The Murder Of Debra Davis (And Other Whitey Bulger Atrocities)

More Whitey news! I provide some links below to articles about the eagerness of Whitey Bulger victims (or their survivors) to strike back any way they can. In 2009, a federal court ruled that "$350,000 to the families of each of the three victims, because of the conscious pain and suffering endured by Debra Davis, 26, who was strangled in 1981; Deborah Hussey, 26, strangled in 1985; and Louis Litif, 45, who was stabbed and shot in 1980." Davis and Hussey are among at least two women strangled by Whitey Bulger. On separate occasions. It almost makes you wonder why on earth Whitey was not investigated as a possible Boston Strangler suspect, back in the day. And keep in mind that becoming Boston Strangler II was just one of his sidelines. The middle-aged Litif was a South Boston bookmaker who was about to provide evidence about Whitey before he was killed. The judge awarded an additional $800,000 to his widow and two children. The losing defendant in this civil case was not just the government, but specifically the FBI, who protected Whitey from local authorities while he acted as their informant. But winning a lawsuit against them is not enough, say many. They want everyone in the FBI involved with the Whitey Bulger protection scam to be exposed and prosecuted - not just their fall guy, John Connolly.

Debra Davis was Steve Flemmi's longtime girlfriend, having met the middle-aged thug as a teenager. After nine years she wanted out, but Flemmi passive-aggressively lured the poor woman to a South Boston address where Whitey (not Steve, you notice) strangled her with his bare hands, and then extracted her teeth with a pair of pliers. Kevin Weeks, who is now something of a minor celebrity and definitely not in jail, helped Whitey bury the body in Quincy. Of all Whitey's black-hearted shenanigans, I find this the most chilling. When Whitey was not killing women, he was killing their kin - even those of his mistress, Catherine Grieg. He not only killed her brother-in-law, Paul McGonagle, but may also have killed her brother, David. David Greig supposedly committed suicide by shooting himself in the heart. Relevant factoid - Whitey "discovered" the body. You can reach your own conclusions there.

Now that Whitey has been apprehended and sits in jail awaiting justice, lots of former friends, enemies and/or fre-nemies have come out of the woodwork to give their blessings, so to speak.

Here are some samples of how fondly Whitey is remembered and how well he is loved:

Patrick Nee, a former member of the Mullen Gang who once had a running gun battle with Whitey: "I wish I’d killed Whitey Bulger when I had the opportunity."

Richard Marinick, the author and a onetime armored-car-robber, was once threatened by Whitey - and rather disgustingly at that: "I’m walking along the street in Southie one day, and Bulger’s car pulls up. He says, ‘Get in.’ I’m sitting in the back seat, face to face with Jimmy. He says, ‘You’re a health nut, right, a healthy guy?’ Bulger was into good health, eating right, taking vitamin supplements; we’d talked about it before. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘what you’re doing now is not very healthy.’ He explained to me, ‘Our primary line of business is racketeering. Our secondary line of business is killing people. You do not want to be part of our secondary line of business … I will kill you and run your body through the meat-grinding plant. I will grind up your body, put it in a plastic bag, and leave it on your mother’s doorstep.’"

Kevin Weeks, Whitey's righthand man, claims that Whitey is still dangerous in jail at the age of 82: "He was a hard guy, tough as nails. A stone-cold killer. I know he’s 82 now, but still, he’s in great shape, mentally strong. I hear they’ve got him in protective custody to protect him from other inmates. But don’t put it past him: he might try to kill somebody himself. Put a shank in his hand, and he’d know what to do with it."

Still feral after all these years...

They say Whitey Bulger is in for it. The attorney for Debra Davis's family says, "Any plea that he agrees to, he gets a telephone pole shoved up the ass. If he goes to trial, he gets a telephone pole shoved up the ass." Well, maybe - but what in the end can they do to him? They can give him life, but - face it - he's 82. What kind of punishment is that? Prison would just be Whitey's own version of assisted living. The Bay State doesn't currently have the death penalty, but maybe they'll reinstate it just for him. God knows they should.

(As a sidenote, read some of the comments underneath the article. One commenter conflates "whitey" with white people in general, and disses both. Another taunts Whitey about how his "bung hole" will be used (or abused) in the joint. Still another pooh-poohs Whitey's dominance in South Boston, claiming most residents wouldn't have known him if he had walked past them on the street.)

Whitey’s Payback (Daily Beast)
Judge rules government liable for slayings by Bulger, Flemmi (Boston Globe)

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)

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)