Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (8 page)

Alcatraz changed his attitude. He liked his job, his single cell, the food. Eating, he said, had become a pleasure again. He was listening to classical music. He was reading as many books as he liked. He was lifting weights almost every day. He told the priest that the rules were “fair and sensible, and to break one would require going out of your way.” He said his brothers and sisters were comforted by his description of life on The Rock and that eventually his mother would be, too. “We intend to make the best of things,” Whitey wrote, “and hope that one day I’ll be transferred closer to home.”

Many inmates echoed Whitey’s thoughts on the tone of life in Alcatraz, and especially the food. The prison staff prided itself on providing the best meals in the federal system, a deliberate strategy aimed at mollifying the hard men held there. Whitey spent three Christmases at Alcatraz, and the holiday menu was hardly hardship fare: roast young tom turkey, chestnut dressing, giblet gravy, fiesta salad, stuffed olives, snowflake potatoes, candied fresh yams, buttered June peas, baked young pearl onions, Parker House rolls, bread and butter, mincemeat pie, fruitcake, and coffee and cream.

He seemed as contented as a man spending much of his young life behind bars could be, but soon enough trouble found Whitey again, or he found it. Ironically, this time it was two of the things that Whitey liked most about Alcatraz—going to work every day and the institution’s food—that snared him. A group of inmates with complaints about the food not being as good as it once had been orchestrated a work strike. The strike organizers urged other inmates to stay in their cells when the morning alarm sounded to report for work. The few who didn’t go along with the plan were branded scabs and targeted for retaliation.

Whitey had no problems with the food, but he did have a problem with being considered a scab, so he joined the strike. After nearly two weeks most of the strikers gave in and returned to their jobs, but Whitey was among the eight on his cellblock who held out. He told prison staff it was unfair that Sunday and another inmate were singled out for punishment and sent to “The Hole,” a dimly lit cell with a solid steel door, a toilet, a sink, and, at night, a mattress on the floor.
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Prison officials had also heard rumors that Whitey and three other inmates were planning a knife attack on inmates who had worked on the dock during the strike.
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When he was called before a prison board poised to revoke some of his hard-earned good conduct time, Whitey seemed despondent but also proud. He said he acted not in self-interest but out of principle: “I felt bad about the guys in the hole I worked with. How could I face them? I have to live with them and I can’t let them down, that is the reason I stayed in.”
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Tension over the strike lingered as guards wrote reports noting that Whitey, Sunday, and another inmate were seen talking intently in the recreation yard. “They are up to NO good—but what I don’t know,” the associate warden scribbled on a report.
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In the dining room, Whitey and several other inmates moved their seats in what was seen as a deliberate attempt to “freeze out” those who had worked during the strike. In the end, Whitey forfeited two hundred days of good conduct time for his acts of defiance during the strike.
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Years later, he bragged that he spent ten days in the hole for fighting, and Sunday agrees that he did. But there’s no way to know if this story was true or a bit of legend building. There is no record in his prison file of Whitey’s ever being sent to isolation.
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The loss of good conduct time hurt—badly. Every day lost meant one more behind bars. Whitey had been keeping close track of those days and wanted to make sure he got credit for them. He wrote to the Atlanta prison to see how much he had earned for joining the LSD study and was furious to learn he had been shorted by forty-five days. He took out his aggression with a punishing weight lifting session that sent him to the infirmary complaining of “heart pain.”
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He was assured his heart sounded normal and that it was likely muscular strain. But the decision to lash out at the weights, and his body, instead of prison authorities suggested that Whitey was beginning to appreciate that it was more effective to be calculating and agreeable than it was to be impulsive and aggressive. He wrote a solicitous letter to prison officials, politely asking what steps he needed to take to verify his claim that he was owed good conduct time for volunteering in the LSD experiment. “Hate to be of any bother but this good time was earned at the expense of physical and mental discomfort and is valuable to me,” he wrote.
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The Atlanta staff reviewed the medical records and acknowledged that Whitey was right. He was credited with the additional forty-five days.

Soon afterward, he got even better news. He had come face-to-face in Alcatraz with one of the bank robbery accomplices who had told the FBI that Whitey was involved in a 1955 murder in Indiana. That man, Richard Barchard, was now profusely apologetic, saying he had made the whole story up. What Barchard didn’t know was that the betrayal had actually gone both ways; that Whitey had identified Barchard as an accomplice in the robbery and even convinced his girlfriend to give a written statement implicating him in the bank job.

The bank robbery was very real; the murder never happened. At Alcatraz, Barchard told Whitey he had concocted the wild story of the murder of a nonexistent person, implicating himself and Whitey, while he was in isolation at Alcatraz. He said he did so on the assumption that by offering an admission and giving up Whitey he would be shipped out to Indiana to do easier time and possibly win a reduction in his sentence. It was a harebrained idea, Barchard admitted, but he was desperate at the time. Whitey was furious; being accused of murder had put him under a whole different level of scrutiny in Atlanta, opening up his girlfriend to questioning and upsetting his family. But he also realized that getting mad at Barchard solved nothing. Instead Whitey persuaded him to publicly recant his story about the murder. Barchard wrote a four-page letter to authorities on November 3, 1960, saying, “This is an honest attempt on my part to right a wrong that was rash and an immature act.”
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Whitey knew that a murder charge could keep him in prison for life. Now he hoped that his vindication would make prison officials view him more favorably, and that they would perhaps recommend that he be moved closer to home. The great distance from Southie meant he seldom had visitors; indeed, the last time his brother Bill had visited him was in the summer of 1958, when he was still in the Atlanta prison. But Bill remained Whitey’s tireless advocate, lobbying prison officials for a favorable transfer and writing to him frequently.

Bill Bulger had also continued his rise as a lawyer and would-be public figure. He’d gained increasing notice in Boston for his wit and gifts in public speaking and debate—excellent arenas to display the classical passages he’d memorized. His ambition to leadership was obvious. In 1960, Whitey was thrilled to learn that Bill had been elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. “Wow, he won,” Whitey said, after getting a letter from Bill about his election.
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“When I get out I’ve got to keep straight for him.” Whitey was proud of his younger brother’s accomplishments and a bit sheepish when he confided to Sunday that back home they were known as “the good brother and the bad brother.”

Bill’s success boosted Whitey’s morale. During his annual prison review several months later, he was commended for his “improved attitude.”
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He was conscientious in his job in the prison’s massive laundry room, where he worked alongside Sunday, and was often assigned to operate the mangle, a large machine used to press bedsheets. Whitey was praised for being a dependable worker who got along with black and white inmates alike.
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In that era of deep racial prejudice and growing civil rights unrest, it was a trait that stood out.

Still, Whitey was homesick. It was difficult for his family to make the long trip to Alcatraz, and he had only three visits while there: two from his sister Carol and her marine pilot husband, who lived in California, and one from a childhood friend on active duty nearby with the navy. About two weeks before he turned thirty-two, Whitey asked prison authorities to take a photograph of him and mail it to his parents. “I have been locked up for five and a half years and have only seen my parents once in this period,” he wrote on his request form.
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Bill Bulger and House Majority Leader McCormack continued to pressure prison officials, and the head of the Massachusetts state prison system, Department of Correction commissioner George F. McGrath, joined the chorus with a letter to Bennett, the Bureau of Prisons director, pushing for Whitey’s return to his home state. McGrath had been the assistant dean at Boston College Law School under Father Drinan when Bill was a student. Few inmates could claim such a powerful corps of advocates, the fruit of political pull and Southie solidarity. And this time, it had an effect. In October 1961, Bennett ordered Alcatraz staff to conduct a special review of Whitey’s progress. The detailed report said Whitey had avoided trouble since his involvement in the strike but still had trouble controlling his temper and was vain about his intelligence and character.
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“He is an extremely nervous individual and it requires a great effort on his part to avoid serious conflict with other inmates,” the report read. “He resents bitterly any disparaging remarks made by others about religion, Country and womanhood. He recently indicated he is very well pleased with the new four man tables [in the dining room] as it enables him to avoid listening to ‘unsavory characters.’ He uses no profanity and dislikes hearing others use it. He expresses great respect and love for his family and says he will never again cause them shame and humiliation by any of his deeds or actions. He blames no one for his present predicament and is not bitter towards any law enforcement officials. When asked why he does not attend church services he says too many inmates scoff, sneer and criticise [
sic
] the clergy after the service is over and he does not want to risk getting into trouble by expressing objection to their remarks.”

Whitey began telling people in a position to help him that he owed it to his family to go straight once he got out. It became his mantra, and others echoed it. The laundry foreman who supervised Whitey predicted he was unlikely to return to a life of crime once freed:

He has an urgent desire to be well thought of in all things; his ability to think things out, his physical prowess with weights and the ability to get along with his fellow inmates. He is extremely nervous and jumpy much of the time and seems to be “on guard” at all times. He has a high regard for his family members and considers himself to be the “black sheep” for which he seems to be ashamed. . . . His hopes are that he can go to school on his release and that he can someday redeem himself in the eyes of his family and friends. He seems entirely sincere in this regard.
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The officer in charge of the cell house was equally complimentary, describing Whitey as a neat, well-groomed man who kept a slightly better than average cell, seemed better educated than most, and enjoyed reading poetry.
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He said Sunday was Bulger’s closest friend and that “although some of his friends are known troublemakers Bulger seems to have a mind of his own and does not follow this group.” The officer said, “To my knowledge he has never asked for any special favors of any kind and he is not the type to get on personal terms with the officers. He smiles a lot, as though he has some sort of a joke to himself. Although he is very strong he is not known to use strong arm tactics on other inmates.”

But if Whitey didn’t ask for any special favors, he was certainly the beneficiary of McCormack’s political influence. The officer’s report disclosed something quite unusual: Bureau of Prisons director Bennett personally interviewed Whitey during a visit to Alcatraz. The officer wrote that Whitey’s overall attitude and conduct had been very good in the past, and then noted: “Since his interview with Mr. Bennett, when he last visited this institution, his conduct has been excellent.” A prison committee found Whitey had “an ebullient personality,” regretted being “suckered” into participating in the food strike, and deserved to be transferred to a less secure prison.
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Prison officials restored one hundred days of good conduct time, and in April 1962 Bennett approved his transfer to the penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.

While Whitey was still in Alcatraz waiting for his transfer, three inmates attempted a daring escape. On June 11, 1962, after several months of using stolen tools to chisel holes in the walls of their cells, Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin squeezed through the openings, made their way to the roof, and disappeared into the bay on a makeshift raft made of raincoats. They left dummy heads in their beds to fool the guards during cell checks. The men were never found, leaving some to speculate that they drowned in the frigid water and were swept out to sea. Others believe they got away. It was one escape plot that Whitey, his long dreamed-of transfer now in the offing, was never implicated in. The following month he left Alcatraz still strong and trim at 176 pounds but a much changed person—more calculating, deliberative, and confident of his path.

Whitey spent the following year
in Leavenworth, where he was assigned to the sanitation detail and worked as a rodent and pest controller, spraying insecticides and setting bait for mice and rats. The remaining hundred days of good conduct time he had lost at Alcatraz had been restored, paving the way for his possible parole. But the parole board was unimpressed with his initial request in February 1963 and turned him down.

In Kansas he received repeated visits from his father, his brother Jack, and Will McDonough, a friend from South Boston who became a renowned
Boston Globe
sportswriter and who had managed Bill Bulger’s successful run for the Massachusetts House of Representatives. In each case, McCormack wrote on their behalf, vouching for them. Then on September 3, 1963, his thirty-fourth birthday, Whitey was transferred to the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. His resemblance to his politician brother was so strong that, during his move, prison authorities confiscated two photographs of Bill, thinking they were of the inmate.
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Whitey filed a report, indicating that he received one of the pictures when he was Alcatraz in 1960, the other in Leavenworth in 1962. “I’d like to have these pictures but if you rule against it would you please permit me to mail them home,” he wrote. The photographs were mailed to Whitey’s mother in South Boston.