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Wed column ping

Set the Navy SEALs on Whitey Bulger
By Howie Carr | Wednesday, May 4, 2011 |
http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists

You’ll have to admit that the Pakistani ambassador to the United States did have a point when he was explaining how Osama bin Laden could live so openly in Pakistan for so long.

“If Whitey Bulger can live undetected by American police for so long,” Husain Haqqani told the Atlantic, “why can’t Osama bin Laden live undetected by Pakistani authorities?”

He’s right, isn’t he? The reason Whitey could live “undetected” so long was exactly the same reason that bin Laden could likewise remain “undetected” in Pakistan. He was one of the boys, he was on the team.

Haqqani, it turns out, is a former BU professor, so he knows the Whitey story. My old friend Chris Lydon told me that yesterday, and Lydon pointed out another similarity between the FBI’s two Most Wanted. Both were recruited by U.S. intelligence (FBI, CIA) for use against other enemies (the Italians, the Soviets). Eventually, however, the wars the feds hired them to fight were won.

As Lydon wrote to Haqqani yesterday, “The U.S. authorities in both cases forgot to deal with their agents, who suddenly went rogue and then disappeared entirely.”

Of course, it’s easier to be missing when the cops are looking under every rock except the one you’re hiding under.

What was it that Whitey once said to the cops from the DEA? “You’re the good good guys and we’re the good bad guys.”

So here was Osama, living in a fortress in the literal shadow of Pakistan’s West Point. And yet nobody knew what was going on?

Look, I didn’t force the Pakistani ambassador to set me up to write this column. But yes, I do have a new book out in which Whitey figures prominently, and if you’d like to get a personally autographed copy of “Hitman,” I’ll be signing them tonight at the Paper Store in West Roxbury at 7:30.

Back in 1975, Whitey et al set up a Dorchester bar owner named Eddie Connors. They maneuvered him into a phone booth at the Sunoco station on the corner of Morrissey Boulevard and Freeport Street. A couple of hundred yards away was a function hall, where a few hundred cops inside were getting loaded at some big retirement banquet.

You think the presence of all those cops stopped Whitey and Stevie? They knew nobody was going to hear them, and nobody did. For decades you could stroll into the death booth, its broken glass replaced, pick up the phone and see the nicks in the receiver left by Whitey’s bullet holes.

One rogue agent down, one to go. Maybe instead of the FBI, the feds oughta send the Navy SEAL Team 6 after Whitey.

Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1335369