The Cape is lovely this time of year – far too nice for Whitey Bulger’s moll.
Unless, of course, Catherine Greig finally wants to spill to the feds about where her serial-killing boyfriend stashed all his blood-soaked millions.
At age 68, she’s doing her final months as federal inmate 57820-112, for harboring a fugitive and contempt of a grand jury. Her lawyer says all the talk about Bulger’s hidden ill-gotten cash is “speculation.”
But c’mon – does anyone truly believe that the safe-deposit boxes in Clearwater, Montreal and London, not to mention the wall hide in Santa Monica with the $833,000 cash, were all the dough Whitey left behind?
Whitey’s underworld partner Stevie Flemmi testified that a Charlestown drug dealer once paid them $1 million cash for their “protection” of a single shipment of marijuana – the “protection” being that they didn’t rat out the load to the cops on their pad.
In some quarters now, Catherine Greig is being portrayed as another of Whitey’s victims. Hasn’t she suffered enough? But what about the family she married into – the McGonagles? Her husband was a Boston firefighter, now deceased, and she had two brothers-in-law.
Whitey murdered both of them.
He always said the first McGonagle hit was a mistake. There was a gang war going on in Southie, and Bulger was gunning for one of the Mullens named Paulie McGonagle. His brother made the fatal mistake of borrowing Paulie’s car. When Whitey saw the Mullen mobile, he immediately seen his opportunity and opened fire. Hey, it coulda happened to anybody.
A few years later, he lured Paulie into his car with the lure of counterfeit $20 bills. They buried his body on Tenean Beach. This was right before Christmas, and soon thereafter, the phone rang in McGonagle’s grief-stricken home. At Whitey’s sentencing in 2013, one of Paulie’s sons told the judge what happened when, as a 10-year-old boy, he picked up the phone.
“Your father ain’t comin’ home for Christmas, kid,” a gruff voice told him.
“Who is this?” asked young McGonagle.
“Santa Claus,” Whitey replied.
This was the man Catherine Greig has described as “the love of her life.” She told a beautician in southern California that she had a weakness for “the bad boys.”
Whitey ruined the neighborhood. He also ruined the neighbors. He even tried to take Catherine Greig’s younger brother, David, under his wing, or something. He’d bring him around to the mob’s hangouts, and the kid would nod off.
“Vitamin deficiency,” Whitey would tell the other hoods. Yeah right. David ended up dead, on Cape Cod, supposedly a suicide.
And now Catherine is coming home, almost a quarter century after taking it on the lam. Whitey always enjoyed the Cape, especially Provincetown. That was where he had the photo taken of himself in a cowboy outfit, looking like one of the Village People.
When the jai-alai millionaire was murdered in Oklahoma, Whitey had one of his crooked FBI agents establish his alibi as a visit to Provincetown – “with female companionship,” his G-man pointedly added, just in case some higher-up might get the wrong, or maybe right idea.
Soon Catherine will be fitted with that ever-fashionable Southie fashion accessory, an ankle bracelet. It won’t be long before she’s living with her twin sister in Quincy, which is the answer to the question, Where did Southie go?
Twin Margaret McCusker likewise paid a heavy price for sis’ Bulger connection. After the feds put a pen register on her phone, they quickly established a log of Catherine’s calls to her twin from Louisiana. Then they called McCusker before a grand jury and asked her about them. Like Whitey’s brother Jackie and God only knows how many other Whitey enablers, McCusker lied under oath and ended up with house arrest.
That was very bad news for Catherine’s two miniature French poodles, Niki and Gigi. When Catherine and Whitey hit the road, they’d abandoned the dogs with McCusker. When she couldn’t go outside anymore, she had her sister’s poodles put down.
Now they’re claiming Catherine Greig is a model prisoner in Minnesota. Her job is… training dogs. Yeah, tell it to Niki and Gigi.
Let Catherine go, they say. Let her come back here and pray for a happy death, as Dapper O’Neil used to say. My feeling is, it’s as easy to pray in Minnesota as it is on Cape Cod.