T.J. English came to Boston- Planning to tell a story
- With pen and paper in his hand
- He was seeking a little glory
- T.J. English arrived in Boston
- Hooked up with local hoodlums
- He got an earful of fancy tales
- He couldn’t tell they were foolin’
- T.J. English while in Boston
- Hung out with the media guys
- The story that he thus produced
- Was a repeat of all their lies.
- TJ. English wasn’t from Boston
- He had a chance for glory
- He fell in with the wrong crowd
- And missed the real big story
T.J. English is a very good writer of crime stories. He’s from New York City. Perhaps he knows that crime scene well. Perhaps he is aware of the right people to talk to so that he gets his facts right. He has one problem endemic to people from that city. He thinks the rest of the world operates like the Big Apple.
It is very hard for a guy from New York to understand Boston; just like it would be almost impossible for a guy from Boston to get take the correct cut of the jib of New York City. How could a guy new in town know when he’s being taken for a ride? T.J. English didn’t even suspect it.
English tried to suggest he is not a stranger to Boston. He tells of how in 1979 he visited South Boston as an 18-year-old teenager. His purpose was to visit with one of his former teachers who was then at the all-girls Cardinal Cushing High school in South Boston. Hanging around those pretty high school girls of his age apparently they talked about the local scene.
He suggests his teenage talk with these girls involved the Bulgers. He writes: “The name of Whitey Bulger was not yet well known, even in the neighborhood.” How did the name even come up? Hardly would English a stranger have heard of him. Perhaps, because as English wrote the girls at Cardinal Cushing mostly knew of the Bulgers because of “Senator Billy Bulger, who was a figure of renown.”
English’s recollection though is important. We have read how Whitey was terrorizing the neighborhood, if not the city, for a quarter of a century. How does that square with him being hardly known in Southie his home section of the city. You’d have to accept that he was far from notorious.
In 1994, fifteen years after English’s encounter with the Cardinal Cushing girls, Whitey would have vamoosed from the area. To become notorious Whitey had those fifteen years in which to build his reputation. English would later write:”Whitey was the real deal. He made humans disappear. And when the bodies washed up on Carson Beach, or were found stuffed in a ten-gallon drum or appeared unceremoniously at O’Brien’s Funeral Parlor, nobody said nothin’.” I suppose that would have been the case if any of that happened. It didn’t. People disappeared for sure but there were no bodies washing up on Carson beach or in ten-gallon drums or suddenly from nowhere appearing at O’Brien’s. Writing such things is buying into a myth which T.J. English seemed happy to embellish upon.
Whitey’s career is notable for one thing which is until he was hyped up by people writing books or in the media he was hardly known outside of in his native South Boston, the criminal element or some law enforcement groups during his days of glory.
He was sentenced in 1956 to prison for several armed robberies, he hit the street after nine years in 1965, he went straight for a bit but chafed at that life style especially after his son died. Around 1970 he became a strong-arm guy for the Killeens who controlled the South Boston rackets. They would get into a small bloody conflict with the Mullins wherein three people died, one from the Mullins gang and two of the Killeens. Seeing he was on the losing end in 1972 Whitey went hat-in-hand to join up with Winter Hill
In the summer of 1974 Whitey met Steve Flemmi his future partner. Flemmi had been hiding out in Canada until the FBI fixed it so that the murder and other charges against him could be dismissed. They were partners with five others in Winter Hill: John Martorano and Howie Winter, the leaders, Joe McDonald, Jimmy Sims, and Jimmy Martorano.
According to Angela Clemente, Peter Lance lifted a
lot of his material from Angela Clements
Angela was the person responsible for getting murder
charges filed against FBI agent DeVecchio
After that she got a physical beating from FBI agents
see
https://nypost.com/2006/06/18/mob-buster-mom-to-quit-after-near-hit-by-tipster/
MOB-BUSTER MOM TO QUIT AFTER NEAR-HIT BY ‘TIPSTER’
New York Post
Jun 18, 2006 · Fearless G-mom Angela Clemente – beaten senseless during a clandestine meeting with a phony tipster in Brooklyn – says she’s quitting her…
also see
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-dc-circuit/1870569.html
ANGELA CLEMENTE APPELLANT v. FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION ET AL APPELLEES | FindLaw – FindLaw: Cases and …
FindLaw › caselaw › us-dc-circuit
Aug 11, 2017 · SRINIVASAN, Circuit Judge: Appellant Angela Clemente, acting under the Freedom of Information Act, sought records from the FBI pertaining to a former informant. Clemente later initiated this FOIA
also see
https://books.google.com/books?id=wT4dDgAAQBAJ&pg=PR3&source=kp_read_button
Nonfiction Book Review: Murder Machine by Gene Mustain, Author, Jerry Capeci, With Dutton Books $23 (432p) ISBN 978-0-525 …
Publishers Weekly › …
DeMeo’s crew was so “scary,” according to an FBI agent quoted here, that even then-Mafia don John Gotti was wary of them. By the FBI’s estimate, the Murder Machine killed at least 200 people before it was dism
I agree that T.J.’s friends in South Boston were deceptive, after all, they had to keep their stories going to please puppet master Wyshak. T.J. failed to see the strings–or perhaps just ignored them?
But, I will say that T.J. is a gentleman. He rescued me from Steve Davis, who was foaming at the mouth outside the courthouse as he verbally accosted me in his attempt to hold me singularly accountable for the “no finding” in his sister’s death.
I’ll always be grateful to T.J. for that.
Janet:
I don’t think T.J. is a bad guy. He just bought into the story laid out by the media that Whitey was some sort of criminal par excellence who towered above everyone else. I suggest that is far from the case. I don’t believe that Pat Nee’s stories had anything to do with Wyshak. He wrote a book telling some of them long before Wyshak was on the scene with respect to him.
I fond it interesting that you wrote Whitey looks forward to seeing Wyshak in Hell with himself. I don’t quite understand Whitey’s bitterness to Wyshak. It’s as if somehow he thinks he was framed and should not be in prison. And, one other thing. I will write soon about my take on Whitey suggesting the CIA program had something to do with his criminal behavior. I don’t buy the either.
Keep up the good work.
Havana Nocturne: How The Mob Won Cuba And Then Lost It To The Revolution …. T.J.English
What can you say about the guy. He can write ! … He saw his opportunity … He took it ! … The rest is a story that only GOD knows !!!
And he is busy with other pursuits .
John:
Agree – he’s a good writer – but he got some big things wrong.
Matt:
You’re telling ME ?!?
Tough to fit 50 gallons of T.J.’s hyperbole inside a ” ten gallon drum.”
But, he gives it a good try.
Jimmy Bulger was an Artist .
Matt
Have you read any other T.J. English books? A recent one is The Corporation. Its about Cuban underworld in this country. Oh yeah. Have you finally gotten a chance to read Deal with the Devil by Peter Lance? Thats the book about another high level murdering informant named Greg Scarpa.
Matt
I see in your glossary of terms that the
phrase “ death squad “ is missing
Do you consider the Whitey Bulger crew
a death squad?
in other newes
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2018/sep/17/CIA-adlai-affair/
CIA file confirms the White House’s role in “The Adlai Stevenson Affair”
by Emma Best
September 17, 2018
The details of the negotiations and planning surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis have long been the subject of some contention for historians, with some of the most influential and enduring accounts contradicting what the tapes of those planning sessions tell us. Almost immediately after the Cuban Missile Crisis resolved, rumors began floating around Washington D.C. that the narrative that emerged was the handiwork of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in an effort to force the resignation of Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy’s Ambassador to the United Nations. A Central Intelligence Agency chronology, originally classified SECRET and recently released to MuckRock, confirms that the architect of this historical revisionism was, in fact, Kennedy – and reveals that denials of this were based on nothing more than
also see
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/ny-news-ice-agent-charged-sodomy-oregon-20180916-story.html
ICE agent in Oregon arrested on sodomy charges
also see
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/football/ny-sports-dallas-protesters-att-stadium-20180916-story.html
Demonstrators march outside AT&T Stadium to protest police killing of Botham Jean in Dallas
Await more of the real story.
I had written elsewhere and alluded to it here: “It’s sad that the history of these times is being written by men like Carr and Cullen” based on the perjurious tales of serial killers like Flemmi and Morris and weak-kneed bully boys like Kevin Weeks, a career felon. Now we add T.J. English, another No Nothing, or rather a misinformed No-Little about what he’s writing about writing about Southie and Savie in the ’60s and ’70s and even ’80s when none of them took a whiff, took a sniff of the air there . . .of the air off Carson Beach or off Savin Hill by the Sea . . . .you see, as Matt correctly writes, the No-Littles are selling us malarkey . . . .
Remember that story about the guy who said he was strong-armed into selling his store in Southie, until his two sisters came along and said, “Nonsense”, he was eager to sell and get rid it of it for years?
Who knows where the Truth lies? Not with Carr, Cullen and apparently not with Mr. T. J. English . . . .he sounds, sounds off from the get go, like Kevin Weeks selling a spooky story about whispers he heard inside a closed, refrigerated walk-in cooler in a liquor store off Kosciusko Circle in 1995; free speech whispers, coincidentally, corrupt FED prosecutors turned into a crime . . .a new crime . . .private citizens whispering what they heard through the grapevine . . .Credence Clearwaters’ song, “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”, if sung confidentially inside a beer case cooler is now a federally prosecuted felony: Obstruction of Justice . . . .
Perhaps, T.J. English will tell us at length about the obscenely lenient deals the FEDS, like Jihadi Javert Wyshak, cut with serial killers for their patently perjurious testimony. Remember the Boston Federal Jury did not believe one word of Martorano, and Fred the FED Wyshak drugged him to Miami to sing the same song before another jury. Talk about dissing a jury!!!! Come on T.J.! Spill the beans!
Bill C
I have read many of your comments regarding John Connolly. Do you think John Connolly broke any laws at all? If so what were they? Would you agree there are facts mixed in with lies and half-truths in the books and stories written by these authors? Have you read Rifleman or Hitman by Howie Carr or Deadly Alliance by Ralph Ranalli? Thanks again for your immense contributions and perspective.
At some point I am sure you will get to Kevin Cullen and Shelly Murphy of the Globe? These so called experts did not put very much into print when Jimmy Bulger was in his heyday. Also, I would love to see the Globe writers put out a book about Fred Wysheck and his Ahab like quest to get Billy Bulger.It seems very clear that a lot of people have made a lot of money writing about the Whitey saga. Not much fact checking.
Norwood Born
Do you think the Boston area writers feared Bulger and Flemmi and Martorano during the times they most powerful and making huge profits? How would local writers know what these individuals were up to? In countries like Mexico reporters have been murdered. Reporters covering drug cartels etc. But its very rare that reporters who cover organized crime are murdered in the USA no?