Episode 2: Face to Face with Whitey Bulger

Continuing our conversation on the new book, Face to Face with Waddy Bulger, a former FBI agent, head of the Bulger Task Force, Rich Tehan is here along with Bob Ward, Boston 25's own, who wrote the book with Rich, and we've talked a little bit about the background in our earlier episode of how this all came together. But the big thing about this book that stands out from anything else that's been written about Waddy Bulger is how he managed to stay on the run for so long. And there's new information in here that folks haven't heard before, and it's pretty fascinating about how he did it, the cooperation he had from others, that sort of thing. So where do you wanna start at the beginning with this, Rich, because he's gone, he leaves, he gets the tip, he heads out of town, but he's very well-prepared for this in advance. Yes, yeah, he made his way to New York and was staying with Nadine Matos, who was the aunt of Kevin Weeks, under, utilizing the name Tom Baxter. Originally, he fled with Teresa Stanley, and then Teresa Stanley got homesick, and he delivered her back to Boston, which was dangerous all on its own. Picked up Catherine Gregg and went on the run for the final time. How was he able to pull that off? I wish I could tell you, Gene, I wish I could. A lot of guts. So he took the risk and knew he was, you know, could have been captured. That Baxter ID he had been working on long before he went on the run, and he called it his little project with Kevin Weeks. Thomas Baxter was a real person, another incident where there was a real birth certificate and they developed it, and he was actually getting a driver's license with those IDs and then renewing it, making sure it got renewed every four years. So that's how well he planned it. He also put money in safe deposit boxes around the country and around the world. So he was ready for the day when it came. But when he went on the lam with Teresa Stanley, he was no longer James Balger, he was Thomas Baxter. He already had the driver's license, said he got pulled over, he would just show it, and his name is Thomas Baxter. He's Thomas Baxter visiting Long Island, and they hit the road. So when he came back to Massachusetts to drop off Teresa Stanley and pick up Katherine Gregg, he had a really good cover. Somebody would have to rat him out to say, oh, by the way, Buddy Balger's gonna be over here. It was Thomas Baxter, and he was pretty good about that. So people are like, well, where was he this whole time? He wasn't in Santa Monica the whole time. Talk about Louisiana, how he wound up down there, and basically how he sort of ingrained himself into that community as well, and befriended some neighbors, and just seemed, again, like a harmless old guy and a harmless old couple. You know, he was traveling, and I think he picked up, if I remember correctly, he picked up a pamphlet for Grand Isle, Louisiana, and it was a seaside community. It was quiet, and he befriended a family by the name of Betro, bought them gifts, bought them appliances, and they just thought that he was a nice old guy from somewhere else, and continuing to use the Baxter name, but he manipulated the Betros in standard procedure for him, and was in Grand Isle, and then proceeded to go to Chicago, and then fled from Chicago on a train out to L.A., originally to Venice, California, and then down to Santa Monica. Yeah, he liked Santa Monica. Nice and quiet, a lot of affordability, correct? So go back to Louisiana for a second, Bob, because you got to write about this in pretty good detail in the book. There are a couple things in particular in that he wanted to buy a house, use some land, and he actually asked these, the Betros, hey, can I put it in your name? Isn't that amazing? And you mentioned buying them gifts, washer, dryers, and never once did they say, huh. Well, that we know of, right, that we know of. We don't know what kind of questions they may have had, because here's this guy that shows up magically. Because that just doesn't happen. It doesn't. Imagine a neighbor appearing in your life, and all of a sudden, he's a money tree, and can solve all your money problems and everything, but that's how he did it. That's how you buy silence, too. That's how you buy silence, and Grand Isle was way out of the way. He could have, when it was in the off-season, it's a tourist community, but in the off-season, the population really dwindles, and he could get a sense if there was law enforcement coming around to see, you know, asking questions, and it was a perfect place for him and Catherine Greig to hide out for a while. It's really amazing, a very, very smart thing for him to do. Yeah, well, I don't think anybody's pushing his intelligence with certain things, but you also wrote about something in the book which struck me, is that they had a dog they had to put down and he was talking about, he got really emotional, really upset about it, and you're saying to yourself, well, this is a guy who's involved in, what, 11 murders, including one where after he committed the acting, he went and took a nap, and now a dog being put down, he couldn't handle it, it just doesn't, you know, it doesn't balance, it doesn't jive, for a guy who would take a human life without thinking twice about it, but with a dog, it got him incredibly upset. Yeah, it's just, it's who he was, you know, extremely emotional at times, and there would be, you know, I think it showed how narcissistic he was, where he would be, you know, worried about a dog versus a human being, committing murders and extorting people and that type of thing, I think it just showed, you know, how manipulative and narcissistic he really was. I think it just shows how he could compartmentalize. You know, there were people, he had his family that loved him, you know, and never gave up on him, but he also had this vicious side that was just, you know, sociopath, and, you know, when the dog incident took place, that was the human side of James Bulger, that was James Bulger, but when Whitey came out, then all bets were off, you did not wanna cross him. But while he was in Grand Isle, he was Tom Baxter, he was somebody else, and he was able to compartmentalize that very, very well. I mean, he was still in contact with people back home, so people, you know, knew he was okay. Actually, his entire time that he was a fugitive, he was in touch with people in South Boston. Whether or not they knew exactly where he was, I'm not so sure about that, but he was in contact. That helped in Chicago, too, you talked about going from there, from Louisiana to Chicago, which was his next step, and there was an opportunity there to maybe track him down, or to grab him there, explain what happened with that situation. Yeah, it's our, you know, our investigation to compromise down there, and I think that James Bulger, you know, Whitey Bulger, did a good job at insulating himself, and would be provided information about anything that may, you know, allow him to be captured, and that included compromising the fugitive investigation, and allowed him to get away. All right, so let's go now to Santa Monica. You go there, you try to blend in. Well, you've gotta get an ID, you gotta find a place to live. There are usually things in place. I mean, not as easy it is to track people now as it was, you know, back then in the 90s, but still, at that point, wasn't all that difficult, so he had to take steps to protect himself and to remain anonymous. What are the things he did to make sure no one would be able to figure out who he really was? So when they arrived out in Venice and Santa Monica, they decided they were going to target homeless people, and specifically people that were his age, and Catherine's age, and he found, you know, Charlie Gasco, which was the name he was using on the apartment, and he found James Lawler, who looked just like Whitey Bulger, and so that was his key moment to buy his identity, and he took care of James Lawler for years, you know, bought him an apartment in West L.A., took his ID, took his DD-214 military license, and basically bought his identity, and even drove his car, which was a green Honda Accord, and opened a bank account and utilized the bank account. And he paid Gasco, too, the homeless man, to take his identity, so all of that money that he had stored, and, you know, he figured out a long time ago that money, money can get you where you need to be and get you what you want. Yeah, that's a lesson I think he learned as a child, and he practiced his entire life, and I, you know, sitting through the trial, and, you know, years later, and hearing the scope of his crimes, and the victims, a lot of them, not just homicide victims, but other people who he made money off of, that he preyed off of, either loan sharking, or the drug trade, or whatever it was, he made money wherever he could, and he knew the power of money and what it could do for him, so he just took that attitude, that way of thinking, and brought it with him into his fugitive life, and it was very successful. With the fake identities, talk about the other things that allowed him to do, medical perspective, I mean, it just basically allowed him to kind of live a normal life. Yeah, I mean, early on, he would walk across the border to obtain medications in Mexico early on, and then they developed this identity, which was so good, that it allowed Catherine to walk into any pharmacy and utilize the alias names to get him medications. She helped him stay on the run, and she was ultimately charged for it. Right, and after years and years, he's out there, he's in California, there really wasn't any close calls for him at all. I mean, there wasn't any, like, oh, this person, they recognize me, there was that one incident with the OJ trial, across the street from where he was, and he saw a big press gathering there, and he goes, oh, maybe that's for me, and they kind of snuck out of the hotel that was across the street, but other than that, he was just an average guy, he was Charlie Gasco, or Lawler, Jim Lawler, he wasn't Whitey Bulger anymore, he was somebody else, and that's how they carried themselves. They didn't draw attention to themselves, they were living in that tiny apartment, they were not buying property, they didn't have expensive cars, they didn't have expensive clothes. When you got into that apartment, you could see how spartan everything was, and the way that he lived, and he just was in plain sight, but he kind of melted into the background, so that, like I said, if any of us had walked by him on the sidewalk, maybe not you, but Gene and I, if we were out in Santa Monica at the time, we wouldn't even look in there, second look, right. Yeah, and when you got into the apartment, well, first of all, explain how you captured him, because we talked in the previous segment of the tip that came in, and you sort of were able to confirm, okay, that's him, then you had to get him out of the apartment in order to get him arrested. Sure, I mean, we received the tip in Boston, and L.A. received the tip as well. We had a command post set up. When we released the PSA, we had a fully-staffed command post receiving leads, and we did receive leads the first day from Biloxi, which, Biloxi, Mississippi, which turned out to be a lookalike. Then we received the tip that, utilizing the name Charlie Gasco and Carol Gasco on 103rd Street, Santa Monica, so as an investigator, you start doing your deep dive, and we could find nothing on them, nothing on public databases, nothing. And that's a big warning sign. Big, big red flag, yeah. And so I called out to L.A., I called out to a friend of mine, Scott Gariola, who led the task force there. He developed a plan. It wasn't my plan, it was his, and he was able to gain cooperation from the manager of the building, and came up with a ruse to pull him out of that apartment under the guise that somebody broke into a storage locker underneath, on the parking underneath the building. Lo and behold, he grabbed onto that and came down by himself. He was dressed in all white with a white fisherman's cap on, and Scott arrested him right there with no issue. For a guy who was so careful about everything, it seems surprising, in a way, that he would fall for that ruse. I mean, because if you go into his house, he was prepared for anything. You go through the house, you find firearms, there's money in the wall, there's all kinds of things, the shades are down. I mean, he was always sort of 24-7 on guard. You know, hindsight's 20-20, if he had not come out, we would have run the real risk of a barricade situation, and he would have- He went in there with as well-armed as he was, who knows what may have happened. In excess of 30 firearms, and several thousand rounds of ammunition. So, you know, I can't say what he would have done, but that was certainly a real risk that we were facing. And that's something I wonder about myself, is how did a guy this smart fall for that ruse? And when they caught him, he said to you on the plane, I knew this was the end. And I wonder, this is just me thinking aloud, I wonder if he, in his mind, was thinking, it's time to end this, that he was getting older, and it was time to come home, and didn't know how to do it, and all of a sudden this ruse happened. Because it is such a stunning way that he let his guard down, to get on that elevator and come down, and there's the FBI waiting for him. You know, for a guy that always prized his own security, and was very secret about everything- Maybe a subconscious surrender? I wonder about that. He had stated on the plane that if he was younger, he wouldn't have fallen for that. Now, that's a manipulative person talking, and so you have to take that with a grain of salt. What was your response? We get the call, we got it. I threw my phone across the room, and my kids were in the room, and I jumped up in the air, I looked crazy, but it was such a surreal moment, it was incredible. And then I packed a bag and headed out to LA And when you were getting ready to, heart pounding, you know, anxiety, anticipation of the interview, and meeting him, and talking to him, all of that. We had a strategy in mind for how we were going to interview him, and how we were going to approach it, and it all goes out the window. It's like any arrest plan. It all goes out the window, and you just do it on the fly. Well, it's fascinating, you get into those details in the book as well. Now, coming up in our next segment, or another segment coming up, I want to talk about the near misses here, and including a story that I was not aware of, and Bob, I don't know if you were, about how you were going to flush out his brother, Billy Bulger, the president of the Massachusetts Senate, later ran UMass, and he had a plan in place, but how it was quashed by somebody very high on the chain. That's coming up in our next segment, as we continue talking more about this terrific new book, Face to Face with Whitey Vogt.