Whitey Bulger in exile

 

At least a twice a day, Carol Gasko would crouch on the sidewalk in front of her Santa Monica apartment building to feed an abandoned, tiger-striped cat while her husband, Charlie, stood by protectively. They brought Tiger to the veterinarian when he was sick and kept his picture on their wall. Their devotion caught the attention of Anna Bjornsdottir, a former actress and Miss Iceland 1974, who lived in the neighborhood for months at a time and sometimes stopped to chat while they fed the tabby. “Isn’t she nice?” Bjornsdottir said of Gasko to a neighbor. It was this bond, formed over the cat, that proved the downfall of one of America’s most wanted men, South Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, after 16 years on the run. The Icelandic beauty, who gained minor fame decades ago starring in Vidal Sassoon and Noxzema commercials, was home in Reykjavik, Iceland, when she saw a CNN report on the FBI’s latest effort to track the 82-year-old Bulger and his 60-year-old girlfriend, Catherine Greig. Bjornsdottir recognized them immediately as the Gaskos, her former neighbors - Tiger’s benefactors - an ocean away on Third Street. With a phone call to the FBI, Bjornsdottir ended one of the longest and most expansive manhunts in FBI history and brought Bulger home to face charges that he had killed 19 people, some of whose bodies were unearthed while the gangster was posing as a retiree in Southern California. Now, through dozens of interviews with people who knew Bulger in Santa Monica and Boston as well as visits to Iceland and the couple’s California home, the Globe has drawn the first comprehensive picture of how Bulger lived on the lam all these years - and why he ultimately was caught. The man once suspected of gallivanting through Europe had been holed up in the same rent-controlled apartment for at least 13 years, staying up late into the night watching television in his living room with black curtains drawn. When he finally went to bed, the aging gangster slept alone in the master bedroom - windows covered in opaque plastic sheeting - while his girlfriend used the guest room. To fellow residents of the Princess Eugenia complex, the Gaskos were friendly retirees who valued their privacy. She sent thank you notes for small favors addressed to “kind neighbor,” but the couple seldom invited anyone into their home. Bulger once overruled Greig’s request to have a maintenance crew repaint the chipped walls in their apartment, perhaps because workers would have discovered the holes he cut to hide an arsenal of weapons and more than $800,000 in cash. It was a carefully constructed life built on lies within lies, a life in which Bulger went by different names as the situation required. The FBI recovered 15 different aliases in the apartment along with a book, “Secrets of a Back-Alley ID Man,” about how to forge identification papers.