Massachusetts Senate President Therese Murray, who now serves in the seat Whitey's brother William once held, said she though he was either dead or out of the country.
By MICHAEL NORTON
and KYLE CHENEY
BOSTON - Four days after launching a new publicity campaign aimed at locating the longtime girlfriend of James J. "Whitey" Bulger, law enforcement authorities captured the former fugitive mobster from South Boston wanted for 16 years in connection with his roles in 19 murders committed during the 1970s and 1980s.
The FBI on Tuesday began running public service announcements in 14 U.S. cities to bring attention to Catherine Greig, 60, Bulger's longtime girlfriend accused of harboring a fugitive, with hopes that the publicity would lead to quality tips about the whereabouts of Bulger, 81.
His capture is expected to touch off a frenzy of reaction from the families of his alleged victims, within the South Boston community where he once lived, and regarding his relationship with his brother, former UMass and Senate President William Bulger.
During a radio interview Thursday morning, Senate President Therese Murray said she thought authorities would never find the fugitive mobster.
"I honestly didn't," Murray told WATD, explaining she thought he might be dead or might have been in Europe, unable to get back to the United States after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Murray described Bulger as "just like Osama, hiding in plain sight."
"The fact that he had a lot of cash and lot of weapons in that apartment means that somebody has been helping him along the way and maybe we'll find out who that is," she said.
Adding to the intrigue about Bulger's disappearance were accounts written throughout the years about Bulger's questionable relationship with the FBI, his years of work as an informant for the agency and whether he had been tipped off to the charges pending against him, enabling is flight.
U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz was planning a morning press conference at her Moakley Courthouse office on the Boston waterfront to discuss the news that Bulger had been apprehended. She was expected to be joined by state police superintendent Marian McGovern, U.S. Marshal John Gibbons and officials from the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Dick Lehr, a Boston Globe reporter who worked on the Spotlight team that chronicled the mysterious Bulger family in the 1980s - Billy's rise to the pinnacle of Massachusetts political power and Whitey's seeming invincibility from prosecution, despite his reputation as a prominent gang boss - and later helped unravel his unseemly relationship with the FBI, told the News Service Thursday morning that he often wondered whether this day would come.
"It's been one of the big water cooler questions of all time. Will he ever be captured? Is he dead? Is he alive?" Lehr said in a telephone interview. "I've always felt that this is obviously the big, unfinished piece was capturing the crime boss who was essential to several decades of corruption in Boston law enforcement."
Lehr said he hoped Bulger's capture would help investigators and reporters fill in the blanks about one of the most mysterious eras in organized crime and law enforcement, not only for historical curiosity, but to prevent the misuse of confidential informants.
"The FBI basically made him and preserved him and enabled him to do all the death and destruction that he did," Lehr said. "The modern significance, at a minimum is, hopefully a fuller understanding of what did happen and what went so horribly wrong for so long.
"It's hard to put your head way back then," he continued. "Whitey Bulger was … a legendary crime boss who somehow magically eluded law enforcement. We started peeling away the onion. At the time it was mind-boggling because he was an Irish crime boss. The fact that he would be a rat was almost unimaginable."