I managed a hotel and an apartment building
in Santa Monica for about seven years.
I lived in the apartment building
and I had an office in the hotel across the street.
Super easy commute, it's great when you live in LA.
You meet a lot of interesting people
when you manage an apartment building.
For example, there was a retired couple
who lived in the apartment next to mine, the Gaskos.
And the first time I met the husband,
I was in my apartment playing guitar
and trying to write a song, and there's a knock on the door
and I open it to find this 70 year old man
holding a black case.
He tells me that he heard me playing music and he liked it,
which was good, and he thought I could use
this black Stetson cowboy hat.
So, really nice gesture.
I thanked him and he said his name was Charlie.
So fast forward four or five years,
and I'm taking a nap on my couch.
I'd been working for like two weeks straight, no days off,
on call every night, but this particular Wednesday,
I was taking off work early.
I was going to see this band,
My Morning Jacket, in Hollywood.
I was meeting a friend, all planned out.
At 2 p.m. the phone rang.
My coworker is at the hotel with the FBI.
So before I know it, I'm on the phone with an FBI agent
and he says, "I need to talk to you"
"about a tenant in your apartment building."
And I'm on my couch so I say, "Can we do this tomorrow?"
And he says, "No, where are you?
"Come here now."
So I get to my office and I have a seat,
and there's a larger man with a Hawaiian shirt and jeans on.
He closes the door, he throws a manila folder down
on the desk, he opens it and points to this sheet of paper.
Across the top is "Wanted," you know, the familiar "Wanted"
and underneath a photo of a man and a woman with names.
And he says, "Do these people live
"in the apartment next to mine?"
At first glance,
I know the woman is my neighbor, Carol Gasko.
The man, not as familiar, but after another look,
I know these are my neighbors.
And while I've never heard the name Catherine Greig,
the name James J. "Whitey" Bulger is very familiar.
I had heard this name many times
when I was in college at Boston University
but I didn't really know anything about him.
He was more of a Jimmy Hoffa type guy to me, it was like,
"Oh this guy's missing, he's never going to be found."
It was almost like a joke.
So, I'm standing there and the FBI agent says,
"What do you think?"
And I said, "What does my face tell you?"
And he says, "I need percentages."
I said, "99.5, 100 percent."
So he gets on his radio and while this is happening,
almost like a movie after an explosion
where the sound just disappears,
and you're trying to process something
that you're not familiar with,
you don't know what's going on
and you don't know what's about to happen.
This is an old man who bought me a bike light one time
because he was worried about me riding my bike
at night without one.
And now I'm discovering he's a notorious fugitive.
So another agent quickly appears and he says,
"We need the keys to his apartment
"and we'll bust his door down if you don't give it to us."
And I said, "Okay, here are the keys."
And he left and then the other agent, Hawaiian shirt,
kind of walks up to me and he says,
"Look, this guy's pretty high on the Most Wanted List,
"one, two maybe, I don't know.
"We could use your help apprehending him."
So my first response is, "I just gave you the keys
"to his apartment and told you he lives there,
"so I'm not really sure what else I can do."
And he says, "Well you know we can't just go
"to his apartment, we have to make sure he's in there.
"If it's just her, it doesn't really work for us.
"So why don't you go knock on the door
"and see if he's there?"
And in the previous months before this,
Carol had been telling people in the building,
"Charlie has dementia, he has heart problems."
And they put notes on their door during the day,
"Don't knock on the door."
And I knew from talking to him over the years
that he slept during the day.
So I explained this to the agent,
and without skipping a beat, he moves on and he says,
"What are you doing tonight?"
And I said, "Well I'm going to a concert."
And he said, "You might want to cancel those plans."
And so I call my buddy and tell him,
"Look, I don't think I'm going to make the show tonight
"and I can't tell you why."
So as the original shock is dissipating,
I realize I'm going to be with these guys
until they have him in cuffs.
So, "What do you need me to do?"
And then things kick in.
We place an agent in the hotel at a window
that has a good view of the balcony,
of the Gasko's balcony
and then the agent wants to go to my apartment.
So I take him through a back alley and some side streets
so we aren't walking in front of the apartment building
in clear view of Charlie and Carol,
and we're stopping at cars and he's talking on the radio
and there's agents everywhere,
and I'm starting to think this is a pretty big deal.
It must be, there's this many people staked out
in the neighborhood, and I'm hearing chatter over the radio,
"Oh they just closed their blinds."
"Did you tip them off?"
"I've been with you the whole time, no of course not.
And then I hear that a man walked out
onto his balcony, and so I say,
"All right he's there, you got the keys."
And he says, "Nah, he had a hoodie on
"and so we couldn't really identify him,
"but you can go knock on the door
"and tell us if he's in there."
I say, "No, I don't want to do that."
So we get to my apartment, and I draw him a floor plan
of the Gasko's place,
and we're throwing ideas back and forth
of how to get this guy out of his apartment.
And he's talking on the radio and we're in my living room
and my living room wall shares a wall
with Charlie's bedroom, so I'm like,
"This guy can hear everything we're saying."
He's replayed conversations I had at night with my friends
asking me why we don't curse or fight
as much as he and his friends did in his younger days.
So...
So I take the agent, we walk back into my bedroom
and we come up with an idea.
We're going to break into his storage locker in the garage.
So we go down to the garage and we walk out
into the back alley and he goes to get his car,
he had some bolt cutters in there, and I'm just pumped up.
I'm involved in something, it's like a movie,
I'm having fun almost at this point,
and I call my brother because I got to tell somebody.
And I say, "Man, do you know who Whitey Bulger is?"
And he goes, "No."
And I said, "Well, I'm with the FBI right now
"and I think we're about to arrest this guy,
"he's the old man who lives next to me."
I had to hang up
because the FBI agent came around the corner
and I don't think I was supposed to be on the phone.
So we get in there and he's like,
"All right stand by the elevator
"and whistle if anybody appears
"while I break into this storage unit."
And I'm sitting there and the adrenaline
and the energy of the situation is kind of helping me
to forget about my relationship to these people
over the last four years.
I mean, this is the same man
who bought me a Christmas present every year
for the four or five years I had lived there.
And once the lock was broken, we go back to my apartment
and he's telling me, "Okay this is what's going to happen,
"we're going to go down, I'm going to go down,
"we're going to get everything set, I'm going to call you,
"you knock on his door, bring him down."
And I'm like, "No, I'm going to go to the hotel,
"I'm going to call him, I'm going to tell him to meet me there,
"then you guys take care of your business."
So I'm in my office and I'm thinking about this guy,
my neighbor, who took care of an old woman
on the first floor and who, one year
when I didn't write a thank you note
for a Christmas present he gave me,
gave me a box of stationery.
And I'm like, "What did this guy do?"
And so I go to Wikipedia and I'm reading murders
and extortion and gambling, and I get to the bottom
and one of his last public sightings
with one of his Mafia buddies, there's a quote from him
and he says, "When I go down, I'm going out guns blazing."
So around this time, I start to rethink my involvement
in the day's events.
And conveniently, my phone rings and it's the FBI,
and they say, "Make the call."
So I start to kind of, "Look man, I don't know.
"I just read something about this guy that's not,
"I don't know about this."
He said, "No, no, no, he'll never know.
"He'll never know."
Which was obviously not true,
but I was that close to getting to my concert,
so I said, "All right, I'll make the call."
So I called the Gasko's from the hotel
and there was no answer and I was so relieved.
So happy that they didn't answer the phone.
I called the agent back and said,
"Hey man, sorry, they didn't answer.
"Going to have to do something else."
He's like, "Are you sure you don't want to knock on the door?"
And I'm like, "Look man, curtain's closed, guns blazing,
"what if he comes to the door with a gun?"
And he says—I'll just be like, "Hey man, what's going on?"
I'm thinking to myself, "He would shoot me
"before I finished that one statement."
And I tell him I'm not going to do that.
While this is going on, Carol calls back.
So I get on the phone and I explain to her
that the storage unit's been broken into
and I can either call the police or Charlie can meet me
in the garage and we'll look at it.
So she discusses with him and she's like,
"He'll be down in five minutes."
And I say, "All right, great."
Hang up, call the FBI, "He's on his way, do your thing."
And then, I walk outside, I call my friend and I say,
"Look man, I think I'm going to make the show,
"I'll explain everything to you when I get there."
And I'm standing in the courtyard of the hotel
and Carol walks out on her balcony,
which is directly across the street, and she looks at me
and then she quickly looks down to the garage
and then she looks back at me.
I don't know if she knew but she looked worried
and she walked back in and then I got a call from the FBI
and they said, "We got him, go to your concert."
So I go change clothes and the adrenaline and the rush,
and I'm walking back to the garage and as I open the door,
I mean it's like a slow motion shot
of Suburbans and vans and FBI agents everywhere.
My neighbor Charlie Gasko's standing there
in cuffs surrounded by agents, laughing and telling stories.
He almost looked relieved, and I'm kind of staring at this
and as I pass him, a few feet away
I see Carol standing there in cuffs
and there's maybe one agent with her.
The magnitude of everything that had happened
started to sink in a little bit, and she looked at me
and she said, "Hi Josh."
And I couldn't speak, I just meekly waved
and walked to my car and got on the highway
and called my brother and said,
"You'll never guess what happened to me today."
And he said, "What?"
And I said, "I helped the FBI arrest the most wanted man
"in the country."
So a couple months later,
my family's a little worried about me
and my friends are taking bets
on how much longer I have to live.
And I get home one day, and there's a letter in the mail
from the Plymouth Correctional Facility.
I open it later on that night
and I see the same familiar cursive writing
and the same shoot-the-shit dialogue tone that I knew
from four years living next to Charlie Gasko,
but in this letter,
he's reintroducing himself as Jim Bulger.
So I wrote him back and I said,
"Look, you know I had something to do
"with the day of the arrest
"and my family's a little worried.
"Just a little note of 'everything's good' would be nice."
So he wrote back and he said,
"Look, they had me with or without your help.
"No worries."
So that made my mom feel better, definitely.
Anyway, new neighbors eventually moved in
and they seem like nice people.
But what do I know?