US organized crime has long held a tight grip on America’s popular imagination, sustaining entire industries of books, television series and Hollywood movies, as well as countless breathless headlines in tabloid newspapers.
But few names have been as famous as the south Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger, who for decades presented himself as a benevolent gangster who protected his community and was given Hollywood treatment by Johnny Depp in Black Mass and Jack Nicholson in The Departed.
