THEBROTHERSBULGER.COM

The official website of Howie Carr's book "The Brothers Bulger"

First question: who knew Whitey Bulger liked to take photographs, especially at the funeral of a good criminal friend of his from Alcatraz who may have also been his boyfriend?

            Second question: what exactly is the meaning of the jottings and numbers on the back of one of the pictures the serial-killing gangster snapped at the 1988 funeral of Clarence Carnes, a/k/a “the Choctaw Kid?”

            Here is what Whitey scribbled on the back of one of his photographs:

            RAJAB

            0819686538

            Yes, Rajab is a month in the Islamic lunar calendar, but Whitey is not a Muslim. As for the number, it’s got one too many digits to be a Social Security number, and it doesn’t appear to be a foreign phone number either.

            You can see all five of Whitey’s cemetery photographs (plus the two-page funeral bill) on my Internet websites -- thebrothersbulger.com and howiecarr.com. Whitey left the photos behind when he went on the lam in December 1994, before he was added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, with a $1 million reward on his head.

            The fugitive is now 77 years old. There has not been a confirmed sighting of him since 2002.

            For those not familiar with the (love?) story between Whitey and the Choctaw Kid, it dates back to the legendary federal penitentiary in San Francisco Bay, where Whitey was imprisoned for bank robbery from 1959 to 1962.

            Clarence V. “Joe” Carnes Kid was only two years older than Whitey, but he’d been at Alcatraz since the age of 17 after killing a gas-station attendant during a robbery in Oklahoma. In 1946, he had taken part in the famous prison uprising, when Army troops had to storm the island to regain control.

            In later years, as he piled up bodies and bucks, Whitey used to say that Carnes had saved his life in a prison riot. But there was likely more to their relationship than that, considering Whitey’s bisexuality, dating back to his days as a teenage male hustler in the gay dives of Bay Village where he first met corrupt FBI agent H. Paul Rico.

            Later, after his release from Leavenworth, Whitey had a one-night stand with Sal Mineo, the has-been Hollywood boy-toy, when Mineo appeared at Blinstrub’s.

             By the late 1980’s, after ratting out most of his fellow gangsters to the FBI, Whitey began edging out of the closet,  posing in Village People drag as a cowboy in Provincetown, sipping brandy Alexanders at the bar at Jacques.

            Meanwhile, the Choctaw Kid was finally paroled. But he had spent too much time in stir to make a go of it on the outside. He was soon back inside the joint, where he contracted AIDS and died on Oct. 3, 1988. He was buried in the graveyard at the federal prison hospital in Springfield MO.

            Whitey knew that the Kid had desired more than anything to be interred back home in the Indian Territory – Oklahoma. And by then Whitey had more than enough cash to make it happen.

            He called Robert Embry at the Atoka Funeral Home in Billy, OK. After Whitey obtained permission from the Kid’s next of kin, Clarence Carnes’ body was dug up, placed in the expensive bronze casket in the photograph, and shipped back to Atoka County in the white hearse. Whitey flew to Dallas with his girlfriend, Teresa Stanley.

            They arrived 20 minutes late for the Kid’s funeral on Nov. 17, 1988. Whitey had driven to Tulsa to bail Carnes’ nephew out of jail, and then, running late, he had been pulled over by a cop for doing 110 in a 55 miles-per-hour zone. At the cemetery, he told funeral director Embry he’d been staying at the very chic Adolphus Hotel where he had ordered “pheasant under glass.”

            Years later, the funeral director said that that Whitey had cut quite a swath at the services. He was wearing a sportcoat, slacks and an open shirt. Pulling out the proverbial roll that would choke a horse, Whitey peeled off $100 bills and passed them out as tips to all concerned, the preacher, the singers, even the funeral director. No wallet, just a wad of bills.

            And he took photographs. And on the back of one of them he wrote RAJAB 0819686538.

            For years afterward, Whitey occasionally called Embry, the funeral director, just to chat, usually late at night. After awhile, Embry would say, “We’ve been on the phone a long time, haven’t we?”

            “Well,” Whitey would say, “it’s my nickel, ain’t it?”
            Three years ago, Embry was living in Arkansas, where he worked obtaining easements for crews laying pipelines on private land. Whitey Bulger is… traveling.