Free Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice by Kevin Cullen

meant nothing to them: Few people outside the research community had ever heard of lysergic acid diethylamide, or knew of its effects, in 1957. In exchange, inmates would receive small cash deposits in their prison savings accounts and a promise that they would be credited with enough good conduct time to shave months off their sentences. 10
    What they were not told is that the LSD injections were part of an effort, sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to develop a mind-control weapon. Project MKUltra, the agency’s secret program of research into behavior modification, mostly recruited college students and other doctors. The Atlanta prison was just one of eighty-six universities and institutions involved in the testing, which ran from 1953 to 1964. 11
    On August 6, 1957, Whitey signed a contract affirming that he understood “the hallucinatory effect of lysergic acid diethyl amide, LSD-25” and that “the potential benefits to humanity, and the risks to my health of participation in this study have been explained to me . . . and I hereby freely assume all such risks.” 12 Six days later he reported to the psychiatric ward, a large, antiseptic room with bars and a locked steel door in the basement of the prison hospital, where he was injected with his first dose of LSD. It was a routine that would continue once a week for the next fifteen months. Whitey got three dollars for every injection, and fifty-four days off his sentence in total, but it was a devastating compact. The hallucinatory effects of the LSD would last a lifetime and Whitey would bitterly recall, years later, how he felt tricked into taking something that nearly drove him mad and would forever rob him of a good night’s sleep. 13
    The hallucinations began within minutes of the injection. Suddenly, blood seemed to explode from the walls and drown him. The inmate sitting next to him turned into a skeleton. The bars on the windows morphed into writhing black snakes. He and the other test subjects became “raving . . . totally out of control mental and psychological animals.” Whitey felt depressed and suicidal after the sessions. He said two inmates in the project became psychotic and were shipped off to the federal prison hospital in Missouri. 14
    Richard Sunday, an inmate who worked in the prison hospital with Whitey and became one of his closest friends, witnessed the effect of the experimental injections and was horrified. Whitey, he said, screamed wildly and babbled incoherently. His face was contorted. “He was one crazy individual when he was on those drugs,” Sunday said. 15 “He was a lunatic.” 16 Sunday urged Whitey to drop out, but Whitey trusted Dr. Pfeiffer and stuck with it. For someone who had shown little respect for authority before he got to prison, Bulger was surprisingly deferential to the doctor. Years later, he would threaten to hunt down and kill Pfeiffer, but his trust was implicit when he was in prison. Sunday speculated it was a manifestation of Whitey’s sense of duty, an extension of his patriotism, that he saw the LSD project as a form of public service. 17
    This uncharacteristic bow to authority may have been an outgrowth of his upbringing in South Boston, where loyalty and pride in the blue-collar, working-class neighborhood fused, for most, with an unquestioning love of country. Young men felt a duty to join the military, and Southie has had a disproportionate share of soldiers killed in action over many generations. Street corners, parks, and schools are named in their honor. Despite his own very sketchy service record, Whitey prided himself on being a veteran. It rankled when other inmates went off on anti-American rants. “People in there talked about the country like a dog,” said Sunday, a decorated US Army veteran who was sent to prison after a military court found him guilty of raping a woman when he served in Korea. “I was extremely patriotic . . . Jimmy [Bulger] was also patriotic. He