BOSTON GANG BOSS WHITEY BULGER GOES TO TRIAL

Whitey Bulger is the last of America's old school gangsters and sometime this week he will go on trial for a litany of crimes -- including 19 murders. The man who owned Boston for decades --and inspired Jack Nicholson's crazed mob boss in The Departed -- was finally run to ground after years on the run with his mob moll in 2011.
Now 83, the crime lord's platinum hair is gone and the remnants of his feared Winter Hill Gang are dead, in prison  or if they're lucky, scattered to the wind. Can the old crook pull another miracle?

"He's a survivor. He's had a very long shelf life in a profession where that is not typical," said Dick Lehr, who wrote Bulger's biography Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss "The many faces of Whitey make him intriguing," Lehr added.

Bulger was always a contradiction. A working-class hero in tough South Boston who bought turkey dinners for his struggling neighbors at Thanksgiving, kept dope peddlers out of the area and a stone-cold killer who had some members of the Boston FBI field office at his beck and call. In fact, it was G-Man John Connolly who tipped the master criminal off in 1994 that cops were closing in.
Jury selection begins Tuesday for a trial destined to be one of the last great mob spectacles.
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