Watching the “Whitey” Bulger trial has been like reading an intricately written crime novel. There are details, there is testimony- each side builds its case often without emotion. What can be forgotten in the day-to-day proceedings is the effect that Bulger’s drug dealing had on Boston.
Author Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in the South Boston housing project close to where James “Whitey” Bulger sold drugs. On Greater Boston, MacDonald took WGBH’s Gail Huff on a tour of the neighborhood where the gangster still looms large.
“He was the cause of a lot of people’s deaths in the neighborhood, not just the 19 murders he’s on trial for, but a whole generation being wiped out by the drug trade he sat at the helm of,” he told Huff.
Dick Lehr, a former Boston Globe reporter who has been writing about the Bulger saga for more than a decade, joined Huff on Greater Boston to talk about the trial and the story the media missed in the 1980s.