The Long and Frustrating Hunt for One of America's Most Wanted ( Psst: He's Not a Terrorist)

By Jumana Farouky / London Saturday, June 11, 2011
    • Illustration by Asaf Hanuka for TIME

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    A few people have been talking, though, and indeed, what they've said suggests Bulger could be in Europe. His old Mob associates told the task force he used to say that when it came time to split, he would go there. As far back as the late 1970s, Bulger had been collecting fake passports and setting up bank accounts and safe-deposit boxes in various cities around the U.S. and Europe. "He knew that at some point, based on his criminal history, he was going to have to become a fugitive for the rest of his life," says an investigator on the case. "He talked about that openly with his associates."

    Bulger holds an Irish passport — obtained through his parents, both Irish immigrants to the U.S. — so traveling to and from Europe would be easy for him. And once inside the Schengen zone of 25 European countries, travel is passport-free. (Neither Ireland nor Britain, though, is a member of the Schengen zone.) From at least as far back as 1986 until 1994, Bulger traveled to Europe once or twice a year. Each time, the FBI believes, he took with him large amounts of cash, totaling tens of millions of dollars. The last confirmed sighting of Bulger was in London in 2002, by a businessman who also remembered seeing him working out in the gym of the Méridien Hotel in London's Piccadilly Circus eight years earlier. So while the hunt for Bulger continues around the world, the task force is keeping a close eye on Europe. The team has an idea of which country Bulger is possibly living in but won't say for fear of alerting him. "That would be putting our playbook out there," says Teahan.

    Without the authority to investigate beyond the U.S., the FBI is at the mercy of Europe's police in its search for Bulger. It's a problem faced by any law-enforcement agency working across borders — which, in the days of the Internet and globalization, is all of them. "Fugitives are mobile and opportunistic," says Ronald K. Noble, secretary general of Interpol. And because many of them fund their flight from the law by committing more crimes, that often means "multiple criminal charges in more than one country, therefore involving multiple jurisdictions, different legal systems and linguistic differences." These days, the best way for police agencies to catch a fugitive is to work together. "This is important when criminals ignore borders and when criminal networks establish links that span the globe," says Noble.

    Organizations like Interpol and Europol (the European Police Office) find their jobs have become a little easier over the past decade, thanks to E.U. legislation that has simplified the process of bringing international criminals to justice. When the European arrest warrant was introduced in 2003 — replacing often convoluted bilateral extradition agreements — the time it took to get a suspect extradited went from as long as a year to as little as 10 days. (When Swedish authorities wanted to question WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on sex-crime allegations late last year, it was a European arrest warrant that allowed British police to hold him in custody while Sweden pushed for his extradition.)

    Meanwhile, since 2000, police agencies have been allowed to set up joint investigation teams that let one nation's police force extend some of its powers to another for a limited time. "We're seeing organized-crime groups becoming more fluid, multinational and multiethnic," says Rob Wainwright, director of Europol, which deals with 14,000 cross-border operations a year. "The E.U. has given us the tools and built the architecture to help us get a grip on organized crime. Now it's up to us to use these capabilities to their maximum."

    But while Europe's police forces have the tools to work together, they don't always use them. Sometimes the impulse to protect sources or the hesitancy of investigators to work alongside people they don't know — and so don't trust — overrides the need for cooperation. "You still have the old-school detectives who are reluctant to work on investigations that are outside their own jurisdiction," says Wainwright. "But now there isn't a single major criminal case that isn't international in nature. The reality of the challenge has changed."

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