A Book About Whitey Bulger: Juror Janet Uhlar’s View of American Justice: 2/2

A month or so ago Janet Uhlar posted a comment on my blog telling me that she had written and published a book. I was keenly interested in getting it. I hoped it would give Whitey’s perspective on certain happenings. Reading it I found some of my prior thinking on certain issues was reinforced or clarified. It got the juices in my mind stirred so that I recalled there was much I had to say about the matter which remains to be said despite the plethora of information put out to this date. Much of that was copy and paste with one following the other without any real analysis.

The one problem I found with the book was it was fiction. She thinly disguises the characters in the Saga. It is easy to figure out who she is talking about. What she writes about them has a ring of truth but how can one rely on it. She wrote: “the reader should determine through his or her own investigation where fiction ends and the truth begins”

I perhaps have the ability to do that in some areas but how many others will be able to do so?The end of the book contains and appendix. Most of it contains excerpts or letters from Whitey about himself or about others. These proved to be of interest and well worth reading.

Using Uhlar’s book gives me an opportunity to elucidate some of my present views that I have developed on the Saga since the time I first got involved back in 2002 when I attended the trial of Retired FBI Agent John Connolly who was Whitey’s handler. I wrote about that in my book, “Don’t Embarrass The Family” which I published back in October, 2012. At that time Whitey had been arrested the year before. Commensurate with my renewed interest I started this blog.

There are certain areas that I hope to develop in line with my reinvigorated thinking on the subject. I recognized I never spelled out fully my thoughts. A long time ago I wrote a series on Whitey that I will go back to rediscover especially to how my views have changed, if at all. I was told by one of Whitey’s attorneys that he had read the series and was amazed that it was ninety-five percent accurate.

Off the top of my head I want to understand and write about how Whitey who was no more than a small time brutal hoodlum gained such mythical status. Then I want to explore the relationship between Whitey and Connolly. I will do my best to answer whether Whitey was an informant – what shows he was, what shows he wasn’t. I suppose next I’ll talk about Whitey’s immunity grant from O’Sullivan. After that about how corrupt is the Department of Justice if it is corrupt at all.

My present plan will be when each section is complete to post that subject in as many posts as it takes limiting the words in each post to around 600 or so. This is how things were done back in Dickens days when his stories came out serialized chapter by chapter over months; or like the Saturday morning movies I saw at the basement of St. Monica’s Church when it was across the street from the John A. Andrew elementary school. The day’s movie ended with something disastrous happening to the hero which we had to wait anxiously for a week to see how he managed to squirm out of it. Mine, of course, will have hardly the excitement the movies did to a seven-year old.

Until then but in the meantime if you want a different view into the Whitey Saga than what you have  read then you would definitely want to read: “Truth Be Damned.”