Public Enemy: The Life of Whitey Bulger Comes Full Circle

Not so long ago, my mother and Whitey Bulger had some nice sidewalk chats. It was June, 2011. She was in her nineties, and in the aftermath of a bad fall she was stuck in a rehab facility on 4^th Street in Santa Monica. Her caregiver liked to take her out for walks in the neighborhood, and they both enjoyed kibitzing with a white-bearded gentleman who was frequently seen walking his dog. Then one day the street was ablaze with police cars and emergency vehicles. The notorious James “Whitey” Bulger, a Boston mob boss who’d been on the lam for 16 years, had just been caught. The FBI’s Most Wanted Man had been living a quiet life in a Santa Monica condo down the street from where my mom was staying. Obviously—given his background in organized crime—he was no gentleman. But he’d always be my mother’s favorite gangster.

Now both Mom and Whitey Bulger are gone. She passed on in 2014, at the ripe old age of 96. He lived until the day before Halloween: October 30, 2018. When I first read that he’d died  behind bars, I figured old age had caught up with him. Yes, he needed a wheelchair, but his end was apparently not as uneventful as that. When he was found unresponsive in his cell at the high-security prison in West Virginia to which he’d just been transferred, authorities immediately began investigating. Now the word is that he’d been beaten to death by a fellow inmate, who just happens to be a Mafia hitman.

More to come, I’m sure.

And this story will of course once again ramp up our fascination with the life (and death) of mobsters. Bulger himself inspired more than one movie and television drama. TV series ranging from Law and Order to Ray Donovan have included characters based on Bulger. In Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning 2006 film, The Departed, Jack Nicholson plays a colorful Bulger-like mob boss. The film Black Mass, released in 2015, is based on a 2001 non-fiction book, Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob, by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill. To quote Wikipedia, “The film chronicles Bulger's years as an FBI informant, and his manipulation of his FBI handler as a means to eradicate his rivals for control of the Boston underworld, the Italian Mafia.” A heavily made-up Johnny Depp nabbed a Screen Actors Guild award for his lead performance.

Let’s face it: we love on-screen gangsters. Think of Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films. Think of Scorsese over and over, probably hitting his peak with 1990’s Goodfellas. Now think back in time to the glory days of James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. Cagney’s  The Public Enemy and Robinson’s Little Caesar, both 1931, helped pave the way for bigger, bolder films about vengeful hoodlums who somehow won the audience’s affection. They also paved the way for the enforcement of the Production Code, which tried (but failed) to staunch the public’s yen for bad guys who were blood-thirsty but appealing.

Gangster stories are also fairly economical to film, which is why low-budget moviemakers of the Roger Corman ilk often put them on their production schedules. They mostly require prop weapons, lots of blanks, and gallons of fake blood. Corman made I Mobster, Machine-Gun Kelly (with the young Charles Bronson), and lots of others. I personally worked on Capone (starring Ben Gazzara) and—much later—Dillinger and Capone (with Martin Sheen and F. Murray Abraham). In Hollywood, at least, bad guys make good.

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.