The full, breathtaking scope of Boston gangster James ‘Whitey’ Bulger’s collaboration with IRA terrorists is revealed today in a new Daily Mail podcast, From Bomb To Ballot: The History of Sinn Fein.
Martin Ferris, a former IRA gunrunner and prisoner who became a parliamentarian, confirms in his first ever major interview that Bulger was central to buying guns and explosives in Boston in 1984.
But it is John Crawley, an Irish-American US Marine who left the US to join the IRA, who unveils the true, jaw-dropping breadth of Bulger’s conspiracies with the separatist organization that for 30 years carried out a savage terrorism campaign in Ireland, Britain, and Europe.
The FBI pursued Bulger for many years and moved him to Number 1 on its Most Wanted list in 2011 after the death of Osama Bin Laden.
Bulger achieved a grisly mythical status in the annals of crime and has been played in Hollywood movies on a number of occasions, most notably by Johnny Depp in Black Mass.
A fictional Irish-American mobster played by Jack Nicholson that was inspired by Bulger was also central to Martin Scorsese classic, The Departed.
John Crawley gives in From Bomb to Ballot a riveting first person account of his dealings with Bulger and the subsequent voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in the swordfish trawler the Boston crook purchased for him.
Crawley speaks in episode 4 of his first meeting with Bulger at the infamous Triple Os bar in Boston.
‘I met him in Triple Os, the famous bar upstairs. He had a bit of an office up there. We were brought up, me and another guy. I call him Mark,’ he said.
‘As we were going in, I said to the guy bringing me up, I said, ‘Whitey in here?’ ‘Don’t call him Whitey,’ he says, ‘don’t call Whitey to his face. He hates it’.
‘I said, ‘well, thanks for telling me. What do I call him?’ ‘Jim.’ OK. ‘Cause I would have gone in there and said, ‘hello, Whitey’. So, it would have been on the wrong foot right away.’
Crawley explained that the IRA leader and later politician Martin McGuinness sent him back to the US to buy weapons.
However, after initial meetings with the Boston criminal underworld, he was told not to complicate things.
Crawley said they told him to obtain false driving licenses to buy firearms in gun shops. And ‘Whitey’ was the man to organize this.
Bulger also raised $1 million – a lot of money in 1984 – to buy weapons and explosives. He then bought the trawler – the Valhalla – which carried the deadly load out of Gloucester Harbor in Massachusetts.
Crawley explained that the last person they saw as their fateful voyage began was Whitey Bulger waving them goodbye on the pier at Gloucester.
He revealed the true involvement of Bulger in the minutiae of the operation: ‘He was back there [on the harbor] with a radio scanner listening to local police.
‘Whitey said that if the cops came he was going to come down and ram their car and we were to scatter and just take off, you know.’
On board the Valhalla were 91 rifles, eight submachine guns, 13 shotguns, 51 handguns, 11 bulletproof vests, 70,000 rounds of ammunition, and an array of hand grenades and rocket warheads.
Crawley, a US citizen of Irish descent, joined the US Marine Corps in 1975 – just after the end of the war in Vietnam – and spent four years training, eventually joining their elite recon unit.
He was so well regarded that he was asked to be an elite drill instructor, like Gunnery Sergeant L Hartman in the Stanley Kubrick’s film Full Metal Jacket, which he said was an accurate representation of the Marine Corps at that time.
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, senior IRA member Martin Ferris was leaving Fenit Harbour in Kerry, on board another trawler, the Marita Ann.
They performed a treacherous transfer of the arms in the middle of the Atlantic, but not before the Valhalla was hit by a hurricane.
Crawley recounted in From Bomb to Ballot: ‘And I remember thinking, you know, that’s all we need now, the hurricane hit us. And I don’t know how we survived it. I really don’t. We were just battered to bits.’
But there was an informer in their midst. It later emerged that Bulger was an FBI informant, but Ferris and Crawley believe the mole was on the Irish side, a Kerry ‘friend’ of Ferris.
‘We were compromised before we left,’ Ferris said.
Crawley said a notorious IRA informant betrayed them: ‘Sean O’Callaghan 100 per cent informed on us. 100 per cent. He boasted about it. He rejoiced in it. He reveled in it.’
Both Crawley and Ferris were captured by the Irish Navy in a stunning operation off the Skellig Rock – where Star Wars sequel The Last Jedi was filmed – and they went to jail for a decade.
Bulger was eventually captured, aged 81, in Santa Monica, California, on June 22, 2011 after 16 years at large and 12 years on the FBI 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list.
He was beaten to death in prison in Oklahoma, while in a wheelchair, in 2018. He was 89 years old.
Boston mob kingpin James ‘Whitey’ Bulger is remembered as a charismatic and ruthless leader whose name was linked to 19 murders and countless gruesome events involving victims being tortured, bound in heavy chains, shot and buried in cellars with their teeth removed to prevent identification.
He also famously torched the Brookline birthplace of John F Kennedy and relished in taking cat naps after shooting people in the head.
Once the head of South Boston’s ‘Winter Hill Gang’, Bulger’s mark on American organized crime is just as pronounced as the stain he left on the FBI’s reputation as he managed to evade prosecution for decades, sitting atop the Most Wanted list for 16 years before his arrest in 2011.
It emerged in Bulger’s 2013 trial that he had served as an FBI informant as far back as 1975, though he always denied it. The deal gave Bulger virtual impunity to commit any crime he wanted for decades – except for murder.
Bulger was ultimately convicted of killing at least 11 people in 2013 and was serving two life sentences at the time of his death.
Bulger was born in September 1929 about four miles north of Boston in the town of Everett. He was the eldest of six children in an Irish-American family.
His father, James Sr, worked as a docker, but found himself unemployed after losing an arm in an accident. Due to the poverty that ensued, the family moved to a social housing project in the tough neighborhood of South Boston when Bulger was eight years old.
Yet while his siblings studied hard and did well at school, Bulger started veering off the straight and narrow from a young age. By the time he reached his teens, he already had a reputation as a street fighter and a thief.
Unsurprisingly he had also come to the attention of local police officers, who nicknamed him ‘Whitey’ because of his distinctive blond hair.
It was at the age of 14 that he was first arrested for theft. By now, he was a member of a street gang called ‘the Shamrocks’ and convictions soon followed for assault, robbery, extortion and forgery.
Spells in juvenile detention centers did little to deter him from becoming a one-man crime wave. Nor did a stint in the US Air Force, which he joined at the age of 18.
After training as an aircraft mechanic, he was stationed initially in Kansas and then Idaho. But he ended up in military prison over a number of assaults and was arrested for going absent without leave at one stage.
He managed to leave the forces with an honorable discharge, however, and returned to Boston. It was at this point that his burgeoning criminal career took a crucial twist.
In 1956, the 25-year-old Bulger was sent to a federal jail for the first time after being convicted of armed robbery and hijacking.
According to some reports, he was one of the inmates given LSD and other substances as part of a CIA research program into mind-control drugs.
What is certain is that he was such a troublesome prisoner that he was ultimately transferred to Alcatraz, the notorious maximum security prison in San Francisco Bay, as one of the last batch of jailbirds sent there before it closed in 1963.
After doing time in two other institutions, Bulger eventually emerged a free man in 1965 following nine years in custody. Unlike many felons, he never boasted about his incarceration.
‘To him,’ said William Chase, an FBI agent who spent years pursuing Bulger, ‘prison time was evidence of failure.’ Back on the streets, he was determined to do two things: stay out of jail and establish a criminal empire.
Though he at first took jobs as a janitor and construction worker, Bulger quickly got involved in bookmaking, debt-collecting and acting as an underworld enforcer.
Before long, he managed to take over a small-time operation called the Winter Hill Gang and transform it into Boston’s most ruthlessly efficient crime syndicate.
Its main areas of activity were drug running, gambling and prostitution. Bulger based his modus operandi on the Mafia, which controlled the city’s northern suburbs.
But unlike some of his Italian counterparts, he was supremely disciplined.
Not only did he not while away lazy afternoons over long lunches in neighborhood restaurants, Bulger appeared not to have any vices. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, never used credit cards, didn’t even gamble.
What little time he spent away from his nefarious business was largely devoted to body-building and reading. He always had an interest in history, especially anything involving Adolf Hitler.
Much of his energy also went into trying to become a master of disguise. He dyed his hair different colors and wore varying styles of glasses, although most observers agree that he found it impossible to mask his thick Boston accent.
Another thing that Bulger struggled to hide was his volcanic temper. Even in seemingly casual conversations, he was prone to explosive outbursts.
Meanwhile, his propensity for extreme violence shocked both hardened criminals and police alike. Rivals and enemies were brutally killed either by Bulger himself or on his direct orders.
His former right-hand man Kevin Weeks later said: ‘He stabbed people. He beat people with bats. He shot people. Strangled people. Run over ’em with cars. After he would kill somebody, it was like a stress relief, y’know? He’d be nice and calm for a couple of weeks. Like he just got rid of all his stress.’
Given such brazen criminality, it wasn’t long before questions were asked about how he was allowed get away with it.
The answer was a long time coming and, when it did, it was a shocking one: Bulger had been operating as an FBI informer since the mid-1970s.
From his perspective, it was a perfect arrangement. He tipped off his Bureau handler and childhood friend, John Connolly, about other criminal activity in Boston in return for being allowed to proceed unimpeded with his own activities. The information he passed on virtually wiped out the Mafia presence in the city.
It was the 1990s before the Boston Police Department and the Drug Enforcement Agency, angered at the FBI’s failure to act, launched their own investigation.
After being tipped off by Connolly — who was later jailed for ten years for obstructing justice — that the authorities were on to him, Bulger vanished on December 23, 1994.
During his years on the run with girlfriend Catherine Grieg, various sightings were reported from locations as diverse as New Zealand, Canada, Italy and along the US Mexican border.
He and Grieg ended up in Santa Monica, California, where they posed as married retirees from Chicago.
After al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed by US forces in Pakistan in 2011, Bulger succeeded him as No 1 wanted fugitive on the FBI’s ‘Ten Most Wanted’ list.
One of the many aliases Bulger used while on the run was that of James Lawlor, a man who Bulger found living on the street in the Los Angeles area.
The two men resembled each other so much that Bulger could use Lawlor’s driver’s license and other identity papers. In return, he paid Lawlor’s rent, according to the Boston Globe.
Playing a crucial role in Bulger’s capture was Miss Iceland of 1974, Anna Bjornsdottir, who lived near him and Grieg in Santa Monica.
While she was visiting Iceland, the actress who worked under the name Anna Bjorn saw a news report about the authorities’ hunt for Bulger.
She recognized him as the quiet retiree she knew from her neighborhood and called the FBI, which arrested him in June 2011. Bjornsdottir later claimed a $2million reward.
When police raided his Santa Monica apartment, they found several fiction and non-fiction books about criminals, including ‘Escape From Alcatraz.’
Police also found some $800,000 in cash and an arsenal of weapons in the modest apartment where Bulger and Greig had lived for years as Charles and Carol Gasko.
In his 2013 trial, Bulger was convicted of 11 murders, including the strangulation of a woman. Jurors were unable to reach a verdict on a charge that he strangled a second woman. A witness said Bulger insisted that the women’s teeth be pulled to obscure their identity.
Bulger refused to testify at his trial claiming he had been given immunity from prosecution by federal agents.
He steadfastly denied being an FBI informant, but close links between some FBI agents in Boston and Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang in the 1970s and 1980s have been well documented.
Former FBI agent John Connolly was sentenced to prison after being convicted in 2002 of effectively becoming a member of the gang.
His trial, which featured 72 witnesses and 840 exhibits, produced chilling testimony worthy of a pulp novel.
It heard harrowing tales of teeth being pulled from the mouths of murder victims to foil identification and the strangulation of a mobster’s girlfriend who ‘knew too much.’
In June 2013, Bulger went on trial accused of 32 counts of racketeering, which included allegations that he was complicit in 19 murders.
The two-month hearing, which included testimony from more than 70 witnesses, resulted in him being convicted of 11 of the murders.
It also heard evidence that Bulger supplied the arms and ammunition used in the IRA’s Marita-Ann gunrunning escape in 1984, which resulted in current Sinn Féin TD Martin Ferris being jailed for ten years.
Sentencing him to two life sentences plus five years, the judge told Bulger that he had been involved in ‘unfathomable’ crimes that involved ‘agonizing’ suffering for his victims.
Five years into his sentence, Bulger had just been transferred to USP Hazelton, a high security prison, when he was found dead overnight on October 30, 2018.
A prison source said wheelchair-bound Bulger was in general population when three inmates rolled him to a corner, out of view of surveillance cameras, beat him in the head with a lock in a sock, and attempted to gouge his eyes out with a shiv.
The source said he hadn’t even been processed at the West Virginia facility when he was killed. But someone who knew he was being transferred put the word out – the killer had to know he was coming.