Tag Archives: Boston

WHAT REALLY CAUSED THE SALEM WITCH HUNTS

The Salem witch hunts and mass executions of innocent victims falsely accused of sorcery is an American historical black mark. Through June to October of 1692, Puritan authorities in Salem, Massachusetts hung nineteen citizens after trying and convicting them for witchcraft. They crushed another man to death with heavy stones and let five others perish—shackled in chains. Two imprisoned souls were mere children.

Today, all Salem witch hunt victims are officially exonerated. This terrible debacle became the poster case for trumped-up accusations and wrongful convictions. In fact, the term “witch hunt” is symbolic for going after those profiled for a vengeance need or paranoid forces “out to get someone”. Even a past United States president Twittered-on about witch hunts.

This horrific travesty of malicious injustice was an American turning point. Historians call the Salem witch trials the rock upon which theocracy shattered. They were the perfect storm of isolationism, religious extremism, fanaticism, and divided socio-economic structure. The witch trials were also unprecedented as bad jurisprudence and horrible miscarriages of justice.

Today, few educated or rational people believe in evil witchcraft or black magic. (Modern peaceful Wiccan practitioners are a different matter.) That old destructive medieval and ignorant mindset sieved from America after the Salem witch trials. But, for over three centuries, few people understood why the disaster happened. Various theories suggested Freudian mass-hysterics, a widespread fungus causing mind-altering behavior, and even meddling by alien forces aligned with the dark side.

Now the truth is out there. A meticulous, scientific study by two American academics published in the book Salem Possessed wraps up the witch hunt reason. It’s not some supernatural power or psychedelic drug. The answer lies in a complex mix of sociology, geography, demography, human psychology, genetics, pathology, and forensic science.

Something far more sinister than sorcery really caused the Salem witch hunts.

History of the Salem Witch Hunts

It trigged with teenagers. In January 1692, three bored girls played a game similar to today’s Ouija Board. They cracked eggs and separated the whites in a pan of cold water, then used imagination to decipher patterns divulging hidden secrets and foretelling future events. They got carried away. Soon they were writhing in fits and cramping into twisted contortions.

The girls were relatives of Salem Village vicar Samuel Parris, a Massachusetts Bay Puritan parishioner who referred the distorted girls to a local physician. The doctor found no medical cause for the girls’ discomfort. He suggested it was work of witchcraft and turned it back to the minister. The reverend sided with Satanic superstition and went about extracting accusations from the young girls.

They implicated three Salem women for bewitching and causing their erratic behavior—Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba. Good was known for tardy church attendance. Osborne was a loose-moraled beggar. And Tituba was a Carib slave house servant. The trio were hardly credible to Salem’s upper crust and certainly suitable scapegoats not equipped to defend themselves.

Good and Osborne fervently denied being witches. Despite intensive interrogation in magistrate’s court, they held to their denials. Tituba, on the other hand, confessed. She gave wild accounts of signing Satan’s book and offered crazy tales of human hogs, great black dogs, red cats, and yellow birds. Tituba also named of other Salem witches.

From there, everyone got carried away. Authorities rounded-up scores of witch suspects, hauling them before interrogatories. More people—women and men—confessed under duress and named more names. In a few months, nearly two hundred “witches” were accused, hunted down, and arrested in Salem and neighboring communities. Quickly, the arrests turned to trials and mass hangings began.

The 17th Century Salem Legal System

1692 was an important year in 17th Century Salem’s legal system. It coincided with a new charter for the Province of Massachusetts Bay following the 1680s King William War. The colonists were deeply divided in Salem and the surrounding area’s social structure. It was protective Puritism vs. progressive private enterprise. The King’s newly-appointed Governor, William Phip, arrived with the charter in January,1692—just as the witchcraft accusations arose.

The spiraling sequence of accusations, arrests and confession led to mass hysteria and a “thronged” legal system. To accommodate justice, Governor Phip convened a Special Court of Oyer (hearing) and Terminer (deciding). He appointed magistrates, judges and sheriffs based on local recommendations by powerful people in the religious sphere.

The Salem witch trials occurred long before the United States Constitution was a gleam in revolutionary eyes. Rules of evidence stemmed from English common law and principles based on religious doctrine. For witchcraft cases, evidence came from accusatory mouths of uneducated and manipulated common folk, not from corroborated independent and credible witnesses.

Once a citizen claimed their loss or discomfort was witchcraft caused, they laid a complaint against the accused before an appointed magistrate. If the complaint appeared credible by the magistrate’s standard, the accused was arrested and brought in for mandatory interrogation. This was well before the right to remain silent.

Interrogations were public events. Open questions by a panel and audience members given standing were standard procedure. Every effort pressed the accused to confess and reveal other witches. It was a Puritanical purging of Salem’s evils and a chance to rid society of undesirables. Once a grand jury heard interrogation evidence, they preferred an indictment and the ‘witch” was set on trial.

Witch trials depended on what’s called “spectral evidence”. This was testimony of the afflicted who claimed to see the apparition of the accused witch appear in a ghostly form while performing witchcraft upon them. Theologically, the court evidence relied on whether or not the accused gave the Devil permission to use their shape. The Salem witch courts contended the Devil could not perform evil acts using a person’s shape without that person’s expressed permission—therefore, if the afflicted complainant had seen the accused’s shape—it was in facto proof the accused was guilty of witchcraft and complicit with the Devil. According to Puritan law, the witch must die.

This convoluted logic resulted in immediate hangings and a compression death through layered stoning. It also caused deaths of those awaiting trial while shackled in dungeons. In three months, twenty-four innocent people were dead and many more awaited similar fates. That’s until someone accused Governor Phip’s wife of being a witch.

Suddenly, the executions stopped. Phip ordered an evidentiary review. It determined spectral evidence was inadmissible, noting it was not credible and highly prejudicial to the accused. Phip stayed the remaining execution warrants and commuted sentences, essentially freeing all those facing witchcraft allegations. Within three years, the Province of Massachusetts Bay officially exonerated all accused witches and ordered a consolidating day of fast and remembrance.

Cause of the Salem Witch Hunts

Many historians and writers pondered how normally rational people got so swept by the wind of witchcraft craze. Certainly, there was a mass psychological hysteria and paranoia. But the actual reason—the root cause—of why so many witch accusers and so many accused witches behaved so bizarrely was unknown. For years, suspected causes for bewitched symptoms like convulsing and hallucinating fell on the Claviceps purpurea fungus found in Puritan bread. It’s known for LSD-like side effects.

But a bread acid trip didn’t cut current standards, even though the mass hysteria was long explained by archaic superstitions of wanton witchcraft and the Devil’s demons. Everybody ate Puritan bread in Salem, and only a few presented weird symptoms. No, a rational look at the Salem witch hunts needed further investigation by reasonable and independent thinkers.

That rationality came from two Harvard-educated history professors at the University of Massachusetts who wrote the intriguing book Salem Possessed. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s work took an in-depth look at the social, economic, and geographical factors affecting Salem’s citizens back when the witch hunts started. They also took a forensic approach to the psychological and pathological influences causing the complainant’s symptoms.

Boyer and Nissenbaum came to an astounding social conclusion. However, they weren’t the first to arrive there. In 1867, New England historian Charles W. Upham produced an accurate map of how Salem Village appeared in 1692. Then he plotted the houses where witch accusers and accused witches lived. Astonishingly, almost all accusers lived on the west side of Salem Village. The accused lived on the east side.

Salem Possessed’s authors concluded that if the Devil had come to Salem, he was being very choosy about which homes he visited. No, they concluded. The reason for the witch hunts had to lie in Salem’s history, and they were right.

Salem is one of the oldest European settlements in North America’s New England region. As the crow flies, it’s less than twenty miles northeast of downtown Boston. English immigrants of the Puritan faith first occupied Salem to establish a community based on their conservative views to protect old ways threatened by the age of Enlightenment and the then-liberal Anglican Church.

The Puritans were agricultural people. Naturally, they chose to settle in the best farmland which lay to the west of Massachusetts Bay. Over the course of eighty years—roughly four generations back then—the Puritans built a religious and agricultural society centered around what they called Salem Village. Today, the area is known as Danvers, Massachusetts which is a different jurisdiction from present-day Salem.

During the mid-1600s, a harbor community developed on Massachusetts Bay, east of the village. It became known as Salem Town. Commercially progressive settlers occupied Salem Town and focused on making money rather than praising the Lord and preserving old ways. As Salem Town grew, it pressed westward and crossed the border into the village. That didn’t sit well with the Puritan villagers.

Boyer and Nissenbaum uncovered a tangled history of feuds, jealousy, mistrust and hostility between the west Salem villagers and their eastern invaders. West Salem had two tightly knit prominent families who married within. The easterners were a mix of newcomers who married outside family lines. For some reason, everyone who displayed physical symptoms of being witch victims came from the two prominent Puritan families.

From a socio-economic and religious point, it’s clear the impact of commercial capitalism and the shifting role of the church left the backward Puritans threatened by their modern newcomers. It led to unbearable tensions which broke once the first bewitched symptoms showed in January of 1692. That opened a floodgate of superstitious opportunity to kill the eastern Salem villagers.

Salem Possessed makes a powerful argument that human personality partially caused the Salem witch hunts. If that be the Devil in humanity, then so be it. However, the Devil isn’t a good forensic reason for why the teen girls experienced peculiar symptoms like mood swings, cramps, and hysterical contortions. Something else was at work, and the pathology points at genetics.

Putting it bluntly, the Puritans were inbred. Their closed circle was more than religious and economic. They married within and secluded their gene pool. Huntington’s Chorea or Huntington’s Disease is common in people with dysfunctional genes. It’s a hereditary neurodegenerative illness with physical, cognitive, and emotional symptoms exactly like the west Salem village girls experienced. The gene mutation creates a protein that kills cells in the brain’s cerebral cortex.

Many adults in the Puritan community already had some stage of Huntington’s Disease. That impaired their thought processes as well as their offspring’s. Because of longevity in the Salem region and that power still clung to the Puritan Church in the late 1600s, Puritans made up the judicial force that persecuted the alleged witches. Their personality and pathology dysfunctions are what really caused the Salem witch hunts.

For three centuries, lore held that the witches of Salem were hung from scaffolding in the center of today’s Gallows Park. That’s not correct. Several years ago, the Gallows Project funded by the University of Massachusetts did a thorough research based on historical records and advanced forensic techniques like GPS analyzation and ground penetrating radar.

They conclusively identified the execution spot as a tree at Proctor’s Ledge. It’s right beside a Walgreens, and the community built a small memorial honoring the wrongfully accused witches of Salem.

BROWN DEATH — BOSTON’S MONSTROUS MOLASSES MASSACRE

A massive molasses storage tank ruptured in downtown Boston, Massachusetts at 12:40 pm on Wednesday, January 15, 1919. 2.3 million gallons of liquid sludge, weighing over 12,000 tons, burst from the receptacle and sent a surge of brown death onto Boston’s streets. The sickly sweet wave was 40 feet high and moved at 35 miles per hour. When the sugary flood stopped, 21 people were dead and over 150 suffered injuries. Property damage was in the millions, and the legal outcome changed business practices across America. Sadly, the Boston Molasses Disaster, or Boston Molasses Flood, was perfectly preventable.

The molasses tank (reservoir or container, if you will) belonged to the Purity Distillery Company owned by United States Industrial Alcohol (USIA). It was 50 feet tall (five stories), 90 feet in diameter, and had a circumference of 283 feet. At the time, the Boston molasses tank was the city’s largest liquid storage facility. It was also the deadliest.

In January 1919, Boston was a happening place. The U.S. concluded World War I efforts two months earlier and was on the verge of Prohibition being enacted. Alcohol was in huge demand, both recreational for making spirits and industrial for manufacturing explosives. Molasses was a staple source for both, and Boston was an ideal spot for storing molasses.

Through Purity Distilling, USIA owned a strategic location on Commercial Street at Boston’s north end waterfront. It’s now a public place called Langone Park. The tank site was adjacent to a wharf where longshoremen could unload molasses tankers arriving from sugar cane plantations in the West Indies, pump the slurry mix to the receptacle, and then load it into rail cars when needed by USIA’s Purity distillery in Cambridge, west of downtown Boston.

The tank’s construction began in 1915, but it suffered delays. Completion occurred in 1917 and it went into operational use with little testing applied. Immediately, molasses leaks appeared at riveted seams where the metal panels overlapped. Many nearby residents, mostly Italian immigrants, complained of the unsightly mess and unfavorable smell. USIA’s response was not to fix the leaks but paint the tank brown  to mask the molasses stains.

People complained about more than the appearance and the odor. Employees who worked around the tank heard creaks and groans coming from within the molasses storage unit. They felt shudders and shakes when the tank was loaded and unloaded, and they sounded their concerns about the structural integrity of the hastily-built monstrosity. Their voices fell on deaf management ears.

On January 12, 1919, the shaky tank took on a 1.3 million gallon load of Cuban molasses. The tank was at its highest-ever capacity with an overall weight of 26 million pounds. The molasses sat until the Wednesday morning when the sun came up and began an unusual temperature gain for that time of year.

Without warning, at 40 minutes past noon, the molasses tank ruptured at its bottom seams. A massive force sent metal debris flying as heavy-weight shrapnel with the gooey molasses mess radiating in a four-story-high wave knocking buildings off their foundations, smashing their wood frames to smithereens, toppling freight cars, and killing these innocent people:

Patrick Breen, age 44
William Brogan, age 61
Bridget Clougherty, age 65
Stephen Clougherty, age 34
John Callahan, age 43
Maria Di Stasio, age 10
William Duffy, age 58
Peter Francis, age 64
Flaminio Gallerani, age 37
Pasquale Iantosca, age 10
James Kenneally, age 48
Eric Laird, age 17
George Lehaye, age 38
James Lennon, age 64
Ralph Martin, age 21
James McMullen, age 46
Cesar Nicolo, age 32
Thomas Noonan, age 43
Peter Shaughnessy, age 18
John Seiberlich, age 69
Michael Sinnott, age 78

First responders were overcome with one main obstacle. That was trying to move in the 2 to 3-foot deep pool of semi-liquid molasses that thickened as the day cooled and the goo dropped to the ambient temperature of Boston’s wintertime. It took 4 days to recover nearly-unrecognizable bodies and decontaminate them so identification could be made.

Medical workers established a field hospital to treat assorted injuries like broken bones, crushed organs, and obstructed airways. Cleanup efforts took months. And the molasses smell remained ingrained in Boston’s air for years. Today, over 100 years later, local legend says you can still whiff molasses on hot summer nights.

The Investigation and Legalities Began

Someone had to be accountable for Boston’s monstrous molasses massacre. Those were the people managing USIA’s storage facility in North Boston, and the process would take six years. Eventually, no individual was prosecuted for a criminal act although the utter negligence displayed in (lack of) planning, overseeing, and commissioning the molasses tank’s construction was outrageous.

Two factors drove the need for such a large molasses container. First was the marketplace because, at the Roaring Twenties onset, there was a highly-profitable demand for recreational and industrial alcohol. The USIA executives wanted to capitalize on molasses-based alcohol products as quickly as possible. Strike while the iron’s hot, as they say.

Second was the onset of Prohibition. The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified the day after the Boston disaster, and to be in effect one year later. After that, the manufacture of recreational alcohol would be illegal and USIA wanted to stockpile as much as possible.

To corner the American molasses market, USIA needed bulk buying power and an economical supply chain including a convenient storage facility. They found it at Boston Harbor, and they relied on one man to oversee the construction project.

Arthur P. Jell was the USIA’s comptroller—their treasurer. Jell wasn’t an architect or an engineer. He had no basic building experience let alone constructing something as large and complex as a steel container capable of safely holding 12,000 tons, or 2.3 million gallons, of a substance weighing 1.4 times the mass of water.

Jell was an accountant. He was a bean counter and thought like one. Jell’s primary focus was on costs and speed. He was also on a shaky career footing.

Arthur Jell was under orders to get the tank built and get it built fast. The USIA bosses assigned Jell to lead the tank project in 1915 which was the early stages of WWI where steel supplies were running scarce through high wartime productions. By 1917, Jell only had the tank’s concrete foundation done. He was running late and under immense pressure to receive a pre-ordered and on-the-way Caribbean molasses shipment of 700,000 gallons.

If the tank wasn’t ready, the USIA executives would have to find another storage facility (of which there were none that size in America) or dump the molasses at sea. Either way was a major loss for USIA and for Arthur Jell himself.

Jell got the tank operational just in time to save the shipment. Through the low-bid contractor, Hammond Iron Works, the molasses receptacle was hammered together and filled without proper testing. And because the tank was a “receptacle” by definition—not a building or a bridge— the City of Boston did not require a permit for anything other than the foundation.

The tank’s structure had no approved plans, sealed drawings, listed specifications, professional oversight, or approved inspections and tight commissioning procedures. The project depended on a tight-fisted, building-ignorant manager and a corner-cutting construction company operating on a profit-first agenda.

Hindsight is usually 20/20. Stephen Puleo does hindsight carefully in his scholarly 2003 book on the Great Boston Molasses Flood titled Dark Tide. Here’s a quote from the book’s description:

For the first time, the story of the flood is told here in its full historical context, from the tank’s construction in 1915 through the multiyear lawsuit that followed the disaster. Dark Tide uses the gripping drama of the flood to examine the sweeping changes brought about by World War I, Prohibition, the anarchist movement, immigration, and the expanding role of big business in society. To understand the flood is to understand America of the early twentieth century – the flood was a microcosm of America, a dramatic event that encapsulated something much bigger, a lens through which to view the major events that shaped a nation. It’s also a chronicle of the courage of ordinary people, from the firemen caught in an unimaginable catastrophe to the soldier-lawyer who presided over the lawsuit with heroic impartiality.

Stephen Puleo’s Dark Tide does a deep dive into the structural failures and cause-effect details for why the molasses tank ruptured. So does a highly-respected company called Think Reliability that does cause-mapping, or root-cause analysis, of significant events. Here are the main points of what occurred to cause the failure of USIA’s giant molasses tank in downtown Boston:

Inadequate Design — The tank’s steel walls were half as thick as best engineering practices should have designed them. This was to save cost. The rivets were inferior, too small, and improperly installed. Again, to save cost as well as speed the timeline. The steel panels had low manganese levels which made the tank brittle at low temperatures. Once again, cost saving.

Inadequate Supervision — Arthur Jell did not understand construction methods and engineering standards. He focused on cost and speed instead of reliability and safety. Hammond Iron Works focused on profit and were not supervised or overseen by proper drawings and specifications as well as competent inspectors. Once more, speed and cost drove the bus with no regard for end-use safety.

Environmental Influence — Setting aside the bad design and lack of oversight, Boston’s environment was a wild card. On January 12, when the tank took the 1.3 million gallon Cuban load, there was a smaller amount of cold molasses sitting at the tank’s base. The Cuban molasses was heated on the tanker so it could be pumped to the storage receptacle. The thermal inequality of hot molasses sitting on cold molasses started a fermentation reaction that off-gassed carbon dioxide and raised the tank’s internal pressure. When the morning temperature unusually rose on January 15 (from overnight of +2F to 40F at noon) the pressure exceeded the steel strength.

Ignored Warning Signs — The creaks and groans and worker warnings went unheard or ignored by persons in USIA’s management. To “paint the tank brown” rather than fix the problem would amount to gross negligence in the current industrial safety world. The courts, today, would think along the same lines and it’s from the litigation following Boston’s monstrous molasses massacre that safety rules—specifically in the design, permitting, and inspection of building projects significantly changed. For the better.

Civil litigation began immediately following the Boston Molasses Disaster. An abundance of lawyers filed 117 separate lawsuits against United States Industrial Alcohol and its subsidiary Purity Distillery. The suits amalgamated into one class-act procedure which was the first time in American history that a class-action of this magnitude began. It set the stage for all other class-action or representative-action legal proceedings.

It took six years to wind through the courts. USIA used the defense that the tank had been an act of sabotage—domestic terrorism—committed by Italian anarchists. There was absolutely no proof of this, but the defense tactic took hold the day following the tank rupture. The Boston papers reported that the tank had “exploded” which indicated some sort of explosive device being set off rather than natural forces of pressure exceeding containment and carried out by gravity.

The presiding judge didn’t buy the explosion argument. In his judgment finding complete fault on behalf of Purity and USIA, the judge wrote, “The tank was wholly insufficient in point of structural strength, insufficient to meet either legal or engineering requirements. The scene was unparalleled in the severity of the damage inflicted to the person and property from the escape of liquid from any container in a great city.” In conclusion, the judge ordered USIA to pay the plaintiffs $628,000 which is approximately $10.12 million in today’s currency.

Aside from the legal impact, American building processes changed after the Boston Molasses Flood. Jurisdiction upon jurisdiction required building projects to be professionally designed, properly constructed, and strictly inspected by competent authorities. Today, all major works are intricately designed and approved with architect/engineering stamps and carried out by qualified workers under legal permits.

And today, the site of the brown death—Boston’s monstrous molasses massacre—is a pretty park containing a Little League baseball field, a playground, and bocce courts. There’s a small plaque paying tribute to its horrific past.

KUDOS TO WHOEVER WHACKED GANGSTER JAMES “WHITEY” BULGER

One of the world’s most infamous criminals is dead. 89-year-old James Joseph Bulger, aka Whitey—once head of the Boston Mob—was murdered inside Hazelton Federal Penitentiary in West Virginia on October 30, 2018. Authorities transferred Bulger from a Florida maximum security jail to the WV medium security facility less than 12 hours earlier. The wheelchair-bound, high-risk geriatric inmate got placed in general population. Credible prison sources say other prisoners quickly isolated and beat Bulger beyond recognition using the “lock-in-a-sock” technique, tearing his eyes from their sockets and cutting out his tongue. It was a signature end for the notorious American gangster.

Whitey Bulger was more than a larger-than-life mobster—he was a devious, double-crossing sonofabitch convicted of eleven brutally cruel murders inflicted on organized criminal associates during the 70s and 80s when South Boston’s Irish Mob ruled town. Bulger also acted as a top FBI informant and turned into a Bureau embarrassment while he continued his criminal enterprise under federal government immunity. Just before indictment on racketeering charges, Bulger’s FBI handler tipped him off. That corrupt information about pending arrest gave Bulger years on the lam before he was taken down in 2011.

My opinion is Whitey Bulger deserved what he got, and kudos to whoever whacked him. It was long overdue. Bulger should have been executed years earlier had the State of Massachusetts retained the death penalty and nabbed him. However, his murder inside the joint raises the question of what protection a high-profile and vulnerable prison inmate like Whitey Bulger is entitled to.

That Bulger died less than a day after arrival at Hazelton suggests powers within the U.S. Bureau of Prisons intentionally placed Bulger in peril. It’s likely no coincidence convicted Boston mafia hitman, Fotios “Freddy” Geas, was on the scene and in the cell when Bulger died. Currently, Freddy sits on ice. He’s in the hole pending an investigation.

Before examining who in the system is accountable for setting up an old con-man’s death, let’s look at Bulger’s past and what he did as a sociopathic killer.

James Bulger was born in 1929 at Everett in North Boston. His father was injured in an accident and unable to work, placing the family in poverty. From an early age, James Bulger bounced between relatives’ homes and whoever would put up with his delinquent behavior. Nicknamed “Whitey” for his platinum hair, Bulger preferred being called “Jimmy”. However, the name Whitey stuck and it stayed with him throughout his criminal career.

Whitey Bulger developed a nasty reputation as a cruel dude. At fourteen, he was a seasoned street fighter and enforcer for the South Boston Shamrock gang. Also at fourteen, Bulger went to jail for theft and burglary. He was placed in adult population and learned from some of the country’s most experienced cons.

Bulger was in and out of prison during the war years. He tried reforming in 1948 by joining the U. S. Air Force, but that didn’t work. Whitey Bulger was jailed in military prison for assaults and being absent without leave. To get rid of Bulger, the Air Force released him with an honorable discharge in 1952. He went back to the streets of South Boston.

Whitey Bulger graduated to extortions, drug trafficking and armed robberies. By 1956, he was incarcerated for robbery in Atlanta but was transferred to Alcatraz prison at San Francisco. Bulger was too much for Alcatraz authorities to handle so they sent him to the super-maximum pen at Leavenworth. He made parole in 1965 and never saw another day in jail for 46 years.

Back in Boston, Whitey Bulger joined the Killeen gang who were established pimps and bookies as well as experienced loan sharks and bone bashers. During a gang war between the Killeens and their rival Mullen gang, Bulger committed his first known murder by shooting an unarmed man between the eyes, then biting off the end of his nose. Things heated up for the Killeens and Bulger, so he turn-coated to the powerful South Boston mob. Bulger joined the Winter Hill gang and went about setting up the Killeens to eliminate their leaders.

Whitey Bulger rapidly rose in South Boston’s underworld. He had a peculiar modus operandi, or MO, for a con. Bulger preyed only on other criminals, not the general public. It was a pattern that worked well for Bulger, as it was high-level criminals who controlled the money, and he used the lower lying cons to rat out their bosses.

Whitey Bulger manipulated other influential people, too. He was a paid informant for the Boston Police and given leeway to operate with impunity. Bulger worked both ends against the middle. By the mid-70s, Whitey Bulger was in complete control of the South Boston mob. Secretly, he was also the FBI’s snitch.

In 1971, the FBI recruited Whitey Bulger. Or, it was more like Bulger recruited the FBI. What Whitey Bulger wanted was the FBI’s help in eliminating the Italian Mafia while leaving him alone, and it worked. Soon Mafioso members were being rounded up and jailed. Other Bulger rivals were disappearing or turning up dead. Throughout the 1980’s, Whitey Bulger ran unopposed and committed or ordered at least nineteen known murders. His body count might be higher.

There was a problem, though. That was Bulger’s FBI handler, Special Agent John Connolly who’d been giving Bulger carte blanche permission to operate freely as long as Connolly got arrests. Connolly was eventually exposed by the Bureau as a crooked cop, but not before tipping Whitey Bulger off that a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) indictment was about to fall on Bulger’s head.

With FBI Agent Connolly’s help, Whitey Bulger went into hiding. This was in 1994. For the next seventeen years, Bulger was a wanted man, and for twelve of them, Bulger was on the FBI’s most wanted list at #2—right behind Osama bin Laden. A $2 million reward was offered for Bulger’s scalp and sightings came in all over the world.

But the truth was, Whitey Bulger never left the States. He and his long-time girlfriend, Catherine Greig, holed-up in California where they rented a quiet apartment in Santa Monica. Finally, after the FBI did a media blitz with age-corrected sketches of Bulger and Greig, a neighbor recognized the pair and turned them in.

It was June 22, 2011, when the police captured Whitey Bulger. He was now 81. In Bulger’s apartment, they seized over $800,000 cash and a horde of firearms along with plenty of fake ID. Bulger and Greig were extradited back to Massachusetts where Grieg pleaded guilty to harboring a fugitive. She drew six years. Bulger went to trial.

Whitey Bulger was charged with 48 felony counts—19 of them first-degree murders. The trial lasted three months and heard from a rogue’s gallery of convicted mafia members, mobsters and hitmen. It also heard from relatives of Bulger’s victims. The jury convicted Bulger on 11 murders, and he was sentenced to two consecutive life terms, plus an extra five years for good measure.

Evidence told of Bulger’s viciousness. He had many people severely tortured, especially those suspected of informing on him. Some of those maimed and then killed were women—girlfriends of Bulger’s subordinates in the gang world. Others were rival drug dealers and racketeers who posed business threats to Whitey Bulger. Further evidence showed Bulger being involved with arms trafficking to the Irish Republican Army terrorist group as well as firebombing Senator Ted Kennedy’s house.

Upon sentencing Whitey Bulger, Judge Denise Casper told him, “The scope, the callousness, the depravity of your crimes are almost unfathomable. Your crimes are more than heinous because they were all about money.” Bulger replied, “Money is the common denominator in crime. It will never stop.” Bulger also said he wanted an epitaph on his tombstone stating, “I’d rather be in Alcatraz.”

*   *   *

Whitey Bulger was also indicted for murders in Florida and Oklahoma, however, prosecutors there stayed charges due to his age and existing life sentences. Bulger first went to the Coleman II U.S. Penitentiary in Somerville, Florida where he was held in protective custody. Later, he moved to the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City, also in protective custody, then back to Florida. All of Bulger’s federal pen time from 2014 till 2018 was in maximum security and tight protection—never given access to the general inmate population. Even though he was old, Whitey Bulger was a marked man and a high-value target inside the system.

Then, on October 29, 2018, Bulger was suddenly transferred from protective custody in a Florida max jail to open population at a medium place in West Virginia. He arrived at 9:53 pm and by 8:20 the next morning, Whitey Bulger was whacked in his cell. Conveniently, the cameras didn’t catch the actual death sentence, and somehow Freddy Geas and friends were lying in wait. This reeks of a system-orchestrated event.

When I say kudos to whoever whacked Whitey Bulger, you might think I’m condoning planned and premeditated murder. I’m not—not for ordinary, law-abiding and peaceful citizens that is. But, I’ve got no sympathy for the devil, and I think guys like Whitey Bulger, Freddy Geas and their kind deserve what they get in the end. Career criminals are not remotely like you and me. These animals have no regard for human rights and human life. It’s the law of the jungle in their world, and it’s fitting that Whitey Bulger finally got whacked.

But, what I’m having a hard time getting my head around is how bureaucrats and employees in the correctional system stuck their necks out like this. I’ve been around the system for decades and I know most system players are government appointees and employees. They value security, promotions, pensions and non-publicity. Yet, somebody—some people—within the United States Bureau of Prisons let Whitey Bulger’s murder happen.

This case made the news. There’s a fascination with gangster and gang lifestyles in America and around the world. Whitey Bulger was a pop-figure and a cult idol. Just look at two high-profile movies like The Departed where Jack Nicholson won an Oscar portraying Bulger’s character. Then Johnny Depp hit the big screen as Bulger in Black Mass. Currently, there’s a lot on the news about Whitey Bulger.

I found an interesting interview in the Washington Post with retired Boston PD Sergeant Bill Bratton. He knew Whitey Bulger and described him as, “The consummate gangster. The consummate manipulator. He was a brutal, feared, stone-cold killer.” Another cop, not wanting to be identified, simply said, “He was a bad, bad, bad guy.”

Although it’s interesting to hear comments about Bulger’s character, I was more curious about how people in the correctional system responded. I found an answer through NBC where Rick Heldreth agreed to a statement. Heldreth is president of AFGE Local 420 Prison Workers Union representing employees at Hazelton Penitentiary in West Virginia. Here’s how Rick Heldreth explained it.

“Hazelton is known as one of the most violent penitentiaries in the country. It’s very unusual that this particular inmate (Bulger) of this notoriety would be placed in general population given the level of violence and the type of inmates housed here. This decision was made far above us. Hazelton has a reputation of con-honor and placing a massive turncoat like him (Bulger) in general population and not in protective custody made him particularly vulnerable to attack. I know how he was labeled in the system, and it’s not something that went well with our inmate population.”

Rick Heldreth offered insight about how recent federal government cutbacks affected their staffing levels. Heldreth reported that Hazelton normally holds 120 high-profile, violent inmates. It’s one of the most dangerous environments in America’s prison system. In the past three months, there were two other inmate murders, both happening immediately after admission. Heldreth said inmates always know who’s coming in. “It’s really like in the movies.”

Heldreth stated it takes 880 staff to manage 120 inmates at Hazelton. That’s a 7.3:1 ratio. “Since the Trump-era hiring freeze, we’re down about one hundred staff and can’t replace them. We have prison plumbers and teachers filling in for guards.”

In my opinion, forces within the U.S. Bureau of Prisons purposely sent Whitey Bulger to his death at Hazelton Penitentiary. Bulger was far from a model prisoner. He was a problem—a psychopath and without any form of normal conscience. Shortly before being sent to Hazelton, Bulger’s file records that he masturbated in front of a female prison worker and—at 89—threatened to kill another prison official. They had enough of him.

We’re not in a perfect world. If we were, Whitey Bulgers wouldn’t exist. But they do, and now one of them got a just reward. I say kudos to whoever whacked Whitey Bulger. He was fair game after prison authorities threw fresh meat over the fence and into the jungle. But autonomous authorities shouldn’t authorize death sentences and capital punishment really has to follow a legal and due process.