In James “Whitey’’ Bulger’s capture, there is finally justice for all.
There is, of course, the critical justice for every daughter, every son, every sibling, and every spouse of every one of the 19 or more victims Bulger allegedly killed in his multidecade, FBI-sanctioned reign of terror.
There is justice for South Boston, where the mobster ran roughshod over an entire neighborhood, allegedly murdering and maiming and flooding Broadway with drugs that ruined countless lives.
There is justice for every one of the dozens, if not hundreds, of State Police investigators, DEA agents, and Boston police officers who saw endless and arduous hours of surveillance, risky bugging operations, and honest detective work compromised by Bulger and the corrupt FBI agents with whom he consorted.
But beyond the families, beyond the borders of Southie, beyond the cadre of people who have chased Bulger’s shadow across continents and decades, there is another justice that is as broad as it is deep.
It’s about Boston, all of Boston. It’s about how Bulger turned a city of natural skeptics into a community of unabashed cynics when news exploded in the 1990s that the FBI, the nation’s foremost law enforcement agency, coddled this alleged killer.
A federal indictment says that 19 people died while the FBI had this relationship with Bulger. Many were tortured. Grown men and women lived in fear. Others lived in mourning. All the while, Bulger, late at night, dined with FBI agents, slipped quietly into their houses for casual talks, bribed them, exchanged gifts with them — all of it giving him license to kill.
Bulger’s close relationship with the FBI, first revealed by the Globe in 1988, began with his ever-odious FBI handler, John J. Connolly Jr., though it didn’t end there. It splashed on all his colleagues in the FBI’s Boston office. It flowed to his bosses, each one of whom was inexplicably mesmerized by Bulger and his equally murderous cohort, Steve Flemmi. It seeped deeply into the US attorney’s office in Boston, where some high-level prosecutors looked as ridiculous as the starstruck agents on the streets. It extended to the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, because what happens in Boston doesn’t stay in Boston.
The alliance was supposedly about the frantic efforts to sink the Mafia, to which Bulger was of dubious help, but it was really about something far less grand. It was about the blind ambition of so many FBI agents who saw Bulger as a path upward. And along that journey, they found in Bulger an unlikely — and opportunistic — friend.