Whitey Bulger: The Godfather, Part IV

So they got Whitey Bulger, just down the street from the rehab facility where my mom is recuperating from a fractured pelvis. It’s a quiet street: folks walk their dogs there, and take strolls toward the ocean two blocks away. Bulger, on the lam after racketeering, narcotics, and murder charges put him at the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted list, had slipped into Santa Monica fifteen years ago. He and his longtime lady friend posed as a mild-mannered pair of retirees, shopping at the 99 Cents store and becoming familiar faces to neighborhood residents. Bulger’s arrest on June 22 was a great moment for law enforcement, as well as for the geriatric folks whose day was brightened by all the TV vans and other commotion in the vicinity.

The thought of Whitey Bulger growing old and grey in Santa Monica put me in mind of Henry Hill, the leading character (played by Ray Liotta) in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. In the course of that film, Hill (based on a real-life mob henchman) swindles, robs, murders, and betrays; by the end he is under the wing of the Witness Protection Program, surviving a dull, law-abiding life in suburbia. His final voiceover tells the tale: “I'm an average nobody. . . I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.” Scorsese’s film is a brilliant exposé of a Mafia sidekick, but -- from what I hear --Whitey Bulger played second fiddle to no man. So, though of course I’m relieved that he was arrested peaceably, without recourse to any of the thirty weapons he apparently had stashed in his modest apartment, I can’t help feeling slightly disappointed that his demise was so, well, uncinematic.

Yes, I’m a sucker for the classic gangster films of the 1930s. Those early crime-does-not-pay flicks, with their dramatic finales, set the pattern for decades of movie bad guys. (Warning: spoilers ahead!) Remember James Cagney in The Public Enemy unexpectedly coming home in a box? Remember Paul Muni in Scarface, felled in a shoot-‘em-out with the coppers? Best of all, remember Edward G. Robinson as Caesar Enrico Bandello in Little Caesar? In a sorry state following a life of crime, he is lured from his flophouse by his nemesis on the police force.. When Sgt. Flaherty guns him down beneath a billboard that bears the image of his glamorous former love, he raises his eyes to the heavens and utters a deathless line, “Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?”

Over the decades, the endings of gangster movies have kept getting bigger. White Heat (1949) has one of the all-time great death scenes, featuring gunfire, explosions, and Cagney on high shouting, “Made it, Ma. Top of the world!” I don’t pretend that the characters played by Cagney and the others were heroes. But they were bold, forceful, charismatic figures, pursuing the American Dream on their own terms. As a red-blooded American, I can’t help rooting for guys like these on the movie screen, if not in real life. They went out in a blaze of glory. Whitey Bulger, though, met his fate quietly—not with a bang but with a whimper.