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

did not want to hear any commie talk about the country.” 18
    Plagued by persistent insomnia and nightmares after the injections, Whitey went to the infirmary, begging to be excused from work and left alone in his cell for a day while he recovered. “Shook up from LSD project,” a medical staffer wrote on Whitey’s medical chart after examining him one day. 19 After fifteen months, doctors dropped him from the study because he was “persistently noisy and boisterous to a rather extreme degree.” 20 It’s unclear whether they were running out of volunteers or Whitey settled down, but, still desperate to earn good conduct time, he rejoined the LSD study for six weeks the following summer. He also volunteered for a less grueling experiment, testing a vaccine for whooping cough. He was rewarded with one dollar for each vaccination, two dollars for each blood test, and three days’ additional good conduct time each month. 21 Gradually and painfully, he was earning his way out.
    When he first went to prison, Whitey made good on his vow to use this time to better himself. He took typing classes and completed correspondence courses in bookkeeping, salesmanship, and business law. He began reading in a serious way and discovered an interest in historical novels about war and politics, and in autobiographies, westerns, and poetry. He subscribed to America , a Jesuit magazine recommended to him by Father Drinan, whose writings appeared regularly in its pages. And he was a steady letter writer, allowed, under prison rules, to correspond with ten reputable people who had passed a background check. Initially, his list included his parents, brothers, sisters, Jacquie McAuliffe, Drinan, and another priest. When his girlfriend stopped writing, he replaced her on his list with another priest, and thus the boy who couldn’t be bothered to walk the few minutes from Logan Way to St. Monica’s Church in Southie was now corresponding in prison with three priests—and going to Mass regularly. He may have found a new spirituality, or perhaps he’d simply figured out that one way to impress a parole board is to find religion behind the walls—and to show that you had reputable allies on the outside.
    Whatever his motives, his image in the prison began to shift. “This man is devoted to his mother,” staff wrote on his annual review, noting that he corresponded regularly with her. 22 He earned a “meritorious award” for helping physical therapy patients in the infirmary, where he demonstrated “cooperative work habits and a cheerful personality.” But for all his conscientious reputation building, Whitey still found it hard saying no to the temptation of trouble. A year after that glowing annual review, prison staff discovered he had slipped a hacksaw blade to four inmates who used it to saw their way out of the hospital. The men were captured on the roof over the prison’s dining room and an inmate informant told authorities of Whitey’s involvement. 23 That Whitey would risk his institutional record for a prison escape he wasn’t even going to take part in seemed especially reckless, and prison authorities now viewed him as an escape risk, too. “Almost every time information is received about some escape plot, Bulger’s name heads the list,” Associate Warden W. H. York wrote, recommending to his boss that Whitey be transferred to Alcatraz, the nation’s first super maximum security prison.
    Bill Bulger, far away and busy with his own burgeoning career, had access to few of the day-to-day specifics of Whitey’s prison life, but it was nevertheless plain to him that things weren’t going well. He wrote to McCormack, then House Majority Leader, complaining that Whitey was in solitary confinement, cut off from communication with his family. 24 McCormack personally contacted Bureau of Prisons director James Bennett, urging him to investigate the complaints, and his intervention worked: Whitey was returned to the general