For a middle-aged Irish guy like me, who came of age in the working-class precincts and public schools of Boston, the most riveting news for months now has been back in what used to be home. Nothing in scandal-plagued Albany comes close.
It's in Boston where one of the most violently and ruthlessly venal people in the history of America, a once-fabled goon named Whitey Bulger, stood trial for a spree of murders that he carried out over more than two decades with the explicit sponsorship of the FBI. Whitey was found guilty last week of just about everything the feds could throw at him in a case that had the government itself on trial.
Boston is also where some of the most viciously false manufactured history imaginable, even in a city still haunted by the Irish attraction for delusional sentiment, exploded as well. The whole Bulger family has fallen further from grace and deeper into the black hole of condemnation.
Whitey has a brother, you see. Two, actually — including a disgraced political hack named Jackie, himself a convicted felon for trying to cover Whitey's tracks while he was on the run from 1994 to 2011. The other, more prominent brother is Billy, once the feared leader of the Massachusetts state Senate and later the president of the University of Massachusetts.
Now, Billy might as well be underground himself. The brother act, in which one further empowered the other, is over. Billy is a lot more than what his press clippings suggested for far too long — a charming and scholarly if hard-edged politician who had to endure a roguish but ultimately not so thoroughly dangerous gangster of an older brother.
Billy's downfall began first, actually. It was 10 years ago this summer — I wasted a day of a vacation on Cape Cod watching C-SPAN — that Billy got hauled before a congressional committee investigating the corruption of the FBI by using the likes of Whitey as an prosecution-free informant. Billy was pressed to explain himself, not as the latter-day Marcus Aurelius he fancied himself as, but quite literally as his contemptible brother's keeper.
Billy told Congress where to go, that he felt no obligation to help bring Whitey into custody before he killed again. With that, he was done at UMass.
Some family, isn't it?
Jackie was a constant presence at Whitey's trial. But not Billy. He resurfaced, sort of, in a recent Boston Globe story in which he portrayed himself and what had come of his career as one more victim of Whitey's life of crime.
It's around this point in this appalling tale that I inevitably think of one of the most noble families I know. It's David Kaczynski; his wife, Linda Patrik; and his late mother, Wanda.
Their role in bringing Ted Kaczynski to justice for the carnage he committed as the Unabomber is well known around here, of course. Less so around Boston, however. I well recall making the moral comparisons in an email exchange with a suburban Boston newspaper columnist a decade ago. This guy, too, was of the unsettling opinion that Billy's obligation was to his brother, and not to any larger sense of justice.
Yet it's David's enduring honor and courage that sticks with me as the myths of the Bulgers lie in tatters.
Here was Billy in 1990, at the retirement dinner of John Connolly, Whitey's handler in the FBI and now in prison for his role in one of Whitey's murders.
Billy quoted the Roman philosopher Seneca: "Loyalty is the holiest good in the human heart."
Loyalty to whom, Billy? Loyalty to what?
Enough, already, of Seneca. Enough of the self-serving and self-deluding classicist act.
You can learn better lessons about loyalty — both legitimately directed and obscenely misplaced — from David Kaczynski, a man who's more humble and more wise than you'll ever be.
And then you can slink out of hiding and explain yourself.