This is a great story. I don’t know how much our resident Bostonians (you’re transplants, right?) followed this story but the real South Shore lifers, e.g. most of my extended family, talk about Whitey all the time:
James (Whitey) Bulger, a legendary Boston crime boss indicted in 19 murders and who is on the F.B.I.’s 10 Most Wanted list, was arrested by federal authorities Wednesday night in Santa Monica, ending an international manhunt that had gone on since Mr. Bulger disappeared nearly 16 years ago, the F.B.I. announced.
[….]One tipster reported spotting Mr. Bulger watching the Boston gangster movie “The Departed” at a theater in San Diego in 2006, according to The Boston Globe.
I love “The Departed”, my favorite movie since “Pulp Fiction”, especially the scene where they smash DiCaprio’s cast on the pool table, but I think it would have been better with Brian Dennehy or Charles Durning in the Whitey Bulger role instead of Jack Nicholson.
Chris
Oh man. I watched that film just the other week! (Don’t know if someone else would’ve been better, but Jack Nicholson did a quite good job in my book).
Well done, feds.
stuckinred
Jack was great. Maybe Will Geer should have gotten the role!
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
i didn’t know anything about whitey bulger when i saw departed. honestly i thought scorcese was copying himself a lot in that movie.
bailey
Actually, he was copying “Infernal Affairs,” which was an awesome movie.
Anne Laurie
There is no way of living in the Boston media market for longer than a college semester without learning about Whitey Bulger; reports of the FBI’s newest initiative led all three local newscasts yesterday. Of course, it was widely believed (although the teevee people didn’t repeat this slur) that the FBI either had Bulger on ice somewhere, or that if he were ever captured the Bureau would find it necessary to kill him before he could testify. Of course he’s 81 years old, but if he drops dead now, the conspiracy theorists will have not just a field day but a multi-media convention & Old Home Week reunion!
Gin & Tonic
Both Dennehy and Durning would have been good, but too keg-shaped — if they were really trying to be Whitey.
The really jarring thing about that movie was the fake accents. They should have just left well enough alone, IMO, and not try to fake them if they can’t do them for real, but it was some California dialogue coach’s idea of a Southie accent, and it just didn’t work for me.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
so how much of the departed was supposed to be whitey bulger, the story from internal affairs, a movie from hong kong?
MAJeff
Wow, I can’t believe they finally got Whitey. It was weird, after reading a couple books about his gang, to walk through Southie and think, “Oh, that was his gym” or “oh, that’s where he had so-and-so killed.”
Steamboat
Nothing is ever improved by the addition of Brian Dennehy.
Gin & Tonic
Oh, and BTW, Billy reportedly has “no comment”. That’s rich.
snoey
SoCal?
Everybody I knew with Irish cousins had the full story on where he was holed up over there.
JPL
Gin & Tonic The first thing I thought of was that the fed is now checking his brother’s travel records.
dr. bloor
I fully expect that Emily Rooney will pleasure herself on air over this story during her daily noon-hour hackathon on WGBH.
stuckinred
Need I say more?
Actor Brian Dennehy claimed for years that he served a five-year tour as a Marine in Vietnam, where he was wounded in action. In reality, Dennehy’s only Vietnam “action” was on-screen in “A Rumor of War”, in which he portrayed a Marine gunnery sergeant. While Dennehy did serve in the Marines, it was not in Vietnam; his only “combat duty” was playing football in Okinawa in 1962.
Read more: cbsnews.com/stories/2005/11/11/opinion/main1039199.shtml#ixzz1Q68l48gg
JGabriel
Sounds like that Pakistani ambassador who referenced Whitey Bulger 7 weeks ago inadvertently lit a fire under someone’s ass.
.
JPL
stuckinred ..I didn’t know that but it does seem he would have made a great mob boss in the sense they both lie.
I thought Jack did a great job.
stuckinred
JPL
I guess I’m a one issue voter.
Cat Lady
Mystic River or Gone Baby Gone were better IMHO. Hey Hollywood – you suck at Boston accents – leave those to Matt, Ben and Mark. No one here says Bahston, mmkay?
Whitey’s capture is another outstanding item of business to cross off my list of things I thought I’d never see resolved in my lifetime – the Soviet Union, apartheid, the Berlin Wall, Egypt, bin Laden. Up next – alien contact.
MomSense
When I heard the news on the radio horribly early this morning, I thought that I was dreaming and almost fell out of bed. I think they said that he was in California. Wow, just wow.
So for the real connoisseurs of Boston accents, there isn’t just one. Eastie is different from the North End, Southie, etc.
mem from somerville
Winter Hill checking in here. I couldn’t believe it when I heard the news on WBUR this morning. I am heading up to see my dad today (whose is in the hospital for a brief bout of shingles) and probably doesn’t know yet–I can’t wait to tell him they got Whitey! Dad has had a number of conspiracy theories (of the fun variety) ever since Whitey disappeared….
Bobby Thomson
My thoughts exactly.
JPL
The Town was a pretty good movie although not on the same level as Mystic River or the Departed but it was entertaining.
Tom Levenson
Third/fourth generation Boston here, though my dad committed the apostasy of moving to CA before I was born. (I now live a out eight blocks from where he grew up.). The Boston-Jewish Chelsea to Brookline and Roxbury accent is different from the others too, and my uncle had it in a near pure version. None o these nuances survive the dubbing room.
But, man! Getting Whitey! Truly never thought that would happen, and I can’t actually believe he hadn’t long ago decamped to someplace w/out extradition.
MomSense
@Tom
Now I’m really getting sentimental. I also have fond memories of Charlestown. My Mom worked at BHCC for years. It was a smorgasbord of Boston accents.
tokyokie
I like the movie OK, but had some problems with it. I think the Hong Kong policier from which it’s derived, Infernal Affairs, is a better film, and, if anything, much more cynical. I think my biggest problem with the film is the Mark Wahlberg character; he has no function in the plot, so I figured he was only around to set things right at the end (although I guess he had the accent right). A couple of casting decisions that I thought were a bit odd were Ray Winstone as Nicholson’s right-hand man; the role seemed perfect for Brendan Gleeson, who is, of course, actually Irish and with whom Scorsese had recently worked on Gangs of New York. And then there’s Nicholson, who’s game, but doesn’t quite pull it off. The combination of gregarious and psychotic the role calls for would have been a splendid late-career role for Lee Marvin, had the movie been made about 20 years earlier. But the older actor who I think could have pulled it off would have been Nick Nolte. But then, I always thought he would have made a much scarier and complex Dudley Smith in L.A. Confidential than James Cromwell did.
shortstop
Too bad they didn’t get him then — would have been very Dillinger at the Biograph watching Manhattan Melodrama.
Good call; totally agree. The vague offness of Nicholson in that role marred an otherwise outstanding movie for me. Actually, I feel that way about him in many roles; he’s the most overrated actor in Hollywood, for my money.
DougJ in Damascus
That’s really interesting. There’s also a distinctive Boston African-American accent that is very identifiable. Lawrence Fishburn nails it Mystic River.
DougJ in Damascus
I bet you’re a big Lee Marvin fan. Me too. I love that guy.
Gin & Tonic
@tokyokie — Marky Mark is from a Catholic blue-collar family from Dorchester, so he can talk the talk, as it were.
Laura Clawson
Damn. Can’t believe he’s still alive and they got him.
Libby
ZOMG! They got Whitey? Good Lord. Next you’ll be telling me they found Jimmy Hoffa…
J.W. Hamner
He fled the winter before I came up here for college, but it was obviously still a big news item when I was a freshman (and beyond). I’d have to say it never really captured my imagination like it did the natives… but then I didn’t have all the back story that they grew up with. It’s a crazy story to read about though.
Judas Escargot
Yet another Somerville native here (though I decamped to the north shore a decade ago). Anyone with Boston-Irish Uncles of a Certain Age had heard the Whitey stories.
BTW, fans of The Departed might like Monument Ave, with Denis Leary in the lead and DS9/TNG’s Colm Meany in the Whitey-analog role. Done by the late Ted Demme (Beautiful Girls, Blow), and IMO catches the ‘feel’ of certain neighborhoods better than The Departed did.
Denis Leary can’t hold the right Boston accent either (he’s from Worcester, or at least sounds like it), but close enough. Meany, being an actual Irishman, gets the Somerville/Charlestown accent down pretty damned well, though.
Stefan
I love “The Departed”, my favorite movie since “Pulp Fiction”, especially the scene where they smash DiCaprio’s cast on the pool table, but I think it would have been better with Brian Dennehy or Charles Durning in the Whitey Bulger role instead of Jack Nicholson.
Totally agree. Nicholson didn’t work for me at all in that part, the main reason being that he wasn’t genuinely scary. He hammed it up, as is his wont, but in so doing he drained the part of any genuine malice or threat. The character needed to be devoid of all real feeling or compassion, needed to be someone who gave off the sense of being able to kill you at any moment without a second thought, and that just wasn’t how he played it. It was The Joker Comes to Southie.
Also, too, Nicholson (and Dennehy, Durning, etc.) are all fat. Whitey has to be whip-thin, his own acid helping burn any fat off his bones.
Stolen Dormouse
Wow! Maybe we will finally find out what happened to the paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Some of the theories suggested that Whitey B (and/or the IRA’s support crew in the Northeast U.S.) had links to that.
Stefan
BTW, fans of The Departed might like Monument Ave, with Denis Leary in the lead and DS9/TNG’s Colm Meany in the Whitey-analog role. Done by the late Ted Demme (Beautiful Girls, Blow), and IMO catches the ‘feel’ of certain neighborhoods better than The Departed did.
Agreed. It feels much more true to life Bostony than “The Depahted” did. Also check out:
“State of Grace” with Sean Penn, Ed Harris and Gary Oldman as Westie gangster in 1980s Hell’s Kitchen.
“Miller’s Crossing”, with Gabriel Byrne and Albert Finney as Midwestern Irish gangsters in the 1920s.
“The Friends of Eddie Coyle” with Bob Mitchum, about a run-down Irish gangster in 1970s Boston (it’s stunning).
“The Town” and “Gone Baby Gone”, both directed by Ben Affleck and set in Charlestown and Southie, respectively.
Nutella
I remember when Billy was MA senate president and Whitey was first on the lam, a reporter asked Billy if he would turn Whitey in. Billy said of course not, they were raised to never turn anyone in to the man. At the time, of course, Billy was the man.
Others besides Billy like the idea that Whitey is a colorful character who was kind of like Robin Hood but really he did anything for a buck, including plenty of murders and selling drugs to children. I hope I don’t see any kid-gloves treatment of the poor old geezer now. He and everyone who helped him needs to be treated like the violent and disgusting thugs that they are.
James E. Powell
Directors & producers seem not to care about the accuracy of accents in any films. There are plenty of period films set in England where the accents are a mixture of people who would never have been found speaking to each other. Films about the American south feature members of the same family who have accents that are hundreds of miles apart.
Stefan
But the older actor who I think could have pulled it off would have been Nick Nolte. But then, I always thought he would have made a much scarier and complex Dudley Smith in L.A. Confidential than James Cromwell did.
Spot on, my friend. Nolte would have been brilliant. A movie where Nolte did play a very scary corrupt Irish cop is “Q&A”, with Timothy Hutton and Armand Assante. It really gets the feel of the NY Irish-American cops/prosecutors milieu.
I love James Cromwell, but he never put the fear of god into me the way that Dudley Smith did when I imagined him while reading the book. (I always pictured Dudley as looking and sounding a bit like Kevin Tighe).
Mnemosyne
Not surprising that it was specifically Santa Monica — it’s probably the most Irish part of So Cal.
Stefan
Another pretty good fictional representation of the Whitey-Bill Bulger dynamic is the Showtime series “Brotherhood” (oddly enough mentioned in another thread today). It’s set in Providence rather than Boston, but steals the Bulger story of having one brother be an Irish-American politician and the other brother a gangster.
brendancalling
I am so glad they finally caught Bulger. He’s a murderer, a criminal, and an overall piece of shit.
i hope the motherfucker dies in prison.
shortstop
That’s true, but I think the culprit is not only directors’ indifference but also many actors’ limited skill in this area. I know nothing about the nuances of Boston accents, but the two examples you mention are things I do have some familiarity with. I can say that most Northern-raised Americans have a total tin ear for the differentiations in Southern accents unless the gap is as blatant as, say, tidewater vs. Little Rock or northern Louisiana vs. the low country. Similarly, everybody can tell the difference between cockney and Mayfair-Belgravia, but most American actors can’t seem to get anything in between. And god help them if they have to do regional English accents.
Hurling Dervish
Yeah, it was weird that it was always Santa Monica where he was rumored to be.
I never believed it. Didn’t think he would be that dumb. If he was stupid enough to stay in the U.S., I figured he’d at least be in some place like Arkansas or Idaho where he’d be able to live anonymously.
And weird also that he was still living with his girlfriend. So both rumors were right all along.
GregB
Congrats on finally sweeping this trash off of the street. He is one of the few people that I willingly refer to in such a manner. At least now he gets to die in captivity as a rat.
Heck, all we need now is D.B. Cooper to make this a 2011 most wanted hat trick.
Also too, if you want to read a great book about the incestuous relations between Bulger and the law enforcement enablers, try Black Mass.
Grover Gardner
My audiobook company just released Howie Carr’s history of this case, HITMAN. I wasn’t paying that much attention, just another crime book, right? It’s really taken off. I didn’t realize how strong this story still is after all these years.
Medrawt
What annoys me is when everyone in Baaahston movies has the SAME bad accent, though I can tune it out. I’d rather watch a movie where they don’t try terrible hard to make it Baaaahston, because the resulting blend of accents can be more realistic.
I’m from New Bedford, which has its own distinct variant of the New England accent-family, but I don’t have anything close to a “New Bedford accent”; I speak more or less the way Matt Damon or Ben Affleck do when they’re not playing poor Bostonians, i.e., vaguely New Englandy but with the “R”s put back in – this is how my parents spoke, how most of my friends in school spoke, etc. I have two younger cousins, a year and a half apart, one of whom sounds pretty close to me, the other one has the full “Nu Befuh” thing going on. So, yeah, families don’t automatically have the same accent – it depends on school, friends, education, and sometimes willpower (I think my cousin wanted to affect a heavier local accent than her parents/sister had).
And as a kid who grew up fascinated by the “Where’s Whitey?” phenomenon, this is an odd day.
fasteddie9318
Wasn’t De Niro supposed to play that role but had to back out because he was directing The Good Shepard?
Anyway, I thought Nicholson was fine.
“How’s your mother?”
“Oh…I’m afraid she’s on her way out.”
“We all are. Act accordingly.”
ETA: I’m wrong; according to IMDB De Niro was supposed to play Capt. Queenan.
Joel
I swore someone here mentioned that they were from the Lake (Nonantum). Of all the Boston-area accents, the Lake accent is by far the weirdest.
tokyokie
@Doug J in Damascus
I love Lee Marvin so much that when I found a male lilac-point Siamese kitten at an animal shelter last year, I immediately claimed him because he seemed the perfect cat to name “Marvin.” But I’m still kicking myself for not picking up one of his seal-point litter mates so I could have named him “Van Cleef” and had the Lee brothers.
Marvin is pretty much the feline equivalent of his namesake: garrulous, silver-haired, blue-eyed and an inveterate troublemaker.
Elliott
Remember when Whitey won the lottery? That’s when I learned who he was and that he was Billy’s brother. I never saw Massachusetts government in the same way after that.
Mike Kay (The Base)
Doug
You must see “Infernal Affairs“, the Hong Kong movie that was remade into “The Daparted”. Easily 50 times better.
replicnt6
Although it does sound incredibly suspicious, I’ve also heard that organized crime sometimes uses the lottery to launder money. They get lackeys to go out and buy 10’s or 100’s of thousands of tickets. If they win, they have the money perfectly legit. I don’t know what the return in other forms of laundering are, but I could imagine that the lottery is competitive.
Stefan
Remember when Whitey won the lottery? That’s when I learned who he was and that he was Billy’s brother. I never saw Massachusetts government in the same way after that.
Well, it didn’t really have anything to do with MA state government. Whitey just heard of someone in Southie with a winning ticket, went to the guy’s place, put a gun to his head, and made him give Whitey the ticket, which Whitey then turned in as his own. Simple and easy.
I’m so happy they finally caught him. Between that and the Bruins Boston is on a roll!
Stefan
They get lackeys to go out and buy 10’s or 100’s of thousands of tickets. If they win, they have the money perfectly legit. I don’t know what the return in other forms of laundering are, but I could imagine that the lottery is competitive.
This…would not work.
mclaren
Nicholson was totally wrong for the part. Plus, the original Chinese version of the film was far far far superior.
joeshabadoo
The fact that the Departed won the Oscar really pisses me off.
It takes a hugely popular and successful Hong Kong movie, simply transplants it to America and then stuffs it full of A list actors.
It’s like hitting a homerun out of a T ball field. When you do it you can admire how far you hit the ball but you sure as hell don’t deserve an award.