It was back in the ‘60s that I met Whitey Bulger.
I had traveled to Boston’s colorful old Southie neighborhood to finally see if I could realize my dream: to make it as an Irish minstrel.
At a raffish neighborhood bar one night, after I had sung “Danny Boy” while accompanying myself on the flute–no easy feat, by the way—a tough-looking guy with extremely blond hair came over and introduced himself.
“I’m James Bulger,” he said. “Call me Whitey and I’ll strangle you.”
“How about Bulgy?” I quipped. He struck me over the head with a bottle of beer, opening a gash on my scalp that required fourteen stitches. From then on, we were the best of pals.
“If Whitey don’t kill you, that means he likes you,” a member of his organization, the Winter Hill Gang, explained. “He’s got rage issues.”
Over the years we hung out together, Whitey often beat me senseless with bats or tire irons, jabbed his switchblade into my kidneys or shot me in the kneecaps but he never once killed me. Despite all the negative publicity he has received from a biased media, he was a generous man.
And also a very capable one. When it came to robbery, loan sharking, drug pushing, murdering rivals and informants and muscling in on legitimate businesses, he was the most talented thug I ever met. Even the police respected his abilities. “I know I should bust Whitey,” one detective told me. “But he gives me too much money.”
Once Whitey went on the lam in the’90s, I saw him less often but now and then I’d visit him and his girlfriend, Catherine, in their modest hideout in Santa Monica. He seemed to have mellowed, punching me in the stomach with considerably less force than he used to.
His once crazed blue eyes looked tired beneath the gorilla mask he habitually wore to elude the FBI and there were moth holes in his Red Sox sweatshirt, despite the three-foot-high pyramid of cash he kept in the guest bedroom.
“You know,” he said sadly, after we had finished a delicious home-cooked dinner of Boston-baked beans and tofu, “they used to say that when I walked down the street in Southie, the earth trembled. But when the earth trembles in Santa Monica, they just blame it on some fuckin’ fault line or something.”
After our last get-together, I spent several sleepless nights before turning in my old friend to the feds, but finally the reward money was too good to resist.
I’m really going to miss Whitey. To most people, he was just another celebrity criminal, but to me he was the man who taught me that true friendship is worth a few dozen scars and corrective surgical procedures.