Inside the World’s Biggest Manhunts—How Fugitives Are Tracked Down
Inside the World’s Biggest Manhunts—How Fugitives Are Tracked Down
Speaker 1: The two explosions that tore through the Boston Marathon nearly
a year ago were like a starting gun on a
second race against time. Unknown terrorists were on the loose,
and they had more bombs. Now, for the first time,
you're going to hear the inside story from the federal
investigators who ran the man hunt. They led a task
force of more than one thousand federal agents, state police,
and Boston cops. Tonight, they will speak of the disturbing
evidence that cracked the case, and of a debate among
the investigators that ultimately led to the dragnet's violent end.
The afternoon of April fifteenth, the FBI's man in charge
of Boston got a text two large explosions near the
finish line for Special Agent Rick D.
Speaker 2: Laurier.
Speaker 1: The marathon became a sprint to catch the killers before
they struck again.
Speaker 3: I felt that week that I had the weight of
the world on my shoulders, and I'm sure I wasn't
the only one.
Speaker 2: Did you feel if there was a third bombing, it
would be on.
Speaker 3: You, That's everybody's fear. It would be on me, It
would be on the Joint Tism task Force. But that
wasn't what drove us. What drove us is preventing more
people from getting hurt.
Speaker 1: Two hundred and sixty four were hurt already three killed.
Moments before, Rick d' laurier had been counting the days
to retirement twenty six years at the FBI now on
Boylston Street, he took over the biggest investigation of his life.
Speaker 3: It was a scene of devastation. There was evidence everywhere.
Speaker 2: And you said what to yourself? In that moment, I.
Speaker 3: Said, we will find those responsible for these despicable crimes.
Speaker 1: FBI Director Robert Muller ordered every office in the world
back up de Laurier. De Laurier's link to headquarters was
executive assistant director Stephanie Douglass.
Speaker 4: We were very, very concerned about other bombs in Boston,
but we had to think beyond that. Were there other
bombs in other cities? Were US interests even abroad at risk?
So we had to consider everything. We could not eliminate anything.
Speaker 1: First came the crime scene, twelve blocks of debris, abandoned
backpacks and bomb parts blown to smithereens.
Speaker 3: They set up a grid pattern. Evidence could be on
window cells, evidence could be on roofs of buildings, evidence
could be anywhere.
Speaker 2: Are they going down the street with tweezers?
Speaker 4: Sometimes when they need to, they're doing that, But yes,
they're very carefully picking up everything they see.
Speaker 1: They saw a battery pack for model cars and chunks
of two pressure cookers. The cookers concentrate the explosion for
maximum force. You decided to set up a warehouse near
Logan Airport, right every thing swept from the street was
processed in this forty six thousand square foot warehouse. Twice
a day a plane flew the items to the FBI
lab in Quantico, Virginia.
Speaker 4: And you basically have almost like an assembly line of evidence.
So it gets tagged, it gets recorded as evidence, so
that you're preserving that chain of custody. But it also
for all the different parts and components that would later
go to recreating the devices themselves.
Speaker 2: The bombs.
Speaker 1: Yes, recreating the bombs, Yes.
Speaker 2: From the pieces that you found.
Speaker 5: Yes.
Speaker 1: Successful as that was, It turned out the evidence that
would solve the case had been collected before the first
bomb exploded that Monday. The FBI could travel back in
time through the lenses of dozens of security cameras up
and down Boylston.
Speaker 4: Almost thirteen thousand different videos were obtained. One hundred and
twenty thousand, actually more than one hundred and twenty thousand
still photographs.
Speaker 1: At the FBI lab in Virginia, one hundred and twenty analysts.
We're searching video feeds from Boston.
Speaker 2: What are you looking for?
Speaker 3: Somebody who just doesn't look similar to others in a
crowd who would be watching a race.
Speaker 1: Was there a eureka moment in terms of the video.
But at some point somebody said, hey, boss, have a
look at this.
Speaker 2: Yes it was.
Speaker 3: It was, I believe Wednesday morning, and we watched that
video hundreds and hundreds of times.
Speaker 4: You can see an individual, a tall man wearing a
white ball cap, walk into the frame. He has a
backpack slung over one of his shoulders. He puts the
backpack down very nonchalantly. He joins the crowd. You clearly
see everybody look very very definitely to the left, like
they've heard something, they've seen something, so you know that
first glass has gone off.
Speaker 5: He does not do that.
Speaker 4: He does not do what everybody else in that video does.
He does not turn to its left. He instead just
stands there for a second or two and walks very
deliberately back the same direction that he came in.
Speaker 1: The Eureka video hasn't been seen by the public. It
is being kept for the trial. But this still photo
shows much the same view of the suspect and the
people who would be torn apart by the blast. Let
me ask you to describe what you see in that picture.
Speaker 3: I see the subject on the individual who has been
charging investigation, and I see people who are grievously who
are grievously injured in that blast. And I see individuals
who died in that blast.
Speaker 2: The people along the fence line there several of them.
Speaker 3: Yes, very very emotional time when I look at that
to know what happened. A few moments afterwards, I.
Speaker 4: Believe I see his backpack on the ground, and then
I see.
Speaker 5: One of the people that was killed as a result
of that bomb.
Speaker 2: Do you know their name?
Speaker 6: Is this?
Speaker 7: Martin Richard.
Speaker 1: Martin Richard was eight years old, his seven year old
sister Jane lost a leg. Their father, Bill suffered hearing
damage from the bomb in the backpack laid at their feet.
In the video, the backpack explodes twenty seconds after the
man in the white hat walks away. Stephanie Douglas saw
it in the FBI's Washington command center. Nobody I've talked
to can quite find the words.
Speaker 5: It's a horrible video to watch.
Speaker 4: I mean, after the bomb goes off, obviously, it's a
very smoky situation. There's a lot of smoke, and the
smoke clears, and what you saw is a very happy
scene of people watching that marathon is no longer that,
even after seeing something so horrible. I remember this survivor
who unfortunately his clothes were on fire, and I just
remember this police officer getting down on his hands and
knees and putting out the flames on this person with
his bare hands. And I just thought to myself, you
know what an incredible contrast of events, something so horrific,
and then we have this person with no thought or
of his own comfort or consequences to himself Russian and
actually do something like that.
Speaker 5: That was so brave. I still remember that very clearly.
Speaker 1: Only two days had passed. Now they were looking for
every image of the suspect they called white hat. Massachusetts
State police analysts found him with a man in a
black hat, which turned out to be his older brother. Yes,
now you have the Sarnaya brothers. Yes, but you don't
know that.
Speaker 5: No, I don't know that. I don't know who they are.
Speaker 1: Then suddenly, that Wednesday confusion, when cable news channels erroneously
reported that a suspect had been arrested and was headed
to the courthouse. The error caused pandemonium. According to US
attorney Carmen Ortiz, who's leading the prosecution.
Speaker 8: And I remember turning to my colleagues saying to my
press person saying, do we have someone in custody? And
I turned to Rick to Laurie, do we have someone
in custody? And they were like, no, we don't have
anyone in custody. I think that kind of misinformation makes
it appear as if government isn't in control of the investigation.
Is sort of confusing, and so it can be very,
very harmful.
Speaker 1: More harm was done the next morning when The New
York Post added to the erroneous reporting by putting a
man with a white hat on its front page. The
only problem was wasn't the right man in the white hat?
Speaker 8: That generated tremendous risk and harm. It gives people false
sense of security, thinking, oh, they've identified these suspects when
it turns out that it's wrong individuals, those individuals at tremendous.
Speaker 1: Risk, the risk to the innocent, lent urgency, to the
debate over whether to release the real pictures. Why wouldn't
you release the pictures to the public. Isn't that the
fastest way to find the perpetrators.
Speaker 4: Sure, but it's also gives them every opportunity to escape. Remember,
we do not have the identities of anybody.
Speaker 1: So your concern was that if you put the pictures
out there to the public, they'd know they'd been had
and they'd run.
Speaker 9: Yes.
Speaker 5: Absolutely.
Speaker 3: The countervailing argument is you had individuals. We had photographic
evidence of individuals who we strongly believed or responsible for
the bombings, and we needed to identify them as quickly
as possible.
Speaker 1: So Thursday, Rick de Laurier walked out in time for
the evening news.
Speaker 3: These images should be the only ones, I emphasized, the
only ones that the public should view to assist us.
Speaker 1: The pictures set events in motion that de Laurier didn't predict,
in fact, didn't recognize even after they started.
Speaker 3: My wife was watching the news that evening.
Speaker 1: An officer has been shot, and.
Speaker 3: There was a story about an MIT police officer who
was subsequently identified as Officer Sean Collier, who had been
murdered that evening and right on campus. My wife looked
at me and she said, I bet those are your
guys and they're on the run right now, and I
bet they've murdered this police officer. And I didn't believe her.
I said, oh, no, I don't think so, and I
went to bed.
Speaker 2: Your wife had cracked the case, and you went to bed.
Speaker 3: I did not believe that she had cracked the case
at the time I went to bed.
Speaker 4: I went to bed probably around ten o'clock. And this
is probably a sad commentary in my life, but my
BlackBerry was on the pillow.
Speaker 3: Next to me, and somewhere around twelve thirty quarter to
one in the morning, I received the phone call from
one of my assistant special Agents Agents in charge, Jeff Silette,
and my.
Speaker 4: Phone rang about a little after one in the morning.
Speaker 3: I woke out of a sound sleep and I said,
an MIT police officer has been murdered earlier this evening
by individuals we believe to be responsible for the bombing,
and they are on the streets of Watertown right now,
engaged in a shootout with a Watertown Police Department.
Speaker 1: It was combat two suspects through pipe bombs and a
pressure cooker bomb at the police An officer was gravely wounded.
Those who argued that releasing the pictures would cause the
suspects to run were right.
Speaker 2: Was putting the pictures out the right call?
Speaker 10: Yes?
Speaker 4: I think at the end of the day, we really
had no choice. Believe me, the death of Sean Collier
is not lost on the FBI. We consider it an
incredibly tragic event. But I think at the end of
the day, given the facts as we knew them at
the time, we made the best decision.
Speaker 2: How do you feel about that decision now?
Speaker 3: I stand by that decision, Scott. He could have force
reasonably foreseen that a police officer would be murdered. What
could reasonably be foreseen is that these individuals could have
had more bombs, could have set those bombs off and
caused this carnage similar or even greater to what they caused.
In April fifteenth, one suspect was killed, the other vanished
in minutes.
Speaker 1: The FBI matched the dead man's fingerprints to Tamerlin Sarnaiev,
an immigrant from Kyrgyzstan. Other records showed he had a brother.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I remember that so clearly.
Speaker 4: If somebody walking in with a Manila folder and said, okay,
here's his brother, and they opened it and it's his picture,
and I go, that's him, that's white hat, That's who
we should be looking for.
Speaker 1: Friday, the governor ordered a lockdown of Boston, but a
house to house search turned up nothing.
Speaker 4: Everybody's exhausted and deflated, you know. I mean, it's a
very sad day for Boston, day for Boston.
Speaker 1: But then a man noticed someone in a boat in
his backyard. Joe Kar Sarnaiev was wounded but alive.
Speaker 3: What did you think as he went into court to
be arraigned, he had a smug grin on his face.
Much of the time in the courtroom he would glance
over his right shoulder back to his relatives and smile
and smirk at them. And I found that absolutely galling,
and I found it reprehensible.
Speaker 1: The Attorney General has decided to seek the death penalty
in this case.
Speaker 3: Yes he has, and I support that decision.
Speaker 1: Joekar Sarnaiyev has pled not guilty. His defense team declined
to speak with US. US Attorney Carmen Ortiz is preparing
for a November trial.
Speaker 11: The notorious narco known as El Chapo has achieved one
of his greatest aspirations. He's the most famous drug lord
of all time. This is our fourth sixty minute story
about El Chopo, whose real name is Joaquin Guzman. Our
first story came when he was captured after thirteen years
on the run. We told you then that El Chapo
Spanish for Shorty was on Forbes list of billionaires and
had earned an outsized reputation for his worldwide smuggling empire,
his ruthless brutality, and most of all, for his daring getaways,
like the one we told you about last year, when
he vanished from a maximum security Mexican prison through one
of his trademark escape tunnels. Then there was our interview
with actor Sean who met Guzman at a hideaway last fall.
After El Chappo's stunning prison break. Many thought he'd never
get caught again, but he was. How you were about
to see.
Speaker 10: Where in the pantheon of drug traffickers drug lords does
El Chapo fall.
Speaker 12: El Chapo resides at the very top of that hierarchy.
Speaker 11: Peter Vincent was a senior official and legal adviser of
both the Justice Department and Homeland Security during the international
manhunt for Guzman. He says, after the daring escape last summer,
Al Chapo became almost delusional.
Speaker 10: So what precipitated his downfall?
Speaker 12: He became drunk on his own wine. He started to
believe the hype that he was special, that he was
almost a demigod, that he was something truly magical, and
he became so incredibly arrogant that he thought he was untouchable.
Speaker 11: Jim Dinkins agrees. As Chief of Homeland Security Investigations, he
was part of the US Mexico task force that nabbed
El Chapo in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 13: He knew how he was captured last time, and so
he had the upper hand, right, he had all the
cards in his hand to go off into the sunset
and to learn from his mistake. But he just can't
help himself, and he remained in the public eye.
Speaker 11: After his first escape from prison in two thousand and one,
Guzmand virtually disappeared from sight for thirteen years, but not
this time.
Speaker 13: Here he gets out of prison and he's on the
road being spotted at this place, having you know, drinks,
and this place, you know, with his family members.
Speaker 10: He invited Sean Penn and the actress Kate del Castillo
to come in to see him. Yeah. Did Mexican law
enforcement know that these two actors were going in to
see al Choppo?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 10: Absolutely.
Speaker 13: They knew where Sean was going to go when he
was going to land. They knew right away.
Speaker 11: How did they know because they were listening in on
the cartel's communications and watching. Mexican and US law enforcement
reformed the task force that caught al Choppo the last time.
They were tracking not just Goosemand, but everyone in his
inner circle, including his cook and everyone his lieutenants contacted,
including Sean Penn.
Speaker 10: Did it become sloppy?
Speaker 2: Definitely.
Speaker 13: There was more sightings of him in the last six
months than there was in the last ten years before
he was captured in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 10: After he escaped the last time, you told us that
you were not confident that he would ever be captured again,
that al Chopo had become a smarter criminal. Did you
overestimate his intelligence? I truly did hear?
Speaker 2: He had over a years in prison.
Speaker 13: I presumed he was using that same amount of time
to think about how he was going to remain a
fugitive for the rest of his life.
Speaker 11: Mexican officials told us that only twenty days after his escape,
the Marines had picked up on Gusman's trail.
Speaker 12: They created an even smaller team of Mexican Marines a
search block, and they focused on the prize at hand,
and that was capturing Il Chopo Guzman alive if they
absolutely could.
Speaker 11: Their first opportunity came in early October, just days after
Sean Penn's visit. The Marines told us they waited because
they didn't want the American actor caught in the crossfire.
A team of Marines approached one of El Chopo's mountaintop
ranches by jungle road, while another group of commandos flew
in by helicopter.
Speaker 10: So what went wrong on that October mission?
Speaker 12: As I understand it, despite all of El Chopo Guzman's
bravado of being a macho, very powerful man, he was
running with a child in his arms.
Speaker 10: A human shield, a baby as a shield.
Speaker 12: That's the only way that one can rationally see it.
Speaker 11: So once again, Al Chapo got away. In early December,
intelligence led the Marines to this house in the sleepy
coastal town of Los Mochi's in northern Sinaloa. Wiretap intercepts
talked about a visit planned by Grandma and Aunt, code
names for El Chapo and his lieutenant known as Cholo Yvonne.
The Marines watched the house for a month as painters
and construction crews came and went. Then, on the morning
of Thursday, January seventh, Grandma finally showed up. An assault
force quickly moved into position nearby. That evening, someone in
the house called out for a large order of tacos,
and this armored truck left to go pick up the food.
Chopo was having a party.
Speaker 12: For an incredibly savvy, clever, almost a criminal genius that
El Chapo Guzman was. He ultimately was done in by
very simple tastes. What do you mean tacos, tequila and chicas.
Speaker 11: At four forty am in the pre dawn hours of Friday,
January eighth, the Marines began battering down the gate of
Chappo's safe house. We've concealed the identities of the commando
leaders for their safety.
Speaker 14: Nonsto's, so when we first knocked on the door of
the house, the shooting started.
Speaker 11: A fierce gun battle erupted. The first marine through the
door was shot in the arm.
Speaker 10: I watched the videotape. It's very intense.
Speaker 15: Chappo's people inside the house were firing high caliber rounds grenades,
so it's like a war zone.
Speaker 11: The Marines moved methodically through the house. Chopo's henchmen retreated
up the stairs. Just inside the door. One gunman lay
dead down the hall. Four more taken prisoner, and the
commandos quickly checked a walk in closet covered with full
length mirrors. Upstairs, the Marines find two women, one of
them the cook, cowering on the bathroom floor. Outside the house,
more commandos fought it out with gunmen who fled across
the rooftops. When it was over, there were five cartel
members dead and six in custody, but once again Choppo
with Cholo Ivan had vanished. A couple of days later,
the Marines took us to the safe house in Los
Moches in an armed convoy. Here, just inside the gate
a pool of blood where the marine was shot sangre blood,
and inside the door more bloodstains. The walls pock marked
with bullet holes and the scars of exploding shrapnel. And
remember that walk in closet. The mirrors masked a hidden door.
Behind the secret door the entrance to one of El
Chopo's trademark tunnels. It's connected to a network of storm
drains and sewers. It was forty five minutes before they
found El Chapo's escape route. That morning the Marines gave chase.
Speaker 15: We intensified the search inside the tunnels, opening manhole covers
and inserting people into the sewers.
Speaker 11: Then it started raining hard.
Speaker 14: This bois after twenty minutes of rain. We thought that
Chapo might drown in the sewers because of the high
level of the water.
Speaker 10: So he popped up out of the manhole right in
the middle of a busy street.
Speaker 14: That was his only option.
Speaker 10: So this is where he came out. He popped out
of this manhole cover, which is about a half mile
from the house, straight down the road.
Speaker 14: There.
Speaker 11: Look carefully at the security camera footage from the gas
station across the street at eight fifty five am, four
hours after the first shots were exchanged. Right there you
can see Chopo and Cholo Ivan climbing out of the sewer.
And then in this cell phone video you can see
them carjack a white VW Jetta and speed away. The
fugitives got only three blocks before the Jetta broke down,
so they jacked a second car, a red Ford Focus,
but only a couple of miles out of town, that
car broke down. Within minutes, the Federal Emergency Center got
two reports of hijacked vehicles on the highway out of town.
The marines found the Ford already on the bed of
a tow truck, but no sign of Chopp and his lieutenant.
They had been picked up by the Federal police and
taken to a nearby motel. What were they doing in
the backseat of the police car.
Speaker 15: They weren't talking. They were relaxed, but they looked confused.
Speaker 11: No one knows why the Federal police took Choppo to
the motel instead of to jail, but Peter Vincent has
a theory.
Speaker 12: El Choppo undoubtedly said one you let me go now,
and I will make you wealthier beyond your wild imaginations.
If you should choose to decline my most generous offer,
I am not only going to kill you, but I
am going to rape and kill your wife and your daughters,
and I'm going to torture your sons.
Speaker 10: He has behaved like that in the past.
Speaker 12: He has behaved like that virtually his entire criminal career,
bribes and threats, bribes and threats, bribes and bullets. Luckily,
the Mexican Marines showed up, realized what was going on,
and took control of the situation.
Speaker 11: Chopo was flown to Mexico City for booking. He was
paraded before reporters and returned to Altiplano, the same prison
from which he had escaped last July.
Speaker 12: This time, he is rotated from cell to cell to sell.
Guards are circulated every fifteen minutes through whatever cell he
happens to be occupying on that particular day.
Speaker 11: The US Justice Department, once Guzman extradited, brought here to
face charges for his crimes. Seven separate jurisdictions, including New York, Chicago,
and San Diego, all want to put El Chapo on trial.
Juan Pedro Badillo is a lawyer who only has one client,
Al Chapo. He warns extradition can be a lengthy process.
Speaker 10: How long do you think the whole extradition legal proceedings
will go on?
Speaker 16: Yes, gains ten, fifteen, twenty years perhaps, or it could
be one or two years.
Speaker 12: El Chapo Guzman knows that if he is ultimately extradited
to the United States, it's essentially game over for him.
Speaker 11: Soon after Choppo's arrest, the US Mexico Task Force captured
another two dozen Sinaloa cartel members.
Speaker 12: It sends an incredibly powerful message to current kingpins, to
future Narco traffickers that you may run, you may hide,
but ultimately this multinational force will track you down from
the highest mountains or the deepest, darkest jungles, or through
the stinking sewers of towns and cities anywhere in the
world and bring you to justice.
Speaker 16: Charlie and Carol Gasco were an elderly couple who moved
to Santa Monica, California, sometime in early nineteen ninety seven
to begin a new phase of their life.
Speaker 7: For the next.
Speaker 16: Fourteen years, they did almost nothing that was memorable, and
they would be of absolutely no interest if it weren't
for the fact that Charlie Gasco turned out to be
James Whitey Bulger, the notorious Boston gangster and longtime fugitive
who's just beginning to serve two lifetime sentences. Carol Gasco
was actually Catherine Gregg Whitey's longtime girlfriend and caregiver. The
story of how they managed to elude an international manhunt
for so long while hiding in plain sight is interesting Tonight,
you'll hear it from the Gasco's neighbors and for the
first time from the federal agents who finally unraveled the
case with the help of a boob job and an
alley cat. If you're forced into retirement with a comfortable
nestag and a desire to be left completely alone, there
is no better place than Santa Monica, California. This low
key seaside suburb of la is shared by transients and tourists,
hippies and hedonists, celebrities, and lots of senior citizens attracted
to the climate, and an abundance of inexpensive rent control
departments just a few blocks from the ocean, places like
the Princess Eugenia on Third Street, which is where Charlie
and Carol Gasco, a childless couple from Chicago, lived for
fourteen years without attracting much attention from longtime neighbors or landlords.
Josh Bond is the building manager.
Speaker 7: What were they like?
Speaker 17: They were like the nice, retired old couple that lived
in the apartment next to me. Good tenants, excellent tenants,
never complained, always paid rent on time in cash and cash.
Speaker 16: Janice Good wouldn't live down the hole.
Speaker 18: They had nothing. Then they never went out. They'd never
had fruit delivered. She never dressed nicely.
Speaker 16: You thought they were poor, Yes, without a doubt. The
one thing everyone remembers about the Gascos is that they
loved animals and always made a fuss over the ones
in the neighborhood. Barbara Gluck remembers that Carol Gasco always
fed a stray cat after its owner had died.
Speaker 19: She would, you know, pet it and be sweet to it,
and then she would put a plate of food like
out here.
Speaker 10: And she liked the cat.
Speaker 19: Obviously she loved the cat, and we all liked the cat.
Speaker 5: But she was taking care of the cat.
Speaker 7: And what about Charlie Gascon, You.
Speaker 19: Know, he always had a hat on and dark glasses.
I have to say, it was mysterious to me why
a lovely woman.
Speaker 5: Like that.
Speaker 19: Was hanging out with that guy, that old grumpy man.
I never could figure that one out until I heard
they had eight hundred thousand something dollars in the wall.
Speaker 5: And then I went, oh, okay.
Speaker 16: You know money wasn't the only thing found in the
Gascos apartment on June twenty second, twenty and eleven, when
the FBI stopped by and ended what it called the
most extensive manhunt in the bureau's history.
Speaker 20: Weapons all over the apartment, I mean weapons by his nightstand,
weapons under the windowsill, shotguns, mini rugers, rifles loaded, loaded,
ready to go.
Speaker 16: What had started out as a routine day for Special
Agent Scott Gariola, who was in charge of hunting fugitives
in LA would turn into one of the most interesting
days of his career. After getting a call to stake
out of building in Santa Monica, he notified his backup
team with the LAPD.
Speaker 20: Had four guys working that day, and they said, we
got a tip on Whitey Bulger, and I'll see you
there in about an hour, and invariably the text will return.
Speaker 10: Who's Whitey Bulger?
Speaker 2: Really?
Speaker 20: A few of them had remind him, gently, remind him
who Whitey Bulger was.
Speaker 7: That he was number one on the FBI's.
Speaker 20: Number one number one big East Coast figure, but in
the West Coast not so much.
Speaker 10: Imagine a cartel leader, the.
Speaker 16: Cops said in la were focused on gangbangers and cartel members,
not some retired Irish mobster who hadn't been spotted in
sixteen years. But then, few mobsters have ever been as
infamous in the city as Whitey Bulger was in Boston,
and his reputation was for more than just being grumpy.
Besides extortion and flooding the city with cocaine, Bulger routinely
performed or ordered executions, some at close range, some with
a halo of bullets, and at least won by strangulation,
after which it said he took a nap. A special
agent Rich Tan, who ran the FBI's Whitey Bulger Fugitive
Task Force, had hurt it all.
Speaker 7: Bulger was charged with nineteen counts of murder.
Speaker 2: He was charged with other crimes.
Speaker 9: He was scorged to the Society in South austin his
own community.
Speaker 16: He was also a scourged to the FBI and a
great source of embarrassment to ti In special Agent Phil
Toursney and others on the FBI task force. Years earlier,
Whitey Bulger had infiltrate the Boston office of the FBI
and bought off agents who protected him and plied him
with information including the tip that allowed Bulger to flee
just days before he was to be indicted.
Speaker 9: We really had to catch this guy to establish credibility
after all the other issues, and it was just a
matter of bringing this guy back to Boston to make
sure this guy didn't die or you know, or get
away with this thing.
Speaker 16: Torsney, who's now retired, and the agent Tommy MacDonald joined
the task force in two thousand and nine. The joke
was Bulger was on the FBI's least wanted list. There
hadn't been a credible lead in more than a decade,
and their efforts in Bulger's old neighborhood of South Boston
were met with mistrust, in ridicule.
Speaker 9: Some people, they told us right out from you guys
aren't looking.
Speaker 2: For that guy.
Speaker 9: People just made the assumption we had him stash somewhere.
I mean, people really thought that kind of thing.
Speaker 21: Despite that mindset that we're not going to help you,
the FBI still got it done.
Speaker 7: Took sixteen years. Took sixteen years.
Speaker 21: This was a typical fugitive.
Speaker 16: The FBI says Bulger had planned his getaway years in advance,
with money set aside in a fake identity for A.
Thomas Baxter. During his first two years on the LAMB,
Bulger was in touch with friends and family, shuttling between
New York, Chicago, and the resort town of Grand Isle, Louisiana,
where he rented a home, until his identity was compromised.
After that, it seemed as if Bulger had disappeared from
the face of the earth, except for the alleged sightings
all over the world.
Speaker 7: How many of these tips do you think might have
been true? Boy?
Speaker 9: There was thousands and thousands of tips, and I think
I don't think any of.
Speaker 2: Them are true.
Speaker 16: One of the obstacles was there were really no good
photographs of Bulger or his longtime living girlfriend, Katherine Gregg,
a former dental hygienist. The FBI often noted that the
couple shared a love of animals, especially dogs and cats,
and asked veterinarians to be on the lookout. There were
reports that greg once had breast implants and other plastic
surgery in Boston, so the task force reached out to physicians.
Eventually they got a call from a doctor, Matthias Donolan,
who had located her files in storage.
Speaker 21: I was trying to leave the officer early to catch
one of my kids' ballgames. And I said, well, listen,
I'm going to swing by in the morning and pick
those up. And they said to me, do you want
the photos too, And they said you have photos and
they said, yeah, we have photos. I said, we'll be
there in fifteen minutes.
Speaker 16: The breast implant lead produced a treasure trove of high
resolution Catherine greg photographs that would help crack the case.
The FBI decided to switch strategies going after the girlfriend
in order to catch the gangster.
Speaker 1: This is an announcement by the FBI.
Speaker 16: The FBI created this public service announcement.
Speaker 5: Sixty year old Greeg is the girlfriend of eighty one
year old ballger.
Speaker 16: It ran in fourteen markets on daytime talk shows aimed
at women.
Speaker 1: Called the tip line at one eight hundred call.
Speaker 16: FBI, and it didn't take long. The very next morning,
the Bulger Task Force got three messages from someone that
used to live in Santa Monica and was one hundred
percent certain that Charlie and Carol Gasco Apartment three to
oh three at the Princess Eugenia Apartments were the people
they were looking for. The descriptions and the age difference
matched and Deputy US Marshall Neil Sullivan, who handled the lead,
said there was another piece of tantalizing information.
Speaker 22: The tips A specifically described that they were caring for
this cat and their love for this cat. So that
was just one piece of the puzzle on the tip
that just added up to saying if this isn't damn
it's it's something we better check out immediately because it
sure sounds like them.
Speaker 16: A search of the FBI's computer database for the gascoes
raised another red flag, not for what it found, but
for what it didn't.
Speaker 22: Basically like they were ghosts. No driver's license exactly, no
driver's license, no California ID, Like they didn't exist.
Speaker 16: That's the apartment that corner the third floor on the
right hand side YEP. By early afternoon, FBI agent Scott
Gariola had set up a number of surveillance posts and
had already met with apartment manager Josh Bond to talk
about his tenants.
Speaker 17: He closed the door, threw down a folder and open
it up and said, are these the people that live
in a part of three oh three?
Speaker 7: Did you say anything when you saw the pictures?
Speaker 17: Mys reaction was holy.
Speaker 7: You're living next door to a gangster.
Speaker 17: Well, I still didn't really know who he was.
Speaker 16: But it didn't take him long to figure it out.
While the FBI was mulling its options, Bond logged onto
Bulger's Wikipedia page.
Speaker 17: I'm just kind of scrolling down. It's like, oh, wow,
this guy's serious. It's like murders and extortion. And then
I get to the bottom and there's this this thing.
It's like from one of his old people saying, well,
the last time I saw him, he said, you know,
when he goes out, he's he's gonna have guns and
he's gonna be ready to.
Speaker 7: Take people with him.
Speaker 17: I was like, oh, maybe I shouldn't be involved in this, and.
Speaker 7: We were sitting here laughing about it. But he's a
pretty serious guy.
Speaker 19: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I've killed a lot of people, had them kill.
Speaker 17: I didn't know that at the time.
Speaker 16: Bond told the FBI he wasn't going to knock on
the Gasco's door because there was a note posted expressly
asking people not to bother them. Carol had told neighbors
that Charlie was showing signs of dementia.
Speaker 10: So we were back there.
Speaker 16: So Garyola devised a ruse involving the gasco storage locker
in the garage had the name Gasco.
Speaker 20: Across an apartment three.
Speaker 16: H three, he had the manager called to tell them
that their locker had been broken into and that he
needed someone to come down to see if anything was missing.
Carol Gasco said her husband would be right down.
Speaker 10: We just rushed him.
Speaker 7: He mean guns out, FBI, don't move.
Speaker 23: Gave the words hey, FBI and get your hands up.
Hands went up right away.
Speaker 20: And then at that moment we told him get down
on his knees, and he gave us yeah. He gave
us I ain't getting down on my f and knees.
Speaker 7: Didn't want to get his pantstory.
Speaker 20: You don't want to get his pants dirty, you know,
wearing white and seeing the oil and ground.
Speaker 10: I guess he didn't want to get down in a will.
Speaker 16: Even at eighty one. This was a man used to
being in control.
Speaker 20: I asked him to identify himself and acting to go
over well. He asked me to fin identify myself, which
I did, and I asked him, I.
Speaker 10: Said, are you are you Whitey Bulger? He said yes.
Speaker 20: Just about that moment, someone catches my attention from a
few feet away by the elevator chef.
Speaker 16: It was Janice Goodwin from the third floor, coming to
do her laundry, and I.
Speaker 18: So, excuse me, I think I can help you. This
man has dementia, so if he's acting oddly, you know,
that could be why.
Speaker 20: Immediately we flashed through my mind as oh my god,
I just arrested an eighty one year old man with
Alzheimer's who thinks he's Whitey Bulger. What is he going
to tell me next? He's Elvis, So I said, do
me a favor. I said, this woman up here says
you have a touch of Alzheimer's. He said, don't listen
to her. She's f n nuts. He says, I'm James Bulger.
Speaker 16: A few minutes later, he confirmed it, signing a consent
form allowing the FBI to search his apartment.
Speaker 20: As he's signing, he says, that's the first time I
signed that name in a long time.
Speaker 7: There was a feeling of resignation.
Speaker 23: I don't think he had it.
Speaker 20: I did ask him. I said, hey, white I said,
aren't you relieved that you don't have to look over
your shoulder anymore? And it's come to an end? And
he said, are you nuts?
Speaker 16: But in some ways Whitey Bulger and Catherine Gregg had
already been prisoners in Apartment three oh three, which appeared
to be a mixture of the murderers in the mundane
alongside the weapons and all the money they had stockpiled
the lifetime supply of cleansers, creams, and detergents. The FBI
took special interest in a collection of sixty four ounce
bottles with white sock stretched over the top.
Speaker 20: I said, hey, Whitey, what are these? Are some kind
of Molotov cocktail you're making? He goes, No, he said,
I buy tube sox from the ninety nine cent store,
and the two tied of Mike Calves, so I stretched
them out. I said, why are you shopping at the
ninety nine cent store? You have half a million dollars
under your bed, He goes, I had to make the
money last.
Speaker 16: It's been said that one of the reasons it took
so long to catch Whitey Bulger is that people were
looking for a gangster in Bulger, whether he liked it
or not, had ceased to be one.
Speaker 9: He said, it was hard to keep up that mindset
of a criminal, and that's part of the reason he
came down to that garage. He said, if he was
on his game, you know, fifteen twenty thirty years ago,
he probably would have sent something there. But it was
hard to stay on that edge, that criminal edge. After
being on the lamb as a regular citizen for fifteen years.
Speaker 16: The master Manipulator gave credit to Catherine Gregg for keeping
him crime free, hoping it would mitigate her sentence. She's
now serving eight years for harboring a fugitive. On the
long plane ride back to Boston, Bulger told his captors
that he became obsessed with not getting caught and would
do anything to avoid it, even if it meant obeying
the law. Whitey Bulger's biggest fear, they said, was being
discovered dead in his apartment. A plan to avoid it.
Speaker 9: If he became ill and knew he was on his deathbed,
he'd go down Arizona, crawl down the bottom one of
these mines and die and decompose and hope, hope that
we would never find him and still be looking for
him forever.
Speaker 1: Shortly after nine to eleven, the Pentagon ordered a top
secret team of American commandos into Afghanistan with a single
simple order, kill Osama bin Laden. It was America's best
chance to eliminate the leader of al Qaeda. The inside
story of exactly what happened in that mission and how
close it came to its objective has never been told
until tonight. The man you're about to meet was the
officer in command leading a team from the US Army's
mysterious Delta Force, a unit so secret it's often said
that Delta doesn't exist. But you're about to see Delta's
operators in action. Why would the mission commander break his
silence after seven years? He told us that most everything
he's read in the media about his mission is wrong,
and tonight he wants to set the record straight.
Speaker 24: Our job is to go find him, catch or kill him.
And we knew the writing on the wall was really
to kill him. No one wanted to bring us on
the line back to stan trial in the United States somewhere.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and one, just ten weeks after nine
to eleven, he was a thirty seven year old Army
major leading a team of America's most elite commandos. Even now,
we can't tell you his name or show you his face.
We hired a theatrical makeup artist to take the former
Delta officer through a series of transformations to create the
man you see now. He calls himself Dalton Fury. He's
the author of Kill Bin Laden, a new book out
this week. Dalton Fury is used to disguise as in fact,
in two thousand and one, his entire team transformed itself
in Afghanistan.
Speaker 24: Everybody has their beer grown, everybody's were on local Afghan clothing,
sometimes carrying the same weapons as them.
Speaker 1: The idea was that if this all worked out, Osama
bin Laden would be dead and no one would ever
know that Delta Force was there.
Speaker 24: That's right, That's the plan, and that always is when
you're talking about Delta Force.
Speaker 1: And there was no mission more important to the United States.
Speaker 23: We'll smoke him out of his cave and we'll get
him eventually.
Speaker 1: But the administration's strategy was to let Afghans do most
of the fighting. Using radio intercepts and other intelligence, the
CIA pinpointed Bin Laden in the mountains near the border
of Pakistan, following the strategy of keeping an apt face
on the war. Fury's Delta team joined the CIA and
Afghan fighters and piled into pickup trucks. They videotaped their
journey to a place called Tora Bora. Fury told us
his orders were to kill Ben Laden and leave the
body with the Afghans.
Speaker 24: Right here, you're looking at basically the battlefield from the
last location that we had firm on a somber Law's location.
Speaker 1: This ridge line is at about fourteen thousand feet and
back this way toward me is Pakistan.
Speaker 23: That's right.
Speaker 1: On a scale of say one to ten, ten being
the toughest. How tough a position is this.
Speaker 23: To attack, in my experience is to ten.
Speaker 1: Delta developed an audacious plan to come at Bin Laden
from the one direction he would never expect.
Speaker 23: We want to come in on the back door.
Speaker 1: You were going to come up over the tops of
the peaks.
Speaker 23: That's right.
Speaker 24: The original plan that we sent up to a higher headquarters,
Delta Force wants to come in over the mountain with
oxygen coming from the Pakistan side over the mountain, to
come in and get a drop on the line from behind.
Speaker 2: Why didn't you do that?
Speaker 24: Disapproved at some level above us, whether that was a
central command or all the way up to the president
states I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: The next option Delta wanted to employ was to drop
hundreds of land mines in the mountain passes that led
to Pakistan ben Ladden's escape route.
Speaker 24: First, God blows his leg off. Everybelle stops. That allows
aircraft overhead to find them. They see all these heat
sources out there. Okay, there's a big, large group of
all Kainda moving south.
Speaker 23: They can engage that.
Speaker 1: Why didn't you do that?
Speaker 23: Disapprove?
Speaker 1: Why was it not approved?
Speaker 23: I have no idea.
Speaker 1: How often does Delta come up with a tactical plan
that's disapproved by higher headquarters.
Speaker 24: In my experience, in my five years of Delta, never before.
Speaker 1: The military wouldn't tell us who rejected the plans or why.
Fury wasn't happy about it, but he pressed on with
the only option he had left, a frontal assault on
ben Ladden's dug In alcohol of fighters, the Delta team
had only about fifty men, so the mission would depend
on the Afghan militia as guides and muscle. Their leader
was a warlord, a self styled general named Ali.
Speaker 24: Ali told us after about thirty seconds of discussion, he
kind of listened to me Arambalan, and then the first
thing he said was, I don't think you guys can
handle it.
Speaker 23: You can't handle Al Kada in these mountains.
Speaker 1: Ali second from the left, met with this CIA officer
and accepted millions of dollars in cash from the agency.
In short order, his muja Hadeen fighters were escorting Delta
force into the mountains. Paint the picture for me of
these Afghan muja Hadeen troops.
Speaker 24: They ranged anywhere from maybe fourteen up to maybe eighty.
Speaker 23: Various dress.
Speaker 24: Basically we would probably consider it rags, which is the
standard dress for a Mujahadeen warrior.
Speaker 1: This is video of the top secret mission, never seen
by the public. It was recorded by the Delta commandos
themselves dressed like Afghans. The Americans maneuvered up the mountains,
calling in airstrikes on al Qaeda. By day they would advance,
but at night they soon discovered that their Afghan allies
went home. Well, I have to assume that if you
started up the hills of Tora Bora and the muja
Hadeen took territory, they didn't abandon.
Speaker 23: That at night, Oh yes they did.
Speaker 2: They gave it up to the enemy.
Speaker 23: Absolutely.
Speaker 24: The Mujadin would go up, get into a skirmish, firefight,
lose a guy or too, maybe killing al Kada guy
or two and then they leave. It was almost like
it was an agreement in understanding between the two forces
fighting each other, almost put on a good show and
then leave.
Speaker 1: Four days after arriving in Tora Bora Dalton, Fury was
faced with a fateful command decision. Three of his men
were in trouble behind enemy lines, and at the same time,
the CIA had been listening to Ben Laden's radio transmissions
and had a breakthrough.
Speaker 23: And this is where it gets complicated.
Speaker 24: At about the same time the CIA George comes into
our room and he says, guys, I got a location
for sam bin Laden. That's probably the best location of
data we've had on sam Mi Lan.
Speaker 1: Ever, it was night, so Fury was without his Afghan allies. Still,
he managed to rescue his men and then found himself
approaching bin Laden's doorstep.
Speaker 24: We're about two thousand meters away when we think Ben
Lond's at still from where we're at.
Speaker 23: Now, we have to make a decision.
Speaker 1: Fury had two choices. Advance his small team with no
Afghan support, or returned to camp and assault In the morning.
He was under orders to make the Afghans take the
lead and intelligence said there were more than one thousand
hardened fighters protecting ben Laden. You write in the book
my decision to abort that effort to kill or capture
Bin Laden when we might have been within two thousand
meters of him about two thousand yards still bothers me.
It leaves me with a feeling of somehow letting down
our nation at.
Speaker 2: A critical time.
Speaker 23: That's correct.
Speaker 1: Why do you feel that way?
Speaker 24: Had we gone up that ridge line towards that location,
some be Laden might have been five hundred meters away.
We might have run right into him. So there's always
that doubt that we might have run into him. We
also might have got up there and found nothing. It
wasn't worth the risk at that particular moment to go
up there and play cowboy. It was better to be
cautious refit, go up there with the entire force the
next day and play the battle out as we had planned.
Speaker 1: In the morning, Ben Laden was on the radio. The
CIA Delta and their Afghan allies were listening. How did
the Afghans react when they heard from Osama Bin Laden
on the radio?
Speaker 24: Some of Laden is many a Muslim's hero. These guys,
in my opinion, were more in awe of Osama bin
Laden than they were willing to kill him. When they
heard him talking on the radio, they would gather around
the individual to hell that handheld transistor. He would hold
it up in the air, almost as if he didn't
want the connection to break, almost like they could see
the ridge line with Lada happened to be talking from
like they could almost see him and feel his presence.
And they just stood there with white eyes and someone
in awe that here is a leader of the Jahad,
the leader of al Qaeda, and they're actually hearing his
voice over the radio.
Speaker 1: And these were the men who were supposed to help
you capture or killing some allies.
Speaker 23: Some were better than others.
Speaker 1: The radio intercepts gave Delta a fix on Ben Ladden's location,
and one of the Delta soldiers narrated his own video.
Speaker 6: This top hill, very top up there, that supposedly were
Ben Lon's hanging out. We've seen movement along this saddle
right here. We don't know if it's up friendly or not,
so we have been able caught fire on it.
Speaker 1: And then something extraordinary happened. Fury's Afghan allies announced that
they had negotiated a ceasefire with al Qaeda, something the
Americans had no interest in. When Fury's team advanced anyway,
his Afghan partners drew their weapons on Delta. It took
twelve hours to end the bogus ceasefire, precious time for
al Qaeda to move.
Speaker 23: So we think he's moved over here.
Speaker 1: So Osama bin Laden starts here as far as we know,
and he's coming all the way around. Now he's doubled back.
Speaker 2: You got to figure he's heading for the.
Speaker 1: Valley and the pass into Pakistan.
Speaker 23: Our assumption is he's going for the valley.
Speaker 1: At that time, ben Laden had changed direction and the
tone of his radio calls.
Speaker 24: Clearly under dress, clearly hurting, clearly caring.
Speaker 1: For his men inside this building. The American team listened
to ben Laden on the radio. Fury wrote down the
translation in a notebook.
Speaker 24: Quote, our prayers were not answered. Times are dire and bad.
We did not get support from the apostates who are
our brothers. I'm sorry for bringing you here. It is
okay to surrender. End quote.
Speaker 1: When you heard that, what did you think?
Speaker 23: I thought it's almost over.
Speaker 1: Soon after that intercept, a Delta team called Jackal radioed
that they had been Laden's entourage. In sight, the.
Speaker 24: Operation Jackal team observed fifty men moving into a cave
that they hadn't seen before. The Mouja Deans said they
saw an individual, a taller fella wearing a camouflage jacket.
Everybody put two and two together. Okay, that's got to
be a Sambad lad egressing from the battlefield. They called
up every available bomba their took a toll of the
airspace and they dropped several hours of bombs on the
cave he went into. We believe it was our penny
of the time that he died inside that cave.
Speaker 1: Ben Ladden's radio went silent, and Dalton Fury believed that
the bombs had killed him. Six months later, American and
Canadian forces came back for proof. They checked al Qaeda
fighting holes and used explosives to try to open up
collapsed caves. This is where they hoped to find Ben
Ladden's body. It's an al Qaeda graveyard rising from the
opium poppies. The troops dug up bodies and removed the
fingers for forensic analysis, but there was no luck. In
October two thousand and four, Ben Laden released a message,
and Fury knew that his team had failed. Today based
on intelligence, Fury believes he knows what happened. He says
that Ben Ladden was wounded in the shoulder by shrapnel
from an American bomb and was then hidden in this
town next to the al Qaeda cemetery.
Speaker 24: We believe a gentleman brought him in, a gentleman who
him and his family were supporting al Qadra during the battle.
They were providing food alma water. We think he went
to that house, received medical attention for a few days,
and then we believe they put him in a vehicle
moved them back across the pass.
Speaker 1: This is the trail Ben Laden would have used to escape, does.
Speaker 24: My understand They believe he got into a vehicle, he
moved as far as he could, and then got out
and walked across or was carried across the pass in
a Pakistan free and clear. When this is all over
and this all dies down, and once we finally do
grab Assamba Lauden, I think the fact that we lost
him into a bora will move out of my memory,
so to speak. Now I'm looking forward to those days