Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (45 page)

Not long after the beauty salon incident, the FBI became distracted by a series of Whitey sightings overseas. Still, Whitey and Greig never left the United States, except for their occasional day trips into Mexico. Soon after 9/11, they even stopped those, for fear of tightened border security.

All the same, after years of keeping people at arm’s length, Whitey and Greig seemed to yearn for social contact. They set aside caution to take a trip to Las Vegas, where Whitey played the slots and won more than he lost. They had a close call when Whitey thought that he had spotted one of John Connolly’s old friends, Joe Pistone, the retired FBI agent who became a legend by infiltrating the Mafia while working undercover as Donnie Brasco.
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Nobody recognized Whitey and Greig, however, and they returned to Santa Monica feeling even more confident that nobody would. They had been living at the Princess Eugenia for about ten years when they began initiating more conversations, especially with newer, younger tenants. Greig also widened her circle by signing up for evening courses at a local high school, taking classes in everything from how to operate a computer to how to repair a toilet.
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The couple began cultivating friendships with neighbors but remained selective, gravitating toward people who were too busy or polite to ask personal questions. Often they were notably generous with those they came to like. They bought a neighbor with lung disease a four-hundred-dollar air purifier. They gave Enrique Sanchez, the maintenance supervisor, some tools. They passed out flashlights to women in the neighborhood so they could walk home more safely at night.

Greig would sort through magazines and junk mail left on the floor in the lobby of the Princess Eugenia and deliver it outside the doors of other tenants’ apartments. She fetched the newspaper for Catalina Schlank, an elderly woman who lived on the first floor, and occasionally tucked a mango or an orange into the plastic newspaper bag. When Schlank offered a copy of her house keys to Greig in case of an emergency, Greig declined after checking with Whitey, saying, “My husband doesn’t want to be responsible.”
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They occasionally invited Janus Goodwin into their apartment. Goodwin eyed a couch so shabby that even the Salvation Army would have rejected it.
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“They seemed very lonely,” Goodwin said. “I think they were starving for company.” The three would talk for up to an hour about movies, art, the weather, and local events, but Goodwin was never invited to sit down or offered anything to eat or drink. “It was almost like they were out of practice,” Goodwin said of the couple’s social skills.

Whitey grew obsessed with following local crime news. He regularly placed the free Santa Monica newspaper at the doorsteps of the tenants he befriended and cautioned them to read the police blotter on Fridays. When a homeless man began loitering on the front steps of the apartment building, he told him to leave or he would call police.
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“We thought he was a paranoid guy telling us to watch out, be careful of crime,” said a middle-aged man in the building. “We didn’t know he had experience.”
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Whitey seemed especially drawn to some of the young people at the Princess Eugenia. Their busy lives interested him, and their safety became his concern. When a young single woman moved in, Whitey and Greig took her under their wing and Whitey offered self-defense advice.
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He urged her to let him install locks on her apartment windows and warned her to put patio furniture on her first-floor balcony so “if anyone hopped your balcony you could hear them with the furniture and plants there.” He cautioned her to walk on the side of Wilshire Boulevard that was better lit when heading home from the gym at night and advised her to hold her key in a way that would allow her to fend off an attacker. One night, the woman heard a knock and opened her door to find Whitey and Greig standing there. “You have to protect yourself,” Whitey told the woman, handing her a large can of Mace. “Just flip it open and spray it in his face.” Later, when she admitted she didn’t carry it because it was too bulky, he produced a smaller can that fit in the palm of her hand. “He was very protective of me,” she said.

Whitey and Greig rarely talked of their past, and when they did, not surprisingly, what they shared was largely invented. He claimed he was a military veteran who had fought in Korea. Hints of the real man sometimes filtered through. He confided to Enrique Sanchez that he carried a knife and that he used to have a violent streak. “I used to like weapons and I used to fight,” Whitey told him. “I just thought that was because he was in the military,” Sanchez said later.
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Joshua Bond, a tall, young Mississippian, was hired as a property manager at the Princess Eugenia in 2007 and moved into the apartment next door to the Gaskos. He had graduated from Boston University two years earlier and had a Boston decal on the back of his car. Despite having lived in Boston for four years, Bond had never heard of the legendary Whitey Bulger. Whitey, in any case, seemed unconcerned about the Boston connection. Bond, who played in a country band, stayed up late playing music as Whitey listened through the walls. Whitey started calling Bond “Tex,” and one day he appeared at Bond’s door. “I’ve heard you play,” Whitey told him. Whitey handed him a box and urged him to open it. It was an expensive black Stetson cowboy hat. Whitey said he no longer wore it and thought that his young neighbor might like it. He showed up at Bond’s door offering him a half-f bottle of Grand Marnier, saying a nephew and his wife hadn’t finished it during a recent visit—a rare reference to family or house guests. Bond appreciated the gestures, though sometimes Whitey’s attention seemed over-the-top. Whitey complained when Bond and his friends smoked cigarettes on the adjacent balcony. When Bond had friends over, Whitey sometimes eavesdropped and recounted their conversations to Bond, word for word, the next day.
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Bond grew especially uncomfortable after he noticed that the gifts Whitey kept giving him were often aimed at improving his personal appearance. Whitey gave him a brake light for his bike, an inducement to ride more. A curling bar to build his biceps. A squeezer to build his forearms. A crunch machine to work on his abdomen. A trimmer and a comb for his beard. “He told me I needed to take care of my beard better,” Bond said.
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It got a little creepy. Bond comforted himself by thinking that Charlie and Carol were “such a nice old couple,”
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and then, once again, Charlie would veer over the line. One time, Bond failed to acknowledge a small gift left hanging on his doorknob in a plastic bag. “You didn’t write me a thank-you note,” an indignant Whitey complained when he confronted Bond a few days later.
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Chastened, Bond went home and scribbled a gracious message on a piece of notebook paper: “I’m sorry. I couldn’t ask for better neighbors. You guys feel like family.” Whitey and Greig responded by presenting Bond with a box of stationery, and Whitey told him, “That was the sweetest thing we’ve ever gotten.” Beyond that one sharp rebuke, Bond never saw evidence of Whitey’s temper, infamous in Boston, all but invisible in Santa Monica. But he did get a sense of how jumpy Whitey was when he startled him once by approaching from behind on a bicycle. “Jesus fucking Christ!” Whitey screamed. “What the fuck, Josh. Don’t sneak up on me like that.” Whitey then quickly regained his composure, and Bond never gave it another thought, knowing how concerned the old man was about crime.

Just as in Grand Isle,
Whitey and Greig charmed their Santa Monica neighbors with their demonstrative love of animals. During their daily strolls, they stopped just about anyone walking a dog, chatting amiably as they stroked the animal. “I love bull terriers,” Whitey gushed the first time he spotted his neighbor Denise Walsh walking toward him on Third Street, led by her muscular white terrier with its distinctive egg-shaped head. Whitey played with the dog, confiding that as a boy he’d had a bull terrier that had lived to be twelve. “They’re the sweetest dogs ever,” said Whitey, complaining that the powerful breed had an undeserved bad reputation.

Greig in particular had a deep empathy for pets in pain or otherwise neglected. She was always rescuing cats that tumbled from balconies in the apartment complexes around their neighborhood and then making calls and knocking on doors to reunite them with their owners. When she spotted a fluffy white cat roaming the neighborhood with a tight pink harness partially imbedded in its fur, she brought the animal to a veterinarian and paid for its removal and for follow-up treatment. Then she put an ad in the local paper, appealing to “CAT LOVERS” to give the animal a home.
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After an elderly man in the neighborhood died, his striped cat, Tiger, began hanging around the Princess Eugenia. “We would see her searching in the bushes for the cat,” said a neighbor.
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“The cat would not go near anybody else.” At least twice a day, around 6:00 a.m. and again in the evening, Greig crouched on the sidewalk in front of her apartment building with tin cans of food or plastic bags filled with tuna and fed the abandoned tabby as Whitey, who also had a soft spot for strays, stood by protectively.
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Whitey and Greig brought Tiger to the veterinarian by taxi when he was sick and kept a framed picture of the cat on the wall of their apartment. Their devotion caught the attention of many, but especially Anna Bjornsdottir, a former actress and beauty queen, who lived in the neighborhood for months at a time and sometimes stopped to chat with the Gaskos as they fed the tabby.
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“Isn’t she nice?” Bjornsdottir said of Greig to a neighbor. The two women, whose faces had become well-known for very different reasons, bonded over the cat, becoming friends. Bjornsdottir had competed as Miss Iceland in the 1974 Miss Universe pageant, where she was voted Miss Congeniality by her fellow contestants. By 1980, she and her Icelandic rock musician husband had relocated to California and were living the glamorous life in Los Angeles. A profile of the couple in
People
magazine described her as “one of the world’s most beautiful and successful models”; she had earned more than two thousand dollars a day for appearing in commercials for Vidal Sassoon and Noxzema—she was one of the blondes in the iconic “Take It Off” commercials. Shortening her name to Anna Bjorn, she had landed feature roles in several movies, among them
The Sword and the Sorcerer
, and guest-starred on television shows, including
Remington Steele
and
Fantasy Island
. She eventually divorced her husband, and over the years settled into a quiet life in Iceland, away from the spotlight, working as a graphic designer and yoga instructor. She married Halldor Gudmundsson, an Icelandic businessman, with whom she published a book about the exploits of Mosa, a cat they adopted after it survived weeks being lost in the mountains.

Sometime around 2000, the couple began staying in Santa Monica for several months each year, initially at the Embassy Hotel across the street from Whitey and Greig’s apartment complex, then in another apartment a few blocks away. Bjornsdottir often walked by the Princess Eugenia and was impressed by how kind Greig was to Tiger. She was less impressed with Whitey, who grew openly hostile one day when she suggested that Tiger was so ill that the most humane thing to do was to euthanize the cat. When Tiger died, Greig was heartbroken, and the cat’s demise seemed to increase her concern for Whitey, who had recently turned eighty and was beginning to show his age. Greig fretted over her arthritis and Whitey’s prostate and worried about paying their medical bills.
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She subscribed to health magazines like
Prevention
, shopped for healthy foods, and put herself and Whitey on a reduced-sodium diet aimed at lowering their blood pressure.
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He was not a very good patient. A dentist in Marina del Rey who treated him later noted in his file that he was “a high fear patient and hated needles.”
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Whitey joked that he was a “dental chicken from Chicago.”
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Whitey’s aversion to doctors was so strong, in fact, that he worried he might lose his temper with one them and get himself in trouble. But Greig helped him control himself, often playing goodwill ambassador while accompanying her cranky old boyfriend to dentist and doctor visits.
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A doctor who treated Whitey (under the name Lawlor) at a Los Angeles clinic complained that he “had a temper and would push the nurses around.”
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Whitey complained about arthritis, but when the doctor suggested he get a cortisone shot, he bristled, admitting he was scared of needles. Greig calmed him down and smoothed things over with the medical staff. He introduced her as his wife. When asked why he traveled all the way to the Los Angeles clinic since there were many closer to his Santa Monica home, Whitey told the doctor, “You run a clean place. I like to come to you.”

Greig, increasingly, tried not to leave Whitey alone for too long and told neighbors he was ailing, though he always appeared fit and alert during his daily walks. Every few weeks, Greig got her hair cut at the same salon on Wilshire Boulevard, The Haircutters, stopping on the way to pick up medication for Whitey at the pharmacy and groceries at Whole Foods supermarket. She confided to her hairdresser that her husband had a problem with his prostate and that she was concerned about his health. “She was very worried,” Wendy Farnetti, her hairstylist, said.
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The Carol Gasko that had her hair cut and lightened every two or three weeks had changed considerably over the years. She didn’t color her hair. It was as if she were consciously changing her appearance.

Greig and Farnetti chatted easily during the haircuts. One day the talk turned to men. Farnetti mentioned an ex-boyfriend who was trying to talk her into joining him in Texas. “You’re going to probably not like it,” Greig told her, “because it’s probably hot and, you know, you like California. And besides, I’d lose my hairdresser.” Farnetti nodded. She knew that going back to her boyfriend would be a mistake. “I have the worst taste in men,” Farnetti said. “I’m a bum magnet. If there’s a bum in the room, I’ll attract them by magnetic force.” Greig laughed. “I really love the bad boys,” she told Farnetti. “My husband was a really bad boy when I married him, but he’s a lot more mellow now.”
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