Whitey’s first mistake was when he decided not to continue his job as a custodian at the Suffolk Court House. He’ll blame John E. Powers for him losing that job but that’s a cop out. He could have kept the job but found the lure of easy money too tempting.
Had he stayed as a custodian, he’d now be retired and probably at this moment carrying his beach chair along Day Boulevard looking for a good spot to place it down on Carson Beach. He’d have what is most important to all right thinking people, freedom to come and go as he wants.
His second biggest mistake will be to take the stand. He now leaves it up to others to tell his story. Sure, he’ll write his book but who will care after he testifies. Only by keeping his secrets and giving them to one of his family to publish could he come out on top. He’s let his enemies lure him into a trap by calling him a coward for not taking the stand. He’ll show them he’s not afraid and will walk into their trap.
We know he is going to testify because he has submitted some of his old photographs as proposed exhibits which make no sense if considered apart from testimony. The Boston Globe was kind enough to publish them.
Looking at them it looks like Whitey is going for the dog lover’s vote. I don’t know whether this is part of his defense blaming the dogs for some of the crimes or not but I do know he feels the dogs are going to play a big role somehow in his case. Maybe he heard one of his guards talk about the dog days of summer and figured that made them relevant.
If the Globe has it correct, 30% of the photographs have animals in them; two holding poodles but the look on his face shows he’s not too happy to have them sitting on his lap but what we do for love; then there’s one with a black lamb or goat, (I’m not too good at animal identification) and in that picture he looks like he is trying to figure out how it will taste on his plate; one picture shows a smiling Catherine Greig with her poodles; another is the old one we’ve seen often of Whitey and Catherine walking with the two poodles between them, both wearing sun glasses to disguise themselves, and the final one an unusual photo of Whitey and Theresa Stanley at the Tower of London holding two canaries – sort of appropriate for the issue of whether Whitey was a canary or not. I did notice the canary in Whitey’s hand doesn’t trust him, smart canary, because he keeps staring at him. Also the location is where the British used to cut off the heads of people like Anne Boleyn who were imprisoned in the Tower. Whitey must have felt a warm feeling being there.
Another 30% of the photographs show Whitey as a young man: in three of them he is smiling and three he is serious. One of the smiling ones he is with his brother Billy, in two of the serious one’s I notice he is wearing what we used to call garrison belts – you could take them off, wrap them around your hand and leave the buckle free a few inches away and use them as weapons – and in the other serious one he is with a man in an air force uniform.
In other photographs in one we see he stood near the Stanley Cup and did not steal it; in another he’s sitting next to a priest but doesn’t look that happy about it. We see him in Rio posing above the ocean – which lends an international flavor to his resume.
The remaining show him together with Theresa Stanley; another with another woman when he was in his early twenties; another shows him wearing a white suit and red tie. He includes individual photographs of Catherine Greig and a dark-haired woman who is a mystery.
There doesn’t see to be any pattern to the photographs he selected. Maybe you can figure out what his plan is?
What is it about this mug from Old Harbor that induces Sarte, Solzhenitsyn,Lord Byron,Homer,Coleridge?
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Billy
How Overreach Led to the Legend of Whitey and the Government’s Release of Serial Killers onto the Streets of Boston
What is it about this mug from Old Harbor that induces Sarte, Solzhenitsyn,Lord Byron,Homer,Coleridge? His crowd has no redeeming social value, yet some of us are titillated; vicariously, we take a walk on the wild side. Sometimes I think they should put the white hat and black hat cast of characters on the slow boat to Devils Island and they can play their games to their hearts content.
The defendant reminds me of how lucky we are that most of the criminal element are boneheads and so few have his skill and finesse in staying on the outside being the kingfish in a little pond.
Only the shadow knows what he will do for the finale in Judge Casper court, my money is on him going mano a mano but I always go with the hometown team regardless of what the numerologists and logic tell me.
Well, Hopalong, I said he should be bullwhipped. That should count for something.
Hopalong:
While dealing with this subject we do have to come up for air and talk about better ideas so as not to get totally depressed. I often said the only reason we’ve caugh a lot of them is because of their stupidity, not our brilliance.
Mano a mano or no mas. We’ll know today. I’ll post on how he comes into the courtroom dressed. That may be a clue.
Let’s hear Jim “Whitey” Bulger’s story, and we all can decide for ourselves what is true and factual and what is false and fiction. We like stories: “Tell to me, O Muse, of that much travelled man who toppled the topless towers of Troy, Illyrium” (paraphrasing) or “It ’tis an Ancient Mariner, he stoppeth one of three;; ‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, now wherefore stoppest thou me?'” Let Whitey the old salt tell his tale, howsoever too tall or true, and let the cards fall where they may, then he, like almost all of us, can meet his Maker having spoken his peace, and then he can, like all of us when our time comes, pass on to the Happy Hunting Grounds or the Great Beyond, like Byron (the Englishman turned Greek Patriot) said he would, relatively “unknown, unkeened, unknelled, unmourned and unremembered.” (paraphrasing Byron.) Of course, the poetry and books keep a few literary greats, like Byron, long-lived, but for the rest of us including all the writers for the Globe and Herald, the destiny is oblivion. Whitey’s book, however, could outlast all of us! Certainly Billy Bulger’s “While the Music Lasts” and his history of James Michael Curley will outlast any trash produced by Cullen, Gelzinis, O’Neill, Lehr and all the garbage spewed from the mind of the thoughtless, knee-jerk Howard “the Coward” Carr, another truly vile human being who delights in hurting people via slurs and character assassination, his life’s work. A pox on all the houses of these bearers of false witness!!! On second thought, I’ll retract that last statement and I’ll defer to our Maker and let our Maker decide who gets or doesn’t get the Pox!!!! “The wheels of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding fine!” Don’t cast the first stone, but when punks throw stones at you, it seems to me, consistent with principles of self-defense, you have every right to stone them right back. “Hit ’em again! Harder!” as the Dot High School Cheerleaders used to say at the football games. Have faith and hope: “The good will out.”
The pictures are poignant for the fact all of these women are still above ground. Not every witness in this trial could produce such pictures of all their girlfriends.
(Actially, Theresa Stanley died of natural causes last year. Whitey remains a suspect.)
Patty:
Who are those women – Grieg and Stanley I know – two others are mysteries.
William:
If Whitey talks, Connolly never walks. If Whitey says he was never a rat, if he says Connolly was his guy on the take does that make him a rat?
In pre-Christian Ireland, warriors feared the poets. A few cutting verses disguised as wit, could stick in the collective mind forever. On the positive side, a memorable panegyric (praise poem) perpetuated, as it enhanced, the legend of the hero.
It was all about one’s image after death. Sartre, in his discussion of the temporal states of human consciousness, describes the condition of “past” as a state in which a being has no conscious agency (B&N). There are no more choices to be made, no ability to choose. The memories of others preserve that being in the past tense, but, that being, is at the mercy of the agency of the living. In three, or, four, generations passage of time, most people are forgotten. As Sartre puts it, “they join all that came before them in the necropolis of the unremembered.”
The only way to avoid the common fate is to immortalize oneself. Bulger knows that once he is dead, his memory (past-being) will be at the mercy of those who have, and, will, profit from his legend, those who would alter his story to suit their own designs. Testifying on his own behalf in open court, is the last opportunity Bulger will get to take center stage, and, bask in the limelight. It will also be his final opportunity to refute his accusers, and, steer the course of his legend away from the dolorous rocks of ignominy. The whole world’s ear will be cocked to hear, how he got to where he is at. It should be a memorable valedictory.
.
Khalid: Words of wisdom!!! I play my riff on that below!!!
Khalid:
Before you were born no one knew you or cared about you – you were not loved nor were you hated – yet you never let that bother you that the world was indifferent to your arrival here – so why should you let it bother you that once you pass no one wants to know you or care about you or no one wants to love you or hate you. In other words if it doesn’t affect you why care?
Bulger could testify and have a thousand angels crowded into the courtroom swearing that every word out of his mouth is the absolute truth and his legend will be written by those who hate him and forever he will be remembered as a man who informed on his friends and murdered to women and being exhausted by his murders went upstairs to lie down and rest. It’s only a fool who thinks he can alter the public mindset by telling his story.
Yes a few will be interested in his story and before he finds himself in the same facility as Terry Nichols and Agent Hanssen most of the few will have forgotten and the city will send the street sweepers up to clean up the dirt in front of the federal court house.
Matt, as you know Irish guys are extremely charming. Whitey as likable rogue, however… That’s pushing it pretty far.
I’m sure this isn’t C&B’s decision or preference. Yet you have to ask, what’s the downside of remaining silent? Can Whitey’s counsel tear the likes of Flemmi apart, without losing credibility with jurors when Whitey refuses to man up and take the stand himself? That said– he’s on balance better off leaving C&B to give their three-hour speech at closing. He’s not going to make the case any better then they will.
Steely:
Old Irish guys have as much charm as a headache – they may think they have some but the more they pretend to themselves that they do the foolish they look. In other words, Whitey may think he can con people but he is deluding himself.
C&B do what Whitey tells them. That’s why when I criticised them for doing something good lawyers would not have done I realized after I did that they would not have done it but their client demanded that they do it. The whole case is one big downside for Whitey. His only hope now is to somehow abort the trial and have it begin again some time in the future. If he takes the stand he has to admit some of the murders to be credible and that’ll do him in; he’s already conceded the drug dealing and the bookie stuff and the money laundering although he might try to say the guns weren’t his but that’ll go no where.
My thoughts until the last couple of days was he wanted his day in the spotlight but then I realized by doing that he deprives his siblings of an attempt to have a big pay day by writing a block buster book but now I realize as I said early on that’s nothing he caares about. He has this image of himself as going down shooting so he takes the stand – tells his story – and lives unhappily ever after.
“Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?”
(Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago Vol. I. p.3.)
Khalid:
Solzhenitsyn was a great man – I loved his Gulag books – he finally got a chance to go back to Motherland Russia – the Russia of his dreams and was sorely disppointed – he’d have been better off staying in Vermont.
Sounds like if arranged chronologically he might appear to be a fairly regular guy. If we had believed the papers, there were so few photos that one should think he was a pookah or some kind of golem that is invisible in a photo. I was looking for the picture of him just trying to make a buck doing the three card monte operation off Times Square when he was young and not tied down by a girlfriend, pets and that group of perverted human beings. When Johnnie Powers demurred on putting the fox in the chicken coop he should have gone out to Oklahoma with his friend and become a real roughneck and got rich legit boomtown style. Another clever irish boy that went sour. Tis a pity
No matter what the defendant will do it his way
Hopalong:
He’s just a run of the mill guy – there was a photograph of him playing three card monte in Times Square but he was wearing his invisible suit according to the Globe – you are right it was the pet poodles that led him astray – they demanded he go out and get them their grub – as Billy said in his book – Whitey ran into a group of older guys who led him down the wrong path – yes – with his discipline and iron will he may have done well wildcatting in Oklahoma – wasn’t that how Roger Wheeler made his money.
Yes – watch for my post tomorrow – I’ll see how he is dressed for court – we will then know what his way is – I understand he’s asked C&B to play Sinatray’s song “My Way” as he gets out of his seat at counsel table and walks to the stand.
In one of the pics it looks like he is holding an Angus calf wearing a diaper. Any beef farmers on the jury?
And for posing with Niland he should be bullwhipped, after what Niland did to Ricky Middleton.
Honest:
Howie Carr of radio fame was overheard saying that was a goat. He planned to exist on a diet of goat’s milk. (Not Howie, Whitey)
It was the only way he could get close to Lord Stanley who by the way was a distant relative of Theresa Stanley