- James Whitey Bulger, one of the most infamous mobsters
of the 20th century.
- I tell you, this case had everything.
There's murder, drugs, international organized crime.
- Whitey Bulger is charged with murdering 19 people.
- He had been on the run for about 15 years.
- Bulger had money.
He had fake IDs.
He had connections.
- The FBI is getting their shit kicked out of them
constantly in the media in Boston.
- I believe that he's on the ten most wanted list
because they're not looking for him,
but they want us to think that they are.
- People truly thought that we didn't wanna find him.
[dramatic music]
- In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.
♪
Drug busts,
mob stings,
terrorist takedowns.
- Get down! Get down!
- We understand why people want to tell stories about us.
- Mark it.
- Freeze! - FBI.
- FBI! - Action!
- But they don't know the half of it.
[indistinct radio chatter]
What really goes down,
we save that for each other
when we're talking agent to agent.
♪
This is "FBI True."
[tense music]
♪
- Cindy Coppola is a 23-year veteran of the FBI.
She worked on cases that included
organized crime and terrorism
and took part in multinational investigations
into drug trafficking and money laundering.
Coppola finished her career with the Los Angeles Division,
running two offices, supervising investigations
and providing undercover security for special events.
- So you guys didn't know each other before 2009?
How did this come up that you guys were asked
to be part of the Whitey Bulger case?
- I got a call from the assistant special agent
in charge of the Boston office.
And she flat-out asked me, she said,
"Would you be interested in a temporary duty assignment
to Boston to try and resolve the Bulger case?"
- A man so dangerous that he joined Osama bin Laden
at the top of the FBI's most wanted list.
- This guy that's been charged with 19 murders,
he had been on the run for about 15 years.
- Tommy MacDonald joined the FBI in 1996
and earned a law degree in 2000.
He worked with the NYPD on the joint bank robbery task force
and violent crime squad in New York City.
He retired as a recruiter
for the bureau's Boston field office.
- And, Phil, what about you?
- I was getting toward the end of my career.
I liked the case. I knew the case.
And I tell you, one of the things I always wanted to do
was arrest an FBI top ten fugitive.
- Phil Torsney worked for the National Park Service
before becoming an FBI agent in 1984.
He served on the SWAT team
and worked on the violent crime squad in Cleveland
before joining the city's newly formed
fugitive task force, where he worked for 25 years.
- After we both got the call, we talked.
I didn't know him before.
He said, "Hey, you know, we're gonna catch this guy.
I'm not going back here just to sit on my ass."
And I'm like, "I'm not either." We knew that.
- I don't think it's common for two, like, violent crime agents
to be plucked out of their field office
and brought to a different city 'cause, you know,
most agents who work fugitives top ten cases,
that's one of 40 or 50 cases on your case roster.
You get pulled in different directions.
This was a great opportunity to come to Boston
and to work one case,
and that was what really excited me about that.
- I could tell talking to MacDonald
that we were gonna be rocking and rolling.
- What was Bulger's background?
What was he known for? - He grew up in South Boston.
Big family. Big Irish-Catholic family.
But he took the criminal road.
He eventually got caught for bank robbery,
goes away to Atlanta, Lewisburg,
as well as other federal prisons, including Alcatraz.
When he gets out, he comes back to South Boston
after a bunch of years in prison,
and he's in the game--
the Irish gang kind of game.
The Winter Hill Gang, Bulger became a member of that.
He hooks up with some other criminals in the area,
and there's a lot of murders.
There's fighting among several Irish mobs and Italian mobs,
and people are getting killed.
And there's a fight on for who's in control
of South Boston.
- Yeah, back in that time, the FBI's main focus
was the Italian mob--
having a source, an informant that can report,
you know, real time on the activities of the Italian mob.
And it was a high priority back then.
- It sure was.
Bulger eventually was approached by an FBI agent
and began to cooperate.
And Bulger, I believe, saw an opportunity.
He could help out his end of things
by helping give information on the Italian mob,
get them out of the picture through the FBI.
You know, he was a smart guy.
He knew how to run this business,
even though it was a criminal business.
So there was a cooperation there,
but it sort of went both ways.
John Connolly was the FBI agent for Bulger.
Bulger was influencing
and getting information from Connolly.
And information didn't go like it should have gone.
Didn't turn out well.
- FBI agent John Connolly, assigned to handle Bulger,
eventually went to work for the mob boss.
- Were you ever aware of a case
where there was a murder committed by Whitey Bulger?
Wasn't it your obligation
as a law enforcement officer? - It would be my obligation.
From the very beginning, it's understood.
- Did you ever ask them if they killed anyone?
- Well, why would I do that? He was a source.
- He had worked as an informant for the FBI,
but it was the Massachusetts State Police and the DEA
who were conducting an investigation
in an effort to obtain a federal indictment
for extortion, racketeering, and drug charges.
- Bulger is tipped off by John Connolly
that an indictment... - Oh, shit.
Yeah. - Was coming out.
He knew he'd had to go on the run at some point.
Bulger had money.
He had fake IDs.
He had connections.
And the money's all in cash,
which makes it a lot easier to go on the run.
- He was prepared.
- And all of a sudden, he skips town
once we're going to look to lock him up.
- And eventually, Connolly got caught for that,
the corruption, and that caused
a lot of problems there.
- I am innocent of the malicious charges...
- You throw in an FBI agent who's convicted of corruption
right in federal court in Boston.
You throw that in there, and you got a hot mess.
- Boston FBI office paid for it for a while.
- There was a lot of friction between the DEA
and the state police and the FBI.
- Shame, like a black eye for us unfortunately.
- For the FBI in general, we had to catch this guy,
you know, to show the public that we do our job
and get it done no matter what the problems were in the past.
- It seemed as if Bulger had disappeared
from the face of the Earth
except for the alleged sightings all over the world.
- When I got that phone call in 2009 from Noreen Gleason,
who was the assistant special agent
in charge of the Boston office,
you know, the logical question was,
"How long am I gonna be
on temporary assignment to Boston?"
She said, "We'll give you three years
unless you catch him before that."
- Doing a case like this is almost like a cold case.
I mean, so what were your first steps?
You guys get up there, and what did you do?
What was your game plan? - Oh.
I think Boston was really fatigued when we got there.
I mean, there was no more task force in place,
so they were looking to redesign the FBI's approach
to working the case.
- Good afternoon, everyone.
Just briefly, we have a dedicated task force
solely to look for James Bulger.
Its mission is to locate and apprehend Bulger
and as well as seeking anyone who harbors, aids,
or abets his continuing to be a fugitive.
- Bulger skipped town in December of '94.
He was indicted for extortion.
It wasn't until they got cooperation
from that investigation that they superseded the indictment
and he was charged with 19 murders.
That made him go from the minor leagues
to the major league all-star game
in terms of, like, fugitives you got to try and find.
I tell you, this case had everything.
It has murder.
- Charged with murdering 19 people.
- It has drugs, international organized crime.
It has corruption.
Essentially was a one-person crime wave
in the city of Boston for decades.
There have been good work done before us
by the state troopers, the DEA,
the FBI. - Sure.
- We didn't have to go back and recreate the wheel
with a lot of this stuff.
One of our goals was to knock on doors
and talk to people, even to stir this thing up
and take some people out of their comfort zone.
They were truly people in South Boston
when we were knocking on doors that would say to us,
"You're not really looking for that guy."
I mean, people truly thought that we didn't want to find him
just because of stuff he might be able to bring up
about other corruption and that kind of thing.
- I believe that he's on the ten most wanted list
because they're not looking for him,
but they want us to think that they are.
- That wasn't the case at all.
They brought us in to figure this thing out.
- We sat down with the U.S. attorney's office,
and there was a prosecutor assigned
to help us find Whitey Bulger.
And we wanted to get a full idea
of the key family members.
- I thought his brother was a politician in that area.
- Yeah, William Bulger, Billy Bulger,
was a really well-known politician in Massachusetts.
- Well, he's the president of the state senate
in Massachusetts, and then
he was president of UMass Boston after that.
So he's a well-known person in Boston.
- Let me let you describe yourself as others see you.
- Autocratic, dictatorial.
Those are the-- - Boss.
Those kinds of things.
- Did you guys ever talk to him
as part of your investigation? - We tried.
- Yeah. - Yeah?
- Billy never even came to the door.
Both times his wife did, and she just said
he wasn't at home even though his car was in the driveway.
It's one of those things. - Yeah.
- So you leave a card and you hope you get a call back,
And you do. You get a call back from his attorney.
The exact words from their attorney was,
"We're not gonna do anything
to help the FBI find James Bulger."
- He's my brother. I care about him.
- There were certain people it was frowned on
to talk to them, but we went in.
We did an interview of Kevin Weeks.
- And who was he again? I can't--
- Kevin Weeks was Bulger's right hand man.
We went and knocked on his door.
Came the door. Let us in.
- We interviewed Kevin Weeks on a Sunday
at halftime of a Patriots game.
And he was sitting on his couch with an afghan on.
- Yeah. We're up there for an hour or so.
And he described to us a time when Bulger actually got
physically violent with his girlfriend, Catherine Greig.
- He was choking her. - Yeah, choking her.
She's the one he goes on the lam with.
Weeks said, "Maybe something could have happened to her
based on Bugler's temper and this confrontation I saw."
We started talking about that.
Bulger had a violent temper,
and a couple of the murders involved women.
- Bulger routinely performed or ordered executions,
some at close range, some with a hail of bullets,
and at least one by strangulation.
- We're starting to think, you know, what if--
what if she either dies of natural causes
or something violent happens to her
and she washes up somewhere, her body's found?
We start to think that, you know, that's a possibility.
And we need something to identify her if she's deceased.
We have no fingerprints.
She's got no real identifiers.
We have old, fuzzy, grainy pictures of her.
But we knew she had had breast implants.
- Quick note on Catherine Greig:
her background quickly is
very vain about her appearance,
had plastic surgery prior to flight.
- We talked about this over breakfast.
You know, there's serial numbers on those implants
because all the issues going back with failures on implants
and lawsuits and that kind of thing.
If she gets autopsied,
those numbers should be in an autopsy report.
Let's see if we can get those serial numbers.
- We had developed some contacts
that were associated with--
- The Greig family? - The Greig family, yeah.
And so, we ascertained from them
that she had had a procedure done at a hospital in Boston--
Newton-Wellesley Hospital.
So we got a subpoena, you know,
to see if that hospital had any records,
and hopefully, one of those record returns
would be the implant number that we were hoping to get.
Unfortunately, we got one return
for a procedure she had gotten
that was unrelated to the breast.
So then we decided, you know what, let's hustle here.
Let's think outside the box.
Let's serve the doctor
who did that one procedure we know about now.
Let's serve him with a subpoena.
Maybe she got something done outpatient,
not in the hospital.
Unfortunately, he died of melanoma in 2000.
- Ah, shame. - So that was a dead end.
So just on a halfcourt shot,
served a subpoena on the plastic surgeon
that took over his practice in Newton, Mass.
About two or three weeks later, we got the call saying,
"Hey, we actually found records
for Catherine Greig." - Awesome.
- Literally, that's all it was, was a phone call from a doctor,
saying, "Hey, Agent, we got these records.
"She had breast implants.
We have the number that you're looking for."
But on the same phone call, he asked me,
"Do you want the photos too?"
This was a female fugitive
that we really had no great photos of.
That ended up being the ticket.
Like, forget about the serial number.
These photos were highly detailed.
- Gamechanger. both: Gamechanger.
- The way we were able to use the photographs
to get the tip we needed ended up being really
what turned the case in our favor.
We decided, you know, we can't just hold a press conference
and put the photos out there,
'cause if Bulger's on the run and he sees them
and he's got money, they'll just take off and bounce
to another location and start all over again.
And she had a lot of plastic surgery done,
so why would she stop doing that while on the run?
So let's get those photos out
to the plastic surgery practices
all across the United States, all across the world,
with the hope that maybe a nurse or a doctor recognizes,
you know, our fugitive and can give us a call.
And we can identify them living under an alias somewhere
and end the case.
So that's what we did.
We took an ad out in the "Sports Illustrated"
for plastic surgery: "The Plastic Surgery News."
- Oh, really? There is such a thing?
There's, like, a newspaper? [laughs]
- The FBI spent a couple thousand dollars
to take out this ad.
This is when we first--
first had the photos. - Oh, that's awesome.
- We want to release them to the plastic surgery community,
and it went out nationally.
And we got some really good tips.
We got one great tip from Victoria, British Columbia,
which was an area
where we really thought Bulger might be in Canada.
- Why? - He had traveled to Canada.
Safety deposit box in a couple of cities in Canada.
It was easier to get from the U.S. to Canada
once he was charged
than it would have been to fly overseas.
We had a plastic surgeon and a nurse
who worked in the office who looked at that ad and said,
"That's a patient of ours out in British Columbia."
- Wow. - So we flew out.
We went through a whole patient roster and looked.
- You know, we're trying to match pictures we have
with pictures in the files there.
It wasn't pretty, a lot of it, it felt like.
It was a lot of work. - Right.
- It took a long time.
- Unfortunately, we never were able
to identify Catherine Greig as being a patient out there.
- But she had been there? Like, she had...
No? both: No.
- We really thought that we were gonna come home
with Whitey Bulger on that trip.
That was a crappy plane ride home, you know,
because that was a really good tip.
Stood out from the rest.
- So you guys are disappointed.
You come back from Canada, and there's no more information.
What do you do next?
- We wanted a reward on her. We had a reward on Bulger.
- Mm-hmm. - There's very few
female fugitives that you see a reward for.
And we were able to get a $100,000 reward
for information leading to the arrest of Catherine Greig
as well as the $2 million that was out there on Bulger.
And the other thing we did,
one of the media people in Boston knew from, you know,
outside work previously about a public service announcement.
The FBI, they'd never done it before,
so we were able to get the funding.
We got some scripts written up--two separate scripts--
emphasizing, you know, Catherine
and her possibly being in danger, just 30 seconds.
- This is an announcement by the FBI.
Have you seen this woman?
The FBI is offering $100,000
for tips leading to Catherine Greig's whereabouts.
- We emphasized the age difference
between her and Bulger.
- 60-year-old Greig is the girlfriend
of 81-year-old Bulger.
- We emphasized we're focusing on her now, not him.
She's on the run with this guy
that's been charged with 19 murders.
They really wanted to appeal to, like, a female audience,
figuring that would be a female she would talk to
while on the run who would recognize the photo and call.
- Call the tip line at 1-800-CALL-FBI.
- The FBI's doing a public service announcement.
So that's new stuff.
That made the press all over the world.
- The FBI is trying something new
to track down one of its most wanted suspects.
Starting today, it will begin airing
a public service announcement aimed at women.
- Detailing the habits of Bulger's companion,
Catherine Greig.
The FBI produced the ad
and spent $50,000 to buy airtime in 14 cities.
- The FBI's looking for tips to lead them to Grieg
who will potentially then lead them to Bulger.
- It was worth every penny because the media passed it
around and we didn't have to pay for it all over the world.
- So then from there, you start getting tips?
- We're getting tips.
The one we get the next day,
I mean, it's the one.
- So what was the big tip that came in?
- Grieg's and Whitey's photograph was recognized
as a couple
that had been living in Santa Monica, California,
for years.
Right down from the shopping center in Santa Monica.
Not far from the beach. Nice area.
Gave the exact apartment: the Princess Eugenia Apartments.
And they're living there now.
Part of the publicity was
that they liked cats, and dogs, and pets,
and we received information
that a female helped out the strays.
Lot of little things matched up.
And they're using the name Charles Gasko and his wife.
So we take that name,
and then you do all these database checks on that name.
The true Charles Gasko has been dead for years.
- So he stole somebody's identity.
Used it. Smart. - Right, so you got a guy
who's living in Santa Monica using an ID of a dead guy.
And that's a pretty good clue
when you're looking for a guy like this.
- So, of course, then what do you do?
You call LA Division?
"Hey, can you check this out?"
- We had a bunch of fugitive violent crime task forces
during that period.
The guy we knew in LA is Scott Garriola.
We call Garriola.
He got his task force, LAPD guys,
and they set up on the place and watched it.
One of his officers on the task force
saw the female come out of the porch
and made an independent identification
that's Catherine Grieg.
And now we're cooking with gas.
Garriola, he developed a ruse
with some cooperator out there to talk to Whitey,
have him come down in the basement
where he had a storage locker down there.
Tell him the thing's been broken into.
And Scott and two or three of his guys
were in the basement down there waiting.
And sure enough, Bulger went down,
and Scott yells, "FBI! On your knees!"
Bulger says, "I'm not getting down on my fucking knees."
And Scott doesn't know it's him 100% yet, I don't think,
but when he makes that statement,
Scott, he said, "Oh, yeah, this has gotta be Whitey Bulger."
And finally, Bulger gave it up.
Garriola asked him, he said,
"Aren't you relieved after all these years on the run?"
And Bulger's response was, "What, are you fucking crazy?
Who wants to be in jail? Who wants to be in prison?"
But you know it's killing him.
It's killing him because he got caught.
They went upstairs and got Catherine.
And they had all kinds of
sort of strange stuff in his apartment.
- What did they find?
- There's rifles, pistols,
you know, mace, different kind of things.
Most of the pistols are loaded.
Fake ID.
He said, "You're gonna find a hand grenade
in one of these things."
He had big water bottles with socks, like, white socks,
stretched out in the top of these water bottles.
- For what? That's odd. - Yeah.
Well, we asked them that.
And the answer is, "I like white socks,
"but they're too tight on my calves
so I stretch them out."
We were scratching our heads.
He had tons of stuff in the apartment, some strange stuff.
Bulger told Scott where the money was--800 grand, cash.
Behind this mirror, behind this picture,
all drywalled in.
Cut it out, and there's just stacks and stacks
and stacks of cash there.
He had drug money
from the '70s and '80s. - Of course.
- But he told Catherine, "This is it."
And it was it.
It was the end for him anyway.
- One of the most infamous mobsters of the 20th century
was finally brought to justice today.
Whitey Bulger is charged with murdering 19 people
as head of Boston's Irish mob.
- You brought in a team of FBI agents.
We worked the crap out of the case.
And we came up with some innovative ways
to try and find this guy, and it worked.
- You know, I talked to him at length,
and he told me, "My biggest fear when I was on the run
"was that I didn't wanna die in bed.
"If I got sick, cancer, or something like that,
"I was gonna go down to Arizona,
"climb down in one of those mine shafts,
"and just die in the bottom, way back, somewhere else,
hoping you guys never find me looking for me."
- Really? It'd be like another Hoffa.
Looking for the body. - Yeah, he would've loved that.
- There were times working the case
where, yeah, we'd say,
"Man, are they just happy indicting this guy in Boston?"
Like, don't they want to frickin' catch him?
Like, the FBI is getting the shit kicked out of them
constantly in the media in Boston.
Constantly. - Yeah.
- And here we come to town, and we're like,
wow, the bureau's the only one
really trying to do something to find this guy.
And that's exactly what happened.
The stuff the FBI did led to the location of this fugitive,
and he came back on the FBI jet to Boston.
[dramatic music]
♪