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From Los Angeles Times

A deeply grounded image of what nuns are all about

The Catholic sisters don't fly, but they do have a history of rising to great heights. An exhibit at Mount St. Mary's College depicts the often-unseen realities of nuns' service and sacrifice.

by Steve Lopez

June 25, 2011

The Catholic sisters have had it with "The Flying Nun."

For 300 years, they've had their feet firmly on the ground and in the trenches as teachers, social workers and caretakers, and yet an airborne sitcom character from the 1960s still stands as the pop culture image of a nun.

You'll get a different image, though, if you catch the traveling exhibit "Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America" that runs through Aug. 14 at Mount St. Mary's College in Brentwood.

It's time to park that wind-blown gliding nun in a hangar, one sister suggested at a preview gathering of nearly 400 nuns recently, and share the untold stories of the unsung heroes who have ministered to the sick and poor.

Another reason it's time to sing their own Hosannas is that nuns don't even get the respect they deserve from their bosses at the Vatican. For reasons that remain a mystery to many, church leaders two years ago launched investigations into the activities of nuns across the U.S.

This is all the more proof that the church would be in much better shape if it were run by women. With all the trouble caused by abusive priests and their male protectors, it seems like the Vatican could find something better to do than peek into convents. So why the scrutiny?

"We don't always fit the norm," Sister Kit Gray of the St. Joseph's order in Orange County said at the exhibit, theorizing that nuns have rattled the hierarchy by speaking their minds on social issues or stepping outside the lines of expected deportment.

Women are independent-minded, said Sister Eileen McNerney, who stopped wearing a habit years ago because she felt it kept her locked up in a cliche. And McNerney, take my word, is the embodiment of independent-minded.

She began to tell me her story at the exhibit, but she was too humble in the telling for me to fully understand then who she is and what she's done. McNerney described her work simply as helping gang members leave the life.

I later visited her in Santa Ana to get the rest of the story. McNerney had been living in a safe neighborhood in Fullerton in the early '90s, she said, teaching English to day laborers but feeling as though she should be doing more.

Too often, she opened the newspaper and found stories about kids in nearby neighborhoods getting killed as routinely as if they were at war. She didn't feel as though she was honoring her contract as a nun by muttering prayers in the safety of a convent.

"I wanted to understand their lives," McNerney said, so she began driving around neighborhoods with a nightly symphony of gunshots and sirens. And then she and three other nuns decided to move into the middle of it all.

"That was my room right there," McNerney told me as we stood outside the gray clapboard house at 5th and Minter streets that she lived in from 1992 to 1997. "In this house, I heard gunshots every single night."

From the bedroom window, she would look out and see 10 sets of shoes going by — the local gang getting ready for nightly battle. Minutes later, she'd hear gunshots and then sirens. Through the window came the smell of gun smoke.

One boy was killed behind her house and another in front of it. The one behind her house came from a family that had lost another son the same way two years earlier. Long after the boy was killed, at 16, McNerney could hear his mother wailing.

"She finally stopped about 2 in the morning, but by then, I couldn't sleep."

As she got to know her neighbors, she saw poverty and hopelessness like never before, and she began to understand the grip of gang life. She knew boys who, at age 11, had to choose between joining and taking a beating. She saw girls get pregnant at 15, trapping themselves in lives they didn't want.

In 1995, determined to break the cycle, Sister McNerney started Taller San Jose (Spanish for St. Joseph's Workshop) in downtown Santa Ana, offering counseling, education and job training, something like what Father Greg Boyle's Homeboy Industries does in Los Angeles. McNerney asked for help from corporations, churches, foundations and private individuals, traveling from the bleakest corners in a land of riches, armed with tales of hope and despair.

Taller San Jose trains young people — many of whom have done jail or prison time — for medical, office and construction work. Since 1995, 4,500 trainees have gone from poverty to living-wage jobs. And 92% of the grads with a criminal record have remained crime-free after the 16-week program.

At 71, slowed but not stopped by cancer, McNerney is still on the job as president emerita. She told me she doesn't know how she could ever walk away; the needs in Santa Ana are still great. And the love she gives to the youngsters, unwavering through all their many mess-ups, has been returned many times over.

But I can't tell you that as powerfully or poetically as McNerney does in her book, "A Story of Suffering and Hope: Lessons from Latino Youth." It isn't a book about what she's done for anyone but about what all those people in need have done to enrich her life and allow her to fulfill the contract she signed on becoming a nun.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0626-lopez-noflyingnun-20110626,0,4887755,print.column

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From Boston Globe

Bulger offers new details to authorities

Trips to Mexico for medicine; had niece with a unit nearby

SANTA MONICA, Calif.— A chatty James “Whitey'' Bulger provided FBI agents with intriguing details about his life on the run after his arrest last week, boasting that he routinely slipped into Mexico to buy medicine for a heart condition, according to a law enforcement official.

Law enforcement officials have also found another connection between the South Boston mobster and the Santa Monica neighborhood he called home: A niece, the daughter of former Senate President William Bulger, lived 2 miles from Bulger's address back in 1992.

Though Bulger was a fugitive wanted for 19 murders, he was by no means reclusive. Bulger said he and his girlfriend, 60-year-old Catherine Greig, frequently drove to the border, parked on the US side and walked into Tijuana, using a false identification to get through security, the official said. In Tijuana, he was able to purchase Atenolol, a drug taken for chest pain and high blood pressure, without a prescription.

A former close associate, Kevin Weeks, a gangster-turned-author, said yesterday that before Bulger fled Boston to avoid a federal racketeering indictment in January 1995 he talked about the easy availability of prescription drugs south of the border.

“Before he took off, he used to talk about Mexico,'' Weeks said. “He said you could get as much prescription medicine as you wanted.''

The arrest of Bulger, now being held without bail in Plymouth County House of Correction, has written a bizarre new chapter in one of the most sensational crime stories in Boston history. While rumored Bulger sightings came in from around the globe — in April, Bulger was rumored to have died of a heart attack in Costa Rica — he and Greig were living as an ordinary retired couple a few blocks from the beach.

In hindsight, there were numerous indications that Bulger might be in Southern California.

The FBI has known about Bulger's interest in buying prescription drugs from Mexico since at least 2000, when agents distributed wanted posters in English and Spanish along the US-Mexican border. Earlier that year, a witness reported seeing Bulger outside a hair salon in Fountain City, Calif., about 50 miles from where he was finally arrested. The tipster said that a woman who looked like Greig was inside the salon while Bulger waited outside. A 2008 tipster told the TV show “America's Most Wanted'' that he had talked to Bulger on the Santa Monica pier.

But until the FBI launched a new publicity campaign highlighting the girlfriend of the most wanted man in America, law enforcement officials say they had nothing conclusive to link Bulger to California.

Yesterday, the FBI and US Marshal from Massachusetts issued a joint statement rejecting media reports that they initially gave a low priority to the tip that finally led to Bulger's arrest. They stressed that the tip, which came from a source in Iceland, was immediately turned over to the FBI agent responsible for the Bulger Task Force, who verified the tip's legitimacy. The tipster, a woman who had encountered the fugitives in Santa Monica, told authorities that Bulger was going by the name Charles Gasko, a name that didn't correspond to anyone in California, suggesting it was a fake.

“Less than 24 hours after the supervisory agent first reviewed the tip, Mr. Bulger and Ms. Greig were arrested,'' according to the statement from Richard DesLauriers, the special agent in charge of the Boston Division of the FBI, and John Gibbons, US marshal for Massachusetts.

Bulger had rented the unit by 1996 and perhaps as early as 1991, according to the property manager, Joshua Bond, which would be four years prior to his flight from Boston. By the time he went on the lam, Bulger also owned a condo in Clearwater, Fla., and he rented an apartment outside of London. He also stashed cash and documents in safe deposit boxes in London, Florida, and Dublin, Ireland.

When Bulger rented the apartment at 1012 Third Street, the street may already have had a Bulger family connection. In 1992, Bulger's niece, Mary B. Hurley, lived in an apartment at 2805 Third Street, about 2 miles away, according to law enforcement sources.

It's unclear whether Whitey Bulger ever visited Mary Hurley in Santa Monica.

A call by a Globe reporter to Mary Hurley's home in South Boston went unanswered yesterday. No one responded to a knock on the door at William Bulger's home.

FBI officials found more than $800,000 cash, 30 rifles, shotguns and pistols, and knives in the apartment shared by Bulger and Greig. Yesterday, a law enforcement official disclosed that many of the weapons were hidden in a secret compartment that had been constructed in a wall of the apartment.

Bulger built a similar hidden compartment in a closet wall of the house he once shared with Teresa Stanley on Silver Street in South Boston. Years after Bulger fled with Greig, Stanley had a relative break through a plaster wall to get to a hidden safe containing diamonds, gold coins, and letters Bulger had written while imprisoned on Alcatraz Island in the early 1960s.

On the night of his arrest, one unnamed official suggested Bulger was not in good health, but Bulger appears to have remained concerned about fitness. The arresting officers found extensive exercise equipment in the apartment, including an unusual punching bag. Bond, the property manager, said the punching bag was painted to look like a man's torso and was kept in front of the window of the third-floor apartment so that it was visible from the street.

Bulger draped a hat on top of the punching bag, which made it appear like a person sitting by the window, Bond said.

Boston attorney Peter Krupp, who was appointed to represent Bulger at his initial court appearance in Boston on Friday, declined to comment yesterday, saying it's still unclear who will be defending Bulger in the sweeping indictments in federal court charging him with racketeering, 19 murders, money laundering and drug trafficking.

“The case is very large, very complicated, and will require considerable legal effort to defend,'' Krupp said during a brief telephone conversation.

Yesterday, most of the network television trucks and reporters who had been parked outside the building had disappeared. But curiosity-seekers continued to stop by to take photos of the building.

A young woman who lives in the building and knew Bulger and Greig well said she was devastated to learn their true identities, because the elderly couple had taken her under their wing and treated her like a grandchild.

“He was very protective of me,'' said the woman, who spoke on the condition she not be named. She said Bulger, whom she knew as Charlie, urged her to let him install locks on the windows of her apartment, cautioned her to walk on the side of Wilshire Boulevard that was better lit when walking home from the gym at night, and advised her to hold her key in a way that would allow her to fight off an attacker.

“They were so kind to me,'' she said. “My mother has met them and told them thank you so much for watching out for my daughter.''

The woman said she knew Greig had told another neighbor that Bulger suffered from a respiratory illness, but she saw no signs of it and he appeared physically and mentally fit.

She said the couple often sat on benches at the Third Street Promenade, a popular spot dotted by restaurants and shops that is always busy and has surveillance cameras posted throughout. They would shop at a farmers' market in the area on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

“I think he was mocking them,'' said the woman, noting that the couple lived only a few miles from the FBI's Los Angeles office and were frequent visitors to one of Santa Monica's busiest areas, heavily patrolled by police.

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