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WHERE THE BODIES WERE BURIED: WHITEY BULGER AND THE WORLD THAT MADE HIM
by T.J. English
William Morrow, September 2015
438 pages
$28.99
ISBN: 0062290983


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

The country that imprisons more people per capita than any other in the world is, unsurprisingly, the United States of America. One percent of the US population--over 2 million people--are incarcerated. That's 320 times the incarceration rate of China. In this context, it is particularly horrifying to learn, from T. J. English's powerful, informative, and vehement true crime book WHERE THE BODIES WERE BURIED: WHITEY BULGER AND THE WORLD WHO MADE HIM, how the Boston multiple murderer and crime boss James 'Whitey' Bulger and his psychopathic sidekick Stephen Flemmi repeatedly escaped justice.

They did so, English persuasively argues, because the Department of Justice recruited them as 'top echelon' informants for the FBI. In exchange for information, Bulger (brother of the powerful Senator William 'Billy' Bulger) and Flemmi got immunity. Consequently, Bulger's 2013 trial promised to 'provide a much-needed and unprecedented opportunity to bring clarity and accountability to a highly controversial method of law enforcement that had, without the knowledge or full understanding of the people', become, despite its deceptiveness and destructiveness, an unquestioned standard operating procedure. One might wonder whether the goal was to prevent crime or to seem to be doing so.

This story has been told elsewhere, of course, including in the new Johnny Depp blockbuster Black Mass and the book that inspired it. Perhaps that's why English's account seems both somewhat rehashed--the most famous points repeatedly stated--and hard to follow. English eschews chronological order for a 'frame story' concerning the trial, with the decades of Bulger, Flemmi, and their G-men enablers' mayhem stretched out in the middle.

English also perhaps misplaces his focus. Bulger attracted media attention because he was the boss (sometimes) and because he evaded the law longer than Flemmi or any of his other accomplices and rivals. 'The last of a certain type of old-school gangster', Bulger emulated Dillinger but lived to see his own downfall tweeted.

To this reviewer, Flemmi is a more intriguing and horrifying moral black hole. Mephistopheles to Bulger's Faust, Flemmi 'was hooked in with the FBI' as an informant 'before he ever formed his partnership with Bulger', making him as much if not more of a 'central figure in Boston's narrative of corruption'. With Bulger, he was responsible for the eponymous burials in the Third Street, South Boston basement. One was the body of a girlfriend of his, the unfortunately named Debbie Hussey, whom Bulger, with Flemmi's apparent permission, had murdered. She was also his stepdaughter. English claims that 'Flemmi had been having a sexual relationship with his stepdaughter since she was a teenager,' which was problematic because Hussey was a minor and was 'threatening to call him out'. Moreover, in English's rather perplexing syntax, 'Bulger and Flemmi were having problems with her', because 'she was a drug dealer and part-time prostitute who had been publicly bad-mouthing her stepfather, making them look bad'. She made them look bad? Poor rapist and his friend. It doesn't surprise at all that a neighborhood tyrant would also prove a household tyrant, though English accidentally softens the effect. (So does his description of another mobster's girlfriend, as 'not a bimbo'. Was Hussey a bimbo?)

In the end, WHERE THE BODIES WERE BURIED: WHITEY BULGER AND THE WORLD WHO MADE HIM is deeply fascinating and well worth reading, but fails to live up to its complete title because Flemmi is so much more horrific than Whitey, and because the world that made them, one that extends well beyond the FBI's boundaries, also made Deborah Hussey and the language in which she and women like her are so problematically remembered.

§ Rebecca Nesvet is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. She specializes in nineteenth-century literature. https://uwgb.academia.edu/RebeccaNesvet

Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, October 2015

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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