Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [114]
Each rose to power in his respective world. William Bulger entered politics, became president of the Massachusetts State Senate (1978–1996), then served for seven years as president of the University of Massachusetts. Whitey served time in federal prison for bank robbery, then rose to become the leader of the ruthless Winter Hill Gang, an organized crime group that controlled extortion, drug deals, and other illegal activities in Boston. Charged with nineteen murders, Whitey fled to avoid arrest in 1995. He is still at large, and occupies a place on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list.59
Although William Bulger spoke with his fugitive brother by phone, he claimed not to know his whereabouts, and refused to assist authorities in finding him. When William testified before a grand jury in 2001, a federal prosecutor pressed him without success for information on his brother: “So just to be clear, you felt more loyalty to your brother than you did to the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts?”
“I never thought about it that way,” Bulger replied. “But I do have an honest loyalty to my brother, and I care about him… It’s my hope that I’m never helpful to anyone against him… I don’t have an obligation to help everyone catch him.”60
In the taverns of South Boston, patrons expressed admiration for Bulger’s loyalty. “I don’t blame him for not telling on his brother,” one resident told The Boston Globe. “Brothers are brothers. Are you going to squeal on your family?”61 Editorial boards and newspaper reporters were more critical. “Instead of taking the righteous road,” one columnist wrote, “he chose the code of the street.”62 Under public pressure for his refusal to assist in the search for his brother, Bulger resigned as president of the University of Massachusetts in 2003, though he was not charged with obstructing the investigation.63
Under most circumstances, the right thing to do is to help bring a murder suspect to justice. Can family loyalty override this duty? William Bulger apparently thought so. But a few years earlier, another figure with a wayward brother made a different call.
Brothers’ keepers II: The Unabomber
For more than seventeen years, authorities had tried to find the domestic terrorist responsible for a series of package bombs that killed three people and injured twenty-three others. Because his targets included scientists and other academics, the elusive bomb maker was known as the Unabomber. To explain the cause behind his deeds, the Unabomber posted a thirty-five-thousand-word anti-technology manifesto on the Internet, and promised to stop bombing if The New York Times and The Washington Post both printed the manifesto, which they did.64
When David Kaczynski, a forty-six-year-old social worker in Schenectady, New York, read the manifesto, he found it eerily familiar. It contained phrases and opinions that sounded like those of his older brother, Ted, age fifty-four, a Harvard-trained mathematician turned recluse. Ted despised modern industrial society and was living in a mountain cabin in Montana. David had not seen him for a decade.65
After much anguish, in 1996 David informed the FBI of his suspicion that the Unabomber was his brother. Federal agents staked out Ted Kaczynski’s cabin and arrested him. Although David had been given to understand that prosecutors would not seek the death penalty, they did. The prospect of bringing about the death of his brother was an agonizing thought. In the end, prosecutors allowed Ted Kaczynski to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of life in prison without parole.66
Ted Kaczynski refused to acknowledge his brother in court and, in a book manuscript he wrote in prison, called him “another Judas Iscariot.”67 David Kaczynski tried to rebuild his life, which was indelibly marked by the episode. After working to spare his brother the death penalty, he became a spokesman for an anti–capital punishment group. “Brothers are supposed to protect each other,” he told one audience, describing his dilemma, “and here, perhaps, I was sending my brother to his death.”68