Technically, the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list isn’t ranked. Bureau agents are quick to point out that they don’t officially prioritize one fugitive hunt over another, that the mere fact that an alleged criminal makes the infamous list is a strong enough statement about how badly the FBI wants to take someone off the streets.
And yet inside the Bureau, everyone knows there is in fact a Public Enemy #1. In fact, the practice of hunting “Public Enemy #1” began decades ago under the legendary FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who used the gangster era of the 1930s to build up the Bureau into the nation’s first national crime-fighting organization and create a myth and aura around the FBI that it always gets its man (and they’re still today mostly men). During a two-year period from 1933 to 1935, Hoover’s newly christened “G-Men” hunted to ground a string of infamous and colorful bank robbers, gangsters, and kidnappers—”Machine Gun” Kelly, Bonnie & Clyde, “Baby Face” Nelson, Ma Barker, “Creepy” Karpis, and, of course, the original “Public Enemy #1” himself, John Dillinger, who was killed by FBI agents outside the Biograph Theatre in Chicago. The series of victories solidified Hoover’s Bureau as the nation’s protector, all that stood between peaceful citizens and the violent underworld, the white knights in the national fight between good and evil.
Ever since, the FBI’s “Public Enemies” have represented an ever-revolving reflection of the nation’s deepest fears and the criminals who have captured the public imagination. The “Ten Most Wanted” list officially begin in 1950, and since then nearly 500 fugitives have appeared on the list—some for as little as a few hours, others have lingered on the list for decades. The nation’s “Public Enemy #1” has over the years included the gangsters of the 1930s, the Nazi saboteurs of the 1940s, the Communist spies of the 1950s, the Ku Klux Klan and later the student radicals of the 1960s, violent extremist groups like the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Weather Underground in the 1970s, the Mafia and La Cosa Nostra in the 1980s, and so on. The one constant in the FBI’s hunt is that the FBI always wins: Only about thirty “Ten Most Wanted” fugitive have never been located.
Now, in just seven weeks, the FBI has opened two spots on the list, removing two unofficial “Public Enemy #1” fugitives in a remarkable run. On May 1, Osama bin Laden was killed by the U.S. in Pakistan, nearly ten years after al-Qaeda’s September 11th attack catapulted him to the top of U.S. most wanted lists—and nearly twelve years after he was added to the FBI’s Most Wanted list. For the FBI squads who have tracked bin Laden and al-Qaeda since the spring of 1996, the fugitive’s death was a welcome end to a long search.
On Wednesday the Bureau closed its other most vexing case: Boston Irish gangster Whitey Bulger himself was also added to the FBI’s Most Wanted list in the summer of 1999 within weeks of bin Laden’s addition and now has also been crossed off the list just weeks after bin Laden. Bulger’s arrest came after a high-profile public push this week to target the notorious mobster’s girlfriend, Catherine Greig, who has long been suspected of hiding with him since he disappeared from Boston in 1994.
While bin Laden was certainly the unofficial “Public Enemy #1” for the last decade, Bulger’s capture is uniquely sweet too: For many within the FBI, Bulger was not just a “Public Enemy” but a personal enemy too. His freedom was a constant reminder of one of the century-old Bureau’s darkest chapters.
The Bulger case is one of personal interest to current FBI Director Robert Mueller—he served as a junior federal prosecutor in Massachusetts during the 1980s at the peak of Bulger’s reign as the head of Boston’s Winter Hill gang. What made the case so notorious—and so personal for the current FBI leaders—was that Bulger’s rise and power had come with the Bureau’s aid. In Boston, corrupt FBI agent John Connolly helped Bulger for years evade local, state, and federal law enforcement in exchange for information on other gangsters. Bulger has long been a black mark on the Bureau in the Bay State, poisoning its relationship with many local officers for a generation. Bulger has been on the run since August 1994 when Connolly warned that officials were set to arrest him for participating in at least 19 murders. Many Bostonians had speculated over the years that the FBI didn’t want to find Whitey, what with all the dirt he possessed on the Bureau’s Boston operations in the 1980s.
And yet the Bureau actually did keep after him, mounting a special Bulger Fugitive Task Force in its Boston Field Office and adding him to the “Ten Most Wanted” list in 1999—already at that time the oldest fugitive ever to make the list. The subject of his ongoing freedom became something of a dark joke at Headquarters. The nearly two-decade-long search for the now 81-year-old Whitey Bulger, which had stretched out over years with numerous false sightings around the world, has been one of the Bureau’s most vexing cases. After briefings on unrelated subjects at the Hoover Building in Washington, Mueller will sometimes tease executives, “That’s all well and good, but have you found Whitey yet?”
Within the Bureau, Connolly is now seen as one of the Bureau’s two highest profile traitors—lumped together ignominiously with the long-serving Russian spy, Special Agent Robert Hanssen, who is serving a life sentence in federal prison in Colorado. Capturing Bulger will help the Bureau put its own traitor behind it. The capture of Bulger came so quickly after bin Laden’s death that the al-Qaeda leader’s spot on the list hasn’t yet been filled, meaning for a brief moment there are only eight fugitives on its “Ten Most Wanted” list.
So with Bulger’s capture who steps into the unofficial “Public Enemy #1” slot? Many within the Bureau will point quickly to a name unfamiliar to most Americans: Semion Mogilevich, a Russian Mafia leader thought to be hiding outside Moscow and now the only international fugitive on the list.
Given the Bureau’s recent success rate, it’s probably best for Mogilevich to stay at home the next couple of weeks.
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