It Is a Portrait of the Gangster As a Grumpy Old Man, Hunkered Down in a Santa Monica

Whitey in exile

It is a portrait of the gangster as a grumpy old man, hunkered down in a Santa Monica flat with his girlfriend. Neighbors liked them, but no one got close — or, rather, almost no one. And that was their undoing.

By Shelley Murphy and Maria Cramer

Globe Staff / October 9, 2011

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.

Inside his apartment

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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.

Bulger’s most important alter ego belonged to James William Lawlor, a destitute alcoholic with a resemblance to the gangster who gave Bulger his California driver’s license in exchange for money to pay the rent at a cheap motel. When Bulger needed to buy prescription drugs, drive a car, or dip into a bank account, he became Lawlor, even changing the man’s height and eye color on a state-issued identification card to match his features.

Despite Bulger’s post-arrest boast about trips to Las Vegas and visiting Boston “armed to the teeth,” there’s little to suggest the couple traveled much in recent years, especially after the crackdown in airport and border security following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Asked by a Santa Monica friend if she ever went anywhere, Greig mentioned only a single trip to San Francisco 10 years earlier.

Over time, the couple’s world grew smaller as the FBI pressured - or imprisoned - friends and family back east while boosting the reward for information leading to Bulger’s capture to $2 million. The FBI also offered a $100,000 reward for the capture of Greig, wanted for helping Bulger evade arrest.

Bulger became even more reclusive after the May 1 killing of Osama bin Laden, the only person on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List more notorious than the gangster himself. Greig began telling people that his Alzheimer’s was progressing - though, in fact, his mind remained sharp - putting up an additional barrier to outsiders’ questions.

But it wasn’t enough. Catherine Greig had made a lasting impression on Bjornsdottir, the former beauty queen and actress perhaps most famous for starring as one of the blondes in Noxzema’s iconic “Take It Off” TV commercials. Now a 57-year-old yoga instructor and graphic designer, Bjornsdottir recently collected $2 million of the $2.1 million in combined FBI rewards for her tip leading to Bulger and Greig’s arrest in the basement of their Santa Monica apartment building on June 22.

Still, it is a testament to how thoroughly people believed in Charlie and Carol Gasko that, even as Bulger stood in handcuffs surrounded by FBI agents, one resident tried to explain that, whatever Charlie had done, it was a result of his dementia.

That very ordinariness helped Bulger live undetected, according to Charles “Chip” Fleming, a retired Boston police detective who spent six years assigned to the FBI-led task force that worked full time trying to track Bulger. While the FBI chased reported Bulger sightings from a Native American reservation in Wyoming to Piccadilly Circus in London, the gangster was quietly living within walking distance of one of America’s most famous landmarks, the Santa Monica Pier.

“We were looking for a gangster and that was part of the problem,” Fleming said. “He wasn’t a gangster anymore.”

Did you rob a bank?The residents of Apt. 303 fit in comfortably with most of the neighbors at the Princess Eugenia complex, a 27-unit building at 1012 Third St. two blocks from the ocean that once was home mainly to art scholars from the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Property records, which were poorly kept at the time, indicate Greig and Bulger moved in to their two-bedroom unit in April 1998 - paying just $863 a month - but some neighbors say they were there a couple of years earlier. By then, young professionals and retirees had taken over the building, people who were curious enough about one another to spark friendly conversation but often too busy or too polite to question any idiosyncrasies.

And the Gaskos were model tenants - they never made any noise, they paid their rent early, and they treated most neighbors with almost unctuous kindness. The fact that they always paid with cash raised few questions because other tenants had paid that way.

Every month, about a week before the rent was due, Greig would walk across the street to the property manager’s office at the Embassy Hotel Apartments, owned by the same landlord.

One of the managers, Birgitta Farinelli, would take the crisp bills from Greig and joke “Carol did you rob the bank again?” The two would laugh.

Greig usually explained that she withdrew the money from the bank while running errands, said Farinelli, a friendly Swedish immigrant who often chatted with Greig about the best places to get a haircut or manicure.

“I can’t tell you how incredibly nice these people were,” Farinelli said. “They were very low-maintenance. These people never complained.”

Few who knew the hot-tempered Bulger during his Southie days would have described him as “incredibly nice.” The ruthless gangster allegedly strangled two women among his many victims, then took a nap while one of them was buried in the dirt cellar. He allegedly chained another man to a chair and tortured him for hours until he told Bulger where he had stashed cash, then shot him in the head with a machine gun.

Greig’s unstinting devotion to Bulger was remarkable, too, considering that she had tried long ago to break off her affair with Bulger and wasn’t even his first choice as a traveling companion.

A South Boston native who worked as a dental hygienist and dog groomer, Greig had been Bulger’s “other woman” for about 18 years while the gangster was sharing a South Boston home with Teresa Stanley and her four children.

Shortly before Bulger fled Boston in late 1994 to avoid arrest, Greig calmly revealed their on-and-off affair to a stunned Stanley, who had never met the younger woman.

“She wanted to break it off with him, and she had to do something that would just end it for them,” said Stanley.

The strategy worked - at first. A furious Bulger showed up as the two women discussed his infidelity at Greig’s Quincy home, Stanley recalled. The gangster got into a brief shoving match with Greig before leaving with Stanley.

A contrite Bulger, insisting the affair with Greig was over, took Stanley on a whirlwind tour of Europe that included visits to safe deposit boxes in preparation for their life on the run. When Bulger got word from a corrupt former FBI agent on Dec. 23, 1994, that he was about to be indicted on federal racketeering charges, Bulger hit the road with Stanley.

But Stanley missed her family and asked to go home after just a few weeks. On a winter night in early 1995, Bulger returned to Massachusetts, dropping Stanley off at a Chili’s Restaurant in Hingham. Then, he picked up Greig at Malibu Beach in Dorchester, and the couple headed south.

In retrospect, Stanley said Greig had done her a favor because if she hadn’t learned about the affair she might not have had the strength to leave Bulger.

“After 30 years I wouldn’t have been able to say: ‘That’s it. You’re on your own. See you later,’ ” Stanley said.

Greig was suddenly plunged into a fugitive’s life with a wanted man - and without the beloved French poodles she left at home - but she showed the gangster unwavering devotion. She changed her hair and her name, helping Bulger blend into the American landscape, and remained upbeat and affectionate even when Bulger seemed cranky and temperamental.

“She had this eternally positive energy,” said one Santa Monica neighbor who lived in their building. “She was almost too nice.”

Janus Goodwin, a longtime neighbor who was occasionally invited inside the couple’s apartment, recalled that Bulger would lie back on his futon as Greig bustled about the apartment.

When the two women talked in the hallway, Greig would often excuse herself, usually to take care of Bulger, Goodwin said. Greig suddenly would beam and her blue eyes would widen, Goodwin said, as she said, “Someone needs me. I’m needed!”

Some people in the neighborhood described the Gaskos as a “darling” elderly couple, who sometimes held hands during their daily walks. But a few women who knew them said they rarely showed affection and that Bulger, almost 22 years older than Greig, seemed controlling.

“I never thought he treated her so well,” said Barbara Gluck, a photographer who lived down the hall and knew the Gaskos for more than 10 years. “I thought she was a very kind person . . . She was young and she looked very pretty. He was old and grizzled. I kept thinking to myself ‘What are they doing together?’ ”

A Whitey lookalikeWhen Bulger fled Boston with Greig, he had a rock solid fake identity in his pocket. Posing as Thomas Baxter, Bulger bought a car in New York and traveled the country with Greig from Chicago to a resort town in Louisiana’s Cajun country. But when his former girlfriend Stanley started helping the FBI in 1996, she told agents about the Baxter alias and where Bulger had been staying, allowing them to track him to Louisiana. She quickly regretted what she had done and told a Bulger associate, who warned the gangster and sent him scrambling for new identities.

By the time, Bulger and Greig arrived in Santa Monica, they had settled on “Charles and Carol Gasko,” names they invented. It worked for paying bills with cash and cashier’s checks. But if they planned to drive, bank, or get health care, they would need identification in the form of driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers.

Sometime between 1998 and 2000, Bulger was walking in the Los Angeles area when he saw Lawlor, a homeless man living on the streets, according to two people who were briefed on the details of the relationship.

“He literally saw him on a bench,” said one of the people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.

Bulger apparently was struck by how much they resembled each other: Both men had white beards, were bald on top, of Irish descent, and had the same ruddy complexion. Though Bulger was seven years older, the gangster, who had always taken good care of his health and appearance, looked younger than his age.

Bulger immediately devised a plan to assume the man’s identity.

“He saw the guy and realized there was some ability for them to be confused,” one of the two people said. “He took care of him and got him off the booze. They became friends.”

Bulger told Lawlor he had entered the country illegally and needed to use his identification so he could stay in the United States. Bulger took Lawlor’s Social Security number, driver’s license, and birth certificate, information he used to pick up medicine at a Santa Monica pharmacy and dip into a bank account to buy clothes and health products, according to the federal indictment against Greig that identifies Lawlor only by his initials, JWL.

There were crucial differences between them - at 5 feet 4 inches tall, Lawlor was 4 inches shorter than Bulger and considerably heavier. Lawlor’s eyes were also hazel.

Bulger took care of that by lying to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the agency’s records suggest. In 2003, when the state of California issued Lawlor a senior citizen’s identification card by mail, Lawlor had grown 4 inches in height, weighed only 170 pounds, and had blue eyes, according to Department of Motor Vehicles records.

In exchange for letting Bulger take his name, Bulger agreed to pay the rent on Lawlor’s home, a one-room apartment at the West End Hotel on Sawtelle Boulevard in Los Angeles, a place where some other hard-luck people have lived for years.

It was in that tiny apartment that hotel employees found Lawlor dead of heart disease on Aug. 8, 2007. He had been dead for days.

Bulger was devastated by the news, according to people familiar with their relationship. But grief didn’t prevent him from continuing to use Lawlor’s name when he sought treatment at a Los Angeles clinic last year.

Nobody asked about Lawlor again, until late June of this year when two detectives from Massachusetts walked into the hotel, according to the building manager who declined to be identified.

“It was about a week after Whitey got popped,” the manager said.

They said they were visiting “in reference to Whitey Bulger.” And they were very curious about Lawlor: Who visited him? Who were his friends?

“I said, ‘Are you sure you got the right guy?’ ” said the manager, mystified that the short, overweight man with no money and seemingly no connections outside the hotel could be connected to Bulger.

“He wasn’t a flashy guy,” the manager said. “He was nondescript . . . Just a plain Joe.”

The Gaskos at homeThe view from the balcony of Bulger’s apartment showed palm tree-lined Third Street and the elegant, Mediterranean-style hotel across the street. But the couple was less interested in enjoying the view than in keeping prying eyes out.

Black curtains hung over the windows in the living room, where Bulger often spent the night, watching television with headphones on from a futon that folded out into a bed.

The fugitives, who told people they were from Chicago or Boston, kept most neighbors out of the dark, sparsely furnished apartment. The few who went inside said there were no pictures of the couple or any relatives. The only framed photos were of dogs and cats, including Tiger, recalled Enrique Sanchez, the building’s longtime maintenance supervisor. Mirrors and framed prints of works by Getty artists - pieces that had been hung by management before the couple moved in - were the only other wall decorations.