In a rent-controlled apartment three blocks from the beach in Santa Monica, California, the FBI in June 2011 arrested James Joseph “Whitey” Bulger, the South Boston gang boss who had eluded a federal manhunt for sixteen years. He was eighty-one. His longtime companion, Catherine Greig, was taken with him. Inside the unit agents recovered more than thirty firearms, many hidden in holes cut into the walls, and roughly 822,000 dollars in cash. For more than a decade Bulger had lived under the name Charles “Charlie” Gasko, an unremarkable retiree among unremarkable retirees, while his face circulated on the FBI Ten Most Wanted list and a two-million-dollar reward stood unclaimed.
Bulger ran the Winter Hill Gang, the dominant Irish-American criminal organization in Boston, and for much of that reign he was also a paid FBI informant. The relationship was the engine of both his power and his escape. His handler, Special Agent John Connolly, fed him intelligence that helped him eliminate rivals and avoid prosecution, and in December 1994 Connolly tipped him that a sealed racketeering indictment was coming. Bulger left town before the arrests and did not surface again for sixteen years.
The trail did not break through brilliant detective work. It broke through advertising. In 2011, having concluded that the aging, disciplined Bulger was nearly invisible but his companion was not, the FBI ran a publicity campaign built around Greig — her manicures, her plastic surgery, her habits — and aimed it at the daytime television audience most likely to recognize her. A former neighbor in Santa Monica, a one-time Miss Iceland who had bonded with Greig over a stray cat, saw the coverage and called. Agents lured Bulger to the building’s garage and arrested him without a shot.
A federal jury convicted him in August 2013 on thirty-one of thirty-two counts, finding him responsible for eleven of the nineteen murders charged. He was sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus five years. On October 30, 2018, hours after being transferred to USP Hazelton in West Virginia, Bulger was beaten to death by other inmates. He was eighty-nine.
On April 3, 1996, FBI agents arrested Theodore John Kaczynski at a one-room plywood cabin without electricity or running water outside Lincoln, Montana, ending the longest and most expensive manhunt in the bureau’s history to that point. For nearly seventeen years, beginning in 1978, Kaczynski had mailed or planted sixteen bombs that killed three people and injured twenty-three, eluding a task force that had no usable physical description of him. He was not found by forensics or surveillance. He was found because his brother recognized his writing.
Kaczynski, a former mathematics professor who had withdrawn to the Montana woods to live in self-sufficient isolation, conducted a campaign aimed loosely at people he associated with technology and modern industrial society. His three fatal victims were Hugh Scrutton, a Sacramento computer-store owner killed in 1985; Thomas Mosser, a New Jersey advertising executive killed in 1994; and Gilbert Murray, the president of a California timber lobby, killed in 1995. The deaths were the point of the case, not the manhunt’s backdrop, and the record treats them as the deliberate killings they were.
The break came from the bombs’ final escalation into words. In 1995 Kaczynski demanded that major newspapers publish a 35,000-word essay, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” promising to stop the killing if they did. After consultation with the FBI and the attorney general, The Washington Post printed it on September 19, 1995. David Kaczynski read it, recognized his brother’s distinctive phrasing and ideas, and — through an attorney — brought his suspicions and old family letters to the FBI.
That tip led agents to the cabin, where they found bomb components, thousands of pages of journals documenting the crimes, and one fully assembled device. Kaczynski was indicted in 1996 and, after his lawyers’ attempt to mount a mental-health defense over his objection, pleaded guilty on January 22, 1998, to avoid a death-penalty trial. He was sentenced to multiple life terms without parole and held at the federal supermax in Florence, Colorado. He died by suicide on June 10, 2023, at a federal medical center in North Carolina.
On June 13, 1997, French police arrested a man calling himself Eugène Mallon at a converted mill in the village of Champagne-Mouton, in rural southwestern France. He was Ira Einhorn, a celebrated figure of the 1960s and 1970s Philadelphia counterculture who had jumped bail in 1981 rather than stand trial for the murder of his former girlfriend, Helen “Holly” Maddux. He had lived in Europe for sixteen years under assumed names, the last of them as a married man tending a country property. The arrest ended one flight and opened another contest — a four-year legal struggle over whether France would surrender him at all.
The crime was discovered in 1979. Maddux, a Bryn Mawr College graduate from Tyler, Texas, had ended her five-year relationship with Einhorn and gone to collect her belongings on September 9, 1977; she was never seen again. Eighteen months later, on March 28, 1979, Philadelphia police acting on a complaint searched Einhorn’s apartment in the Powelton Village neighborhood and found Maddux’s partially mummified remains packed in a steamer trunk in a closet off his bedroom. Einhorn, who had styled himself a guru and networker and was nicknamed “the Unicorn” — the English meaning of his German surname — insisted he had been framed.
The case became a study in how reputation and social capital can purchase a head start. Represented by the future United States senator Arlen Specter, Einhorn was released on a bail bond of a few thousand dollars, secured by a wealthy patron, and remained free for years before trial. When the trial finally neared in 1981, he fled. Pennsylvania convicted him of first-degree murder in absentia in 1993, but the conviction itself became the obstacle to extradition once he was found, because French and European law barred surrendering a person tried in his absence.
After the arrest, France refused to extradite a man convicted without a trial, and Pennsylvania responded by enacting a special statute guaranteeing Einhorn a fresh trial if returned. The French government issued an extradition decree, and on July 20, 2001, Einhorn was flown to Philadelphia. He was retried, and on October 17, 2002, a jury convicted him of first-degree murder; he was sentenced the next day to life in prison without parole. He died in a Pennsylvania state prison on April 3, 2020, at the age of seventy-nine.