Convicted Boston Mobster Whitey Bulger Says That Johnny Depp's 'Black Mass' Movie Is Pure Fiction

Carlos Greer at the New York Post reports on convicted murderer and mobster James "Whitey" Bulger's reaction to the film Black Mass.

Never- before-seen photos reveal that the real-life James “Whitey” Bulger was not a fan of Johnny Depp’s critically acclaimed 2015 Bulger biopic, “Black Mass,” depicting his crime story.

A guy described as “one step removed from the prisoner who was Bulger’s protector in jail” has offered up the pictures to LA-based memorabilia dealer Moments in Time, which will sell the 22 photos with convicted mobster and murderer Bulger’s inscriptions for $24,00 0. A couple of the photos are of Depp as Bulger in the film.

“Johnnie [sic] Depp on set with his girlfriend playing me on an anti Whitey movie put together by 2 reporters from the Boston Globe,” Bulger wrote. “Many years ago, shot up the building with a 12 ga pump shot gun . . . This movie is pure fiction!” he wrote and signed with his prison number 1428A.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://pagesix.com/2016/01/31/whitey-bulger-says-johnny-depp-biopic-is-pure-fiction/

You can read my interview with Dick Lehr, the co-author of Black Mass and Whitey via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/06/crime-beat-column-q-with-dick-lehr-co_17.html

Actor Johnny Depp In Character As Boston Mobster Whitey Bulger

Eleanor Gower at the British newspaper the Daily Mail offers a piece on Johnny Depp portraying Boston mobster James "Whitey" Bulger in an upcoming film.

You can read the piece and see photos of Depp as Bulger via the below link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2629535/Johnny-Depp-bald-cap-wig-role-mob-boss-James-Whitey-Bulger-begins-filming-biopic.html

You can also read my Washington Times review of Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/06/my-washington-times-review-of-whitey.html

And you can read my interview with Dick Lehr, co-author of Whitey and Black Mass via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/06/crime-beat-column-q-with-dick-lehr-co_17.html

Johnny Depp Talks "Whitey"

Stephen Schaefer at the Boston Herald offers a piece on actor Johnny Depp portraying Boston mobster and murderer James "Whitey" Bulger in an upcoming film.

LOS ANGELES - Johnny Depp tackles one of the most challenging roles of his storied career next month in Boston when he begins filming "Black Mass" where he plays convicted mobster Whitey Bulger.

“I don’t think of him as Whitey – it’s James ‘Whitey’ Bulger,” Depp said at the Four Seasons Hotel yesterday during a press day for his science fiction thriller “Transcendence” which opens April 18.
While Depp, 50, played an undercover FBI agent getting the goods on a mobster in the 1997 true crime classic “Donnie Brasco,” Bulger is definitely a shift to the dark side.

“The reason to play it is obvious to me,” said the three-time Oscar nominee.  “He’s a fascinating character. I don’t think it’s like anything I’ve done before and I’m very excited to slide into that skin for a little bit.”

“Black Mass,” directed by “Out of the Furnace” writer-director Scott Cooper, is based on the 2001 New York Times bestseller “Black Mass: The True Story of the Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob” by Dick Lehr and Gerald O’Neill.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://bostonherald.com/entertainment/movies/movie_news/2014/04/johnny_depp_talks_whitey

You can also read my interview with Dick Lehr, co-author of Black Mass and Whitey via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/06/crime-beat-column-q-with-dick-lehr-co_17.html

Boston Gangster Whitey Bulger Sentenced To 2 Consecutive Life Terms, Plus 5

Laurel J. Sweet has been covering the James "Whitey" Bulger trial for the Boston Herald.

Southie mobster James "Whitey" Bulger was sentenced today to two consecutive life terms -- plus five years -- after a federal judge ripped into the aging gangster for his "unfathomable" crimes all for the love of blood money. 

Bulger, 84, who remained quiet again refusing to address the court or family members of his victims, was also ordered to pay $19,510,276 and 43 cents in restitution to the families. There was no reaction inside the court from families when the sentence was handed down.

U.S. District Court Judge Denise J. Casper took last night to sleep on her decision and what she heard yesterday from 12 sons, daughters, widows and siblings whose impact statements spoke of despair, family suicides, lost loves and even the triumph of moving on.

Today, she is not holding back: "It is hard to know where to begin," Casper said. "The scope, the callousness, the depravity of your crimes is almost unfathomable ... it was all about money.

You can read the rest of the story via the below link:

 http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/herald_bulldog/2013/11/whitey_bulger_sentenced_to_2_consecutive_life

You can also read my interview with Dick Lehr, one of the authors of Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss, via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/06/crime-beat-column-q-with-dick-lehr-co_17.html 

The Whitey Bulger Trial: Bulger Angrily Denies He Spilled As Feds Open His Informant Files

Laurel J. Sweet at the Boston Herald is covering the Whitey Bulger trial in Boston.

Prosecutors threw the best book they have at James “Whitey” Bulger today — the 700-page diary of FBI Informant BS-1544 — in a bid to undermine the mobster’s insistent claim that he was an upstanding wiseguy, a gambit that forced them to reveal to jurors that the Boston FBI office had rotten agents who shielded him.

“I am not a (expletive) informant,” Bulger, 83, grumbled in frustration during a recess in the trial, people seated near him confirmed.

During his 15-year relationship with the FBI from 1975 to 1990, the files indicate that Bulger pinned murders on other men that his own associates now say Bulger and his own gang committed. He gave up secrets about criminal rivals, such as where they could be found. And he provided alibis for his own gang — since refuted by his former associates’ admissions in plea deals after they learned he had turned on them. The files also indicate that the FBI — with Agent John Connolly Jr. acting as the primary go-between — passed on false information to other law enforcement to divert attention from Bulger and his gang.

You can read the rest of the story and watch a local TV new clip via the below link:

http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/06/bulger_angrily_denies_he_spilled_as_feds_open_his_informant_file

You can also read my Q&A with Dick Lehr, the author of Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/06/crime-beat-column-q-with-dick-lehr-co_17.html

The above photos of Whitey Bulger were provided by the FBI. 

Whitey Bulger's Opera: Two Books Detail Boston Irish Mob Boss' Criminal Life

Veteran organized crime reporter George Anastasia reviewed two books about Boston Irish mob boss Whitey Bulger, who is currently on trial for murder and other crimes, in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

It was supposed to be the FBI's "dream team," two high-level informants in position to provide chapter and verse about the workings of the Boston underworld.

This was at a time, the early 1970s, when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had finally decided that the Mafia did exist. And so he put out the word that bringing down that criminal organization was a priority and developing informants who could aid the bureau in that pursuit was paramount.

Paul Rico, a veteran agent in the Boston office, was a master at developing snitches. James "Whitey" Bulger and Steve "The Rifleman" Flemmi would be two of his best. But that dream team proved to be the FBI's biggest nightmare.

The story of how rogue FBI agents gave Bulger and Flemmi license to kill and how Bulger became the target of a 16-year manhunt is told in detail in two books by Boston journalists who have chronicled the saga in countless newspaper articles.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/literature/20130602_The_Whitey_Bulger__opera_.html

You can also read my Washington Times review of Whitey: The life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/13/whitey-bulgers-horrific-crime-span/ 

Two Bookmakers Testify They Were Forced To make Payments To Whitey Bulger's Gang

The Boston Globe is covering the Whitey Bulger trial in Boston.

Two former bookmakers from the 1970s and 1980s told a federal jury Friday that they were forced to make payments to James “Whitey” Bulger and his crew, and that the gangster and his cohorts had a reputation for hurting anyone who did not follow their demands.

“I had heard about them because their reputation preceded them. They were very capable,” said Richard O’Brien, 84, who ran gambling rackets for years and said he was forced into a meeting with Bulger in the mid-1970s.

“You’re working alone ... you ought to be with us,” Bulger told him, O’Brien recalled.

“They were laying down the law,” he told a jury in federal court in Boston.

James Katz, another bookmaker, said he dealt often with Bulger’s right-hand man, Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi, and it was his understanding that Flemmi and Bulger ran their gang together.
“You knew Stevie Flemmi had a reputation that he had killed several people?” Bulger’s lawyer, J.W. Carney Jr. asked.

“I would never want to run into him,” Katz acknowledged.

Bulger, 83, is on trial in US District Court, charged in 32 counts of a racketeering indictment that alleges that while running a criminal enterprise from 1972 to 2000, he participated in 19 murders; extorted bookmakers and drug dealers, and businessmen; laundered his criminal profits through real estate transactions; and stockpiled an arsenal of weapons.

You can read the rest of the story via the below link:

http://www.boston.com/metrodesk/2013/06/14/whitey-bulger-trial-enters-third-day-two-bookmakers-slated-testify/e6IvGhTh4u3xSxOATTytAK/story.html

You can also read my Washington Times review of Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/13/whitey-bulgers-horrific-crime-span/?page=all#pagebreak

My Washington Times Review of 'Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss'

The Washington Times published my review of Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill's Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss.

There have been a good number of books written about Boston’s Irish mob boss, Whitey Bulger, and up to now “Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the FBI and a Devil’s Deal” by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill was the best one in my view. But Mr. Lehr and Mr. O’Neill have surpassed themselves with “Whitey.”

“This biography of James J. “Whitey” Bulger will explain the evolution of Bulger from juvenile delinquent in the 1940s to stone-cold killer in the 1960s, from unchallenged crime boss in the 1980s with the blessing of a corrupted FBI, to fugitive from justice in 1995, and, finally, to his capture sixteen years later in June 2011 at age eighty-one,” Mr. Lehr and Mr. O’Neill write in “Whitey.”

... I contacted Dick Lehr and asked him why, after the success of “Black Mass,” he and his co-author wrote a biography of Whitey Bulger.

“The bulk and the focus of ‘Black Mass’ is the Whitey Bulger-FBI years, basically two decades from 1975 to 1995. When Whitey was captured, we realized that this guy now warrants a biography,” Mr. Lehr told me.

Mr. Lehr said that he and his co-author realized that in 1975 when he cut his deal with the Boston FBI, Bulger was already 48. He lived half a life that the authors had barely scratched the surface of in “Black Mass.”

“There was this whole life that had not been explored, and Whitey Bulger has a place in American history as a significant crime figure,” Mr. Lehr said. “We wanted to put the “Black Mass” years in a larger context of his life story, a biography, in which we try to not just tell this dramatic and horrific story, but get more into the why and how in the making of this monster.”

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/13/whitey-bulgers-horrific-crime-span/?page=all#pagebreak

You can also read my interview with Dick Lehr via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/06/crime-beat-column-q-with-dick-lehr-co_17.html

Whitey: The Life of America Most Notorious Mob Boss

Chuck Leddy offers a review of Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss at the Boston Globe.

Much has been written about Whitey Bulger in the past three decades, but in “Whitey: The Life of America’s Most Notorious Mob Boss’’ Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill (who already wrote about Bulger and his unholy alliance with the FBI in “Black Mass”) have put together a comprehensive life and times of the mobster, beginning with his 19th-century Irish ancestors to his present perch in the Plymouth County Correctional Facility awaiting trial.

In recounting this epic, horrific tale, the authors have mined a rich vein of sources that include Bulger’s federal prison file, interviews with Bulger associates, government documents released through Freedom of Information Act requests, court records, and more.

Lehr, a former Globe reporter, and O’Neill, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Globe editor, make it clear that Bulger’s life and career were shaped by a multitude of factors that begin with an upbringing in a dysfunctional family and an apparent personality disorder amid a South Boston culture of tribalism, violent internecine struggles in the heyday of Boston mobs, and morally-bankrupt FBI agents.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2013/02/18/book-review-whitey-the-life-america-most-notorious-mob-boss-dick-lehr-and-gerard-neill/i8CAaqANDLe3O280GBq70L/story.html

You can also read the Daily Mail's coverage of the book via the below link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2277193/Americas-wanted-fugitive-James-Whitey-Bulgers-outward-hatred-Obama-led-capture.html

Note: Dick Lehr and Gerald O' Neill's Black Mass was a very good book and I look forward to reading Whitey.