JAMES BULGER
Fugitive gangster James "Whitey" Bulger remains elusive. But the mystery couple resembling Bulger and his girlfriend who were videotaped strolling in the Sicilian resort of Taormina last year have been found. They are German.
After a German television show broadcast the video Wednesday night, along with an appeal from FBI agents from Boston who have launched a media blitz overseas in a bid to track Bulger, a viewer called to report that the couple in the clip were his parents, said Gail Marcinkiewicz, a spokeswoman for the FBI.
The couple had been the subject of an international manhunt.
"We have a German couple that are claiming that they are the individuals in that video from Taormina," Marcinkiewicz said.
German authorities who have interviewed the couple say it is the German pair in the video, but Marcinkiewicz said the FBI is awaiting verification, such as receipts showing they were in Taormina at the time the video was taken, before issuing a definitive statement.
The couple have been fingerprinted, and they are not Bulger and Greig, she said. German authorities, citing privacy laws, have not released many details about the couple, Marcinkiewicz said, adding that she didn't have the names or ages of the pair.
Bulger's former girlfriend - Teresa Stanley, who lived with him for 30 years before he fled - said she never believed it was he in the video, because the man had too much hair and the woman seemed much older than Greig.
"He never looked German to me," Stanley said of Bulger, after learning that the look-alikes were German. "He just looked Irish."
Bulger, 78, one of the FBI's 10 Most Wanted fugitives, fled just before his January 1995 federal racketeering indictment in Boston and was later exposed as a longtime FBI informant and charged with 19 homicides. The last confirmed sighting of the gangster was in London in September 2002, according to the FBI.
A vacationing federal Drug Enforcement Administration agent took the video of an elderly couple strolling through Taormina last April because he believed they bore a striking resemblance to the fugitives, but he never confronted them, law enforcement officials said.
The FBI posted a portion of the video and still photographs from the video on its website last September after American and Italian law enforcement officials failed to locate and identify the couple.
After the video aired earlier this week on "Aktenzeichen XY . . . ungelost," which means "File XY . . . unsolved" and is German television's equivalent of Fox Television's "America's Most Wanted," the distraught German couple stepped forward, according to a report by Europe World News.
The couple were on holiday in Sicily and were unaware at the time that they had been photographed, according to the report.
The video was broadcast on television shows in Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain and the United States, Marcinkiewicz said. "This is the first time we've had somebody come forward and say that's me," she said.
The month before Bulger's indict ment, he and Stanley vacationed in Dublin, London, and Rome. But yesterday Stanley said that she has no idea where he is hiding and that he could be just about anywhere. "It's just a guessing game," she said.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
