TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2002 -- One epic Boston drama that has dominated the city for decades is moving rapidly toward a crescendo: that is, the story of James "Whitey" Bulger, the city’s biggest crime boss now on the lam, and his younger brother William Bulger, the former Senate President who was for many years the most powerful political boss. William Bulger is due to testify before the House Committee on Government Reform in Boston on Friday.

Both the Globe and the Herald front stories today reporting that Bulger was in contact with his brother even after he became a fugitive from justice. (Whitey is currently on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. His photo appears right beneath Osama Bin Laden’s!) But the most interesting Bulger-related story is the attempt by the Bulger Team to generate a little sympathetic press with a call to Globe columnist Brian McGrory.

Bulger’s most recent words on the subject paint him as a distraught and disappointed relative, heartsick that he couldn’t have influenced his criminal brother for the better: "I wish we had been closer," Bulger told McGrory. "I care deeply for him, and might have been an influence for the better." This is different from what Bulger wrote in his 1996 memoir, While the Music Lasts: My Life in Politics (Houghton Mifflin). Bulger recalls an incident where he used his political position to help his brother get a job as a custodian at the courthouse (talk about patronage at the courts). Bulger describes this as an innocent attempt to help his brother. "I wanted to see him start somewhere in regular employment," Bulger writes. Alas, this act of the veritable one-man rehabilitation agency failed to perform magic. Whitey wanted out. "Jim tried, I really believe he did, but he was too restless for a routine eight-hour-a-day job," Bulger reports. " ‘I can’t stand it, Bill,’ he told me. ‘I’m bored sick.’" You bet he was. No heads to bang at the courthouse. Earlier in the book, Bulger writes of watching the young "James" transform from "blithe spirit to a rebel." While Bulger generally minimizes the criminal aspects of his brother in While the Music Lasts -- he refers to reports of Whitey’s criminal activity as "lurid allegations" -- he does not dwell on how he could have influenced him for the better.

But let’s take Bulger at his word in the McGrory column. Put aside the whispered possibility -- never proven, rarely spoken about -- that Bulger somehow inadvertently benefited from the power of his criminal brother. He was known to privately joke about him -- perhaps to defuse the tension around the grim reality. The fact of the matter is the former Senate President could not have changed Whitey even if he wanted to. William Bulger was five years younger than Whitey. By the time the younger Bulger came into the scene, James Bulger was already a fully-formed human being. Again, Bulger writes: "Jim and I did not share the same friends. His were older, of course, and they listed, like Jim, to the wild side. They looked on him as a leader, which was the only role he would tolerate."

Does that description sound like the kind of person that is suddenly going to be swayed by his smarmy younger brother as suggested by a description of Bulger McGrory attributes to "Bulger associates?" No way. McGrory describes William Bulger as carrying "a sense of guilt that he didn’t do more -- that he didn’t take walks with his older brother or lure him straight." It sounds from Bulger’s memoir that he 1) knew he couldn’t influence the thinking of the headstrong Whitey and 2) that he made at least one attempt to lure him straight, the courhouse job. My conclusion is that much of the McGrory interview is merely spin to humanize Bulger when he’s being hammered in the local press.

That said, neither Bulger’s memoir nor the Globe column begin to provide a full picture of the true relationship between William and James Bulger. Novelist James Carrol used the Bulger story as the partial basis for a novel, 1994’s The City Below, (Houghton Mifflin), but nobody has adequately captured the amazing, almost Biblical quality, to the relationship between the two brothers. How does the same working class South Boston household produce both the scholarly William and the murderous James? Or were their similar qualities in both that enabled each to rise to the top of their respective fields? It’s a mystery to which we still haven’t found the answer. Perhaps Bulger’s testimony on Friday will help illuminate it. Somehow I doubt it.