True to character

Whitey Bulger, the Boston crime boss who is the subject of "Black Mass," Scott Cooper's new movie starring Johnny Depp and opening on Friday, is probably the most mythologized gangster since Al Capone.

William Bulger (played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the movie) went on to become an immensely powerful Boston politician and president of the Massachusetts state Senate, but his public career ended under a cloud:

The Berlinger movie was shot during Bulger's 2013 trial in Boston, an odd, media-saturated spectacle, during which he never seriously denied that he was guilty of murder, extortion, racketeering and money laundering, but insisted that he was not a rat, an informant — a crime that in the clannish, suspicious neighborhood of South Boston, where he grew up, is considered worse than all those others put together.

Because cameras are prohibited at federal trials, we never actually see Bulger in the film, except in some grainy surveillance footage, but we hear his voice, and he sounds like a character from a '40s crime flick — Jimmy Cagney, say, in "White Heat."

Berlinger's documentary, though generally well received, caused a stir in some Boston quarters by entertaining, without necessarily endorsing, the idea that Bulger might actually have been telling the truth — that he wasn't an informer but, rather, had paid the FBI off and believed himself to have been granted immunity for agreeing to protect a fearful U.S. attorney and organized-crime prosecutor from mob retaliation.

"Black Mass," based on the book of the same name by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill, Boston Globe journalists who followed the Bulger story for years, subscribes to the more widely held, and probably more likely, belief Bulger was, indeed, a rat, even if the information he gave the FBI was negligible compared with the degree of protection he was afforded.

[...] the movie focuses on the connection between Bulger and John Connolly, an FBI