With a biopic coming soon about the infamous gangster, I’m wondering how big he was in organized crime. Was he comparable to someone like John Gotti or Joe Colombo? Was he a big boss or just a thug? Did the Patriarca family, New England’s mafia family, fear him, respect him, or regard him as a violent, but small-time, hoodlum?
Well, there is a movie with some info on him. (Yanno, if Bing Google Yahoo Wikie didn’t help.)
He was big in Boston, but Boston has never been big for the Mob. It’s bigger in Providence. It depends on how important you think Boston is.
In any case, Bulger basically dismantled the Italian Mob in Boston, affecting RI too, by using corrupt FBI guys, and State Police, and killing people fingered by those guys. The story is truly Shakespearian. He is one of the most successful criminals in history to my thinking.
Patriarca didn’t know what Bulger was doing exactly. It was a complicated situation with a lot of mobsters in play. You’ll have to read up on the details.
I envy you: You can read Black Mass now for the first time. It’s a blast. Do it before you see the movie.
When a Boston loan shark complained about being shaken down (by Bulger), he went to see Gerry Anguilo (Raymond Patriarca’s Boss of the North End of Boston). Angiulo said he could do nothing. so even Patriarca (the mafia boss of New England) could not control Bulger.
Bulger and the Winter Hill gang were on top of the Boston mafia and more powerful than the Italian mob in the city. Bulger used his contact with the FBI to take over the Patriarca’s rackets. He did not really run the rackets, however and was mostly a shakedown guy. However, they were not at the same level as the Gambino family in terms of number of soldiers or profitability. After Gotti and associates killed Paul Castellano, and became head of the family he ordered murders but never personally participated. Bulger was more personally involved in the crimes of his gang.
“Whitey Bulger” sounds like the punchline to a dick joke.
Or the name of a Hobbit ;).
Note that the Winter Hill Gang isn’t part of the Mafia. They were originally an Irish gang which also absorbed some Italians gangsters.
They would be generically termed “an organized crime gang” rather than a Mafia gang specifically.
A local newscaster referred to him as “Whitey Bugler.”
Young Jewish kid makes a hit on the urban jazz scene.
I really don’t think it made any difference how big a thug he was to the people that lost love ones to him. He was a cold blooded killer and that was horrible enough ! He was big enough to had a movie made of him .
True but it is still a valid question. The question was whether he was closer to being a large-scale mafia (type) Don or someone that was very successful at running a street gang. I think the answer is much closer to the latter. He was much closer to a notorious gang leader than something you would see in the Godfather. The real Italian Boston Mafia hated Whitey and vice-versa. He served as an FBI informant for years to help destroy their operations. One of the main motivations was that it enabled him to take over parts of their operation once small vacuums of control were created.
Besides the murder and intimidation, he also engaged in opportunistic thuggery as well. Someone once bought a winning $14 million lottery ticket at Whitey’s liquor store. Conveniently, the winner and Whitey were suddenly “close friends” or “partners” if you will and they ended up splitting “their” winnings four ways. Whitey’s brother William was also a Massachusetts State Senator and then the President of the University of Massachusetts. Everything I have ever heard suggests that William was the straight arrow in the family but did not go out of his way to help the authorities capture his brother.
I encountered slightly different spin on that in an article on using the lottery for money-laundering.
It suggested that Bulger had paid for his share of the ticket, and paid more than the value of the prize he received, as a means of laundering the money.
One of the major problems professional criminals face is explaining to the government where their money came from without admitting to a crime. Reportedly, major drug traffickers are willing to pay 50% to have a reportable source for their income. So in this scenario, Bulger received 20 annual payments of almost $90,000 each, totaling to around $1.8 million. He would have been willing to pay the ticketholder twice that (under the table, in money the ticketholder would be unable to explain where he got).
I believe it was listed as “never proven”, but strongly suspected, that Bulger and associates had bought their half of that ticket.
(Although it makes more sense to me that Bulger just insisted on half the winnings, and the ticketholder wasn’t going to be rich enough to get everyone he cared about out of harms way so he agreed.)
I’m reading BlCk Mass right now, basically the Boston mafia considered Whitey Bulger’s crew to be part of their organization. Bulger didn’t feed the FBI much more than gossip, His partner Stephen Femmi said they gave the Feds shit and got gold in return.
Right, nobody knows the exact details of the deal. I don’t think it was ever believed that Whitey actually rigged the lottery. It just so happened that one of his customers won it and then he made so sort of “deal” after the fact.
Some people are stupid and would take a cash payment upfront in such circumstances but I still can’t see how there wouldn’t be any extreme coercion involved. The payment in question got him many times his initial “investment” over time whereas the real winner could have just taken the full payments because it was enough of a payout to last for a lifetime and then some. It isn’t even good money laundering because the details about the winners were fully public and Whitey’s payments on the winnings were eventually stopped by the feds even though it took an embarrassingly long time (years) for them to move on that.
And during that time Whitey had a legal income of record, which is the point.
Not just that, but may have shielded his brother and then lied about it, eventually costing him his gig at UMass: William Bulger - Wikipedia. In the late Eighties, he came to my college to guest-teach a poli sci class. Very shrewd but seemed like a nice guy. I’ll be very interested to see what Benedict Cumberpatch does in the role.
There’s an old saw that Irish families sent one son to the priesthood, one to the cops and (sometimes) one to the political arena… leaving the rest free to make money any way they saw fit.
And strongly influence another that won 4 Oscars.
He’s also been the inspiration for a half dozen characters on various TV shows.
There were also plans for a Damon/Affleck film about him but that’s likely not going to happen for a while, if ever.
Yeah, he’s a big deal.
To take that a bit further because it adds color to the situation. Billy wasn’t just a state senator, he was the majority leader of the senate for 20 years and arguably the most powerful political figure in Massachusetts during that period.
It was said that Whitey ran the Winter Hill Gang and Billy ran the Beacon Hill gang.
Billy also tried to defund the state police unit that was investigating organized crime and Stephen Flemmi, Whitey’s partner, lived in the house next door to Billy.