Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (49 page)

Sullivan was intrigued that the tip mentioned Santa Monica. That fit with what he and Torsney considered Whitey’s profile and his likely choice of a place to lay low. But when Sullivan called the phone number left on the voicemail, the call did not go through. The analyst had had trouble with the woman’s accent—mistakenly believing that she had said that the Gaskos lived on Surge Street instead of Third Street—and her voice had trailed off at the phone number. But she had also left an email address. Sullivan sent Bjornsdottir an email, and when she replied, she included her phone number. As Sullivan talked to her, he felt a surge of adrenaline: She was ticking all the boxes. Carol was nice; Charlie was nasty. He was a couple inches taller than her. They loved animals, especially dogs. They said they were from New York. Sullivan went through every data base he could think of, looking for evidence that a couple named Carol and Charlie Gasko existed. He found nothing. That convinced him that whoever the Gaskos were, they were doing everything in their power not to be traceable. “You’ve got to call LA,” Sullivan said, standing in front of Teahan’s desk.

Even before Rich Teahan called the FBI office in Los Angeles, asking them to send some field agents to Santa Monica to check Anna Bjornsdottir’s tip, Whitey had a bad feeling. The public service announcements didn’t appear in the Los Angeles market that included Santa Monica, in large part because of the expense. But Whitey saw a news report about it, perhaps the same CNN report that Bjornsdottir watched. He knew the news wasn’t good. He later bragged about predicting his own capture, recounting that after watching the new FBI spot, he told Greig, “This is it.”
¹⁰
From now on, they shouldn’t leave the apartment at all. His paranoia after bin Laden’s death now seemed like prescience. Whitey’s long run was almost over, and he seemed to know it.

Josh Bond knocked off a little early
on the afternoon of June 22. Late nights had caught up to him; he was asleep on his couch when the phone rang at about 3:30 p.m. It was someone in the office, saying that the FBI was there and needed to talk to Bond about a tenant. “Put him on,” Bond said.

“This is Special Agent Scott Gariola of the FBI.”

“Can we take care of this tomorrow?” Bond remembers saying.

“No,” Gariola replied. “We’ve got to take care of this now.”

When Bond got to his office in the hotel across the street from the Princess Eugenia, Gariola and another agent showed him a series of photographs. Bond recognized the subjects as Charlie and Carol Gasko and told Gariola that the couple were in Apartment 303.

“How sure are you?” Gariola asked.

“One hundred percent,” Bond replied, adding that they were his next-door neighbors.
¹¹

Gariola turned to the other agent. This was not the answer they were expecting. What they had thought was a routine assignment, checking out a tip, ramped up quickly. They called in more agents. Bond gave Gariola a key to Apartment 303 and another agent went to a room in the Embassy Hotel that was directly across the street from the Princess Eugenia. The agent saw Whitey appear briefly on the balcony. Gariola asked Bond to go to Whitey’s apartment and knock on the door. “No way,” Bond replied. He had just learned that Charlie, the grandfatherly neighbor who had given him a cowboy hat and a beard trimmer and countless other gifts, was really a gangster wanted for many murders. He had been happy to chat with Charlie Gasko, for all his eccentricities, but he’d be damned if he was going to confront Whitey Bulger.

Gariola came up with a ruse. He took a pair of bolt cutters and snapped off the lock on Whitey’s storage locker in the garage, then instructed Bond to call the apartment and let them know that their locker had been broken into. Bond called the cell phone number Greig had listed, but there was no answer. The agent stationed across the street communicated with Gariola—there were two people in the apartment, he said, a man and a woman. Gariola asked Bond again to knock on the door and bring the couple down to the storage lockers, but Bond wouldn’t do it. As Bond and Gariola haggled over how to get Whitey out of the apartment, Bond’s phone rang. “Josh, it’s Carol,” Cathy Greig said. “Did you just call?”

Bond told her that their storage locker had been broken into, and he offered to meet them to inspect the damage or to call the police for them. Greig suggested that it would be best if her husband met Josh at the storage locker. Whitey grumbled, but he went down. It was about 5:45 p.m., and he was walking toward the locker in the garage when FBI agents and Los Angeles police officers rushed up and surrounded him. They pointed guns at him. He had none to point back.

“Get down on your knees!” one of them yelled.

Whitey refused.

“We will shoot!” one of the cops shouted.

“Go ahead!” Whitey shouted back.

Whitey’s biggest concern, he later said, was that there were oil stains on the garage floor where he was standing. He didn’t want to ruin his pants. “I’m moving two steps to my right into clean space, then I’ll kneel down,” Whitey told the phalanx of cops surrounding him.

“Don’t or we’ll shoot!”

“I thought they would,” Whitey later recalled. He took one step. “I could feel the coming lead.” He took a second step.
¹²

The cops and agents held their fire, moved in, and handcuffed him.

Janus Goodwin, the minister who lived a few doors down from Whitey and Greig, was walking through the garage on her way to the laundry room when she saw Whitey standing with a group of men, some of them in police uniforms. She saw that her neighbor was handcuffed and overheard some of the heated exchange; she was mortified. She assumed that Charlie Gasko had done something weird or threatening because of his deteriorating mental state, and she went to his defense. “You know, sir,” Goodwin said, approaching the men keeping watch over Whitey. “This man has Alzheimer’s.” One of the agents looked at her and said, “Ma’am, when you see so many FBI [agents], you should know something serious is going on.”

Whitey kept his eyes down. To Goodwin, he suddenly looked old and defeated.
¹³
An agent held a cell phone up to Whitey’s mouth. “Stay in the apartment,” Whitey told Greig. “I’ve been arrested.” When Goodwin went back upstairs, she saw Greig talking to a few FBI agents. She looked calm, even relieved. Whitey’s demeanor changed quickly, too. By the time Josh Bond walked over from the hotel to the garage, ten minutes after the arrest, Whitey was handcuffed but relaxed, chatting with the cops and FBI agents. “He looked like he was joking around with them,” Bond said.
¹⁴
And he was. Greig stared at the friend and neighbor who had set the trap for them. “Hi, Josh,” she said. When Bond didn’t answer, she said it again.

Gariola’s insistence that Whitey be lured out of the apartment was vindicated as soon as agents began searching the apartment. There was a handgun resting on a shelf of the bookcase in Whitey’s bedroom. From a hole in one of the walls, agents removed thirty shotguns, rifles, and pistols. From another hole, they took $822,198 in cash. When Gariola told Whitey that they had found the guns, his immediate concern was to cover for Greig. “All the guns are in my bedroom,” he said. “Catherine never goes in my bedroom. Catherine has never held a gun in her hands.” As the freshly caught couple were being hauled off to jail, Gariola told Whitey that they had found about a hundred pages of a handwritten manuscript. “Shit,” Whitey said, grimacing, “you found it? Did I name names?” Whitey turned to Greig. “Cathy,” he said, “did I name names?” “I don’t think so,” she replied.
¹⁵

The partnership of FBI agent Phil Torsney and Deputy US Marshal Neil Sullivan had swiftly borne fruit. It was a victory that flowed from the FBI’s grudging acceptance that it needed more help, and from pure luck: Anna Bjornsdottir had been watching CNN as Whitey and Greig’s photos flashed across the television screen.

Tommy Donahue was sound asleep on the top floor of his family’s three-decker in Dorchester when the phone rang. It was his girlfriend’s fourteen-year-old son, Joey. “Bagga,” Joey said, calling Donahue by his family nickname, “they caught Whitey Bulger.”

It was one o’clock in the morning, and Tommy was still half-asleep. His first reaction was to ask Joey why he was up so late. Then it hit him. “They finally caught the bastard,” Tommy said. He walked down to the second floor and woke up his mother and his brother Shawn. Patricia Donahue shook the sleep out of her head and sat up in bed and gave Tommy a “this better be good” look.

“California?” Pat Donahue said. “He was in California?”

Tommy walked down to the first floor and told his brother Michael and Michael’s wife. The lights were now on, on all three floors, and no one would go back to bed. Then Tommy picked up the phone and called David Wheeler in Oklahoma. The Wheelers, a wealthy family from the heartland, and the Donahues, a working-class clan from Boston, couldn’t be more different. But they shared something: a husband and father and breadwinner taken from them by Whitey Bulger. And now Whitey would have to answer for it.

“David,” Tommy Donahue began, “you’re not going to believe this.”
¹⁶

As they drove to Los Angeles,
Whitey couldn’t resist chatting up his captors. It had always been his habit to joke with the cops—when he was tailgating trucks in his teens, when he was robbing banks in his twenties, when he was driving around with gangsters in his forties, when the DEA put a bug in his car in his fifties. He believed he had an innate ability to charm the law. Whitey kept up his joking patter during his brief initial appearance in a Los Angeles courtroom. He mocked reporters who were watching the proceedings and leaned toward Greig, whispering in her ear and laughing. Greig didn’t share his sense of whimsy. It would be the last time they were together. Torsney, Sullivan, and Teahan had flown out to LA early that morning and got right back on the plane with Whitey that night for the long flight back to Boston. They were surprised when Whitey traded wisecracks with them. They were new to this, but it was old hat for Whitey: They were the good good guys, he was the bad good guy. By his logic, they were all good guys.

Whitey was boastful. No one was more devoted to his legend than he. He bragged that he had slipped back into Boston “armed to the teeth” after he had gone on the run, to settle some unfinished business. He went to Vegas and won some money. He went to Mexico and bought cheap prescription drugs. He had money stashed all over the country. The underlying message was vintage Whitey: While you dopes were looking for me in London and God knows where else, I went where I wanted, when I wanted. Whitey viewed himself as the smartest guy in the room.

Even as he congratulated his captors for finding him, he lectured them on their tactical mistakes: They should have focused on Cathy Greig a long time ago, he said. She was the weak link, the one out in public most of the time. Whitey was proud of his ability to stay a step ahead of the law, explaining in detail how he had assumed Charlie Gaska’s identity and changed one letter in the name to create a new person. He freely admitted that he bought driver’s licenses and other ID from vulnerable people and created phony IDs for himself and Greig.
¹⁷
He also spent part of the flight making excuses for two people: Greig and John Connolly. Cathy didn’t know anything about the guns in the apartment, Whitey insisted. John Connolly didn’t belong in jail, he said, but John Morris sure did.
¹⁸

It was the moment most of his victims
had given up hope of ever seeing: Whitey Bulger, his hands and feet bound in chains, shuffling into Courtroom 10 in the Moakley federal courthouse on the South Boston waterfront. The room was packed with more than a hundred people, but Whitey almost immediately made eye contact with his brother Bill in the second row on the right side and mouthed a hello. Bill, sitting between two of his sons, nodded his acknowledgment. Whitey didn’t miss a beat when the judge asked him if he could afford a lawyer. “Well,” Whitey replied, “I could if you’d give me my money back.” Pat Donahue sat in the back of the courtroom with her three sons and shook her head. “He’s worried about his assets?” she whispered. “He should be worried about his ass.”

Whitey flashed a wry smile at his brother and nephews as the marshals put the chains on him and he shuffled out the way he’d come in. As the gallery filtered out of the courtroom, the four men who had been with the case the longest—state police lieutenant Steve Johnson, DEA agent Dan Doherty, and the prosecutors Fred Wyshak and Brian Kelly—came over to say hello to the Donahues. There were hugs and handshakes and backslaps. “People talk about justice,” Tommy Donahue said, watching the last of the spectators leave. “I think the only justice we’ll see is what we just saw. Whitey’s in chains. He’s going to die in prison. He can bitch and moan and scream and yell and he’ll still die in prison. And he’ll die a rat. Because that’s what he is. A rat.”
¹⁹

Even as the FBI took bows for capturing Whitey Bulger, it felt compelled to release a statement denying speculation that Whitey’s arrest was a staged event. “Any claim that the FBI knew about Mr. Bulger’s whereabouts prior to the FBI’s publicity efforts this week are completely unfounded,” Special Agent in Charge Richard DesLauriers said. “When we learned of his location, he was arrested promptly.”

Whitey was sent to the Plymouth County
Correctional Facility, not far from where he had once dispatched a man to protest school desegregation by trying to blow up Plymouth Rock. For the first time in almost fifty years he was known by an inmate number again. He was Prisoner 57950, assigned to Cell 108 on Unit G. He wasn’t impressed. “Wish I was back on Alcatraz,” he lamented.
²⁰

Even as he approached his eighty-second birthday, Whitey was treated as a high-security risk. A guard sat outside his cell twenty-four hours a day. Whitey was amused that three shifts of guards rotated to the chair; he was shocked one day when he opened his eyes and saw that the guard on that particular shift was a woman. The cell door had just a small pane of glass. His food, almost always cold, was passed through a slot. A camera in the cell watched his movements. For twenty-three of every twenty-four hours, he was inside his 8 x 12 foot cell. He exercised in his cell every day, doing 155 push-ups in six sets, pacing back and forth. He got fresh air for an hour, walking as briskly as he could in a small open area surrounded by concrete walls, under the gaze of a prison guard holding a German shepherd on a leash. If he wanted a shower, he had to take it during his hour of fresh air. Three times a week, he was allowed to shave and was given a change of bright orange prison garb. He slept on a 4½-inch-thick mattress with a rubberized cover. The mattress lay on a ledge mounted to the wall. Attached to the opposite wall were a stainless steel toilet and sink, and a narrow desk and stainless steel seat.