"The notion that Whitey Bulger’s pact with the F.B.I. represented not a gross aberration but something like business as usual is almost too bleak to contemplate. It suggests, as English writes, that “the entire criminal justice system was a grand illusion; a shell game presided over by petty bureaucrats more concerned with promoting their careers and protecting their asses than anything else.” Nobody knows how many confidential informants are working for the F.B.I. at any time, but in a 2008 budget request the bureau put the number at fifteen thousand. After the degree of official complicity in Bulger’s crimes was revealed, the Department of Justice ordered the F.B.I. to track any crimes committed by its informants. In a 2013 letter, the bureau disclosed that in the prior year it had authorized informants to break the law on 5,939 occasions. “Stone killers,” Connolly once remarked. “That’s who you’re trying to recruit. Then you’re supposed to tell them ‘You can’t do that anymore’? Are you shitting me?” To English, the cautionary tale of “one very crafty psychopath who had corrupted the system” obscures the “preexisting corrupt system” that created him.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/21/assets-and-liabilities
This is a fascinating story
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