HUNTING WHITEY

Sherman and Wedge turn their attention to the far-flung wanderings of mob murderer and longtime fugitive Whitey Bulger (1929-2018).

Bulger was a nasty piece of work, caught up early in a life of violent crime, becoming an unrepentant contract killer for the Boston mob. He had disappeared from view when, tipped off by corrupt cops and FBI agents in his network, it appeared that he was going to be imprisoned. Sherman and Wedge begin their account with the investigative legwork undertaken in February 2008 by a team led by an assistant special agent named Noreen Gleason, who made it her personal mission to see that Bulger was brought to justice, in part because doing so would restore the Boston office’s tattered reputation. One of her colleagues had just solved the case of Etan Patz, a young boy who was kidnapped and murdered at the hands of a pedophile. Bulger went into hiding just as the team got to work, disappearing from view with a girlfriend who, the authors hold, had pursued him romantically to get revenge on the husband she was then divorcing—and, as they write, “Whitey had killed two of her husband’s brothers in cold blood.” He had untold other victims to his credit. He seemed to enjoy the game of cat and mouse, but eventually he was caught because, he complained, he and his girlfriend were animal lovers, and they went outside once too often to take care of a stray cat. The authors deliver plenty of hitherto undocumented or overlooked details, including the fact that he had been subject to CIA experiments on mind control via LSD while imprisoned in the 1960s. They also link Bulger’s murder as an elderly invalid to lack of prison policing thanks to Trump administration budget cuts.

A deeply unpleasant but highly readable story of crime and punishment.