Does Whitey Still Matter?
Revisiting a documentary from the height of Bulger mania...
A documentary on Whitey Bulger is now available on the YouTube movie channel. I liked it a dozen years ago and I like it now…
Like many New Englanders, I was once fascinated by Whitey Bulger. Unlike many New Englanders, I grew tired of him.
Mostly, I was tired of the cottage industry that sprang up around his case. With the locals hungry for anything related to Whitey, it seemed any two-bit Irish hood who knew him could get a book deal. Any reporter from the Globe or Herald could, too, along with various cops and lawyers who spent time on the Bulger trail. Sure, I read a couple of those books. There was a time in Boston, especially around Saint Patrick’s Day, when you couldn’t walk into a bookstore without seeing a floor-to-ceiling display of books about Whitey. The Boston area readership, which was considerable, lapped up the Whitey books because they recognized the street names. They liked saying, ‘My sistuh knew a guy who lived near the garage where Whitey strangled that broad.”
Like the Kennedys and the Red Sox, Whitey was a Boston thing.
I am glad Joe Berlinger’s 2014 documentary, Whitey: United States of America V. James J. Bulger, is currently on the YouTube movie channel and various VOD services. Berlinger is known for high quality work, including My Brother’s Keeper (1992), and the excellent Paradise Lost trilogy for HBO, Berlinger’s doc on Whitey came out when there was a deluge of movie projects about Bulger in the works. Everyone from Barry Levinson to Ben Affleck and Matt Damon were interested in Whitey and his exploits. Johnny Depp eventually appeared as Bulger in a 2015 film called Black Mass, but something was lost in translation. Depp was OK, but Boston looked airbrushed, not a broken bottle or empty Chinese food carton in sight. The Departed (2008), where Jack Nicholson played a cartoonish variation on Whitey, did nothing for the Bulger legend. If anyone could wade into the quagmire and throw some light on Whitey’s world, it was Joe Berlinger.
Berlinger came through for me, more or less. He focused on Bulger’s 2013 trial, which included the mysterious death of one witness and the long-awaited sentencing of Whitey for his part in 11 murders and more than 30 racketeering charges. Berlinger’s neatest trick is the way he illuminates Whitey’s past just by mentioning tidbits here and there. Of course, it helps if you know Whitey’s story, and at one time we all did. At one time we could name the entire Winter Hill Gang as easily as we could name the Celtic’s lineup.
Whitey appears only a few times in the movie. We see him for a fleeting second, slightly hunchbacked, shuffling around in his orange prison jumpsuit. We also hear his voice on tape recordings. When he feigns shock at some of the revelations made during the trial, he still sounds like a teenage shoplifter saying he doesn’t know how the stuff got in his pocket. Whitey says early on that he’s been humanized in recent years by the love of a good woman. Berlinger doesn’t bother following that particular story thread, as if he knows it’s just more of Whitey’s bullshit.
I don’t think anyone can watch Berlinger’s movie and come away thinking that Bulger is anything other than a lowlife killer. Still, Berlinger makes us doubt previous takes on the case - was Whitey really an FBI informant, as we’ve been told for many years, or did he simply use his money to buy favors from the feds? The documentary also casts doubt on Whitey’s FBI file, which is a meager 700 pages, much of it being info turned in by other informants. Moreover, parts of the file are actually reproduced to pad it out, meaning it is even skimpier than 700 pages. According to one investigator, an actual informant file could be as long as 60,000 pages. Makes ya think, don’t it?
The prosecutors, of course, insist Bulger and the FBI’s John Connolly were in cahoots; others claim both were fall guys, and that the Justice Department should also be on trial for letting Bulger run rampant in Boston for so many years. To me, everyone looked shady, even the prosecutors, one of whom couldn’t stop fidgeting while being interviewed by Berlinger. As one of the victim’s relatives says, “It’s a big circle of shit.”
The families of Bulger’s victims look weary. The people in Bulger’s circle look like mental defectives; they seem more upset that Bulger may have been a rat than a killer. One of them, an obese jerk who speaks with an Elmer Fudd accent, actually blames one of the victims for getting shot. “If you want to hang around gangsters,” says the ersatz Fudd, “that’s what you get.” Oh yeah, this creep had a book deal, too.
Four years after the movie’s release, Bulger met his end behind bars at the United States Penitentiary in Hazelton, West Virginia. Armed with homemade weapons, a few inmates raided his cell. The 89-year-old Bulger didn’t stand a chance. His assailants beat him to death and gouged his eyes out. The great crime boss died the death of a prison rat.
“Hopefully, Bulger’s death will bring some closure to his many victims and their families who never got the true justice they deserved,” Berlinger said. By then, Berlinger had moved on, making a doc about self-help guru Tony Robbins. Now he cranks out crime documentaries for Netflix.
By the time he was croaked in prison, we’d all moved on from Whitey. The bookstores that used to promote those endless Bulger books have all been turned into Starbucks and sushi restaurants. The columnists who got fat on Whitey’s story have had to find other criminals to write about, though all pale in comparison to South Boston’s favorite hoodlum.
Whitey: United States of America V. James J. Bulger was a CNN production and at times it feels like a work made for TV. But it’s solid. Berlinger doesn’t come close to any absolute truths, but it’s unfair to ask that of him. The Bulger story is buried underneath so much deceit that not even an experienced craftsman like Berlinger could hit the bottom of it. Still, in an era where we’re suffering through a glut of mediocre documentaries, we’re always happy to watch a good one. And this is a good one.