds pretty cool. I'm including a link that will net you $4 discounts if you sign up online.

If you want to put together your own tour buffet-style, the Boston Globe has helpfully provided a slideshow of prime crime sites, including Whitey Bulger's South Boston Liquor Mart, the site of the Brink's Job, and the 99 restaurant in Charlestown, which inadvertently hosted its own little rub-out festival back in 1995.

Boston Mob Tours Reel In Tourists (Wall Street Journal)
Boston Movie Tours
Boston TV & Movie Sites Tour - Destination Coupons
Boston Mob - The Tour (Boston Globe)

An Elegy For The Bad Girl In The Family

One of my cousins, whom I shall call “Xenia” (the warrior princess), is the black sheep in her family, just as I am the black sheep in mine. As I confessed several months ago on this blog, I spent a night in jail and a day in court as a youngster, but Xenia has done better (or worse) than that. Much worse, in fact.

Xenia’s life has been a tragedy. She was the youngest child of older parents and probably never got the love or attention she needed. By the time she was twelve, she was getting drunk with her friends. By the time she was in her twenties, she was a party girl and an alcoholic.

(I even met her in a bar during my pub-crawling days – and I’m almost ashamed to admit that I didn’t know who she was at first, and tried to pick her up before I recognized her as kin and recoiled from my mistake. Yes. An embarrassment not nearly on the level of Ryan O’Neal cluelessly attempting to “game” his own daughter, Tatum, at Farrah Fawcett’s funeral – but bad enough.)

By the time Xenia was in her thirties, she’d had a child out of wedlock. A few years later, she lost her driver’s license after a series of DUI arrests. Not to be deterred by the state of Massachusetts, she continued to drive – only to be arrested on a DUI without a license and sentenced to six months in prison. I don’t know if she served the whole term, but after she got out she was arrested again for beating up her social worker – a male social worker with whom she was having an affair – and sentenced to a month in the county jail. Years later, she is – miraculously – still alive. She may or may not be clean and sober, but she still breathes.

I was never ashamed of her exploits or embarrassed by her awkwardness at family gatherings. I never shunned her or condemned her. The worse thing I did, contrary rascal that I am, was to take perverse pride in her bad girl status. That may have been worse than condemning her, but – hell – her rebellious ways made her damned interesting in the context of my family’s stifling lace-curtain snootiness. But the fact remains that her mother is now dead, she has no husband, her only child has not grown up with her, and now she is alone. Sin and bad luck are different things, and there are scoundrels that prosper while good people fail, but sinners who are not lucky should not be considered the worse because of it.

The Safe In My Basement

Thirteen years ago, when my gun moll and I found our safe-house in a Boston suburb where, coincidentally, Whitey Bulger committed one of his first bank robberies, we discovered an actual safe in the basement. The real estate agent pointed it out right after I attempted a bad joke about converting the coal-bin into a mother-in-law apartment. The safe was just lying there on the concrete floor, arranged at an angle like some polyhedron playing hookey from a geometry book. There was part of a shelf or metal wall still attached to it, as if it had been torn off something - and there were burn marks near the door hinges, as if somebody had tried to blast them off, but hadn't used near enough nitro. All three of us stood there laughing, joking that whoever had lived in this house years ago might have been thieves or some such thing. "Thieves like us," I thought to myself. When we finally bought the joint, and I stopped by the empty house to paint the candy-colored decor off the guest room walls, I had the sense of a presence. Like a ghost, I guess. If it was a ghost, it had decent literary taste, because I lost a paperback copy of Moby Dick during those spooked-out painting sessions and never found it again. The day we moved in for real, my gun moll left me alone in the joint while she went to the gun-moll accessories shop to get her mink stole retrimmed, and I was majorly creeped out. Something compelled me to climb the stairs, wide-eyed like some freakin' governess in a gothic novel, all the way up to the third floor, where the crawl-space was, and where curtains still fluttered in a Victorian bay window out of which I could see this old dead tree. I sensed that "presence" once more at this time, but after that never again. Whatever ghosts inhabited the joint, they eventually decided we were okay and left us alone. Maybe they were simpatico with my latently sociopathic soul. The safe is still there, too, tucked away in a corner of the basement. My gun moll and I occasionally shoot the breeze about calling in a locksmith (or a safe-cracker) to open the damn thing and offering the dude half of what we find inside. Visions of 1950's greenbacks sometimes dance in my head. But thirteen years have passed, and we have not yet acted on this pipe dream. I like to think we hold some crook's stash permanently in abeyance, on the cusp between being just a curiosity we can play innocent about - and a Pandora's box type deal that would make us accomplices to a crime decades after the fact, if a little richer.

The Whitey Bulger School Of Creative Writing

(Whitey Dressed In White, Like Tom Wolfe)

Whitey Bulger may be a full-blown psychopath, but you can't call him stupid. Why, many consider him a kind of criminal genius. I recall an episode from that ridiculous new crime show, Rizzoli & Isles, in which the long lost father of the genius IQ medical examiner, Dr. Isles, turns out to be none other than Boston's top Irish mobster - obviously a Whitey stand-in. Whitey Bulger was definitely a reader. His little brother Billy was never without a book as a boy, and Whitey enjoyed books himself, favoring history, military studies and true crime. One of his lieutenants, Red Shea, has reported that Whitey urged him to read books - that books would teach him new things and open up worlds to him. Whitey was a talented story teller as well. When he was first out of prison in the middle 1960's, he worked as a janitor in a courthouse. According to his lunchmates from those days, he could tell a tale like nobody's business. And when he wrote, as he did in his letters to Billy while he was in jail, he used an "elegant script" and his prose beamed with brotherly love and encouragement. The man was born for the pen. Too bad he picked up the ice-pick instead. But, like many a thwarted artist, he succeeded as a teacher as he never did as a writer (except, of course, as the "auteur" of his own legend).

Consider the litterateurs under his tutelage:

Eddie "Mac" Mackenzie - A sexually frenzied ruffian during his criminal days, he served as one of Whitey's choicest enforcers, later penning the "raw and compelling" Street Soldier: My Life as an Enforcer for Whitey Bulger and the Boston Irish Mob.

Kevin Weeks - Whitey's most trusted lieutenant and, like his master, the son of a crippled parent who established himself in Southie the only way he could - through his fighting skills. A man with a reputed IQ of 145 (administered at a Boy's Club, of all places), not to mention two brothers who went to Harvard, Mr. Weeks had brains to burn, finally publishing his own memoir, Brutal: My Life in Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob. Condemned as self-serving and egocentric by some (although why expect anything else from a sociopath?), the book still sold well.

John "Red" Shea - Another claimant to the title of Whitey Bulger lieutenant, Mr. Shea is the author of Rat Bastards: The Life and Times of South Boston's Most Honorable Irish Mobster. This is perhaps the weakest of the books by Whitey's proteges, reproached by the critics as dull, ungrammatical and (again) self-serving. Nevertheless, publication is scarcely failure! Rat Bastards is even being made into a movie. In an interview conducted by the MBTA's commuter paper, Metro, Shea admitted to having visited Venice Beach without even knowing that Whitey was in hiding just blocks away - and to being "freaked out" about it after Whitey's capture.

Bobby Martini - More the son of a Whitey Bulger associate, Howie Winter, than a bonafide gang member, Mr. Martini may only have audited Whitey's tutorials. But he, too, has succeeded in publishing Citizen Somerville: Growing up with the Winter Hill Gang.

When you consider the exposes written by Bulger's nemesis, Howie Carr, and the memoirs of South Boston residents who simply grew up under Whitey's reign, you can only conclude that Whitey's mere presence forged a whole new sub-genre of literature. Frank Conroy, eat your heart out.

Whitey Bulger memoirs (Amazon.com)
I-Team: Letters Written By ‘Loving’ Whitey Show Bond Between Bulger Brothers (CBS Boston)

Charlestown Was The Armored Car Robbery Capital Of The Nation - Once...

My paternal grandfather died in Charlestown. With his boots on, so to speak. He was a nightwatchman for the Hood's Milk Company, whose old brick smokestack I can still see out the window of my subway car every time I ride the Orange Line home from my hitman gigs in Boston. His employers found him dead one morning. They told his family he'd died of a heart attack, but for all I know he might have discovered B-and-E guys in the building and died from the shock of it. God knows, there's always been enough crime in Charlestown. When Ben Affleck's movie, The Town, came out last year, a lot of critics knee- capped it for what they considered its portrayal of that tired anachronism, the Boston Irish criminal with the noble soul. According to the Christian Science Monitor, Charlestown residents balked at the idea that their town - or, indeed, Boston as a whole - is a hotbed of violent crime. The Monitor cited statistics to bolster that claim. The FBI reports that Massachusetts accounts for less than 3 percent of bank robberies nationwide, and the Boston police assert that only 2 percent of all Boston robberies take place in Charlestown. After all, the place has gotten a touch gentrified. I've walked through the burg myself on my way home lots of times, and I sure as hell never felt afraid.

The MIT newspaper, The Tech, reported that between 200 to 300 bank crimes - mostly robberies - had taken place in Massachusetts in the seven years prior to 2010. Massachusetts accounted for roughly three quarters of bank crimes in New England, but "larger states such as New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Florida, and California far outweigh the Bay State in terms of bank robberies." Moreover, fully one third of U.S. bank robberies in, say, 2009 took place in the South, and only a fifth occurred in the Northeast as a whole. As for the assumption that bank robberies are invariably occasions for mayhem, "the FBI reports that only 4 percent of bank robberies, burglaries, and larcenies in the US include acts of violence; hostages were taken in only 47 of the approximately 6,000 cases in 2009. Thieves accessed bank vaults in only 29 incidents whereas explosives were used in only 193 cases in 2009. All of the 21 deaths linked to bank crime in 2009 were those of the perpetrators themselves."

I think I have an intuitive sense of the fundamental wussiness of most bank robbers, too, which is why I generally feel safe in banks. But I do get a glance every now and then if I walk into a bank, Whitey-Bulger-style, wearing a ball cap and sunglasses.

Armored cars though, they do make me nervous. Whenever one of those big clunky things is idling at a traffic light and I'm, like, on foot (still wearing the ball cap and the sunglasses), I feel compelled to avert my gaze from the guys inside, lest they think I'm checking it out. I definitely get a certain vibe from those guys that make me do that, and maybe that vibe is an intangible vestige of a period in Boston history when the town really did lead the nation in a particular type of crime. Between 1990 and 1996, "the Boston area averaged 16 armored car robberies a year, three times more than statewide averages across the country. One in five armored car heists in this country happened here. States such as California, New York and Florida experienced just half the heists of Boston." And the guys behind those robberies came from Charlestown. In fact, according to ASIS Magazine, Charlestown guys were even behind some of those armored car robberies in California, New York and Florida. From the seventies through the nineties, Charlestown actually was a kind of training ground for armored car robbers, who developed their criminal specialty almost like a respectable trade, passing skills down from one generation to the next. Some veterans of this period have suggested that the "forced busing" crisis of mid-1970's Boston interrupted the schooling of Charlestown teenagers, causing many of them to fall into crime by default. In any event, this career choice seemed secure enough, as the close-knit Charlestown community helped keep the identities of the robbers secret. "Between 1975 and 1992, 33 of Charlestown’s 49 murders were unsolved, a no-arrest rate double other Boston neighborhoods. The phenomenon became known as The Code of Silence and federal authorities took note." When they did get caught however, the Charlestown guys discovered that their notoriety had preceded them. One ex-con said that once you ended up in federal prison, and your fellow inmates would "hear you’re from Boston, [they'd] say ‘hey you must be in here for armored truck or bank robbery.’ "

The armored car robberies came to an end when The Code of Silence began to crumble. "Beginning in 1991, the DEA targeted the community and spent at least $2 million in just one case to provide thieves and drug dealers immunity from prosecution and new identities with the witness protection program." As a result, by 1997, the number of armored car robberies had dwindled to two.

Nonetheless, not so long ago, Boston did lead the nation in at least one kind of major crime. Reputations are always built around the core of something actual, even if things change over time.

'The Town': Is Charlestown really America's 'bank robbery capital'? (Christian Science Monitor)
Is Boston a hotspot for bank theft? (The Tech)
Boston: Armored Car Robbery Capital (ASIS Magazine)