The Whitey Bulger Interview

https://www.amazon.com/Face-Whitey-Bulger-Capturing-Debriefing/dp/147669558X/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, I'm retired NYPD detective Vic Ferrari, and welcome to NYPD Through the Looking Glass podcast, where you'll get unique insights into the New York City Police Department. James Bulger was a vicious gangster who ran South Boston's underworld for close to 30 years. When the walls of justice were closing in in 1995, he and his girlfriend Catherine Gregg went on the run for 16 years until their capture in 2011. Today's guests have written a great book about the ordeal, face to face with Whitey Bulger, an FBI agent's account of capturing and debriefing Boston's most notorious gangster. Rich Tihan, Bob Ward, welcome to the show. Thanks, Vic. Thank you. Guys, uh, take it from here. Introduce yourselves and tell us a little something about yourself.

SPEAKER_02 0:39

Go ahead, Rich. Um, yeah, I um I grew up in Massachusetts. I was born and raised in Quincy, Medits, and went to high school here at college, and um, and then uh worked for a defense company after college for a little bit. And then I joined the FBI in 1991 and went to the FBI Academy for 18 weeks. And then um from there my career began uh starting in New Haven for 10 years, um, New Haven, Connecticut, uh, and then Washington, D.C. for four. And then I was transferred back to Boston in 2006 to specifically work the Whitey case, the Whitey Fugitive case, specifically the Bulger Fugitive Task Force, which comprised the Mass State Police and FBI agents, Department of Corrections, a variety of agents, a variety of agencies through the years. You know, some would participate, uh, Boston PD was on it for a little bit, but that you know, I was running that until he was captured in 2011. So great career. I really enjoyed it. I wouldn't trade it for anything. And uh, I'm so glad that the the bureau was the one that caught him.

SPEAKER_03 1:48

And Vic, my name is Bob Ward. I'm a reporter for Boston 25 News. We are the Fox affiliate in Boston, Massachusetts. I am a local guy in Massachusetts. I've spent my whole career in New England, graduated Emerson College in Boston in 1983, worked at a TV station up in New Hampshire, and then down in Providence, Rhode Island, where I covered some mob stories down there. And I arrived at Boston 25 in 1996, and I have a couple of series that I that I have. One's called New England's Unsolved, another one's called Mass Most Wanted, and I've been doing that for about 30 years. I covered a couple of big trials, uh, the Zarnaev trial, the Boston Bomber, and of course, Whitey Bulger. I covered a lot of Whitey Bulger stories over the years. When I got hired at FXT, Whitey was already gone. So I didn't cover him while he was an active gangster, but uh I covered him throughout his fugitive life. And um and I covered that trial, which was an amazing trial. And it was during that trial that I met Rich Tian.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

I was gonna ask that question because I'm curious how an investigative journalist, a retired FBI agent, how you guys got together and wrote this book.

SPEAKER_03 2:53

Well, Rich uh came to me and um and a friend of ours, a mutual friend of ours, had actually put us together. And I had never written a book. It was a goal of mine to do something like this, to do a book. I kind of struggled with what it would be about. But we got together. Rich and I met during the trial, and I remember talking to him during some of the breaks. I knew of him. I knew he was the head of the task force. He was somebody I wanted to talk to and do stories with. But back then when Whitey was a fugitive, you kind of had to go through certain routes to make things happen, and it just never it never took place. So when Rich reached out to me, I was like, yeah, I said, let's talk. And the more I talked to Rich, the more I knew that this was a story that needed to be told.

SPEAKER_00 3:32

But your dad was a Massachusetts state trooper who dealt with the notorious Boston strangler Albert DeSalvo. I'm guessing, you know, watching your dad growing up, that's what made you grow gravitate to law enforcement. But there's a great story in your book when you're a child and you're in a Howard Johnson's and your father points out some people. It sounds like the movie The Departed. Can you go into that a little bit?

SPEAKER_02 3:54

Yeah, I just, you know, we used to, he used, we were buddies when I was, when I was little, and he always used to take me to uh to Howard Johnson's, either in Quincy, right on right on the Southeast Expressway coming out of Boston, or the one down in Boston near South Bay, which is closer to the city. And uh we would go there every Saturday morning and he would have coffee, eggs, bacon, toast. And I I honestly I would probably have pancakes and a lot of syrup on top. But we just love I love those outings with him. And I just remember that specific moment when he, you know, he got a little bit serious and he's, you know, these these guys are over in a corner. And I just didn't pay it any mind at the time. But but, you know, as I got older, especially as I start, you know, when I come back, it it all flashes back to me, you know, when I was it started that, you know, that young, where we had that not so much interaction, but it was, you know, it was a moment that I'll never forget. It was a specific moment in time where he was usually joking around with anybody around him. And it's a moment where he got serious about it. It was something I I'll never forget. And they did look, believe it or not, I know I was a little kid, but they really did look like bad guys. And um, and I just it burned into my memory. But yeah, it was um it was something I'll never forget. And, you know, he just made sure that I knew uh with you know, with his with his stern face and him being serious about it.

SPEAKER_00 5:23

But think about the odds of that. You're sitting in a diner as a little boy, and your father points out Whitey Bulger and and Stephen the rifleman Fleming and says, those are bad guys, stay the hell away from them.

SPEAKER_02 5:33

Yeah, yeah, it really was.

SPEAKER_03 5:35

Wrong time, wrong place, I guess. I don't know. You know, it's it's interesting in Southie and other parts of Boston, everybody has a Whitey Bulger story. Now that the book is out, and I run into people and they'll tell me I remember seeing him here and there, and we couldn't talk about it, but we were aware of it. We were aware of who he was and that we needed to stay away from him. And uh, you know, that's kind of the legend of Whitey Bulger, I think, but it's still definitely there. And when Rich told me that story, I was kind of floored by it, you know. You know, here's like you said, here's the guy that caught Whitey Bulger, but 40 years earlier, he's a little kid in a diner, and his father, who's a state police guy, points him out and says, make sure you stay away from him. I mean, that's it's pretty incredible.

SPEAKER_00 6:20

If you're a Boston guy that's covered crime in New England for many years, can you paint a picture of our listeners of who Whitey Bulger was and how bad he was?

SPEAKER_03 6:30

Well, Whitey Bulger was an unbelievable gangster. He was highly intelligent. Now, when I say these things, I don't want to puff him up into being some great guy. I think he was a ruthless thug. He was a killer, and that's all he was. He was a gangster. But what made him so dangerous was his political connections. His brother was a powerful politician in Massachusetts, eventually became the president of the Massachusetts Senate, president of the UMass system. So he had his brother on that side of it, and he also was able to corrupt police officers and high-level police officers, an FBI agent, John Connolly, his supervisor. And he kind of had this, he had a kingdom. And his kingdom was eastern Massachusetts, and he was very, very powerful. Anyone who crossed him was gonna pay him a visit. They could end up in a ditch, or they could be, you know, they'd be stabbed to death, beaten to death with a pickaxe, shot to death, all the various ways people are murdered. That's how they died at the hands of Whitey Bulger. And he survived, and he wasn't the only gangster around. We also here in Boston had the Italian mafia, we had the Anjulos, we had the Patriarch family, of course, in New England. We had some New York guys coming up this way. And then we had Balger's crew and the so-called Irish Mafia, which I think was kind of a it's a loose way, I think, of trying to organize this whole thing. I don't think he had to be Irish to be one of Whitey's guys, but he would he was able to sit alongside all of them and have his business. And I was just talking about this. I was doing another story today in Worcester, and I was talking to a detective about it. And Whitey had a few headquarters in Boston. And one of the well-known uh headquarters he had was the Lancaster Street Garage, which is near the old Boston Garden. It's also not that far away from Prince Street, where the Anjulos were doing their business. So you had the Italian mobsters, you know, we had the mafia, and we had Whitey Bulger's crew operating within blocks of each other and within view of the FBI building in government center. All of that happening at the same time, but Whitey existed. He was, you know, he got his name taken off of an indictment on uh for fixing horse races. And that's how you knew that the fix was in for Whitey Bulger. So that's how powerful the guy was. He made his money all the ways that gangsters make money. When I was at the trial and I watched all these bookies come in and talk about how they were ripped off by him, how to pay him tribute. It was just eye-opening. If anybody, if Whitey thought he could get$10 out of you, he would get$10 out of you. There was no amount of money that was too small to be ripped off by Whitey Balger.

SPEAKER_00 8:57

Yeah, I mean, one of the guys, uh, I think it was Bucky Barrett, was killed because Whitey knew that he broke into a bank and broke into all those safety departments and tried shaking him down. I think Salemi told him back off. And then once Frank went to jail, Whitey, Weeks, and Flemmy brought him into a basement and where's the money? And then they killed him.

SPEAKER_03 9:14

Yeah, right. It's uh it's all that stuff. Everything that you you've seen in all the big movies and all the research that you're doing with the mob that you see in New York, it's all there. But the thing with Whitey, when he was operating, he was kind of a ghost. He was also somebody who operated in the shadows. He was not a flamboyant guy at all. He wasn't one of the he wasn't a John Gotti. He wasn't somebody who was making the you know the newspapers, oh, I saw Whitey Bulger here or there, whatever. He didn't want anybody to know who he was. That was another thing that made him really dangerous. He was such a ghost that when he was a fugitive, the FBI was trying everything in the book to try to find him. I think this might have been around the time Rich got on the uh task force. The FBI released audio recordings of his voice just so people could hear what he sounded like. So there wasn't there wasn't much in the public domain of Whitey Balger, and that's exactly the way he went.

SPEAKER_00 10:06

Can you share for our audience how Whitey slipped out of a 200-page federal indictment in 1995?

SPEAKER_02 10:13

Yeah, you know, it's it's it's he was he was clearly tipped off by John Connolly um to and you know Steve Flemie also knew, but Steve Flemie decided to stay a little bit longer than that uh Jimmy Bulger. Jimmy Bulger had he had planned for the for that and he had prepared for it. And as I mentioned, you know, he was using an alias or had uh an I uh alias ID in his pocket by the name of Tom Baxter. So he was tipped off and he he fled with Teresa Stanley, and he, you know, Fleming got caught pretty pretty quick, and Jimmy was determined not to get caught. And so, you know, he left and he went down to Selden, New York, to the Matos family house and hit out down there and uh and traveled across the country and basically just you know broke contact. And it wasn't until Teresa Stanley got homesick that he brought her home and dropped her off, which was dangerous in itself, and um picked up Catherine Gregg and went on the run for good.

SPEAKER_03 11:19

You know, I think Vic that white uh Stephen Fleming didn't take it obviously didn't take it seriously enough. They knew the indictment was coming, but I think they were so so protected by people in law enforcement that he didn't think anybody would touch him and he had time. Whereas Bulger, he, like Rich said, he planned for this moment and he knew that it was time to go. But he was also, he wasn't around in Boston when the indictments were coming up and when they went out looking for him. He was out driving around the country with Teresa Stanley, and that's when he found out that it's really happening. He was warned that it was coming. And when it actually happened, he actually heard it on the radio, and that's when he hightailed it out of New England. So I think of you know, the fact that Fleming and Flemie was a fugitive before he took off. They all took off and they were eventually caught. But I just think it was they were so protected for so long that he may have thought, nah, they'll never get me. That this will never happen.

SPEAKER_00 12:12

And then it did. Yeah, and Kevin Weeks's book, I know he goes into how he and and Whitey were both pissed at Flemie because Flemie had never really done a lot of time, and he hung around to help his. I think he had two sons starting a restaurant or something, and Whitey was like, What are you kidding? You gotta go. And he was like, Nah, I got time, and ultimately he never got out.

SPEAKER_03 12:33

He didn't see the danger. And Connolly at the time was retired from the bureau. So, you know, I don't remember if Morris was still with him, Rich, at the time, but you know, he didn't uh Fleming clearly did not recognize the danger that he was in. None at all.

SPEAKER_00 12:45

Rich, can you go into what it was like to lead the Whitey Bulger Fugitive Task Force?

SPEAKER_02 12:50

Yeah, you know, it's funny. I I know I mentioned it in the book, but I was preparing to leave Washington and come up to Boston, and I called a friend of mine, and you know, he basically, you know, I told him what I was gonna be doing, and I'm gonna be, you know, running the Bulger Task Force. And he's like, You're in for, you know, words to the effect, you're in for it, man. Nobody gets along up here, you know, and and you know, he's to quote the term, he's he's like, careful for what you wish for up here, because the the partnerships are really bad. Like, and I had been in Connecticut, and uh, you know, we were the partnerships were great there between the local and the state and the federal. It wasn't that way in Boston, and I I really didn't know what I was getting myself into, other than hearing from people that were friends of mine in the Boston office and also reading about it in the newspapers, you know, from far away. But what was it like to lead it? I would say to you this, I would say it was great, but it was also very frustrating because there was, you know, there were times where we would get stopped on our investigative efforts, or we, you know, we would get subverted in some kind of way, either by competing agencies, i.e. the Massachusetts State Police and the DEA, who were running parallel investigation to try and find him before the FBI could, because the prevailing opinion here was that the FBI was corrupt and that they didn't want to find Whitey Bulger, and that was the tone between the agencies and the media here in Boston. It was a lot, you know, it was a lot to swallow, and it was very difficult. You know, you had to you had to push every day through negativity and just keep seeing, you know, we have gotta get this guy. We have got to find a way to get him, you know, in any way possible. And quite honestly, we used every investigative technique short of a Title III wire intercept on a phone. Everything. And so there was no lead that every lead when addressed. The people that were on that task force were dedicated, and they they really truly did want to find him because of all of what happened in the city and what he had done, both to the city, but to the agencies as well, and and the corruption and the negativity and the you know, so we were dealing with competing agencies. We were dealing with the media that did not was not reporting positively on the FBI, and that, you know, that it was like the bandwagon approach on, you know, that the FBI really, really doesn't want to find him. So what it was like, it was was rewarding, but it was frustrating too. I won't, you know, I can't sugarcoat it any other way than that. It was difficult and and people had people that were there longer than me, you know, local agency guys and the state police that were with us, you know, we had state police with us, and the state police that were competing against us, you know, they thought that they were traitors, you know, our the members that were on my task force, and they they treated them as such. And it it went that deep, you know. It was it was that palpable on the relationships being so bad.

SPEAKER_03 16:02

And even the bureau itself had to take steps, the Bureau recognized what was going on and the damage that Connolly had done. Yes. So, Rich, even your your task force was set up not in headquarters in Boston, but at an off-site. And there was a vault where all the evidence was that you couldn't, you know, an agent, agent, correct me if I'm wrong, but uh, an agent who was not on the task force couldn't go into the file to go and say, Oh, what's the latest on Whitey? Any Whitey sightings I should be aware of. It was highly controlled because even the Bureau recognized how bad this was. And they took steps to do something about it. They brought in Rich, who was an outsider. They brought in some other people who were outsiders too, that had no connection to Connolly or Bulger or anything, trying to keep an independent investigation going that could not be corrupted by anyone on the outside because, you know, the new people, ASACs come and go, right? And they don't really know who's connected to who else. It's, you know, Boston's a lot like New York. Everybody knows everybody. And they had to do something to set up a wall to protect the integrity of the Bulger investigation. And that's what they did. But it was not an easy thing. I was a reporter at the time and watching this all unfold, and the distrust for the FBI in the media was sky high. It was it was really, really a rough time. Unfortunately, it wasn't just Connolly and the Morris. There were other issues too with the way informants were handled, confidential informants were handled from previous generations. There was a good reason why there was this distrust. But Rich and the people on that task force had to crowd that noise out and focus on what they were doing and just go after Whitey Bulger.

SPEAKER_00 17:42

Whitey is captured on a tip. Someone recognizes him, calls the FBI. The FBI captures him. Rich, you're in Boston. You're tasked with flying out to Los Angeles to bring Whitey home and to debrief him about where he's been and what he's been up to. And has anyone been aiding and abetting him? What was what was your game plan flying out to Los Angeles?

SPEAKER_02 18:03

He was, you know, it's funny because we tried to get to get out to LA the night he was caught, and we couldn't, we couldn't get a government aircraft to to come get us, and we couldn't get a flight out through commercial aircraft. So we uh we went out the next morning to his initial appearance in federal court out there in LA. And on the way out, I was so busy with notifications and headquarters in Washington, D.C. And I couldn't get off my phone, but I did carve out a little time with the agent that was with me, Phil Torsny. Phil and I just, you know, the original intent, because at the time, you know, there was a long time that the FBI could not videotape their interrogations or interviews, and that had changed prior to Bulger being caught back in probably 2010, 2011. And so prior to the recording, we could only take written notes and write a report called an FD-302, which is in fact what happened after the fact, after we spoke with him for basically six hours unimpeded. So the game plan really was to focus on the fugitive aspect of his crimes. He was he was indicted on Rico murder, I believe it was 19 counts, and I wasn't interested in the murders. I was interested in his playbook of how he was able to be a fugitive for 16 years and avoid us and evade capture. So that was the the the game plan we were going by. Now, what it turned out to be is, you know, game of a game of chess with him because he would want to control the conversation. He would want to control the interview. You know, we had to be, we had to think on on the fly in order to both reel him in and keep him on task and not let him go sideways, which he, you know, he could do, but he was trying to control the conversation. So we it was a fine line because you didn't want him to shut down on you. You know, it was the it was the art of interrogation, and and you wanted to hear him out, but you needed to keep him on task. And I think we did a good job of that. You know, there were times where he got mad and he would get mad at us because we locked up his brother Jackie, you know, for aiding and abetting, you know, harboring obstruction of justice. And we, you know, the government took away his pension, and he at one point he got really mad about it. And he's like, I shouldn't tell you anything, and threw a couple of adjectives in there, you know, as well. But the game plan was to talk about his fugitive status, and that was it. And and and anybody that was harboring him, and his ethic, you know, at least during that interview, was I'll tell you, I'll tell you information about people that are dead, you know, but if they're alive, I'm not talking to you about it. Like Kevin, you know, we would ask questions about Kevin Weeks. Talk to Kevin, you know, go talk to Kevin, and he would avoid the question that way. And so, you know, we had a game plan going out there with certain questioning, and that went right out the window because, you know, he wanted to be he wanted to be in control, and I didn't want to lose him, you know, because he signed a consent to to waive his rights. So we were fair game to ask him anything. And, you know, he talked about he talked for six hours about his life on the run. And it was the most fascinating interview I I've ever done. I don't think anyone, you know, has had that. I'm the only one that really, you know, had the only interview with him. So it was as a as a as an FBI agent, being able to talk to the fugitive that you chased for for unimpeded access, it was the most coolest thing I've ever done.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

Bob, after Whitey was captured, did you go out to LA to to cover it?

SPEAKER_03 21:42

No, when the night Whitey was caught, I just finished a long shift. And here's an interesting thing. I was on a story about a missing kid in another town in Massachusetts. We were waiting to talk to the police, myself and some other T V stations, and the PSA that Rich developed had just come out and One of the other reporters asked me, because I cover a lot of missing persons. I do a lot with the FBI. He said, Do you think this is going to work? Nothing else has worked. Do you think this is going to work? And I said to him, I said, You know what? I think there's a good shot this could actually work. And then we go about our night, and I was on the way home at about, I want to say around midnight. And I was just I just left the station. And that's another friend of mine from another media outlet called me and said, We we just got a call from Los Angeles. They called Whitey Bulger. What do you know? And then I started calling my sources and uh and got it confirmed, turned around, went back to the station, ended up working, you know, all night, the morning show, all that sort of thing. So they had another reporter go out and I they had me stay here to work my sources to try to develop the story during the day, kind of like anchoring, if you will, the story from Boston. So I didn't I wasn't out in LA for his capture. I went out to LA, oddly enough, in 2018 to cover the Red Sox in the World Series. And one of the stories I developed was, you know, a story about, oh, could you think it was a lighthearted story about you think Whitey, when he was a fugitive, uh, watched the Red Sox? There was a there's a Boston bar not far from his apartment. So we went over there and talked to them. And, you know, the I said, Did you ever see Whitey here? And he said, No, but I I wouldn't put it past him. But anyway, I remember at the end of that day, this was in October 2018, my producer gave me a call and uh said, Hey, there's a story hitting the wires about they're moving Whitey Bulger. You can you find out more about this? Do we know why this is taking place? And within a couple of days, Whitey Bulger was murdered. So it was like the last time, as luck would have it, that you could ever do that story that I did. Because as I was doing my my pieces from Los Angeles on Red Sox and fandom and stuff, Whitey Bulger was the last act for Whitey Bulger.

SPEAKER_00 23:42

You know, I saw those PSAs, Rich, that you put out there to cap I and I remember watching them down here in Florida and I go, Oh, they're gonna catch him. They were just so well done, and with the auto-tune, it was really loud and just focusing on on Catherine Gregg and then the breast implants. I go, somebody's gonna, someone's gonna recognize them. I mean, that that was a really good idea.

SPEAKER_02 24:04

Yeah, it was, you know, it's funny because we um we were using the standard protocols for the media where we'd reach out to America's Most Wanted, we would do, you know, print media, you know, focusing on him. And, you know, we just got in a room and we and we just kind of just threw ideas off each other. You know, one of the things that I wanted to do was take the focus off him and and put it on her. And that's what we did both investigatively and and from a media strategy. And we focused on her vanity, we focused on our, you know, uh breast imp our her dental features and her implants. And she was vain. And so we took a budget of about$50,000 and, you know, targeted 14 cities where there had been leads, you know, and we had, you know,$50,000 is not a lot of money to do an ad buy in in these major markets. And so, you know, we were selective about it and, you know, paid attention from a budgetary standpoint. But the beauty of it was was that it had never been done. That it was the first time that the FBI had ever created its own public service announcement. And it was innovative, and it just was, you know, really, really cutting edge for an agency that had never done that. And subsequent to that, now the FBI offices across the country are using that as a as a real tool to reach a segment of the population that you want to to get. And we were focusing on daytime television, female audience. And the other aspect of that media campaign was because that commercial or that PSA was so innovative and had never been done, that became a global story in its in on its own.

SPEAKER_01 25:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:50

And so, you know, BBC and and uh CNN, all of a sudden I found myself on you know global television. And that we didn't plan for that. And that's the beauty of it, is that it reached the world, and I and I couldn't be more proud or or happy with you know my team that we were able to accomplish that. And and you know, I'll tell you a quick sideline story, and Bob will appreciate this too, is after we created it and we started, we had a a command post set up and we were receiving leads launched on June 20th, 2011. We got some leads down at Biloxi, Mississippi, and and you know, that turned out to be a look-alike. But, you know, prior to that, I had called a prosecutor who, you know, I had a good relationship with it. And he was always, you know, he just was he didn't believe that we could ever caught catch him. And so I told him I'm like, this is what we're doing. And he's like, you know, it's the same old thing, Rich. It's it's it's not gonna work. You know, you guys have done so much publicity, it's just not gonna work. And uh I said, okay, you know, I'll take that. And uh so we did it, and he was captured and the night he was captured, I called this guy and I said, I said, uh you to you know, you told me it wasn't gonna work. Well it did. He said it's silence on the phone, and all of a sudden he's like, Wow, you really did you did it. And I said, Yeah, we did, when no one believed that we could. And so, you know, I thought that was a moment that I wanted to, I wanted to take a second and do that, you know, just to prove them wrong. So yeah, that's the evolution of that of that technique. And like I said, you know, other field offices have been using it for other, you know, I would say top tens, but also large unsolved cases that require, you know, global reach. Um and so I'm proud of the Boston office. I'm proud of what we did. And again, it was the LA FBI that caught him, and and it couldn't have been scripted any better than it was.

SPEAKER_03 27:58

Really couldn't. You know, Vic, I agree with you about those images. They were crystal clear.

SPEAKER_01 28:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 28:03

He really can't say enough about them because before that, when I told you about the audio they released of Whitey talking, so you could at least hear what he sounded like, there were really no, there was absolutely nothing current as far as an image of either one of them. Whitey had some mugshots that were fairly old. And with Catherine Gregg, you kind of had family snapshots and Polaroids that were even older. So to get that image so crystal clear like that, and you can see her as a real person, I mean, that was invaluable. That was gold, absolute gold. When I finally saw Whitey for the first time in court here in Boston, it took me a few seconds to put it together. That's actually Whitey Baldur. Didn't look, he aged a lot and it didn't did not look like him. And I like to I was conscious of him as a fugitive and you know, as a reporter, you'd like to be the one to maybe maybe I can find him, you know, you kind of get carried away. But if I was in Santa Monica and I walked down the pier and I saw him, I I don't think I'd recognize him because he didn't look anything like himself. Put on some weight. But to go after Catherine is a totally different story, you know, and even she didn't really look as glamorous as she looked in the past. She had aged as well. However, those images, along with some of the facts that you had about her, that uh just made a lot of sense. And the tips are put two and two together, thank goodness, and was able to put, you know, give you guys that that tip that you could follow up and you find out that Charles and Carol Gasgow have no no real record of anything. You know, they're kind of invisible. And that was the big red flag that this is this might be them.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

Rich, after you get out to LA, go to White Whitey's already in jail, and you got to take a look at Whitey Bulger and Catherine Gregg's fugitive apartment. Could you kind of go into what it looked like and what you found in there?

SPEAKER_02 29:48

Yeah, you know, um the LA evidence response team had done a search and pulled all the money, you know, out of the hides. He had hides in the walls. If you walk into the apartment, it's it's a one big open space with a kitchen off to the far right and then off to the balcony, and then his bedroom and her bedroom were down to the left in the back corner. In between the the big room and walking into the kitchen, there was a hallway, and in that hallway was a hide where he cut out the the pla the plaster right out of the wall and stacked the money, and then you know, put a mirror right in front of the money with some guns uh uh with the money too. And then if you if you walk to the left and you were to walk into the furthest bedroom on the left, he was that's where he was. In his bedroom, he had walls of books, and all the windows were covered like darkness, because he, you know, he didn't like light. And um, and you know, contained in and around the books was a loaded, you know, weapon, and then underneath his bed was a Tupperware, a large Tupperware container with rifles and pistols and his manuscript and ammunition, you know, a couple thousand rounds of ammunition. We went there and just surveyed the apartment, you know. We decided that we wanted to do we went out again after that and served a search warrant and found more things that we wanted to take. We thought it was of good value both from a trial standpoint but from an evidentiary standpoint on, you know, a harboring case against Catherine, because she she was indicted for harboring him and served eight years. Ultimately, she was brought back to testify, would not testify in the grand jury, and was given another 18-month sentence on top of it. So she, you know, she clearly harbored him, and we we had enough evidence to prove it, you know, and she pled to it. But, you know, I just wanted to see where he was for all that time. I just wanted to get a visual in my head about what he was doing, how he was living. You know, we knew enough about the aliases, you know, and found enough evidence about other aliases to include, you know, not only Carol Gasco and Charlie Gasco, but also James Lawler, who, by the way, looked just like Bulger, and that was his plan was to find somebody that looked like him who was homeless, and he bought his identity and assumed the identity of James Lawler until Lawler died in 2008 or nine, and um, and then he he stopped using that alias. But he went so far using that Lawler as to drive his car, utilize a bank account, and operate with a California driver's license using James Lawler's name.

SPEAKER_03 32:36

And he said, why he said he came back to Boston. He said he was armed to the teeth, he had a disguise, and he was looking to kill someone. No, I think we have an idea who it was, but you know, he never acted on, he didn't he didn't succeed. But what a risk, right? To drive 3,000 miles, come all the way back here, and then uh and actually again talking to someone who said that they saw Whitey in his fugitive years in Southie. So, you know, it's it's just kind of amazing. But he was highly intelligent, but there was also the other side of himself that even in old age I don't think he could control, and that was his anger. You saw flashes of that on the plane. You see that with him coming back here to Boston when he was a top ten. Everybody was looking for him. I'm not quite sure if in '95, how big, you know, the going to get a mobster on a on an indictment to serve, you know, an arrest warrant. I think it I think the guys on the task force thought, okay, we're just gonna go get him, we're gonna bring him in. Well, you know, maybe we'll do a perp walk on him in Boston. He slipped, well, we'll catch up to him, we'll get him. It wasn't the, you know, the big thing that it became until he was gone for 16 years. So for him to then slip back in for a second time after Teresa Stanley, you know, immediately when he, you know, short time after he became a fugitive, and then to come back again during his fugitive years, just shows you how, you know, how brazen he was. But I think there was a side of himself that he really couldn't control, and he wanted to act on that vengeance against someone who did him wrong. I don't really want to say who it is because the person's still alive, but you know, but you know what? It's like an Agatha Christie thing, right? There's a whole list of Whitey Balger enemies out there that he could have uh been targeting. So I don't, you know, we it's right now we don't know who he was talking about. But you know, and then he also called Morris, right? He called John Morris when he was at Cornergo. You know, John Morris was John Connolly's boss, and he called him and claimed he was uh an aide to Kevin White, who was the mayor of former mayor of Boston, and just started screaming at him and you know, I'm gonna kill you. And and Morris was scared to death that Whitey Bulger was gonna come out of the shadows and kill him. And I I think he was still afraid of him when he Morris testified against Whitey at the trial, and I think he was still afraid of him, and he's you know, Whitey can't go anywhere, but he's in the same room with him and he's testifying against him, and there's Whitey Bulger just a few feet away.

SPEAKER_00 34:46

Glaring at him. Yeah. For for Whitey to call an FBI agent in Quantico, Virginia, right? Think about that. It's it's almost like that last scene in Silence of the Lambs when Anthony Hopkins reaches out to Agent Stalling to to you know, bid her a fail to threaten the guy, to threaten an FBI supervisor, like you son of a bitch, you've been taking this money, now you're gonna rap me out, I'm gonna kill you. And then Morris goes and has a heart attack because he's just that afraid of him. Oh, hell yeah. Rich, inside that apartment you guys found$822,000. Do you think he had more money at his disposal stashed in different places?

SPEAKER_02 35:26

I do. I do. We found, you know, he had money under the Baxter ID in Piccadilly Circus in London. He had a safe deposit box in Dublin, and you know, both, you know, seized by the by the police, both in London and in Dublin. But my belief, and I could never prove it, and I tried, is on the plane ride, you know, I there was always talk that he had money in France. And I tried to get him to talk about it, and he wouldn't, he he would not talk about France. And um, and it's my belief, and Bob and I have talked about this, you know, at length, is even though he had the 822,000 in the wall, I firmly believe that he always had a option B and an option C. And by that I mean he used to drive out to the casinos and take that that money because it was all$100 bills in 1995. And he was so careful that he took that old money and brought it and bought chips at the casino or or you know, took that old money and converted it into new money. And if he won a few bucks, you know, he'd go up and and and exchange that money. And when we served the second search warrant or the search warrant on the apartment in mid-July, we found an envelope inside his bookshelf marked New Money. And it was a white envelope, it was plain, and it had new money in it, had legit new money in it. And uh and so, you know, he paid rent for cash. And but to answer your question, I d I'm firmly convinced that he had money in France, and I'm firmly convinced that after his capture, listening to the calls in the jail of his conversations with Billy, I'm firmly convinced that Billy went and got that money and and somehow got it back to the United States. Now, I only base that because Billy traveled to France soon after Whitey was caught. He he was on a Catholic charities trip to Spain, I believe, and he transited through France. And, you know, so you put two and two together, and I'm convinced that he he was able to get his brother that money. I have no idea how much it is or was, and I'm firmly convinced that he had money out west under other aliases that we didn't know about, and that's the reason, part of the reason why Catherine not only served the longest, one of the longest sentences for a harboring case, a federal harboring case, you know, of eight years, and and then was in contempt because she wouldn't testify in the grand jury because we were at going to ask her questions about finances, and she wouldn't she refuse to testify, so she was held in contempt. So that tells me something else in that when she finished her sentence and got off federal probation, she went and took those accounts. But I could never prove I can I can't prove it. It's too late now. But that's my belief at the time, you know, after his capture, that's what I that's what I that's my investigative opinion. But he had so much more than 800,000.

SPEAKER_00 38:27

But Bob, she's gotta know that the FBI is gonna be watching her forever.

SPEAKER_03 38:32

Right. I agree with Rich that there's more money out there, whether she has it now or she's going to get any. I have no idea, but I do agree that there's a lot more money out there that's unaccounted for. And I sat through that trial, you know, all the pies that he had his fingers in was absolutely astounding. I don't think there was any any drugs that ran through Boston that he didn't get a nice big piece out of. He even got his he even got a piece of a winning lottery ticket. You know, I mean, it through his now the liquor store. I mean, he had his hands in everything. And there's no way that in the 16 years he was gone, he went through a couple million and was down to his last$800,000 in cash. There's no way. And I also am kind of blown away when I when I think about it. You know, I wrote the book with Rich, and sometimes you just write it and you're in the middle of it and you stop to think. And when you're just talking about Vegas, you know how many people in Boston are out in Vegas? The risk that he took then to go into a casino and to go and however long he spent in there with a bounty on his head, he's in there, you know, washing money through the casinos and he's playing some uh whether it's table games or slot machines or whatever it was he was doing, just so he could get that money washed, is pretty amazing. He was a lot more careful crossing the border into Mexico to try to get prescriptions when he still felt he could do it. He would he would walk across the border with Mexico. Because he felt if he took Lawler's car and drove across, he they might search the car, they might look at him, might study him a little bit more, and and things might not hold up. But he figured if he just walked across the border, they'd leave him alone. And that's kind of what he did for a lot of years. Before in the end, Catherine was going to a local CBS and picking up his prescription well, picking up prescriptions. And he found a friendly doctor, I guess, that uh was able to help them out. But it's just absolutely amazing. Absolutely amazing he wasn't caught sooner by just he was as smart as he was. You you can't figure out every single circumstance. And he could have been tripped up by any of these other things, coming back to Boston, running across the wrong guy, you know, going to the casino, crossing over into Mexico. But he did not live an extravagant life. You know, going back to the question about the apartment. I mean, in a sense, he was he was kind of in a prison. He was in that tiny apartment, and it's not like they were traveling, it's not like he had a big estate someplace, he had a big boat and he's flaunting his wealth or anything. As far as we know, he was cut off from everyone back home except for his family. I don't think he even trusted his friends. I know he didn't trust his friends. A lot of them by the when he was gone, they'd already cut their own deals. But he just was definitely in touch with people in Southie, but I think they were people that were extremely close to him who would never in a million years ever turn him in. So pretty amazing. A case study here on a fugitive who does not want to be caught in the lengths that they will go to. But I agree that you know you talk about treasure hunts. If somebody wants to go on a treasure hunt, you know, see if you can find a safe deposit box with a Bulger name on it, and you might be well rewarded.

SPEAKER_00 41:23

Rich, the plane just takes off. You sit next to Whitey Bulger, and he tries to dictate the terms of of the interview. And I understand why he asked you up front for immunity for Catherine Gregg, his girlfriend, but why I I I was stunned when he asked for immunity for crooked FBI agent John Connolly.

SPEAKER_02 41:40

It's funny because he didn't I'm gonna say that say it this way, he didn't know what he didn't know, and meaning he didn't realize that he was a papered informant. He only realized that when he got back to Boston and the discovery was provided to his attorneys, and he realized because he thought that Morris and Connolly were giving him information, but in reality, during those times, they could paper him and not even tell him. They could sign him up as an informant and not even tell him back in those days. The files were that thick on information that both he and Flemie had provided, mostly Flemie and Conley would just, you know, pattern the same information into Bulger's informant file. But he realized that that Conley had him as a as he didn't pay him, but he papered him. It wasn't until he realized that you know Conley had official documents, you know, naming Whitey as a top echelon informant, that you know, he he kind of, I think he backpedaled a little bit. But at the time on the aircraft, he wanted he wanted justice for John Connolly because he had feel he felt like he had been wronged at the time. He didn't realize until he got back and the discovery was handed out, and he's you know, his attorneys started talking, they started having having conversations about the trial strategy that he realized that he was now on paper, and I don't think he was happy about it.

SPEAKER_03 43:07

That's why he always said I'm I wasn't a rat. He actually said that at his trial. I'm not a rat. And he cat he took that right to the grave with him. And in his mind, he wasn't a rat. He didn't tell Connolly anything. It was Fleming that was, right? Is that what it was, Reggie? It was, yeah. And then you saw that Fleming's reports were exactly what was written down for Whitey Bulger, but he didn't know anything was being written down for him. No. They're paying Connolly, they're paying Morris, they're they're taking care of him. But he thinks he thinks it's a one-way street that way. He doesn't realize that it's double backed on him. And boy, wouldn't you love to have seen his face when he found that out? It would have killed him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Connolly now is trying to use Whitey's manuscripts that he had. He even wrote in his own manuscript, his unfinished manuscript, uh, that Rich took a look at after he debriefed him. And there was some language in there about how Connolly's an innocent man and he's being framed and all that sort of thing. So Connolly's trying to use that now to try to get some. Try to get to some charges dropped against him. But Connolly's out. I mean, he's out on a uh medical mercy release from state of Florida. So, you know, he's just trying to clear his name, I guess. But I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 44:11

We'll see how that goes. What I found fascinating, Rich, when you were talking to Whitey on the plane, his death toll is at least 20 people that we know of. Yet he cried during the interview about not being able to put down his own dog.

SPEAKER_02 44:24

Yeah, yeah, he did. And and, you know, the other part where he cried was when he when we were asking him about James Lawler, he had developed a friendship with this guy. He was a he was an army veteran, and he developed a friendship with him and paid him a lot of money, you know, got him an apartment in in West LA. And when James Lawler died, uh, you know, we were talking to him about it on the airplane, and he visibly cried. And then on the flip side of it, you know, you'd go to another topic, and he, you know, he was an extremely racist guy, and his personality would just turn on a dime, and all of a sudden he'd be spewing, you know, swears and, you know, F this and F that. So his personality shift was quite something to go from being emotional to all of a sudden being a killer again. It was, it was, it was pretty interesting to see. I had not seen that before. You could just his eyes changed and his and his demeanor changed when he would get angry. But when he was emotional, he he was a crying old man.

SPEAKER_03 45:28

Yeah, he had empathy for the dog, but not for any of these people that he murdered. No, some of them were gangsters, you know, but there were women that were murdered that did not deserve to be murdered. There was uh there was a uh a witness that was murdered um against him, along with a bystander who was just trying to give him a ride home. There was his friend John Callahan, all these people that, you know, he was either close to or maybe they meant nothing, but he didn't care. He killed them anyway. And, you know, some of the testimony against the women that he killed were uh, you know, just it was just horrendous. And he didn't show any mercy, no mercy at all. But for a dog, a dog, a sick dog at the end of its life, he loses it. Unbelievable. It must have been a shock for Rich and Phil to hear him go that way too. You know, that's one of those things you do an interview and you think you've got it all laid out and you know where it's gonna go. And then there's all you know the subject of the interview. Yeah, I find it in my work too. All of a sudden they go down a path and it just you just don't uh expect it. You can't see it coming, and that definitely happened with you guys a couple of times.

SPEAKER_02 46:31

Yeah. Yeah, I didn't see that coming. I I thought he was gonna be, you know, pardon the word, a hard ass the whole, the whole flight. Um that simply wasn't the case. There were there were times where he showed, you know, real emotion, and um, and other times where he, you know, he was, you know, vicious in his in his attitude.

SPEAKER_00 46:52

Aaron Powell You know, you guys came very close to indicting his brother, Billy Bulger, and the U.S. Attorney's Office wouldn't prosecute. Do you think had they prosecuted Billy Bulger, at least indicted him, that Whitey would have came out of the woodwork and given himself up?

SPEAKER_02 47:06

I don't know if he would have given himself up, but I think it would have it would have he would have showed himself in some way. That was the that was the the game plan with why we did that. We knew that, you know, that you know Billy was harboring him in some way, and we knew there were third parties involved. You know, it was it was it was the best method that we could that we could we could make happen where he would be so angry because now not only Jackie, but now Billy, who you know those two were were very close. And Billy, I think he always thought Billy was a hero because he he went down the right path, so to speak, you know, Senate president and and you know, president of UMass system, which is a big job. And he was proud of his brother. And I think if the the big bad FBI had successfully indicted him, I think it would have made him think it would have made him show something, whether it be through a third party or through a negotiation through an attorney, but it would have it would have made made him make a move to to help him in some way, shape, or form. What that looks like, we'll never know. And you know, that that was that was a that was a gun wrenching decision that you know really you know was blew the wind out of our sail a little bit at that time.

SPEAKER_00 48:30

Did you ever get a chance to interview Billy Bull uh did I?

SPEAKER_03 48:33

No, not about this. He wouldn't talk about Jimmy. He wouldn't, he would talk about anything else. He actually showed up our station does a uh something called the zip trip, which is a uh you go to a town on the morning show and you celebrate the the community and everything. And we had a zip trip in South Boston, and Billy Bulger showed up called the station and said, I heard you're coming to Southie. Um I'd like to come and be interviewed, but I'm not gonna talk about my brother. And he did it, but he wouldn't talk about he wouldn't talk to his brother. If you threw a question at him, he would just say, Oh, he's my brother and I love him, and and that's about it. He wouldn't, there was no interviewing uh Billy Bulger on those sorts of things. And I would have a tough time, you know, doing a sit-down with Billy Bulger and not make the whole interview about Whitey Bulger. So, you know, it is what it is. But you know, it is it is tantalizing to think about what would have happened, what would have been Whitey's reaction. But we do know that it was that decision not to prosecute that forced the task force to pivot because so many people on that task force just uh threw their hands up and said, What you know, maybe it's true, maybe nobody wants to get them. I mean, this is our best chance to do something, and that decision was made, Rich, at the seventh hour where the statute of limitations was going to run, right? It was all it couldn't be reconsidered. It was then or never, and the decision was made never. And in the book, you also see from Rich's involvement with other top ten fugitives that decisions to go after family members to try to smoke somebody out, U.S. attorneys don't don't like doing that. And Rich, you ran up against that with a couple of your cases. So this wasn't so outside, you know, the realm of possibility here, but it would still had a devastating effect on the task force, and it did force them to pivot. And the way they pivoted was after they started running down some more look-alike leads, which never really got them anywhere, was to finally get this idea of let's go back and let's see what's going on and see if we can focus on something else, which turned out to be Catherine Gregg. So that wouldn't have happened if if the they did go forward with this decision to prosecute Billy Bulger, the PSA may never have been made. Potentially not.

SPEAKER_00 50:37

Rich, at any point did you, when you were looking for Whitey, did you get to speak to Kevin Weeks, Frank Salemi, or Steve Flemmy about where Bulger could be hiding? Would it get his mindset?

SPEAKER_02 50:47

I I didn't speak to Kevin, but we did we did funnel questions through the U.S. Attorney's Office to Flemme, who was in WITSEC at the time. So we would funnel our questions through the U.S. Attorney's Office. And and we didn't really like doing that, but that's the way that it was structured at the time. They wanted to preserve Fleming for their trial, and they didn't want us to create any new discovery material or any type of exculpatory material that could be used against them at a later time. And so I get the strategy of it, but it was not easy to try and do it that way. Same thing with with um John Moderano and Kevin, same thing. We would have to filter our questions. Ultimately, a couple of guys that worked for me spoke with Kevin. And Kevin was interviewed on television, you know, or print media too. And I don't think he knew where he was.

SPEAKER_03 51:38

No, I I really don't. One of the smartest things that Paul Drever did was when he realized that his Tom Baxter, the original ID that he had, that Teresa Stanley had compromised that ID, was and he he worked his sources, he worked Kevin to try to get material to make new IDs. But once he was satisfied he had what he needed from there, the smartest thing that he did was that's when he cut all his ties to Southie and he got out. And the only people that had any clue that would have had any clue would have been his brothers or somebody else in his family. It's a big Irish family. There's always the possibility there's somebody there that I'm not aware of that had an idea, but I actually think that he was so smart that when they arranged these third-party communications from wherever Whitey was back to Boston, he wasn't telling them where he was. He was just checking in to make sure, you know, hey, I'm okay out here and what's new with you? And they didn't ask, and he didn't tell them where he was. So, you know, I don't I don't think Kevin Weeks or Fleming or any of these guys knew where Whitey was. And meanwhile, they're cutting their own deals with the feds, you know. They're they're doing what they can to save their skin. And Whitey knew that. I mean, he knew that when he was gone, that he couldn't trust anybody anymore. If Teresa Stanley, you know, would give him up and she kind of did it by accident in a moment of passion. If she could do that, what could these other guys do if they're looking to cut deals? So that was a really smart thing that he did. But I do think they could have they could have had him earlier. I don't think it had to go for 16 years. I think before he um hightailed it out of Chicago after uh Louisiana. I think there were things that that should have been done that weren't done that yeah, they could have caught him in Long Island or something. They could have caught him in New York City, but it didn't happen. And he was out there for 16 and a half years. And that's kind of the point of the book. Look, you know, when you got law enforcement, you know, working, you know, all the you know, there's always gonna be turf battles in law enforcement. There's gonna be turf battles in anything, not just law enforcement. But when you have something big like this and people are not working together, you know, you're leaving the field wide open and Whitey Bulgers went right down the middle and was able to get away. Kind of a miracle he was still in the States. Kind of a miracle he's out there in Santa Monica, California, but that's where he was.

SPEAKER_00 53:47

Bob, can you go into Whitey Bulger's connection to former NHL hockey player Chris Nylon? Yeah, it's his um, it's Teresa, what was it?

SPEAKER_03 53:55

It was Teresa's son-in-law, right? Um they were friends. And um, and Chris Nealand was on the Montreal Canadiens, and uh Whitey was there when the Canadians uh he got a he got a Stanley Cup ring, and it was in the was it in the apartment, Rich? We didn't make a big deal out of it in the book, but it was the Nealan's ring was in the apartment. I remember seeing it when they auctioned off all his stuff. And uh anyway, uh, you know, Nealan uh looked up to Whitey, and um, you know, and he there's a there's a great story in here about how there was a uh safe deposit box up in Montreal. Nealin gets traded, and he figures he's gonna do Whitey a favor and take all the money out of it and bring it back to give to Whitey, and he flipped out and Nealan thought he was gonna get killed. He was afraid. It just and so when the task force is looking for more clues, they're they're thinking, well, all right, we've got to find, you know, after the whole thing blows out with the U.S. Attorney's Office, natural place to look is back where all the safe deposit boxes were. They figure out Montreal. Pat Burns was the uh, he who became the coach of the Boston Bruins. He was interviewed by the Bulger Task Force, and you know, they just thought, oh, he was Uncle Charlie or whatever the name was. They all they knew him, they recognized him. He was a visitor in the in the uh you know with the with the players up in up in Montreal. Whitey Bulger. Amazing. That's pre-fugitive years, but just still, it's Whitey Bulger, right?

SPEAKER_00 55:19

Well, what was that championship ring doing in his apartment? Like, why would Chris Dillon give that to him?

SPEAKER_03 55:25

Uh Chris has his issues, so I don't want to really go down that path, but he had issues that that he that he talks about. But yep, I know. It's such a Boston story, isn't it? Such a Boston connection into something through the through the Bruins into the Canadians. Absolutely amazing.

SPEAKER_00 55:39

Rich Whitey had a plan in the event he became terminally ill during his time on the run. Can you go into that a little bit?

SPEAKER_02 55:44

Yeah, I mean, he he had he had, you know, he had I think he had a couple, you know, schools of thought with that where he was going to off himself out in the desert, have Catherine drive him out there. Apparently, and I've never seen them, but apparently there's these tunnels in the desert that drop hundreds of feet, and he was going to drop himself down into those, into those so that the FBI would never be able to find him or his body. And and andor, you know, Catherine just leave him out in the desert desert and he would he would pass away in the desert. You know, am I convinced he would he would have done that? I'm not so sure of that. But the sheer fact that he was thinking about it was uh was thoroughly amazing.

SPEAKER_03 56:30

He also had a plan that he would uh if he was dying, if he was terminally ill and had passed away, that somebody would give word to a friend that uh this is where Whitey Bulger is, and so the friend could collect the two million dollar reward and the negotiating. To try to figure out all those angles. I always thought, you know, before you guys caught him, I always thought that the way we would find out that Whitey Bulger was dead was that all of a sudden we would start noticing somehow that the Bulger family were they were getting on planes and going to some remote island someplace, and that's you know, somebody would get on a plane and try to follow him, and that's how we would find out that Whitey Bulger was no longer alive. Because the longer that thing went on, you just thought, I mean, I thought you'd never find him. You know, right I was glad with the PSA. I thought it might work, but I thought, what if it didn't? You know, how are you ever going to find this guy? After all this time, there's nothing there. How do you find him? How do you find a ghost? And that's really you know what you guys were tasked with. And kudos to you to finally, you know, not give up. It would have been very easy to give up this search for the, you know, to for the bureau to say, you know, after 9-11, you know, you know, he could have been trapped somewhere else. He couldn't maybe couldn't get back because he was already out of the country and all the laws over IDs changed. Or after 9-11, uh, the focus of the Bureau, a lot of it was focused on terrorism and and rooting out terrorists. And an old Irish gangster from Boston uh may not be the, you know, may not be the top of the list of priority, but that's not what happened. He was one of the FBI's 10 most wanted, and on the wanted poster, he was right next to Osama bin Laden. That's how dangerous he was.

SPEAKER_00 58:06

That's how big he was. Rich, you spent six hours with Whitey on a plane. What surprised you most about his personality?

SPEAKER_02 58:12

I think what I had mentioned uh previously, uh what surprised me was the emotional side coupled with the you know flipping back and forth personality-wise, where he was he would be, you know, he would be a Stone Cold killer one minute, and then like we had mentioned, he's crying the next. I think the the s the pivot or the switch in the personality is the biggest thing that that I noticed about him. And like I mentioned, his eyes would change color. And when he got mad, his eyes would change color and they almost look glinty and darker. It was fascinating to see because you know, studying him and his words for six hours, and one minute he seems like this, you know, not dangerous old man, frail old man, and the next minute he's talking about killing someone and uh and or you know, mentioning, you know, people that he didn't like, or you know, racist comments. And but that's probably the biggest thing, his personality, and and you know, one minute he's you know, he wants immunity for Catherine, and you know, is talking so gently about her, and then the next minute he's talking about, you know, um you know his life in in you know Winter Hell and and you know his his comings and goings with Steve Fleming and and Ken Weeks and you know his his abil I think he was really proud of the fact that he remained a fugitive for so long. But I will tell you that when they saw that PSA in that apartment, Jimmy Whitey Baldwin told Catherine, I think I think we've been had. And, you know, I think he knew that it was it was taken off of him and put on her, and it was, you know, he was smart enough that he would know the difference. And he made statements to the fact that, you know, you concentrated on me for so many years. Why didn't you look for, you know, basically taunting in kind of a way?

SPEAKER_03 1:00:08

Yeah, I've always thought, too, that the whole ruse that got him out of his apartment, or the FBI's down in the basement and they work with the manager and said, hey, give him a call, tell him somebody broke into his uh his little storage unit down here. And down he goes. That's how they caught him. He comes down off the elevator, they nab him. But, you know, he didn't, he wasn't suspicious of that. He didn't he didn't bring a weapon with him. You know, he just he got away, they were able to get him away from the apartment, get him away from all those guns, and then you know it's as you know Scott Gariola says that when he got off the elevator, why did he get off the elevator? There was a look on his face like, yep, I I kind of know this is gonna happen. And I I wonder about that. He really let his guard down there on that pivotal day. But thank God he did. Can you imagine with all those weapons in that apartment? What that shame option would have been like yeah, it would have it would have been a barricade situation. It would have been horrible. He had a hand grenade up there, too, at least one, right? At least they had a hand grenade. So he had hunting knives, yeah. He was ready for the end, man. He was ready to go. And um, I saw him my first time seeing Vic when he got in Boston for his uh arraignment in Boston, he comes bounding out and um everybody was craning their necks. We're all like, oh my God, Whitey Bulger, here he is. And he comes out and he's, you know, a little bit overweight, he's got the white beard and everything, but he was acting like sort of like a charming Irish guy, an old Irish guy. And I think it was in Boston where he was at the judge asked him, um, can you afford a public defender? Or do you can you afford an attorney? I'm sorry. He was asked, can you afford a uh your your own attorney? And he got and he just said, Well, I could if you gave me my money back. And it would cause a laugh, and it was like, you know, bar someplace, you know, and then off he goes. And you know, and I was thinking, this is strange. And that led to some people, I remember in the press saying that maybe he's got dementia or something. But later on, I go to subsequent hearings and then the trial itself, and no, he was he had all of his wits about him. He would get into he would argue and and shout at uh Fleming at Kevin Weeks. He was letting people have it. He and you know, but the one thing he didn't do is he never took the stand in his own defense. He never took the opportunity to get up on the stand and say, you know what, it's the entire FBI. I had a license to kill, and I, you know, they knew what I was doing, they knew where I was. He never did that. What's your opinion of why he didn't? Because it didn't happen. I mean, he didn't, I don't think the corruption in the Bureau was as widespread as we thought it was. I think it was with these key people like uh Morris and Connolly, and I'm sure there were some others, but I think it was it was kept to those people. I don't think it was widespread. And uh he had every reason in the world to just let it all out there. Fleming tried tried it. He was trying to say we had a license to kill from this previous U.S. attorney, said we had a we were on their payroll and they knew what we were doing. Uh this, you know, the you can't prosecute us. And that that was a big thing. When that was all thrown out and there was no agreement, then he folded his cards and he agreed to cooperate. So I take all that to me to to believe that he corrupted the people he corrupted. We know who they are, and that's the end of it. But the Bureau itself wasn't so sure. Didn't Mueller himself ask you, Rich? Who's he talking about? Did he name any other agents? How deep does this go? Even Mueller, the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, just passed away, was asking Rich. Who else who did he talk about? Who did he give up? He didn't give up anybody. And he had no reason not to give up anybody. If there was somebody else there, he'd give him up.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:26

That's why I just don't understand why he didn't want his story to be told. Just the ego. I just I just that shocks me that he didn't take the stand, even just to tell a bullshit story, you know. I know.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:36

He called the whole thing a sham. He said, This is all a trial. The whole trial's a sham, and that's it. And that was the end of it. Maybe it was to spare his brother. So, you know what? We talked about would he have come out of the out of the woods uh for his brother? Maybe it was to spare his brother, because his brother was at the trial almost every single day. I think the only time he wasn't there, I could be wrong about this, but I I remember when they were at the beginning of the trial when they're showing the death pits and they were uncovering the bodies and they had the forensic anthropologist uh talking about the bones, and there was vivid video and photographs of all these people you could put names to, and they're nothing but bones now. You know, I I don't think Billy was there for that. Jackie was, but I don't think Billy was. But I think that he may have done this just to say, I've done enough damage to my family, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna talk. I think that may have been what happened. Maybe one thing of decency that he did, but it was for his family, not for the not for himself.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:28

And you guys were at the trial, and I read a few times that, and you brought it up, Bob, that Whitey cursed at Kevin Weeks and Steph Stephen Flemmy. Do you think that that was real hatred or just for bravado?

SPEAKER_03 1:04:38

No, no, I think it was real hatred. I'll I'll tell you an interesting story. I remember it was in between witnesses, and we weren't sure who was coming up next. Um, and I saw one of the prosecutors and uh I said, Is uh Fleming next? And he said, No, it's going to be somebody else. I don't remember who it was. And we kind of said that in passing on the hallway. I go into the men's room, I come back out, and trial has not resumed. Judge is not on the stand, the jury's not in there, everybody's just been out on break. But for some reason, Stephen Flemie was in the witness box. And the two of them were having a stare down, and it was like looking at two gladiators that wanted to pounce and kill each other. It was unbelievable. And I could see Flemie and the look on his face, it looked like he he was staring at him, and he and they hadn't seen each other in 16 years. And Flemie was he was saying things like, why, why? Absolutely fascinating. And Bulger, I couldn't, I was behind him, but he was like muttering something underneath his breath. And F-bombs were eventually flying at some point, and uh, you know, the judge had a and while the judge is in while the trial's in session, and there were times the judge had to get things under control. But he would snap. And um that's when you saw the Whitey Bulger that all the victims uh the last thing those victims ever saw was that version of Whitey Bulger. And we got to see it finally in the in the trial. He was not some kind Old Irish gangster with a colorful pass. He was a ruthless killer right up to the end.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:05

Both of you have written a great book. I encourage any true crime fan to pick up a copy. It's well written. It provides a lot of hidden gems into the world of Whitey Bulger, his personality. There's also some great stories in there from Rich's career about a bank robber by the name of Gary Borman with handcuff keys, which I was fascinated by, and then Alex Kelly, a serial rapist whose well-to-do parents help him flee justice. It's a great, I don't want to give away everything. I want people to buy you guys books. Bob, please, what's the name of the book and where can our listeners pick up a copy?

SPEAKER_03 1:06:38

Yeah, absolutely. The name of the book is Face to Face with Whitey Bulger, an FBI agent's account of capturing and debriefing Boston's most notorious gangster. It's published by McFarland Books. You can order it through them directly. You can also find it on Amazon and Barnes Noble and Walmart and Target, all those places. We're trying to get the book into the bookstores. I think some small independent bookstores are able to stock it, so you might be able to see it there. But right now, anyway, the best place is online. And we really appreciate the chance to come on and tell you about our book.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:11

This this is a treat for me. I mean, when you got in contact with me, I was like a kid picking up the book and reading it. It's like I didn't want it to end. Very well written. And again, I encourage all true crime fans to pick up a copy. Bob Ward, Rich Tihan, thank you so much for spending your time with us today. Thank you for having us. Thank you, Vic. It was a pleasure. And as always, I'd like to thank everyone for tuning in, especially my listeners in Philly, Dover, New Jersey, Seattle, Washington, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Tom's River, New Jersey. If you work in law enforcement or had an interesting criminal background, drop me a note on Twitter or Instagram at VicFerrari50. If you're watching on YouTube, please hit the like, subscribe, and hype buttons. If you enjoy the content, check out my Amazon author page, just type in my name, Vic, Ferrari LikeTheCar, where you can preview all my NYPD books for free. Thanks again, everyone, and I'll see you next week.