Carl Senna's List: Boston

40 Years Later, a Proper Graduation
Josh Reynolds/Associated PressDan Brennan of Cambridge, Mass., carried a sign in Sunday’s commencement ceremony at Boston University that he used during a march in 1969.By KATHARINE Q. SEELYEPublished: May 16, 2010E-MAILSEND TO PHONEPRINTREPRINTSSHARE BOSTON — The telltale clues at this weekend’s festivities, 40 years late, included the tie-dye T-shirt on a woman who also wore a peace symbol necklace and a garland in her hair (“I thought everyone would be dressed like this,” she said). Video: 1970 Revisited (bu.edu)Enlarge This Image
Katherine Taylor for The New York TimesBoston University held a graduation ceremony for its class of 1970 on Sunday morning. The original commencement was canceled amid a tumultuous spring.When the group stood for its class picture, even those in suits and ties made the peace sign. Others raised clenched fists.
And one of them marched in the commencement processional with an antiwar poster slung around his neck.
The accouterment and spirit of their era still radiate from the class of 1970, despite the harsh and abrupt ending to their years at Boston University.
That spring was supposed to bring a flowery conclusion to their four years of academe. But President Richard M. Nixon had invaded Cambodia. National Guardsmen had gunned down students at Kent State, killing four and wounding nine. Young men still faced the draft. And this campus, like many across the country, was in turmoil, with strikes, sit-ins, building takeovers and fire-bombings.
The situation became so incendiary that, for safety’s sake, university officials called off final exams, canceled graduation and sent students packing.
This weekend, on what would have been the 40th anniversary of that ceremony, the university sought to make amends with a proper graduation.
But more than pomp and circumstance, the university wanted to give the students — now in their early 60s, many of them grandparents — a chance to heal the wounds, reflect on what their time here had meant and feel better abo

2 Men Get Probation for Big Dig Fraud
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: May 27, 2010
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BOSTON (AP) -- Two former managers of a company convicted of supplying substandard concrete to the Big Dig highway project in Boston have avoided prison time for their roles in the scheme.

A federal judge on Wednesday sentenced 64-year-old Robert Prosperi of Lynnfield and 53-year-old Gregory Stevenson of Furlong, Pa., to three years of probation, including six months of home confinement.

Federal prosecutors had requested prison sentences of at least seven years for each former manager at Aggregate Industries Inc.

U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said the government was ''disappointed'' with the sentences because they do not ''reflect the seriousness of the offense.''

The men were convicted in August of 135 felonies, including conspiracy to commit highway project fraud. Their lawyers argued for leniency because they did not profit personally from the scheme.

HOME / NEWS / HEALTH AND FITNESS NEWS FROM THE BOSTON GLOBE
Many EMTs’ papers fakedMass. officials find hundreds skipped hours of retraining

By Donovan SlackGlobe Staff / May 27, 2010E-mail|Print|Reprints|Yahoo! Buzz|ShareThis Text size – +At least 200 emergency medical technicians and paramedics in Massachusetts and New Hampshire have been practicing without legitimate certification, paying for fake credentials, rather than receiving medical training, state public health officials said.
DiscussCOMMENTS (19)An ongoing investigation has so far determined that training companies illegally authorized state credentials for first responders in at least a dozen communities, including Boston, the officials said in an interview with the Globe. The probe is expected to continue to grow and include more communities.
“It is extremely disturbing that we would uncover a pattern of falsification of certification for any licensed health care professional,’’ said John Auerbach, Massachusetts commissioner of public health, who added that his agency is still following up on “a number of leads’’ that could uncover more fraudulent medical certifications. “We are determined to identify all of those instances where this has occurred and to put in place a mechanism to prevent this from happening in the future.’’
The state is demanding that improperly certified technicians and paramedics undergo training. Public health officials declined to comment on whether they plan to refer their findings to the attorney general for criminal prosecution. It is illegal to falsify emergency medical training records.
“We are taking aggressive action to make sure people who have deliberately falsified information are appropriately disciplined,’’ Auerbach said.
He said there is no evidence so far that the lack of training resulted in improper or inadequate medical treatment of members of the public. Auerbach said the cases discovered to date have been paramedics or EMTs who faked training records for recertification, meaning they had been trained prope

Edna Mae Hector   |   Visit Guest Book

HECTOR, Edna Mae Of Boston, August 17, 2010. Beloved wife of the late Francis "Fuzzy" Hector. Loving mother of Derek C. Hector of Boston and the late F. Christopher Hector. Beloved grandmother of Derek C. Hector, Jr., William Joseph Dante Hector, Tiara Hector and Chris Hector all of Boston. She is survived by 15 great-grandchildren, 1 cousin Barbara Luacaw, 1 niece Lynn Hector, 1 nephew "Windy-7" and a host of other relatives and close friends. Funeral Service, Monday at 10:00 AM, Davis Funeral Home, 89 Walnut Ave, ROXBURY, MA. Visiting with the family on Sunday, 2-4 PM and 6-8 PM at the Funeral Home. Interment, Mount Hope Cemetery, Mattapan, MA. To send a sympathy message to the family visit DavisFuneralHomeBoston.com

Published in The Boston Globe from August 19 to August 22, 2010

Benjamin Kaplan, 99, esteemed jurist, law professor
Benjamin Kaplan’s legal career spanned more than 70 years. (Wendy Maeda/Globe Staff/File 1981)
By Bryan Marquard
Globe Staff / August 20, 2010
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Few justices were as revered for their writing and thinking as Benjamin Kaplan, yet each ruling he penned for the Supreme Judicial Court or the state Appeals Court renewed his sense that this time he might not be up to the challenge.

“I don’t come to decisions easily,’’ he told the Globe in 1981, restless physically and intellectually as he sat in a swivel chair in his book-lined study. “I really have been in pain most of the time.’’

That discomfort seemed reserved only for him, though. For others, perusing his work was a sublime pleasure.

“He wrote opinions that were so elegant they were breathtaking,’’ said Margaret H. Marshall, chief justice of the SJC. “I remember reading an opinion he wrote when he was 92 or 93, after I had become a judge, and thinking, ‘I’m just never going to be able to write like that.’ He summarized facts, laid out the legal challenges, and reached conclusions in English that was not filled with legalese. It was conversational English, but somehow captured the most sophisticated thoughts. I always loved reading a Kaplan opinion.’’

Justice Kaplan, whom hundreds of Harvard Law School students considered their most influential teacher, died of pneumonia Wednesday in his Cambridge home. He was 99 and kept writing opinions until a few years ago for the Massachusetts Appeals Court, where he was recalled as a justice after reaching the SJC’s mandatory retirement age of 70.

“He was the greatest teacher I ever had,’’ said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the US Supreme Court, who took Justice Kaplan’s first-year civil procedure class at Harvard Law. “He knew his subject matter inside and out. He wasn’t telling us things; he had us thinking all the time. I came to love civil procedure because of Ben Kaplan.’’

Raya Dreben, associate justice of the Massachusetts Appe

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Surge in city homicides laid to drug crime
Release of dealers, money woes blamed

By Maria Cramer
Globe Staff / November 11, 2010
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The number of people slain in Boston has risen 46.5 percent since this time last year, a dramatic increase that Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis attributed to a rise in drug crime.


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Davis said a combination of more people turning to the drug trade to make money and the release of drug dealers from prison has helped fuel street violence that has led to 63 homicides through Nov. 8 of this year. At this point last year, there had been 43 killings.

The increase in drug-related homicides comes after several years in which police have attributed many slayings to feuding and score-settling among street gangs.

Many of this year’s homicide victims are older and have long drug crime records, Davis said. And a significant number of victims have been killed during apparent drug robberies or targeted by perpetrators police believe are dealers, he said.

“It’s very unusual,’’ Davis said of the trend. “We just need to be very aggressive in our narcotics investigations and make sure that we’re targeting the individuals in the drug business in the same way we have with the gangs.’’

Davis declined to say how many of the killings this year he believes are drug-related or to provide specific examples, because, he said, many of the homicides are being investigated by a Suffolk County grand jury.

Since September, there have been 21 homicides in Boston.

The preliminary investigations into the killings of the last two months show that many of them have been connected to drugs, usually street narcotics, like crack cocaine.

Police believe a widely publicized quadruple homicide in Mattapan on Sept. 28 was the result of a drug encounter gone wrong. In another instance, police found a large amount of crack cocaine on Dearborn Str

Black and Green event advances unity
By Christopher J. Girard
Globe Correspondent / March 7, 2011
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Natives of Boston, Ireland, and Montserrat gathered in Dorchester yesterday amid the drone of bagpipes and the aroma of Caribbean-style chicken.


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They were at the 17th annual Black and Green event to talk about what they have in common and to explore the state of race relations in the United States, as well as how some people are recovering from natural disasters here and abroad.

The event was hosted at the meeting hall of the Montserrat Aspirers, a Dorchester-based group that provides tutoring, education, and scholarship programs for local youths. The island of Montserrat is a territory of Great Britain located southeast of Puerto Rico with a population of 5,140, according to the CIA World Factbook.

The Aspirers planned the event with the Irish International Immigrant Center, which advocates for and assists immigrants to the Boston area.

“We started doing this event because race is one of the most prominent sources of strife in our community, and because we saw this as an opportunity to build relationships,’’ said Jeff Stone, a diversity consultant and board member of the immigrant center. “We’re here to have fun, to share good food, and to participate in serious discussion and dialogue.’’

The event featured a panel discussion about recent natural disasters, touching on the Haiti earthquake of 2010, Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami that devastated Indonesia in 2004, and the 1995 volcanic eruption in Montserrat.

Gary Morton, a business leader and managing director of the Leaders of Tomorrow High School Youth Mentorship Program, described the devastating effect the eruption had on Montserrat: “Think of a natural disaster happening in Massachusetts and all of its people relegated to one third of the state.’’

The Rev. Jeffrey Brown, executive director of the Boston TenPoint Coalition, recalled the time in 2005 th

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HOME / GLOBE / IDEAS
Whitey’s generation
What was life like for the tough boys of '30s and '40s Boston? It turns out they were the most closely studied troublemakers in history.

(Walter Sanders//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Boys on a Boston street corner in 1943.
By Leon Neyfakh
July 10, 2011
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It’s the late 1920s in Boston, and thousands of boys are being born all over the city. Soon, as the Great Depression sends their neighborhoods through the wringer, some of them will start ditching school and smoking cigarettes, hanging around rail yards, stoops, and alleyways after dark. They’ll sneak into movie theaters downtown and get caught stealing candy from drugstores. As they grow older, they will cause real problems, running away from home and joining gangs and stealing cars. Before they can say “I didn’t do it,” they’ll have landed themselves in a juvenile detention center.


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James "Whitey" Bulger in a 1953 police booking photo.
Some of the boys will eventually quit the life and go straight. Others will keep getting into hot water.

One of them, an Irish kid from Southie with blond hair and blue eyes, will become the single most famous criminal in Boston history. As a highly effective and reputedly ruthless gangster, he will rise precipitously in the ranks of the city’s underworld before disappearing off the face of the earth and spending 16 years as a fugitive from the FBI.

By the time he is apprehended at his hideout in Santa Monica, Calif., at age 81, it will be hard to imagine James “Whitey” Bulger as anything but a singular figure, much less one anonymous little street tough among many.

But everyone has to start somewhere. And the reality is that growing up where and when he did, Whitey Bulger was not so different from countless other Boston boys who spent the 1930s and ’40s getting into fights and staying out late. We don’t normally think of it this way because the rest of these boys have all but vanished for us, the details of their lives as invisible as Whitey’s story is famous. After all, these weren’t men who got books and magazine articles written about their origins, or Hollywood movies made about their professional exploits. They were just guys who lived private lives: What reason would anyone have had to document them?

As it turns out, someone did. Far from disappearing into the

folds of time, Whitey’s generation was the subject of the single most ambitious and comprehensive study ever conducted on juvenile delinquency. So thorough and meticulous was the study, in fact, that we arguably know more about this group of boys than we do about any other group of boys ever.

It all began in 1939, when husband-and-wife researchers Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck assembled a team of investigators to go door to door through a number of poor Boston neighborhoods and collect data on boys who had grown up there. Their goal was to understand what causes some boys and not others to get involved with crime, a question which, as it happened, would be dramatically brought to life in the story of Whitey Bulger and his overachieving brother in the state Senate, William.

The Gluecks picked a sample of 1,000 boys, half of whom had stayed out of trouble while the other half had racked up records and gotten themselves locked up at one of two local reform schools, Lyman and Shirley. The boys were interviewed repeatedly - once when they were around 14, then again when they were 25 and 32 - as were their teachers, parents, and neighbors. Their world - Whitey’s world - was carefully documented, and their lives were charted as they grew from adolescents into adults.

For criminal justice experts, the material collected for the study represents a unique window into the nature of criminality. And for Bostonians who can’t help but be fascinated by the fearsome and mysterious Whitey Bulger, it offers a glimpse few of us could have expected into the exact time and place that produced him.

Whitey Bulger was still very much in business in 1985, when a young criminologist from Harvard named John Laub learned there was a trove of unpublished information about the gangster’s childhood peers sitting and gathering dust in a Harvard Law School basement.

The boxes in the basement took up no fewer than 80 feet of shelf space, according to Laub, each one full of the notes, interview transcripts, and records that the Gluecks had assembled as part of the juvenile delinquency study. Laub found details on where the boys got their money - whether they shined shoes or hawked newspapers after school, or stole stuff out of trucks and sold it on the corners. There was information about the boys’ families - how much their dads drank, how much they loved their moms - as well as evaluations from psychiatrists and teachers. There were descriptions of whether their homes were dirty or messy, and how crowded they were. There were extensive records of all their dealings with the authorities.

Around 50 of the 500 delinquent boys came from South Boston; the rest were from other poor neighborhoods like Charlestown, East Boston, Dorchester, Roxbury, and the West End. The Gluecks had compared them with the nondelinquents from every angle they could think of - attitudes towards school, relationship with parents, preferred hangouts, even body type.

From the Gluecks’ records emerges a portrait of the city in which these boys came up. Then as now, the city was organized around strict ethnic lines that in many cases lay along neighborhood boundaries. These neighborhoods were populated by working-class immigrants, who had been pouring in from Europe - mostly Ireland and Italy - in great numbers since the mid-19th century. Though many of the boys got frequently moved from house to house by their families - Whitey’s parents relocated him and his siblings from Dorchester to Southie when he was 9 - most of them nevertheless identified strongly in terms of where in the city they lived and where their parents had come from.

More than half of the delinquent boys in the study were involved in street gangs. Ninety percent of them had taken up smoking at an early age. They hated school, skipped class regularly, and told researchers that they wanted to quit for good at the earliest opportunity. On average, they had first appeared in court around the age of 12, mostly for relatively minor offenses like setting off fire alarms, breaking windows, or “jack rolling,” a slang term for robbing drunks.

As the Gluecks found, these weren’t boys with a lot of books or toys at home, and most of them didn’t have hobbies like building models or collecting stamps. Instead, they went to pool rooms, dance halls, and arcades, as well as to the movies three or more times per week, often sneaking in without paying. Many begged for money in the street; others earned it by selling stolen merchandise. And while there were no drugs or guns among kids back then, there were lots of knives and booze. Sometimes the boys threw rocks - at each other, at their school, at people’s homes - and sometimes they stole cars and took them for joy rides.

Whether or not Whitey Bulger was involved in these particular bouts of mischief is impossible to say from the Gluecks’ data. He wasn’t one of the delinquent boys in the study - we know because although the names of the boys in the sample have been changed, all of them were at one point incarcerated at either Lyman or Shirley, which Whitey never was. What we do know about Whitey’s childhood is that he was a member of a gang called the Shamrocks, that he lived in the first public housing project in Boston, and that he was first arrested at the age of 13 on a larceny charge before graduating to assault and robbery. Though Whitey wasn’t in the sample himself, it’s not hard to imagine that he would have come into contact with some of the Southie boys in the group, who spent their early years running loose in the same neighborhood.

Laub, who is now the director of the National Institute of Justice, had first heard of the Glueck boys in graduate school. It was a famous study - one that polarized the field of criminology when it was first published in 1950, in part because of the Gluecks’ insistence on recording physical characteristics like neck breadth and waist size. What Laub hadn’t been taught in school - what no one really realized - was that the Gluecks had only published a small portion of the data they had gathered. What appeared in their two books on the subject, it turned out, was only the tip of the iceberg. As Laub found out after a bit of archival research, there was all kinds of material stored in the Harvard Law School library that had never seen the light of day.

Laub scoured the archive with a friend from graduate school, Robert Sampson, then a young criminology professor at the University of Illinois and currently a sociology professor at Harvard. “The data were just extraordinary,” Laub said. “We had never seen anything like that, in terms of the richness of it, the multiple methods that were used, the extensive and detailed records they were able to secure on these boys, and later as adults.”

After reanalyzing the Glueck data and publishing a book on it, Laub and Sampson decided there was still more to be done. Some of the men were still alive, they realized. Most of them would be coming up on 70. What if they could get in touch with them and find out how their lives had turned out?

The search process began in 1993, and continued for several years. Some of the guys were easy to find: You could just look them up in the phone book, and see that they were still living in the same neighborhood they lived in when the Gluecks first met them. Others were more difficult to track down: They’d gotten married and moved away, for instance, or they were in jail. With a few particularly elusive members of the sample, Sampson and Laub enlisted the help of the police department’s Cold Case Squad. Laub still remembers how the cops quizzed them, for fun, on the art of finding people, and laughed at their bad instincts.

They found 52 of the men in total. Laub did most of the interviewing, meeting the men at restaurants around town, shopping malls, and so on. Often they’d invite him to come over and talk to them at home; sometimes they’d come to his office at Northeastern. The first interview Laub ever did was conducted in a smoky parked car because the guy had a bad leg and didn’t want to go through the hassle of having to walk somewhere.

Not everyone remembered participating in the Glueck study. When Laub filled them in, they would often ask him how they measured up against everyone else. “They wanted to know, ‘What did the study say would happen to me? How’d I turn out?’”

Some of the interviews provoked dark memories and stormy feelings, as the men crumpled under the weight of regrets. Tears were not uncommon. “Particularly men who had what I would call damaged lives, they got emotional about it. And they referred to their lives as a waste,” said Laub.

Of the 52 men Laub and Sampson talked to, 19 had left crime behind at some point after the Gluecks first interviewed them. Some had joined the military and then learned a trade on the G.I. Bill. Some had started families; one had taken up meditation. These men took pride in having spent their lives going to work and earning money for their families. They were electricians, plumbers, cab drivers, mailmen, and repairmen. For them, the turbulence they experienced during adolescence ended not long afterward.

“We’d go through year by year, and so we’d find out when he got fired, when he got a new job, did he live with someone or not, number of children, and all that,” said Sampson. “And we pieced it together.”

What distinguished the men who’d stayed in crime from those who had successfully cleaned up their acts? How had their lives been different? After going through the interviews and constructing detailed dossiers on each man, Laub and Sampson came to a few conclusions: First, that men with strong “social ties” were more likely to leave crime behind. Many of the men who had succeeded at it, Laub and Sampson found, had done so after turning points that involved committing to a stable social institution such as the military or marriage.

Their study earned Laub and Sampson accolades in their field for their insights into the nature of crime. But it also points to a few truths specifically about Boston, and the way the city shaped the Glueck boys while they grew into the Glueck men. It mattered a lot where these boys came from, Laub and Sampson concluded: The city had influenced them like no other city could have. Specifically, according to Sampson, it had made them cynical about authority.

All the poor neighborhoods in Boston were isolated to some degree in the 1940s: As Sampson and Laub discovered, kids who grew up in ethnic enclaves like Southie or the North End during that time did not identify with the city as a whole. Their lives were just too separate from everyone else’s, their daily routines too local. Plus, they knew the people who ran the show on Beacon Hill thought of their neighborhoods as slums, and they resented it.

“This sense of the elite society looking down on them - it gave them an edge,” said Sampson. In this context, he said, crime was not always undertaken as a source of income, but as a way to push back against an outside authority. The politicians and the policemen who ruled over the so-called straight world, he said, were presumed to be crooked. And in the eyes of Boston’s delinquent population, they were no more deserving of respect or generosity than a rival gang might be.

It’s tempting to think these conclusions tell us as much about Whitey Bulger as they do about the 500 other troublemakers who were in the Gluecks’ sample: that there was something about the neighborhood, or something about the era, that explains his story as much as it explains the others’. More tempting still is to imagine Whitey sitting down with a pair of sociologists and, in the name of science, spilling his guts to them about where it all went wrong.

Perhaps it would have thrown off the Gluecks’ sample, to have such an extraordinary outlier in the mix. Or maybe he would have fit right in.

Leon Neyfakh is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail lneyfakh@globe.com.

© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.
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« Details of Bulger's Life Revealed in Greig's Detention Hearing | Main

July 12, 2011

Whitey Bulger's life on the run: Fugitive's trail crisscrosses US

GRAND ISLE, La. -- He didn't look like a gangster. Grandfatherly was more like it, what with his receding gray hair, Bing Crosby-style straw hat, windbreaker and khakis.

He was staying on this small Louisiana resort island on the Gulf of Mexico during the off-season with his girlfriend, an attractive blonde about 20 years his junior, in a beachfront duplex called ``It's Our Dream.''

He liked to play with neighbor Penny Gautreaux's two black Labrador retrievers, so she didn't hesitate to invite him to dinner when he smelled her Cajun cooking and joked, ``Do you have enough for us?''

It soon became a ritual. For months at a time in 1995 and 1996, when they visited this island 90 miles south of New Orleans, the couple who introduced themselves as Tom and Helen from New York would have dinner every night with Gautreaux, her husband, Glenn, and their four children.

They lavished the family with gifts: a stove, a refrigerator, a freezer, toys, clothing, books. Soon the children were calling them ``Uncle Tom'' and ``Aunt Helen.''

Penny Gautreaux, a 31-year-old meter reader for the town, said it was only when the FBI came calling last January that she learned ``Uncle Tom'' was one of the most wanted fugitives in the country: reputed South Boston crime boss James J. ``Whitey'' Bulger.

But investigators also got a surprise: They had a hard time convincing Penny Gautreaux and others who have encountered the charming Bulger during his time on the run that he is dangerous.

These days, he just doesn't look like the Irish underworld leader wanted on federal racketeering charges in Boston for plotting with the Mafia to split up gambling and drug profits throughout New England.

The Whitey Bulger who is accused of holding a knife to a mortgage broker's throat at a South Boston variety store while extorting $50,000 was driving around this remote island offering dog biscuits to strays from a bag in the trunk of his Mercury Grand Marquis.

The Whitey Bulger who was branded a reputed killer, crime boss, and bank robber by the 1986 President's Commission on Organized Crime often shut off the Gautreaux television, lecturing them on how bad it was to expose children to violent shows, including the local news.

This Whitey Bulger wept when a dying puppy was shot in the head to end its suffering. He went fishing once and tossed back all the small fish.

When two of the Gautreaux children came home from school with a note saying they had vision problems, Bulger and his girlfriend, Catherine Greig, bought them glasses.

``He was a very nice man,'' said Penny Gautreaux, a slender brunette who doesn't regret welcoming Bulger into her home. ``He treated us like family. He was kind. He really had a nice personality. How could you not love him?''

Keeping in touch

In the three years since a federal warrant was issued in Boston for his arrest on charges of racketeering and extortion, Whitey Bulger has blended into the American landscape.

Members of the multiagency task force assigned to find him believe his nondescript looks, ability to charm strangers, and seemingly endless flow of cash are helping him elude capture.

Investigators have a good idea of where he's been; they don't know where he is.

They believe Bulger, 68, and Greig, 46, are traveling around the country, staying in inexpensive motels and sometimes renting apartments. They pay cash for everything.

They've been spotted in New York, Louisiana, Wyoming, Mississippi -- and even his hometown of South Boston.

Money is not a problem for Bulger, who doles out crisp $100 bills from a stash tucked inside a pouch strapped to his waist. The pouch also contains a pearl-handled knife.

Investigators declined to comment on whether they know where Bulger has been during the past year. But they say that he remains in contact with associates in the Boston area in an apparent effort to retain control of his organization.

``We know that he's making telephone calls to this area often,'' said FBI Supervisory Special Agent Thomas Cassano, who heads the Violent Fugitive Task Force in Boston. ``We know that he's getting messages to people. He's not doing what a good fugitive does. A good fugitive cuts all ties.''

It's the kind of brazen behavior that investigators hope will lead to Bulger's capture.

Last August, responsibility for the search was transferred from the FBI's Organized Crime Squad to the agency's Violent Fugitive Task Force, comprised of investigators from the FBI, Massachusetts State Police, Boston Police, Department of Correction, and state Parole Board. Four investigators from the 16-member task force are assigned full-time to track Bulger.

According to sources familiar with the probe, a federal grand jury in Boston recently subpoenaed some of Bulger's friends from Boston, New York, and Louisiana in an effort to pressure them to testify against him. They're being asked about his travel habits, his recent exploits, and the source of his money.

Investigators believe Bulger's generosity to the Gautreaux family and others while on the lam is motivated by self-interest. They say he uses impoverished families who unwittingly make it easy for him to evade detection. He ingratiates himself with gifts that buy loyalty.

It was only when Penny Gautreaux was called before the federal grand jury in Boston in November that she admitted Bulger bought her a stove, refrigerator, and freezer.

``He wanted to give [them] to us as a gift for cooking for him,'' Gautreaux told the Globe. She said Bulger has called her twice since leaving this island in July 1996, but she hasn't talked to him since the FBI traced him to Louisiana a year ago. She said she doesn't know where he is hiding.

Scoffing at investigators' speculation that Bulger used her family to hide, Gautreaux said Bulger was genuinely affectionate to them and his gifts went beyond money.

He gave us inspiration and courage,'' said Gautreaux, crediting Bulger with motivating her husband to start his own carpentry business.

``He'd say, `Get off your lazy butt; you've got beautiful kids. You need to make something out of your life,' '' Gautreaux said. ``If my husband was sitting down drinking coffee, he'd say, `Go to work.' Stuff I couldn't make him do, he could.' ''

Gautreaux has to return to Boston this week with her husband and 18-year-old stepson to testify in front of the grand jury again, and she resents the FBI for forcing her to do so.

She refuses to believe Bulger is as bad as the FBI makes him out to be. ``I figured they made it bigger than what it is,'' she said. ``Really, I hate them more than him.''

Ready to run

Penny Gautreaux is not the only one to see the good in Whitey Bulger. At the Mary Ellen McCormack housing project in South Boston where Bulger, the eldest of six children, was raised, people recall acts of kindness. They say he delivered turkeys to poor families at Thanksgiving, and once bought a puppy for a little boy whose dog had been hit by a car.

And for years while fraternizing with local mobsters, Bulger was secretly working for ``the good guys.''

The FBI admitted last year in federal court that Bulger was an FBI informant from 1971 through December 1990. He's been credited with leaking information that helped the FBI send the hierarchy of the New England Mafia to prison.

But when the Massachusetts State Police began building a case against Bulger, the FBI joined the probe that resulted in the current federal racketeering indictment.

On Jan. 4, 1995 -- three years ago today -- a federal warrant was secretly issued for Bulger's arrest. Bulger, his longtime associate Stephen ``The Rifleman'' Flemmi, and reputed New England Mafia boss Francis ``Cadillac Frank'' Salemme were charged with extortion.

Racketeering indictments followed a week later, alleging that Bulger was shaking down drug dealers and collecting weekly payoffs from bookmakers.

A tip that the trio was planning to flee sent the FBI and State Police scrambling to arrest them on Jan. 5, 1995, but only Flemmi was nabbed that day. Salemme was captured seven months later hiding out in West Palm Beach, Fla.

Where was Whitey? On vacation.

Investigators now know that Bulger and another girlfriend, Theresa Stanley, a woman he'd lived with for 30 years in South Boston, were traveling around the country. They had spent time in San Francisco and were staying at Le Richelieu Hotel in New Orleans' French Quarter from Dec. 26, 1994, through Jan. 2, 1995.

They were driving back to Boston when he heard there was a warrant for him and turned around,'' said one investigator.

Investigators suspect Bulger and Stanley stayed at a hotel in Connecticut or western Massachusetts for several days while he figured out what he was going to do. Surrendering was not an option. He had spent nine years in federal prisons, including Alcatraz, for bank robbery from 1956 to 1965, and was determined never to return. He was ready for a life on the run; he already had an alias.

So when the FBI issued a nationwide alert for James J. Bulger of South Boston, he quickly became Thomas F. Baxter of Selden, N.Y., a town on Long Island.

Investigators said Bulger began using Baxter's identity long before he was on the run, even before the real Thomas F. Baxter of Woburn died in January 1979. Bulger obtained a Massachusetts license with his own photograph and Baxter's name, birth date, and Social Security number. He renewed it every four years.

In 1990, Bulger obtained a New York driver's license as Thomas Baxter, then renewed it in 1994. For his address, he used the Selden home of cousins of a trusted South Boston associate.

But while Bulger was prepared for the fugitive life, sources say Stanley was not. In mid-January 1995, Bulger returned to the Boston area and dropped off Stanley in Hingham.

Then he promptly picked up Catherine Greig, a dental hygienist who grew up in South Boston and was living on Hillcrest Road in Quincy. Bulger had been having an affair with Greig for more than a decade while living with Stanley, according to investigators.

Bulger and Greig surfaced Jan. 17, 1995, in Selden, where he bought a new black 1994 Mercury Grand Marquis under the name Tom Baxter. He paid $13,000 by bank check and traded in a 1991 Mercury Sable.

Three days later, Bulger and Greig were in Grand Isle, an island that advertises itself as ``The Cajun Bahamas'' and brags that it is one of the world's 10 best fishing spots.

Most of its 1,500 year-round residents -- a population that swells to more than 6,000 in summer -- earn their living shrimping or working on offshore oil rigs. There are seven full-time police officers; the chief never wears a uniform.

It's only 3 feet above sea level, so homes are built on pilings, some at least 9 feet high in case of flooding.

There are a couple of small supermarkets, and two restaurants open during the off-season. There are no banks, just one ATM. The island is connected to the mainland by a long drawbridge.

``The only people who go there are going there,'' FBI Supervisory Special Agent Cassano said. ``You can't find it by accident. There's only one way onto the island and the same way off. It's an odd place for them to be.''

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Police Chief Roscoe Besson Jr. smiles ruefully at the memory. When FBI agents arrived here last January with posters offering a $250,000 reward for Whitey Bulger, he recognized the fugitive's photo right away.

Twice in 1996, Besson was slowing traffic outside the elementary school at 7 a.m. when he stopped cars on Louisiana Highway 1 to let Bulger cross the street.

``I stopped the traffic and let $250,000 get across the street,'' he said. Bulger nodded politely once and waved another time. ``If he had taken off running, I'd have been on him like gravy on rice.''

But Bulger didn't run. He strode confidently toward the beach for his morning walk.

``If I see a guy with long stringy hair, nasty looking, I stop them,'' Besson said. ``I want to know who they are. Tom [Bulger] was clean-cut. I'd see him walking. This is a tourist community. He and Helen were just traveling around.''

In fact, Greig frequently went to the police chief's daughter, Chrisel Page, to have her hair cut and colored -- L'Oreal light ash blonde or extra light platinum blonde.

Greig walked alone to Page's salon. And now, Page speculates that Bulger stayed away when he saw the police car belonging to her husband, a deputy for the Jefferson Parish sheriff's department, parked in the driveway outside the shop.

Greig was a nice lady and a generous tipper, Page said: ``I enjoyed her company.''

It's unclear how long Bulger and Greig stayed here during their first visit, but in June 1995 they were driving their Grand Marquis with New York plates in Sheridan, Wyo., where they bought jewelry on an Indian reservation. Three months later, they were spotted in Gulfport, Miss. And from Sept. 25 through Oct. 1, 1995, they were back on Long Island, N.Y., staying at a Best Western motel in Holtsville.

Then in October 1995, while the FBI was chasing tips that Bulger was as far away as Ireland or as close as Cape Cod, the cocky fugitive was back in South Boston.

From a pay phone inside Conley Terminal, a freight dock, Bulger called the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., to speak to an official who dealt with Bulger when he was an informant.

``You double-crossing [expletive],'' Bulger screamed at John A. Morris, who once supervised the FBI's organized crime squad in Boston and was then assigned to the training academy.

Bulger accused the FBI of trying to smear his brother, then-Senate President William M. Bulger, by falsely suggesting that the brothers were in contact while he was on the lam.

A search for Bulger in South Boston, prompted by that call, was fruitless. The first week of November 1995, Bulger was back in Grand Isle, staying at the Water Edge Motel.

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The search for 'Whitey' Bulger

Police Chief Roscoe Besson Jr. smiles ruefully at the memory. When FBI agents arrived here last January with posters offering a $250,000 reward for Whitey Bulger, he recognized the fugitive's photo right away.

Twice in 1996, Besson was slowing traffic outside the elementary school at 7 a.m. when he stopped cars on Louisiana Highway 1 to let Bulger cross the street.

``I stopped the traffic and let $250,000 get across the street,'' he said. Bulger nodded politely once and waved another time. ``If he had taken off running, I'd have been on him like gravy on rice.''

But Bulger didn't run. He strode confidently toward the beach for his morning walk.

``If I see a guy with long stringy hair, nasty looking, I stop them,'' Besson said. ``I want to know who they are. Tom [Bulger] was clean-cut. I'd see him walking. This is a tourist community. He and Helen were just traveling around.''

In fact, Greig frequently went to the police chief's daughter, Chrisel Page, to have her hair cut and colored -- L'Oreal light ash blonde or extra light platinum blonde.

Greig walked alone to Page's salon. And now, Page speculates that Bulger stayed away when he saw the police car belonging to her husband, a deputy for the Jefferson Parish sheriff's department, parked in the driveway outside the shop.

Greig was a nice lady and a generous tipper, Page said: ``I enjoyed her company.''

It's unclear how long Bulger and Greig stayed here during their first visit, but in June 1995 they were driving their Grand Marquis with New York plates in Sheridan, Wyo., where they bought jewelry on an Indian reservation. Three months later, they were spotted in Gulfport, Miss. And from Sept. 25 through Oct. 1, 1995, they were back on Long Island, N.Y., staying at a Best Western motel in Holtsville.

Then in October 1995, while the FBI was chasing tips that Bulger was as far away as Ireland or as close as Cape Cod, the cocky fugitive was back in South Boston.

From a pay phone inside Conley Terminal, a freight dock, Bulger called the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., to speak to an official who dealt with Bulger when he was an informant.

``You double-crossing [expletive],'' Bulger screamed at John A. Morris, who once supervised the FBI's organized crime squad in Boston and was then assigned to the training academy.

Bulger accused the FBI of trying to smear his brother, then-Senate President William M. Bulger, by falsely suggesting that the brothers were in contact while he was on the lam.

A search for Bulger in South Boston, prompted by that call, was fruitless. The first week of November 1995, Bulger was back in Grand Isle, staying at the Water Edge Motel.

A television segment devoted to Bulger on ``Unsolved Mysteries'' aired later that month. But if anybody here watched the show, they didn't recognize polite Tom Baxter as the wanted gangster from Boston.

Dog people

By all accounts, Bulger and Greig love dogs. Greig, who left her beloved black poodles Gigi and Nikki in South Boston, carries a bag of biscuits in the trunk.

``They will stop and pat dogs on the side of the road,'' said one investigator. ``The people they have befriended on the road are usually people they met through the dogs.''

That's how they met the Gautreaux family. A brush fire near the Gautreaux house in the fall of 1995 prompted Bulger and Greig to stop their car to watch. They fed biscuits to Penny Gautreaux's dogs, and asked about places to rent.

She directed them to ``It's Our Dream,'' a beachfront duplex they rented for about $400 a month from Dec. 13, 1995, through Feb. 13, 1996, paying with $100 bills.

Soon the couple was having dinner at the Gautreaux house, often bringing groceries. He loved Penny's fried potatoes, and urged her to teach his girlfriend to cook them.

``So he's probably eating fried potatoes right now,'' Gautreaux said. ``He loved to eat.''

It was very important to Bulger that they sit together for a family dinner. Bulger often chided Penny Gautreaux to stop eating on the sofa in front of the television.

When their puppy was dying from a birth defect and a veterinarian suggested they put it to sleep, Gautreaux said Bulger thought lethal injection was a cruel way to die. He thought it more humane to shoot the dog, but couldn't watch as Glenn Gautreaux killed the dog in their backyard.

``He turned his head while my husband shot the dog,'' Gautreaux said. ``He had more than a tear.''

Bulger and Greig also loved to shop. At least four times a week they traveled to the Wal-Mart SuperCenter, the closest big department store, 40 miles north in Galliano and open 24 hours a day.

They took different Gautreaux children with them each time and bought things for them. It's also the store where Greig bought her prescription contact lenses, and where, authorities suspect, Bulger used a pay phone.

Gautreaux didn't think it was odd when Bulger bought them expensive appliances. The family needed them, she said; besides, he was just showing his appreciation for the time he spent with them.

Lanny Schexnailere, owner of Island Appliance Sales, said the freezer, stove and refrigerator cost a little more than $1,900; Bulger paid with $100 bills.

``I was introduced to him as Uncle Tom,'' said Schexnailere, who met Bulger at a barbecue at the Gautreaux home. Somebody told him that Bulger was a long-lost uncle of the Gautreauxs. ``Supposedly he left when he was a baby and was raised by other people,'' he said. ``I figured maybe he made it big and came back to help the family.''

Bulger left the island in February 1996, but when he returned in May of that year, there was tension during his visits to the Gautreaux house.

The retired parents of Glenn Gautreux's ex-wife were now staying with the family, and immediately clashed with Bulger.

``He had this attitude like he was the boss,'' said Thomas ``Black'' Rudolph, 64, Gautreaux's former father-in-law. He complained that Bulger was rude, often whispering to Penny and Glenn in his presence. And Bulger insulted Rudolph's wife, Mary, by saying her cooking wasn't as good as Penny's.

``He thought women should be seen and not heard,'' said Mary Rudolph, recounting how Bulger claimed that all he had to do was clap his hands and Greig would jump. The Rudolphs said Bulger teased them, saying, ``I have control of my woman.''

Mary Rudolph admitted, ``I think he was joking. He was trying to be a macho man.''

Still, the Rudolophs didn't appreciate Bulger's humor. ``I said I worked every day of my life since I was 15 years old and he said he never had to work, he had people working for him,'' Tom Rudolph said.

Irritated by Bulger's constant boasting about how he'd traveled around the world and was in great shape, Tom Rudolph challenged him to a push-up contest.

Rudolph dropped to the floor and did three one-handed push-ups, then vowed to do a one-handed push-up for every one that Bulger could do with two hands.

Rudolph said Bulger declined the challenge, claiming to be older than him. But when Rudolph slapped his driver's license on the table and demanded to see Bulger's, he refused to show it.

Despite their dislike of Bulger, the Rudolphs spoke warmly of Greig, who spent most of her time playing outside with the dogs and children. She gave the Labs baths and took them to the vet.

``I really enjoyed Helen because Helen was very quiet,'' Mary Rudolph said. ``She was always a loner. We walked on the beach one time and she said something about missing New York. Helen was nice.''

The Rudolphs said Bulger once made Penny Gautreaux cry when he sternly corrected the children. But Gautreaux insisted she welcomed Bulger's efforts at discipline.

``He cared for them and that's why he was strict,'' Gautreaux said. ``If I was as strict as him, maybe my kids would listen.''

Gautreaux said Bulger was good to her 18-year-old stepson, 10- and 9-year-old daughters, and 6-year-old son. He held the younger children on his lap and read to them. He bought them books and toys, including the Milton Bradley game ``Twister.''

The Rudolphs said Bulger once treated them and Penny and Glenn Gautreaux to dinner at a fine restaurant, located just off-island in Fourchon.

When the hostess tried to seat them at a table in the center of the room near other diners, Bulger insisted on a table in a darkened corner. He ordered wine for the group, drank a couple of imported beers, and picked up the tab.

From May 19 through July 7, 1996, Bulger and Greig rented a two-bedroom home on Cott Lane, a dead-end street around the corner from the Gautreauxs.

Henry and Barbara Wellman, retirees who owned the house and lived next door, said he paid $1,700 in advance with $100 bills.

The Wellmans described the couple as ``quiet, polite, articulate, and clean as a whistle.''

Bulger gave Henry Wellman copies of Soldier of Fortune magazine after he read them.

Barbara Wellman said Greig implied Bulger was retired, telling her, ``Well, he never could travel all his life, and finally he can, and he never wants to go home.''

``To be perfectly honest,'' Henry Wellman confessed, ``I wish we had more tenants like them. They didn't bother anyone. If they're criminals, I don't know which side I'm going to go on.''

But it appears Bulger's infamous temper was evident on at least one occasion.

Henry Wellman recalled with a chuckle that Bulger once tangled with a group of men who constantly hung out across the street, drinking beer and staring at everyone who walked by.

Glaring from his deck at the men who were leering at Greig while she walked to their apartment, Bulger snapped, ``What's the matter? Haven't you ever seen a real woman before?''

Wellman said, ``I was proud of him. To tell you the truth, I liked him. He didn't give me any reason not to.''

When Bulger and Greig left Grand Isle on July 7, 1996, they left behind clothes and an iron that are now in FBI custody.

``He said they were going to San Diego,'' said Henry Wellman, adding, ``which probably means they're in the Caribbean.''

Still running

Actually, Bulger's next stop was back on Long Island. That same month, FBI agents missed Bulger but found the Grand Marquis he had bought there 18 months earlier.

In the 18 months since he had bought the car, Bulger had driven 65,000 miles. Receipts found inside the Marquis led investigators to Louisiana for the first time. But again, Bulger was gone.

Last May the FBI offered a $250,000 reward for Bulger's capture and announced a criminal charge against Greig for harboring a fugitive.

There have been reports that Bulger may have traveled around the country for years prior to his January 1995 indictment, stashing money and possibly fake identifications in safe deposit boxes. But investigators also suspect Bulger is relying on a trusted associate to routinely funnel him cash.

``We don't know the source of the money, and if we did it would probably be a lot easier to track him,'' FBI Supervisory Special Agent Cassano said.

Federal authorities seized $1.9 million that Bulger claimed as his share of a 1991 Mass Millions jackpot, and $199,000 from a safe deposit box and two bank accounts he held in Boston.

Recently, investigators located a bank account belonging to Bulger in Clearwater, Fla., where he owns a condominium. They are in the process of trying to seize that money.

Investigators believe Bulger is a millionaire from gambling, loansharking, and drug profits.

The Violent Fugitive Task Force has recently placed ads with Bulger's photograph in USA Today, Soldier of Fortune magazine, and the South Boston Tribune announcing the reward. They've posted more recent photographs of Bulger and Greig on the FBI's Internet website.

Tips keep coming, but Bulger remains elusive -- a friendly man in a hat and sunglasses cruising around the country.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/1998/01/04/whitey_bulgers_life_on_the_run/?page=1

Posted by Nealus at July 12, 2011 12:25 PM

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