Tag Archives: James “Whitey” Bulger

Catching up with modern Ireland: October

As of 30 October, traffic on this site surpassed our highest annual total, in 2016. Thanks very much for your readership and support, including several of you who emailed suggestions for this month’s roundup, which starts in arts and ends in crime:

  • Anna Burns became the first Northern Irish author to win the Man Booker prize, for Milkman, a novel about a young woman being sexually harassed by a powerful man during the Troubles. Authors John Banville, Anne Enright, and Roddy Doyle of the Irish Republic won the prize earlier.
  • On Broadway, Jez Butterworth’s “thrilling new play” The Ferryman “mines the folksy clichés of Irish archetypes — as garrulous, drink-loving, pugilistic souls — to find the crueler patterns of a centuries-old cycle of violence and vengeance,” according to this New York Times review.
  • “The extent to which many English people are ignorant about Ireland has become painfully clear. … I’ve noticed a tonal shift in the way I and other Irish people speak about the English. Our anger is more sincere. We are more ready to call them out on all those centuries of excess.” I Didn’t Hate the English — Until Now
  • An Bord Pleanála approved a 25-story residential tower in Cork city. If built, it would become the county’s tallest tower.
  • Ireland ranked 5th on the 2018 CAF World Giving Index, behind the U.S. and ahead of the U.K.
  • The Republic will impose tobacco-style health warning labels on alcohol as part of a sweeping package of restrictions intended to tackle one of the world’s worst rates of binge drinking.
  • “When confronted with a film that identified prime suspects in a massacre of unarmed British citizens [Loughinisland, County Down, in 1994], the authorities made no apparent effort to further question those suspects—and arrested the filmmakers instead.” Why Were a Filmmaker and a Journalist Arrested in Northern Ireland?
  • In a case that reminds me of the “agrarian outrages” of the late 19th century, north Kerry bachelor dairy farmer Michael Ferris, 63, of Rattoo, was found guilty of manslaughter for the 2017 death of John Anthony O’Mahony, an unmarried tillage farmer, 73, of Ardoughter, Ballyduff.  Ferris drove the pallet forks of his teleporter into the car occupied by O’Mahony, apparently enraged by the older man’s use of a crow banger, according to the Irish Examiner.
  • In America, the notorious James “Whitey” Bulger, 89, once head of Boston’s Irish mob, was killed in federal prison. Read my “Southie memories” piece from his 2013 trial.

James “Whitey” Bulger in 1959, early in his criminal career.

Boston’s Irish Americans, good and bad

The old gangster and the young mayor. Two recent stories out of Boston reflect the good and bad of the city’s Irish-American community.

James “Whitey” Bulger, convicted earlier this year for his role in 11 murders, drug trafficking, racketeering, money laundering, extortion, and other crimes, was sentenced this week. A federal judge handed the 84-year-old gangster two life sentences, plus five years.

The young punk. Bulger, 60 years ago on the eve of St. Patrick's Day. (AP Photo/Boston Police)

The young punk. Bulger, 60 years ago on the eve of St. Patrick’s Day. (AP Photo/Boston Police)

Bulger was a lifelong criminal and ruled Boston’s Irish underworld for most of the 1970s and 1980s. He fled from the city in 1994 and remained on the lam until 2011, when he was finally captured in California.

Here’s my August 15 post about living in South Boston, one of Irish-America’s landmark neighborhoods, toward the end of Bulger’s reign of terror.

The better story from Boston is the election of Martin J. Walsh as mayor. The 46-year-old is a lifelong resident of the city’s Dorchester neighborhood, another heavily Irish enclave. Both of his parents are from rural townlands of western County Galway.

Marty Walsh

Marty Walsh

Walsh’s recovery from substance abuse was part of the Boston campaign. He is among the type of people referenced in my earlier blog post about Southie.

Irish Central’s Niall O’Dowd wrote a flattering column about the mayor-elect:

“He has authenticity written all over him, the kid from Dorchester who put together an extraordinary coalition of Irish and minorities to win the election. … This is a man who survived childhood cancer, alcoholism, a minor bullet wound in a drive by shooting.”

Walsh’s recovery from substance abuse is certainly a better story than the crack and alcohol-fueled mess of Mayor Rob Ford in Toronto.

Who knows how long Ford will survive at City Hall. Walsh is scheduled to take the oath of office in Boston on Jan. 6.

Southie: memories of an Irish-Catholic neighborhood

The recently concluded trial of James “Whitey” Bulger has stirred memories of living in South Boston, better known as “Southie,” once a landmark neighborhood of Irish America.

The 83-year-old Bulger, former leader of the notorious Winter Hill Gang, was convicted on 31 of 32 counts of murder and racketeering. He ruled Boston’s Irish underworld for most of the 1970s and 1980s from a Southie bar called Triple O’s, skillfully playing his FBI contacts against the city’s Italian Mafia and other criminal gangs.

I lived in Boston from 1985 to 1992, including three years in Southie. In addition to Whitey, the other big Irish-American figures in the neighorhood included his younger brother, William, president of the Massachusetts state Senate; and Raymond Flynn, the Boston mayor.

Then, the city’s busing crisis was finally drawing to a close. Most of the court battles and violence focused on South Boston High School, a block from my apartment. [See Stephen Burke’s blog/novel “The Chieftains of South Boston.”]

It was impossible to walk the streets of Southie without hearing stories of the Bulger brothers; Whitey, the gangland criminal who allegedly handed out Thanksgiving turkeys to the poor; and Billie, the intellectual lawmaker known for hosting an annual St. Patrick’s Day political roast.

I enjoyed the working-class grittiness of Southie, a stub of peninsula jutting into Boston Harbor. There is a great waterfront park called Castle Island [a variation of the Kerry town] and fingers of ship channels and industrial slips. It was a great place to go for a run. I also exercised at a community center named after former Mayor James Michael Curley, an Irish-American legend.

I loved the Irish Catholic feel of Southie. There were three parishes within a few miles: Sts. Peter & Paul; St. Monica/St. Augustine’s; and Gate of Heaven — “Gatie” as it was affectionately known — where I attended Mass. If you whispered a “Hail Mary” each time you passed a statue of the Blessed Mother, the prayer would stay on your lips the length of any walk through Southie.

Of course, this was before the 2002 Boston Globe investigation that uncovered widespread clergy sexual abuse of children throughout the Archdiocese of Boston.

St. Patrick's Day parade in South Boston, 2008. Image from Boston.com

St. Patrick’s Day parade in South Boston, 2008. Image from Boston.com

There was a joke in Southie that everyone living there was in the CIA: Catholic, Irish and alcoholic. Booze, drugs, and Whitey Bulger fueled a lot of crime in Southie, especially its public housing projects. I remember seeing a mural on the wall of one tenement: the Notre Dame Fighting Irish mascot with the middle finger extended on one hand, a clenched fist in the other. The Irish republican math equation “26 + 6 = 1” was common graffiti.

Many of the alcoholics and drugs addicts in the neighborhood were striving for sobriety in places such as Answer House and Gavin House, which taught the fundamentals of 12-step recovery. David Foster Wallace later immortalized Boston A.A. in his 1996 book, Infinite Jest.

I remember the Aer Lingus flights swooping low over Southie to land at Logan on the other side of the harbor. The Irish tricolor was as ubiquitous as the stars and stripes; the shamrock as common as the stylized “B” of the Boston Red Sox.

Southie was a place of police sirens and church bells, of shouted rage and hearty laughter. The neighborhood was full of cops, firefighters, longshoremen, teachers, pressmen, iron workers and commercial fishermen. Many of the moms were much too young, and kids were on every corner.

Whitey Bulger fled Boston in 1994, about the same time U.S. News and World Report reported Southie had one of the highest concentrations of white poverty in the nation. But young urban professionals, or “yuppies,” already were beginning to discover the neighborhood before I moved to Texas in January 1993. By the time U.S. Sen. John Kerry was nominated for president at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, the transformation was nearly complete, drawing media attention at the time.

Nine years later, during Bulger’s trial, the AP reported:

Triple O’s, a hole-in-the-wall bar where Bulger allegedly collected unpaid loans, is now a sushi bar. Across the street is a Starbucks.

Or here is what the City of Boston says about Southie:

Once a predominantly Irish-Catholic community, in recent years South Boston has become increasingly desirable among young professionals and families who are attracted to the neighborhood’s strong sense of community and quick access to downtown and public transportation.

My wife and I traveled to Boston in March [2013], a few days before the annual St. Patrick’s parade and a month before the Boston Marathon bombing. We stayed at the Seaport Boston Hotel in a section of Southie near downtown. What used to be the hard-scrabbled industrial waterfront was now filled with upscale hotels, condos, restaurants, and shops.

I didn’t get to see much of my old neighborhood during our short stay. It didn’t matter. The Southie I remember had changed a long time ago; for good, for ill, and forever.

(This piece was lightly re-edited on 30 October 2018.)