But why wait for the ending? Already we seem to have decided how the story will be told: Whitey Bulger will go down as an arch gangster, and his signature achievement will be playing the FBI for fools. That was the story told memorably in Black Mass, the nonfiction account by reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill. The theme of informants-run-amok was revisited in “The Departed,” where Jack Nicholson played a gangster “inspired by” Whitey, though Nicholson’s performance was so ridiculous, the rest of the country must have wondered what the hell we Bostonians were so scared of. A second movie is already in the works, this time about Bulger’s murderous Winter Hill Gang, based on a book by its chief thug, John Martorano. We’ll have to wait and see of course, but I’m guessing it’ll be more hard-boiled mobster stuff. John Martorano isn’t exactly the man to write a sensitive, nuanced portrait of his old boss.

I don’t object to any of this. Reducing the story to the familiar shape of a gangster flick is fine, as far as it goes. I love gangster stories as much as anyone. I do have reservations about mythologizing a killer like Whitey, who was exceptionally sadistic even by the standards of his profession. But then, vicious mobsters have inspired great fiction before. Al Capone gave us “Scarface” and “The Untouchables.” Dutch Schultz begat E.L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate, one of the best “literary” crime novels I’ve ever read. New York’s Five Families provided the raw material for The Godfather. These are romanticized versions of the truth, of course, and Whitey will have to be romanticized too, for dramatic reasons. But no one is naive enough to believe that these fictions are intended as accurate portraits. So if writers want to retell Whitey’s story as if it was just another gangster movie — “Scarface” or “Goodfellas” with a Boston accent — I say, more power to ’em. Lord knows, I’ve written similar stuff.

But I hope someone will also step forward to write the real story of Whitey Bulger in the full context of his time and place. Which is to say, I hope someone will write the truth. The story is much more complex than Bulger’s manipulation of his FBI handlers. It sprawls over the whole city of Boston. The Bulger book I want to read might be “literary true crime,” like In Cold Blood or The Executioner’s Song, or it may be straight literary historical fiction like Doctorow’s Ragtime or Billy Bathgate. Best of all, perhaps it would be a fictionalized biography, like Colum McCann’s wonderful Dancer or Colm Toibin’s The Master, the sort of book that brings the real man to life. Whatever the style, the book would be big and baggy and discursive enough to tell the whole story.

To understand why the telling requires such a big canvas, ask yourself, as Chris Lydon recently suggested:

in how many places could it have been said with authority that the overlord of the drug cartel and the overlord of local politics were brothers and intimates?

Medellin, perhaps, but that’s in Colombia.

Marseilles, but that was France, upon a time.

Not included in that list, you will note, are Capone’s Chicago, Dutch Schultz’s New York, or any other of America’s gloriously crooked cities. There simply hasn’t been an American crime story quite like it.

It’s the Boston story. All the elements are there: the tribal resentment that always divided this city by race, class, ethnicity, neighborhood, you name it; the casual corruption of its institutions, from police to government to church; its cramped, provincial high-low culture. And in the end, the inexorable passing of all that, of Whitey’s bad old Boston — the city’s emergence as a wealthier, worldlier place than the one that produced him.

The Bulger story is also filled with complex characters, not least the Bulger brothers themselves. Bad men, to be sure, but not simple ones. As a reader, I want to see them revealed, Whitey especially. I want to see him standing before me with those ice-blue eyes and flat-brim fedora. I want to go inside the Old Harbor housing project in Southie in the 1940s and ’50s, where Whitey grew up. I want to see the world that made him, the journey he took. I want the real Whitey Bulger in all his wickedness and canniness and strutting.

Suspense fiction will not show me that man. It will require that Whitey be flattened. Not completely, not so much that he loses all his complexity and humanity. But enough that his motivations become consistent and easily understood by readers. That’s how suspense works. Its protagonists are desiring machines. They have to be. The audience will not feel tension unless it understands what the protagonist wants and what he must overcome to get it. That sort of perfect consistency is what makes genre characters, however skillfully drawn, not quite human.

In his essay on Charles Dickens, Orwell described the wooden quality of characters who never grow, change, or learn, who never surprise us:

Why is it that Tolstoy’s grasp seems to be so much larger than Dickens’s — why is it that he seems able to tell you so much more about yourself? It is not that he is more gifted, or even, in the last analysis, more intelligent. It is because he is writing about people who are growing. His characters are struggling to make their souls, whereas Dickens’s are already finished and perfect. In my own mind Dickens’s people are present far more often and far more vividly than Tolstoy’s, but always in a single unchangeable attitude, like pictures or pieces of furniture. You cannot hold an imaginary conversation with a Dickens character as you can with, say, Peter Bezoukhov [of War and Peace]. And this is not merely because of Tolstoy’s greater seriousness, for there are also comic characters that you can imagine yourself talking to… It is because Dickens’s characters have no mental life. They say perfectly the thing that they have to say, but they cannot be conceived as talking about anything else. They never learn, never speculate.

To flatten Whitey Bulger and his people this way — to reduce them to “pictures or pieces of furniture” who “have no mental life” — is to miss the truth of the story. It misses the very quality that made the Bulgers so dangerous: their slippery, two-faced, vicious, canny minds. You can turn Whitey Bulger into Scarface or Sonny Corleone, but it would be a lie.

Worse, from a storyteller’s perspective, it would be a missed opportunity.

George V. Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle… LIVE

Staged reading, Saturday, Nov. 13, 3 p.m. The Burren, Davis Square, Free

SOMERVILLE – Widely regarded as the greatest Boston crime novel ever written, a staged reading of a new theatrical adaptation of George V. Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle will be performed at The Burren, Somerville, on Nov. 13 at 3 p.m.

Adapted for the stage by Bill Doncaster, directed by Maria Silvaggi, The Friends of Eddie Coyle chronicles the lowest rungs of the criminal underworld, as Eddie Coyle attempts to stay alive and out of jail in the company of gun runners, bank robbers, hit men and cops in and around 1970 Boston. Critically acclaimed since its release in 1972, Elmore Leonard called The Friends of Eddie Coyle “The best crime novel ever written — makes The Maltese Falcon read like Nancy Drew.”

This staged reading is free, donations for the cast will be graciously accepted, rsvp required: afriendofeddie@gmail.com.

The cast includes Paulo Branco as Eddie Coyle, Rick Park as Dillon, Tom Berry as Dave Foley, Peter Darrigo as Jimmy Scalisi, Jason Lambert as Jackie Brown, Jen Alison Lewis as Wanda, and featuring Jim Barton, Derrick Martin, Courtney Miranda, and Jeremy Lee.

My father played the numbers with a guy by the name of Brownie in the West End for years. He naturally had a formula for figuring the number. One night he came home with a paper bag with $4,000. He had hit a four-number hit, which I believe paid about $30 to the penny, whereas a three-number hit paid $30 to a nickel.

$4,000 in 1950 would be about $36,000 today, according to the inflation calculator. Not bad. (Leonard’s first contribution is here.)

When I was a kid in the 1940′s, my grandfather and father had an egg store at 203 Chambers Street in the West End. It was a landing spot for refugees. There were all types of people, and religions. I remember a Syrian-owned store where the owner spoke in Yiddish to my dad as they didn’t want the customers to know what they were saying. I also remember when my father used to deliver eggs to Charlie S___’s family store in the South End and they were booking numbers and cashing checks as a business in their store.

More West End memories here.

The Boston Public Library in Copley Square, where I often go to write, is running an amazing year-long exhibition called “Cool + Collected: Treasures of the BPL” which highlights some of the rare holdings in the library’s collection. The contents of the exhibit rotate every few months, and the current crop is truly remarkable. It includes original handwritten letters by Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, and others. It is a hall of fame of American letters! My favorites are an original working draft of a poem by Walt Whitman, with edits literally cut and pasted on the page, and a four-page letter from Henry David Thoreau to Horace Greeley which begins:

Concord May 19th 1848.

My Friend Greeley,

I received from you fifty dollars today. —

For the last five years I have supported myself solely by the labors of my hands — I have not received one cent from any other source, and this has cost me so little time, say a month in the spring and another in the autumn, doing the coarsest work of all kinds, that I have probably enjoyed more leisure for literary pursuits than any contemporary. For more than two years past I have lived alone in the woods, in a good plastered and shingled house entirely of my own building, earning only what I wanted, and sticking to my proper work. The fact is man need not live by the sweat of his brow — unless he sweats easier than I do — he needs so little. For two years and two months all my expenses have amounted to but 27 cents a week, and I have fared gloriously in all respects. If a man must have money, and he needs but the smallest amount, the true and independent way to earn it is by day-labor with his hands at a dollar a day. — I have tried many ways and can speak from experience. — Scholars are apt to think themselves privileged to complain as if their lot was a peculiarly hard one. How much have we heard about the attainment of knowledge under difficulties of poets starving in garrets — depending on the patronage of the wealthy — and finally dying mad. It is time that men sang another song. There is no reason why the scholar who professes to be a little wiser than the mass of men, should not do his work in the ditch occasionally, and by means of his superior wisdom make much less suffice for him. A wise man will not be unfortunate. How then would you know but he was a fool?

The letter ends, “P. S . My book” — Walden, presumably — “is swelling again under my hands, but as soon as I have leisure I shall see to those shorter articles. So, look out.” (You can read a transcript of the rest of the letter here.)

The exhibit has other wonderful things, too, posters and prints and rare books and so on. But to me — to any writer or reader, I bet — to see the actual handwriting of these giants of American letters is to feel their presence. The experience is electric.

If you’re around Copley Square, check it out (through June). If not, the whole exhibit is available online, in glorious high resolution, on Flickr. Lord knows what else the BPL has stashed away in the vault. Very cool indeed.

Image: Detail from Thoreau’s letter, from this image of the letter on Flickr.

A trove of remarkable photographs of Boston during the Strangler siege. The photos, which are eerie and beautiful, were taken by Arthur Rickerby for Life Magazine. View the whole collection here. Above: A woman wears a hatpin in her sleeve to defend herself against the Strangler, 1963.

Unfortunately, conditions at the Boston Public Library are in all other ways sleep-optimal: quiet, low light, tens of thousands of dull old books. Just about the only way to ward off sleep under these circumstances is eating — but eating, alas, is likewise strictly forbidden at the Boston Public Library.

Security guards, with not much else to do, constantly patrol the library waking up anyone who drifts off. Ever vigilant, they troop past every fifteen minutes or so. Upon detecting a violation, they knock on the table where the offender has laid his head. Then comes a whisper: “No sleeping.” Sometimes even a finger wag.

The BPL sleep police have a thankless task, and it might be better for everyone if we simply changed the rule to “no more than 15 minutes per nap.” The bookkeeping would be unmanageable (how to track when each patron fell asleep? how long to allow between naps until a new 15 minutes is permitted?), but then libraries have always run largely on the honor system.

I will have to leave this matter to the trustees. The injustice of the Boston Public Library’s policy toward drowsy patrons is beyond my capacity at the moment, marooned as I am in the main reading room with a half-edited manuscript, brain-dead from reading the same pages over and over. And over. If I wait for the guard to pass, maybe I can sneak in a quick nap.

I stopped by the new exhibit today at the Howard Yezerski Gallery on Harrison Avenue, “Boston Combat Zone: 1969-1978.” The gallery and the show both are small but well worth a visit, even on a raw, rainy day like today.

The exhibit gathers together black-and-white photographs by Roswell Angier, Jerry Berndt, and John Goodman. The photographs all show the people of the Combat Zone — hookers, strippers, pimps, lonelyhearts. Some are posed portraits, some are candid, journalistic shots. There are no empty compositions, no unpeopled streets. It is all real faces, real bodies. The subject is what in the Zone was called The Life.

I have been fascinated by the Combat Zone for a long time and always wanted to write about it. (I did write a short story about it once. More info here.) When my third book is finished — I hope to send the manuscript off to my publisher next week — I intend to pitch my editor on a novel set in the Combat Zone for book four. Maybe this exhibit is a good omen.

In the meantime, if you’re in the area I recommend the show. I have done quite a bit of research on life in the Combat Zone and I have never seen so many images, especially such evocative and beautiful ones, in one place.

Photo: John Goodman, “The Schlitz Boys,” 1978 (gelatin silver print, 16″ x 20″). Click image to view larger.

There is a new exhibition at the Boston Public Library of the street photographs of Jules Aarons. The exhibition is located in the Wiggin Gallery in the old McKim Building, just one flight up from the main reading room where where I have been writing every day. The gallery is secluded, and you won’t find much signage or advertising for the exhibit, even in the library itself. The guardians of the BPL apparently have decided to keep this one a secret. That is a shame but not exactly a surprise. Aarons’s work has been underappreciated for a long time now. He is one of the best photographers you’ve never heard of.

I wandered up to the Wiggin Gallery this morning before work, happy to postpone writing a difficult scene that I have been struggling to complete. In the gallery, two women were strolling past the pictures and chatting. They soon wandered off, and I had the entire exhibition to myself. The room was quiet, not the usual library sort of quiet — footsteps, sniffles, sneezes, whispers — but dead quiet. It was an odd place to see these pictures, which are so alive you half expect the people in them to turn to you and speak. (“Get back to work,” they might tell me.)

It is a mystery to me why Aarons’s photographs are not better known. I am not enough of a connoisseur to comment on the technical proficiency of the pictures, but to me they seem expertly composed and printed. Certainly they are very beautiful. Aarons’s street photography has been compared to the work of Lisette Model, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt, and Aaron Siskind, among others. Again, I am not qualified to comment on the comparisons. But I know what I see in these pictures and why I love them: they are alive, authentic, intimate, humane.

Most of the photos in the exhibition date from about 1947-1960, some later. They show ordinary working-class people, often in the West and North Ends of Boston, doing nothing more than chatting on street corners or flirting or lighting a cigarette. Fifty or sixty years later, of course, these people are all gone or transformed by age, but they are utterly alive and present in Aarons’s pictures. To come face to face with them is like traveling back in time. It makes the hair on your neck stand up.

I first discovered Aarons’s work when I was researching The Strangler. His images were always in my head when I closed my eyes and imagined the city during the Strangler period. I even considered approaching him to license one of his images for the book jacket, he so perfectly catches the period feel I was looking for.

Aarons, who died recently at age 87, was never a professional artist. In fact, he was a renowned physicist, an expert in an arcane study that has something to do with radio waves in the atmosphere. Photography was a sort of second career for him. One wonders how a scientific mind could create pictures so soulful.

I suspect that, upon moving to Boston in 1947, Aarons found in the crowded streets of the West and North Ends a subject that reminded him of the Bronx neighborhood where he grew up in the 1920s and ’30s. He was at home in city streets. He seems to have enjoyed the bustle of urban life. His pictures are full of kids playing on sidewalks and women gossiping on tenement stoops and young men leaning on parked cars. I may be biased, but to me he seems especially at home in the streets of this city. His pictures of other places — Aarons traveled and photographed widely — do not have the same vitality and dynamism as the early Boston pictures. His images of Paris and, later, Peru are more abstract, more composed, more consciously artistic. I do not mean that as a criticism. An artist has a right to evolve, to work in a different, cooler style. But I do love the early, raw Boston pictures on display at the BPL.

Aarons’s method was unobtrusive. He used a boxy twin-lens Rolleiflex held at the waist, which gave him an unexpected advantage.

The waist level position allowed me to point my body in one direction and the camera in another. It was important to me not to intrude on the scenes which ranged from card playing in the streets to adults talking to one another.

The effect is like spying on real people, unposed, unself-conscious, unaware of our gaze. It is like visiting a lost Boston — precisely the fantasy I indulged in The Strangler. To see that city here, reanimated in Aarons’s photographs, is an electric experience.

Quote is from Street Portraits 1946-1976: The Photographs of Jules Aarons, Kim Sichel, ed. (Stinehour Press, 2002), p. 10.

Photos: Untitled (West End, Boston), 1947-53 (top). Lounging, North End, 1950s (bottom).

For more info about the exhibition at the Boston Public Library, look here. To see more photos by Jules Aarons, look here and here. There is also a Facebook page dedicated to Aarons here.

Of course reanimating the actual city required that a few prominent Bostonians appear undisguised, or nearly so, including gangsters, cops, and politicians. In the original draft, these characters were accurately named and described. The mob boss Capobianco, for example, was called by his real name, Gennaro Angiulo. The historical Gerry Angiulo ran the Boston mob during my childhood in the 1970s. In 1963 and ’64, when The Strangler takes place, he was just consolidating his power.

Gennaro Angiulo, 1967

On the eve of the book’s publication, I got a call from a lawyer at Random House asking about some of these historical figures, including Angiulo. “Is he still alive?” the lawyer wanted to know. Apparently libel laws are stricter when the subject is living. Angiulo was 87 years old then, but still alive in a federal prison. So his name had to be changed. To further insulate the book from a libel charge, Angiulo had to be mentioned by name in the book so we could plausibly deny that my character Capobianco was an Angiulo stand-in. After all, we could argue, there is Angiulo standing next to Capobianco — how could they be the same person? All this sensitivity about the man’s reputation seemed a little ridiculous to me. How was it possible to libel a murderer and convicted mafioso like Gerry Angiulo? But I did not insist, and shortly before publication the character was rechristened Charlie Capobianco. Still the facts remain: the novel’s description of a “born bookie” who became a mob boss — his physical appearance, his biography, his North End headquarters, his bookmaking operation — all are meticulously faithful to the life of Gerry Angiulo. (The libel issue is moot now. Gerry Angiulo died at the end of August, at age 90. His funeral procession required a flatbed truck to carry the 190 bouquets of flowers.)

Another underworld figure who appeared in the book, lightly disguised, was a vicious hit man named Joseph “The Animal” Barboza. In The Strangler, the Barboza character is called Vincent “The Animal” Gargano, and if you think the character is brutal, I assure you, the original was three times as frightening. Internal FBI reports of the time describe Joe Barboza as “the most vicious criminal in New England,” “a professional assassin responsible for numerous homicides and acknowledged by the professional law enforcement representatives in this area to be the most dangerous individual known.” He was rumored to have killed twenty men. The actual number may have been much higher.

Joe Barboza, 1965

Barboza was a Portuguese-American from New Bedford. He had been a boxer as a young man. While serving time in MCI-Concord he met a lot of gangsters, and when he was released he moved to East Boston to enter the rackets himself.

The story of Joe Barboza’s rise in the Boston underworld of the 1960s is predictably shadowy. He wrote a tell-all book in 1975, with Hank Messick, called Barboza. It is a hair-raising read but hard to trust: the author was an infamous liar. The book is long out of print and hard to find. Used paperbacks go for $200. The Boston Public Library has only a photocopy of the book, which does not circulate.

In any event, what makes Barboza more than just a local thug is what happened to him after the Strangler era. In 1967, Barboza became a cooperating witness for the FBI and later became the first man to enter the federal Witness Protection Program.

His false testimony in a 1968 murder trial would ultimately unravel a story of unimaginable corruption in the FBI’s Boston office, a story in which crooked FBI agents actually protected gangster-informants while they went right on murdering people in the street. Imagine: a select few mobsters were effectively above the law, protected by the federal government. There is a straight line from the feds’ protection of Joe Barboza in the 1960s to its infamous marriage with Whitey Bulger in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. It is as if, in Chicago, Al Capone had cut a deal with Eliot Ness for FBI protection. It is the defining story of the Boston crime world.

The whole story is told in a congressional report called “Everything Secret Degenerates.” If the story interests you, I highly recommend it. The prose is dry and lawyerly, and there is a lot of detail, still the story leaps off the page. There are many other, less authoritative versions out there on the web.

Briefly, the story is this. On March 12, 1965, Barboza and a small crew murdered a small-time hood named Teddy Deegan. Six men were indicted for the Deegan murder. At trial, Barboza — by then a protected state witness — testified in detail about how the murder was planned and carried out. On July 31, 1968, after a two month trial, all six defendants were convicted. Four got the death penalty, two life in prison, all on Barboza’s word.

The trouble was, Barboza lied — and the FBI knew it all along. Four of the men he named — Louis Greco, Peter Limone, Henry Tameleo, and Joseph Salvati — had nothing to do with the crime. And one he did not name, Jimmy “The Bear” Flemmi, was actually one of the ringleaders and may well have been the triggerman. The day after the murder, Flemmi admitted to an FBI informant that he was in on it.

Why did the FBI keep silent? To protect a valued informant-witness in Barboza, no doubt. But it is also true that Jimmy The Bear had been an FBI informant for awhile, a fact the feds were eager to cover up. Flemmi was nearly as volatile as Barboza. He had told an FBI informant that he hoped “to become recognized as the No. One ‘hit man’ in this area as a contract killer.” In 1964, as the congressional report dryly puts it, “Flemmi killed an FBI informant by stabbing him fifty times and then, in a surfeit of enthusiasm, shooting him.” The FBI knew Jimmy The Bear was out of control. In September 1965, he shot another man and was charged with ABDW with intent to murder, and the feds dropped him as an informant — not because of the murder but because, according to an internal FBI memo, “any contacts with him might prove to be difficult and embarrassing.”

Of the four innocent men Barboza framed in the Deegan trial, two died in prison after serving almost thirty years, two others were finally released in the 1990s. The legal battle to free those men was one of the threads that ultimately unraveled the FBI’s corrupt alliance with the Boston mob, most notoriously Whitey Bulger.

But that is a story for another day. (In the meantime, if you’d like to browse a rogue’s gallery of plug-uglies and gunsels from Boston’s gangster past, I highly recommend Howie Carr’s web site, Whitey’s World, a cleaned-up version of the old, priceless Whitey Watch site. There’s nothing else quite like it, and I referred to it often during the writing of The Strangler.)

Back to Joe Barboza. The feds shipped “The Animal” off to California, where of course he murdered again and was protected by the FBI again. The Boston mob, which had put out a contract on Barboza the moment he flipped in 1967, finally caught up with him in San Francisco in 1976, where a North End capo named Joe Russo finally put him down.

All that lay in the future in the Strangler days of ’63 and ’64 when Joe Barboza was cruising the city like a shark and Gerry Angiulo was building his bookmaking operation into an empire. The Boston underworld depicted in The Strangler is a brutal place indeed — too bloody for some readers, as I have been told many times. But the truth is, my novel actually understates the reality of gangland Boston in the ’60s, which was simply more violent than ordinary readers are prepared to believe. Fiction, unlike reality, must be credible.