Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice by Kevin Cullen

Author:Kevin Cullen [Cullen, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

With hangdog eyes and a lilting accent, Sean O’Callaghan did not fit the stereotype of an IRA assassin.26 He grew up in a staunchly republican family in Kerry, the most pro-IRA area in the Irish Republic. His father had been an IRA man in the 1940s, jailed without trial, so Sean was considered a legacy. Joining the IRA was expected of him, but he only made the decision after watching televised images of Protestant thugs burning Catholics out of their homes in Belfast in 1969. He was fifteen.

He grew up in Tralee, a sleepy harbor town in Kerry, and when young IRA recruits from the North started showing up there to train in weapons and explosives, O’Callaghan eagerly joined them. He was seventeen when a bomb he was assembling exploded; he wasn’t badly hurt, but he was arrested for subversive activity and spent six months in jail. In 1974, he was sent to join an IRA unit in Northern Ireland and took part in an attack on a local army base. A woman serving with the local national guard was killed.

A year later, O’Callaghan was given an assignment. An assassination. There was a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s Special Branch, Peter Flanagan, whom the IRA wanted dead. Flanagan was hated not only because he had proved an effective interrogator of IRA members but also because he was Catholic. The IRA went out of its way to murder as many Catholic police officers as possible, to dissuade others from joining the force.

O’Callaghan tracked Flanagan to a pub where he drank while off-duty. Flanagan was reading a newspaper and nursing a pint when he looked up and saw O’Callaghan pointing the gun.

The brazen daylight assassination earned O’Callaghan praise from his superiors. But, at twenty, he had already begun to question what he was doing. He was in an apartment with other IRA men, making tea, when a news program on television reported that a female police officer had just been killed by an IRA bomb. “I hope she’s pregnant,” one of the IRA men laughed, “and we get two for the price of one.”

O’Callaghan, disillusioned by the bloody amorality of it all, returned to Tralee and quietly resigned from the IRA. He moved to London, started an office cleaning business, and got married. But he was haunted by what he had done for the IRA, and by what he considered his naïveté. After spending most of his life convinced it was necessary to kill to bring about a united Ireland, he now had second thoughts. He gradually grew to hate the IRA, believing it indulged in the very acts of sectarianism and barbarism that it condemned in the British forces.

The IRA had trained him in duplicity. He decided to use those skills against his old band, eliminating operatives and frustrating its mission. In 1979, he moved back to Ireland, rejoined the IRA, and secretly offered his services to the Garda Síochána, Ireland’s national police force. O’Callaghan contends that there is nothing

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