Mass Law Blog

Whitey Bulger and Gorky Park

by | Jun 14, 2013

“The FBI is an unindicted coconspirator in the massive racketeering case against Whitey.” – Kevin Cullen, Boston Globe, June 14, 2013

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I wonder if Martin Cruz Smith had Bulger in mind when he wrote this in 1981:

The FBI doesn’t conduct investigations, they pay informers. … Their informers are mental cases and hit men. Where the bureau touches the real world, suddenly you get all these freaks who know how to kill people with piano wire. Say a freak gets caught … he tells the bureau what it wants to hear and makes up what he doesn’t know. See, that’s the basic difference. A cop goes out on the street and digs up information for himself. He’s willing to get dirty because his ambition in life is to be a detective. But a bureau agent is really a lawyer or an accountant; he wants to work in an office and dress nice, maybe go into politics. That son of a bitch will buy a freak a day. … When their freaks are finished testifying, they move them and give them new names. If the freak kills someone else, they move him again. There are psychopaths that have been moved four, five times — totally immune; they’ve got better pardons than Nixon. That’s what happens when you don’t do the job yourself, when you use freaks.

Gorky Park, p. 387-388.