A main character in Carla Conti's book Chained Birds: A True Crime Memoir, befriends famed Boston crime boss Whitey Bulger in the Florida prison where the two men served for four years before Bulger was murdered behind bars.
In 2014, inmate Kevin Sanders stepped off a ConAir flight from Pennsylvania to Orlando and, on the tarmac, met an “old timer” in an orange jumpsuit wearing the same belly chain and shackles. The ornery felon with a sharp tongue and Southie Boston accent turned out to be the notorious Boston mobster Whitey Bulger. Kevin and Whitey were slated for the same prison bus going to the same federal penitentiary, and that moment sparked a friendship between the two convicts that lasted for four years — right up to Whitey’s transfer and murder in a West Virginia medical prison in 2018.
Whitey is one of many memorable characters who appear in my upcoming book Chained Birds: A True Crime Memoir. Kevin told me plenty of stories about Whitey over the years, which I relay in four chapters of the book, including:
- How Kevin and Whitey sized each other up on an hour-long bus ride, with Kevin teaching Whitey how to escape their belly chains and Kevin offering his friendship and “assistance” at their new facility.
- How Whitey described being given LSD as an “experiment” in his early days of incarceration at an Atlanta prison, which left him with lifelong night terrors and the inability to sleep without a light on.
- How Whitey explained his love for his girlfriend Catherine Greig (with whom he spent years on the run as a wanted criminal) and how he begged Boston prosecutors to give her a more lenient sentence in exchange for his death penalty.
- What led to Whitey’s transfer to a West Virginia prison where he was bludgeoned to death with a padlock-in-a-sock for being a “rat” FBI informant.
In 2013 a Boston jury found Whitey — who’d been captured after 16 years on the lam — responsible for the murders of 11 people, and he should stir no sympathy locked up as an old man. It’s not my intention to glorify this vicious mobster, but rather portray Whitey the way his fellow inmate Kevin Sanders knew and interacted with him … proving once again that truth really is stranger than fiction.
**Photo credits in feature image:
Whitey Bulger 1953 Mug Shots – Boston Police via Boston Globe
Whitey Bulger 2011 Mug Shots – US Marshals Service
Whitey Bulger 2011 custody transport photo credit – Stuart Cahill/The Boston Herald, via Associated Press
Carla Conti is a true crime journalist, storyteller, and prison reform advocate. Her debut book, Chained Birds: A True Crime Memoir, will be published by WildBlue Press on November 12, 2024.
