T. J. English - Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish-American Gangster

W ho would have guessed that in the early years of the twenty-first centuryin an era of rampant jihadism and global paranoiathe highest ranking organized crime figure on the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) Ten Most Wanted List was neither a Mafia don nor a Latin American narcotraficante nor a Russian mafiya , but rather an old-style Irish American mob boss from around the way?

During the years of his reign, James Whitey Bulger, formerly the kingpin of South Boston, was like a character out of an old Cagney movietough but sentimental, kind to his mother, politically connected, and a ruthless sociopath who murdered at least nineteen people. Bulger created a criminal organization based in Southie that ruled the roost for over twenty years, from the early 1970s until 1995, when Bulger was tipped off that the Feds were coming to get him and went on the lam. The Age of Bulger transpired during a time when most U.S. citizens probably thought the Irish American gangster no longer existed outside of black-and-white Warner Bros. movies from the 1930s. Bulger not only existed, but he also thrived, making millions of dollars annually through racketeering, killing people at will, and getting away with it through expert manipulation of the System. He eluded capture and prosecution in a manner that would have made a Mafia boss like John Gotti weep with envy.

As an Irish American gangster, Bulger flew mostly below the national radar. Certainly in the later decades of what was an unprecedented 150-year run for the Irish Mob, old-style mobsters like Whitey were content to operate in the shadows. Let the mafiosi walk the red carpet, their exploits made larger-than-life by the likes of Brando, DeNiro, and Pacino. Let the Italians come under the scrutiny of the FBI, which during Director J. Edgar Hoovers administration had denied the existence of the Mafia, but would eventually go after La Cosa Nostra with the zeal of a jilted lover. Each headline-grabbing arrest and prosecution of LCN made it possible for the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to promote their own exploits, creating a self-fulfilling mythology that was great for the G-Men but not so great for the Italians. With the Mafia dominating the headlines, the Irish Mob soldiered on mostly by staying local, keeping their operations small, and working within underworld parameters that had been in place for more than a century.

Whitey Bulger may have been the last of the last, a man whose staying power was unique to South Boston, but the circumstances of his rise in the underworld were the result of a long and violent history. Like most Irish American mobsters, his power was based in part on two major elements: He had a corrupt FBI agent in his pocket and a younger brother in the State House, Massachusetts State Senator William Bulger. The degree to which Whitey was able to finagle these two factorsthe lawman and the politicianwas part and parcel of his inheritance as an Irish American gangster.

Like a neighborhood godfather from long ago, Bulger doled out turkeys to the needy on Thanksgiving and Christmas, lent money to school kids, did favors for his constituents, and settled local disputes. He understood the aggrieved nature of the Irish in Boston, whose legacy was fundamentally the same as that of the Irish in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, early New Orleans, and myriads of other U.S. municipalities large and small. The ravages of colonialism, famine, pestilence, anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry had shaped the Irish American identity and created a people who were sometimes criticized for being clannish or overly parochial. The Irish themselves didnt see it that way. Arriving in America en masse under the most dire circumstances imaginable, they did what they had to do: They looked out for one another and created social systems that allowed them to advance, even though American society at large was determined to keep them in their place.

It is a common misconception among most peopleeven many Irish Americansthat the American Mob began as an Italian institution transplanted directly from Sicily. Indeed, criminal traditions in Sicily, known variously as vendetta societies or la Mafia, were transported to the United States with the beginnings of Italian immigration in the late 1880s and 1890s. But the Irish had been in the United States for over forty years by then, and the American underworldwhich was based on criminal infiltration of the System for social advancement and economic gainwas already firmly entrenched. The earliest progenitors and organizers of this underworld were Irish refugees whose desire to make it in the New World was informed by oppression, starvation, and the threat of total extermination.

To understand the roots of organized crime in the United States, it is necessary to make a leap of the imagination back to the Old Country. In the early nineteenth century, Ireland was a dreary place, a colony of the British Crown where the Irish people lived as virtual slaves on land that had once belonged to their ancestors. They tilled the soil at the behest of their British landlords who controlled the property through laws that made it nearly impossible for tenant farmers to achieve even a semblance of social mobility, and they could be evicted at any time. The names of all streets and towns had been changed from their original Gaelic into English, and the native language was banned by law. This oppressive colonial system was enforced at the end of the lash and the hangmans noose.

After a history of failed rebellions and squelched political uprisings, what remained of an anticolonial movement in Ireland was to be found among the secret resistance societies, loosely structured organizations that used a strategy of sabotage and violence to disrupt the colonial government, especially in rural areas of the country. The Whiteboys, the Ribbonmen, and the Molly Maguires were comprised of members of the community who circulated openly, but whose membership in the underground resistance movement was a well-guarded secret. These groups represented the earliest inklings of American gangsterism in that they presented themselves as custodians of their communities and were just as likely to prey on their own people as they were to go after Crown forces.

In 1845, the rural resistance societies and all other forms of social interactionunderground or otherwisewere brought to a halt by a tiny agricultural virus known as Phytophthera Infestans . There had been blights before in the countrys potato crop, which both as a product for export and a food source sustained the nation. Normally, the potato was a hardy tuber that always bounced back. This time, however, the virus struck at the root and spread like wildfire, wiping out the entire crops of 1845, 1846, 1847, and so on. Over a period of nearly a decade, the countrys potato crop was decimated; one-third of the islands population perished from starvation and disease or were forced to flee into permanent exile.

The Great Potato Famine is a vague and distant memory for most Americans, even though an overwhelming majority of the forty million Americans of Irish descent in the United States can trace their ancestry back to what was the most cataclysmic human event of the nineteenth century. Many of the personality characteristics that were lampooned in U.S. newspapers of the era as typically Irish were a result of famine and mass starvation.