Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (48 page)

For the Donahues,
then, there was no damage award but there was some consolation in Torruella’s words. Finally someone had pronounced, from the bench, the truth that was so obvious to them. Someone had spoken up for them.

What comfort they found was swiftly overtaken by their dismay at the decisions in the cases that followed. Debra Davis and Deborah Hussey, the government argued, had brought on their deaths by taking up with the likes of Flemmi. He was an evil man; they should have known that. Marion Hussey, Deborah’s mother, had enjoyed the good life for many years as Flemmi’s girlfriend, living large off his “blood money.” What business had she now making a claim on the government for monetary damages when the life she’d chosen led inexorably to her daughter’s death? “That’s all blood money coming to her from Flemmi from his life of crime, and she comes in here, says it’s not my fault . . . she washed his clothes after he cut the teeth out of all these people,” Justice Department attorney Lawrence Eiser said during the civil trial.

In fact, Marion Hussey did not have a good life with Flemmi.
¹⁷
She lived in fear of him, and the death of her daughter left her shattered. Deborah Hussey was only a toddler when her mother hooked up with Flemmi, who raised the child as his own. He started having sex with Deborah when she was in her early teens. Deborah Hussey wasn’t Flemmi’s girlfriend, as the government lawyer argued; she was his victim. The Justice Department lawyer said she had been killed because she had become a nuisance to him. But he left out what was most salient: Deborah Hussey knew that Whitey and Flemmi were informants. She wasn’t a nuisance; she was a threat.

Separately, the government argued that Whitey and Flemmi killed Debra Davis because she had decided to leave Flemmi for another man, again leaving out a small detail: Debra Davis was killed, by Flemmi’s own admission, because she knew that Flemmi and Whitey were FBI informants. Olga Davis, Debra’s mother, died during the seven years it took for her suit to make it to trial, but the sons representing her estate pressed on. Justice Department lawyer Lawrence Eiser suggested during the trial that Olga Davis, a mother of ten, shouldn’t collect damages for the loss of Debra’s companionship because “she had many other children who were providing her support and society.”
¹⁸
Several mothers seated in the spectator section of the courtroom gasped.

In the end, the same appeals court that threw out the Donahues’ award upheld awards of $350,000 to Hussey’s mother and $1.3 million to the estate of Davis’s mother. The irony was that many lawyers thought that the Hussey and Davis families had had the highest legal hurdles to clear. But once they survived the statute of limitations challenge, they were able to prevail. Their success suggested that the other families would have prevailed if only their cases had been heard. Ultimately, the government paid about $13 million for the wrongful deaths of five people.

The outcomes left the Donahues disillusioned and embittered. Taking account of the dead, taking the measure of an era of uncontrolled wickedness and assigning a price to it, had, in the end, proved beyond the power of the courts. And really, Tommy Donahue said, a simple apology might have sufficed. “Forget the money,” he said. “Our own government—the FBI, the Justice Department—has never said to my mother, to me and my brothers, ‘We’re sorry.’ They talk about how arrogant Whitey Bulger was, how arrogant John Connolly was, how arrogant John Morris was? What could be more arrogant than the FBI and the Justice Department never having the decency to apologize to my family?”
¹⁹

17

Captured: The Man Without a Country

W
hitey Bulger couldn’t sleep.
He had always stayed up late, but he stayed up even later in Santa Monica. He had placed a full-size mattress on a futon frame in the living room, and he wore headphones while watching TV so he wouldn’t disturb Cathy Greig. The screen was his constant companion.

And so he was almost certainly tuned in a little after 8:30 p.m. Pacific time, on May 1, 2011, when President Barack Obama appeared on the TV screen. “Good evening,” the president began, “Tonight I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murders of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.” A couple of blocks away from Whitey’s apartment, on the Third Street Promenade, people spilled out of Barney’s Beanery and other bars and restaurants. If Whitey had been standing on his balcony, he would have been able to hear the “USA! USA!” chants floating up from the Promenade.
¹

But if the news of bin Laden’s death led to spontaneous celebrations in Santa Monica and across the country, it had a different effect on Whitey: With bin Laden off the FBI’s Most Wanted list, he was arguably now the bureau’s most notorious target. The caution that had defined the last sixteen years—indeed, his entire criminal career—suddenly morphed into paranoia. Whitey and bin Laden had, despite their wildly different circumstances, been living similarly barren existences, stuck mostly indoors, shunning visitors, determined to stay out of sight. Bin Laden never left his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan; Whitey confined his excursions to daily walks, early in the morning and at dusk. After bin Laden was killed, the walks ended. More than ever, being Most Wanted meant being invisible and doing almost nothing. He became even more of a recluse. He stopped circling items in the police blotter published in the local paper and leaving tear sheets for neighbors. He stopped pestering the young woman in the building whose personal safety had so concerned him. He stopped cornering Josh Bond, the young property manager, for the sort of idle conversation that used to drive Whitey crazy when he was a young prisoner in an eight-man cell in Atlanta.

Greig now had to come up with new excuses for his absence. For years, she’d told curious neighbors that Charlie had been a heavy smoker and had emphysema. In fact, Whitey never smoked. Throughout their years in Santa Monica, his health problems—some real, some invented—had been convenient cover for the rarity of his forays outside the apartment and his sometimes cranky behavior. Now she leaned on it even more. Barbara Gluck, a photographer who lived down the hall, remembered chatting with Greig in the hallway one day when Whitey came up behind Greig, his arms folded, his brow knitted. “Stop talking to her,” he barked. “Let’s go.” Whitey was walking away when Greig smiled, slightly embarrassed, and told Gluck, “He’s got dementia.”
²
She also began ascribing Whitey’s odd behavior to early Alzheimer’s disease. The descriptions of his illnesses were all over the map. After bin Laden was killed, Greig told neighbors they hadn’t seen Charlie because he was sick. He had been hospitalized. It was emphysema. It was his prostate. It was Alzheimer’s. It was a pulmonary blockage. Neighbors accepted the litany of woes that are the standard ailments of old age. Some did their best to help. Catalina Schlank, eighty-eight, sent Whitey several Sudoku puzzles, thinking it would keep his mind sharp. Greig sent Schlank a thank-you note, adding, “Charlie is too overwhelmed.”
³

Whitey’s heightened paranoia forced Greig to alter her routine. He didn’t want her leaving him alone. Greig skipped her usual haircut appointment, failing to show up for more than a month. When she finally did, her hairdresser, Wendy Farnetti, was shocked at her disheveled appearance. “She came in and she looked really distraught, really nervous, really like something was wrong,” Farnetti said. “And her hair was a mess. It was long, and it looked like she had been pulling on her hair or cutting her own hair.” Greig sat in the salon chair and Farnetti looked at her crestfallen face in the mirror. “What’s wrong?” Farnetti asked. “You don’t know,” Greig replied. “You just don’t even know.” She didn’t elaborate, and Farnetti didn’t pry.
⁴

Neighbors noticed that a handwritten sign appeared on the door to the Gaskos’ apartment, asking people not to knock. Whitey’s fears ebbed as the weeks passed and no one came for him. But he had been right to be nervous. In Boston, the task force that was hunting him had been reinvigorated with new strategic thinking, a shift that started a year before bin Laden’s death, when the FBI pleaded for help from the US Marshals. There was still a widespread view, particularly among law enforcement agencies outside the FBI, that the bureau had never tried very hard to find Whitey. He was, after all, their nightmare; arresting him would only return the spotlight to the worst case of corruption in the bureau’s history, dredging to the surface decades of grievous mistakes. John Connolly was on the record about his hope that Whitey would never be caught. There were other former agents who shared that view.

But there was a countervailing view, and in May 2010 it emanated from the courthouse on the South Boston waterfront named after Congressman Joseph Moakley, the Bulger family’s old neighbor in the Old Harbor project. Noreen Gleason, the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI in Boston, and Rich Teahan, the agent who had been supervising the Bulger Task Force since 2006, sat down in a conference room with David Taylor and Jon Murray from the US Marshals Service. The FBI’s critics had always found it curious that the bureau had refused to turn the manhunt over to the marshals, the nation’s leading fugitive hunters. If the FBI really wanted to find Whitey, the thinking went, the marshals would have led the search. There had been, to be fair, previous overtures, but the FBI brass wouldn’t concede the leadership role. Now, after more than fifteen fruitless years, the FBI agreed that it was time to turn to them. “This is about Whitey Bulger,” Gleason said, cutting to the chase. “We can’t catch him. We need your help.”
⁵
It was a humbling thing for an FBI agent to say, but it was also a turning point in the hunt for Bulger. “Why don’t you just turn it over to us?” Taylor suggested. Gleason replied that the FBI was looking to improve the task force, not abandon it. “Look,” she said, “this is one of the biggest black eyes in the FBI’s history, and we want to be there when he’s apprehended.”

Taylor, the chief deputy marshal in Boston, once belonged to the large fraternity of FBI skeptics in local law enforcement, but he believed that the bureau’s attitude had changed over the years, and he sensed in Gleason and Teahan a real sincerity. They owed nothing to John Connolly and the other retired FBI agents who had protected Whitey; in fact, Connolly’s machinations had inflicted great harm on the bureau and, by extension, all who worked for it. “This crew wanted him caught,” Taylor said. “They had nothing vested in not having him caught. It was a very cordial and informative meeting. There was no animosity.” There was, instead, a promise to ask US Marshal John Gibbons for permission to add a deputy marshal to the FBI task force. Taylor knew that Gibbons, appointed to the job five months earlier after serving thirty years with the Massachusetts State Police, would be all for it. Gibbons was willing to work with anyone, and he was willing to let all the suspicion, all the bad blood, all the resentment go.

Murray, the assistant chief US Marshal, said he had the perfect guy for the job: Neil Sullivan. Sullivan was thirty-nine, with fifteen years of experience hunting fugitives as a deputy marshal. He had grown up in Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and had come to work in the Boston office in February 2010 after ten years in the Albany office. Sullivan knew how to track people who didn’t want to be found, but, more important, in Murray’s and Taylor’s eyes, he knew how to get along with anybody. In a business where egos, both individual and institutional, clashed frequently, Sullivan’s easygoing nature was as crucial as his highly regarded investigative skills. “This is a win-win,” Taylor told Murray, after the two FBI agents had left the conference room. “If it takes us sixteen years to find his bones, we will have done better than the bureau. But I think we’ll catch him in a year. He’s catchable. He’s no rocket scientist.”

The marshals’ headquarters in Washington was not thrilled about devoting resources to a manhunt they weren’t in charge of. But the top brass deferred to Gibbons, who cleared the way for Sullivan to join the hunt—although bureaucratic hurdles would delay the deputy marshal’s arrival for four months. When Sullivan finally joined the task force’s office in September 2010, it wasn’t exactly bustling. In fact, the task force had never been smaller. An air of futility hung about the place. It had been relocated from private offices near the courthouse to the FBI’s Boston office. FBI agent Phil Torsney and an FBI analyst were the only ones working the case full-time. Another FBI agent was off on National Guard duty. A state police investigator was out on medical leave. Teahan, who had been exclusively supervising the task force, was now supervising the FBI’s gang task force as well. “After we exhausted the leads over many years, the investigation became more about luck than investigative skill,” said Jonathan Mitchell, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw the task force for seven years. “It evolved from a real effort to track leads in the traditional sense to just a matter of continuing to fuel some of the publicity and act on the leads generated by the publicity. That didn’t require as many agents.”
⁶

Sullivan brought a jolt of energy to the team. He hit it off immediately with Torsney, a new arrival in the Boston office who had almost thirty years’ experience hunting fugitives for the FBI. Torsney joined the task force in August 2010 but was familiar with the Bulger case because he had been part of an FBI team that had reviewed the manhunt files years earlier to make sure the task force hadn’t missed anything. He was also a long-distance runner who brought a slow and steady outlook to his investigations. Shortly before he transferred from Cleveland to Boston, Torsney had been involved in a three-year hunt for a doctor from Cleveland who murdered his wife with cyanide. The doctor was finally caught after being detained at an airport in Cyprus. Torsney considered that long manhunt a once-in-a-lifetime case,
⁷
a notion that now seemed quaint; Whitey had been missing five times longer than the doctor and was wanted for nineteen homicides. Sullivan and Torsney brought no baggage to the search. If there was a whiff of burnout clinging to the task force, they chose not to smell it.

Sullivan flew to FBI headquarters in Washington to comb through the Whitey files, sixteen years of dead ends and false sightings. As he went through the record, he studied the extensive profile of the fugitive that had emerged over the years. When Sullivan got back from Washington, he and Torsney compared notes. Besides getting along at a personal level, the two men shared a similar view of what needed to be done and where their focus should be. They were convinced that Whitey was still alive; there was longevity in his family tree, and he had been health-conscious. They were also convinced that he was still in the United States; for all of Whitey’s overseas travel, he knew, they believed, that an American stuck out in foreign countries. And they were confident that he would be in a warm climate, near the water; he had regularly traveled to Florida, Mexico, and California during his pre-fugitive days, and he almost always vacationed by the sea. Wherever Whitey went, he enjoyed walking by the ocean. By the spring of 2011, Sullivan and Torsney were also sure that the best way to get to Whitey was through Cathy Greig. She was younger and more distinctive-looking than her companion on the run, more likely to be out and about and not nearly as hard-wired to caution.

It wouldn’t be the first time the task force had tried to get to Whitey through Greig. Several months before Sullivan and Torsney arrived, the FBI had taken an ad out in a monthly newsletter for plastic surgeons because Greig had had breast implants, a face-lift, liposuction, and eyelid surgery long before she became a fugitive. The ad noted that Greig might be looking to replace the breast implants she had since in 1982. As a former dental hygienist, Greig was also obsessive and punctual about having her teeth cleaned. The FBI put an ad with photos of Whitey and Greig in the American Dental Association’s newsletter. Sullivan and Torsney were determined to get a much wider audience, and they wanted to broadcast the best photographs they had of Greig. With Teahan’s blessing, and fifty thousand dollars in hand, the FBI commissioned a thirty-second ad and bought three hundred fifty time slots in fourteen different television markets across the United States during daytime TV shows. The time slots were during commercial breaks for shows like
The View
,
Ellen Degeneres
, and
Live with Regis and Kelly
, whose audiences were overwhelmingly female. The premise was that a woman would be most likely to recognize Greig from a supermarket or a hair salon or somewhere else. “We’re looking for people sitting in a hospital waiting for an appointment with a doctor where there are three or four [TV] monitors on the wall, and they are watching these shows,” said Teahan. “Or people who are in a beauty salon or barber shop. We’re trying to cast a wider net. Instead of focusing on an eighty-one-year-old man, people can focus on a sixty-year-old woman.”
⁸
But for all the money spent on those ads, it was free TV, a news report on the FBI’s latest strategy to find Whitey, that provided the breakthrough. As Whitey would later lament, “A cat got me captured.”
⁹

Anna Bjornsdottir recognized Cathy Greig’s face as soon as it flashed on the screen. Bjornsdottir was sitting in her apartment in Reykjavík, in her native Iceland, watching a CNN report on the FBI’s new TV ads. She knew immediately it was Carol, the nice woman in Santa Monica who had taken care of Tiger, the orphan cat. On June 21, shortly after 8:00 p.m. Pacific time, she called the FBI’s Los Angeles office from Reykjavík, leaving a message on an answering machine that she recognized the fugitives as Carol and Charlie Gasko in Santa Monica. Bjornsdottir’s tip, one of two hundred generated in the first two days of the ad campaign, was forwarded to the Bulger Task Force office in Boston. The next morning, Sullivan arrived for work and was going through the previous night’s tips. He saw a summary of Bjornsdottir’s message and was curious. “How’d she sound?” Sullivan asked the young FBI analyst who had listened to the voicemail. The analyst said that she had sounded genuine and had used the phrase “100 percent” to describe how sure she was about her identification of Carol and Charlie Gasko.