I was out of town last week so missed the fact that after over a decade on the lamb the FBI caught Whitey Bulger. My 15 year-old son’s reaction, “The end of a dynasty.”
My son goes to Boston College High where the auditorium is named Bulger. Whitney’s nephew is in his class and Billy has spoken there more than once.
Despite the fact that at least two states would like the feds to turn Whitey over so he can be given the death penalty in their jurisdiction, we all seem to have a split personality when it comes to the mob and Whitey in particular. He is charged with 19 murders and was a thug of epic proportions. Yet we somehow gloss over all that and see in him a real life Tony Soprano on steroids.
Take for instance one of my favorite films in the last few years, The Departed.
Jack Nicolson plays a character who can be none other than Whitney. In an early scene we see Jack kill a man and woman on the beach while the Rolling Stones “Gimmie Shelter” blares in the background. In a line that Nicolson ad-libbed, according to director Martin Scorsese, the Whitey character looks at the woman he just shot and comments, “She fell funny.” This is all part of a sequence in which Nicolson is explaining the ways of the world to a young boy who grows up to be Matt Damon, a cop and Nicolson’s rat on the inside. The line is funny and cool. I laughed when I heard it. I instantly fell in love with the character, edging ever closer to a love affair with the real man.
Here’s the thing: Whitey is as bad a bad guy as there possible could be. Far worse than Tiger or Arnold or Charlie Sheen. If anyone deserves the death penalty, which I don’t personally support but just for the sake of argument, he does.
I had to remind my son of all that. And myself too.