I sometimes have to wonder at the pap we get from our newspapers especially in stories relating to Bulger. I indicated yesterday that the mainstream media writers missed the point of Whitey admitting his role in some bank robberies back in 1956. He wasn’t ratting anyone out nor was he cooperating with the FBI. He admitted his role in a robbery that the FBI already knew about. It had a witness who was with him during the robberies ready to testify against him.
Whitey did it to save his girlfriend from going to the can. The media points to this as him being some sort of informant but it was the opposite. He was stand up guy giving the FBI what they already had, taking the hit himself which turned out to be 20 years, so that his girlfriend, Jacqueline “Jacqui” McAuliffe who was with him on one or more robberies, was able to stay on the street and take care of her kid.
You get mixed up when you think everything is black. Nothing ever is. As Somerset Maugham wrote in his book Summing Up: “I have known crooks who were capable of self-sacrifice, . . . and harlots for whom it was a point of honor to give good value for money.” It’d be too much for the local press to ever think Whitey had any good in him yet many in South Boston saw that side of him.
I’m not saying by any means he was a good person. That’d be succumbing to the mentality of someone like Murderman Martorano who says referring to himself: “It’s my belief that good men can do bad things.” (Yuk! , Murderman murdered 20 people and thinks he is a good man.) Whitey was mostly black but even then he was capable of doing some good acts but that doesn’t change his basic character.
I’m not coming anywhere close to saying Whitey seems anything but evil. He was from what I can see bad to the bone. I’m sure at times he thought of others. It wasn’t often, but once in a while. His episode keeping Jacqui McAuliffe on the street was one of those times. The women he lived with had nothing but good to say about him. Catherine Greig is doing an absurd amount of time in prison for her belief in him.
Even Whitey’s gangster understudy, Brutalman Kevin Weeks, acting like a reformed drunk when it comes to Whitey in his new role as toady to the media, can’t seem to figure out what Whitey did back then. It is beyond Weeks to understand how a guy can go to jail for a long rap to protect someone else. It’s nothing he could ever have done as was shown by his willingness to turn state’s evidence after two weeks in jail.
Aside from wanting us to see nothing but limpid black when we think of Whitey, the media just loves to take what we know about Whitey today and juxtapose it back forty or fifty years to suggest that at that time people should have realized that Whitey was going to become what he turned out to be. We are supposed to think that in the mid-Fifties people knew Whitey was going to be the personification of everything evil and anyone who had the slightest association with him back then must have been involved in his evil cabal.
We can see this in two articles I came across that were written during last summer. These are about a letter Whitey wanted to send from prison. We first heard about the letter in Howie Carr’s book the Brothers Bulger which was written in 2006. But the summer news articles presented the letter as something recently discovered and as a startling revelation.
It seems that when 26-year-old Whitey was sent to prison in July ’56, three months later he attempted to reach out to Father Robert Drinan. This is known because that letter was found in Whitey’s personnel file from his time in prison. It is dated October 26, 1956. It never left the prison. Fr. Drinan never received it.
This indicated to me that any letter Whitey wrote to Fr. Drinan never flew over the walls. But I’ll assume, as the media people do, that some letters got out and Whitey and Father Drinan had correspondence. Tomorrow I’ll write about how the media interpreted the letter and the events around it in such a nonsensical way that it gives one pause to believe anything that it puts out.
Kevin Weeks quotes “Whitey” as saying “The Boston press has never been known for it’s accuracy, and they never let the truth get in the way of a good story” so it seems he has similar sentiments.
Jim: I’m none too happy to think I have similar sentiments as Whitey but if he said that, and I consider the source its a 50/50 guess, I guess I am coming around to his way of thinking at least with respect to the media.
IF, John Iuele is actually Whitey Bulger, then he appears in my reporting to have been someone who was willing to con $6000 from my mother Aggie, and myself, but warned us that he was sent to do more harm to us than the money con. John Iuele also warned me that others would not stop where he did. And, as time has past, John Iuele’s warning has come to pass.
IF Whitey Bulger was acting in the name of John Iuele on March 17, 1989, then he alone, if he has any decency in him, will confess. My family has requested this in our letter to his attorney James Carney that has been posted on nhjustice.net.