His picture sits just below Osama Bin Laden's on the FBI's '10 most sought fugitives' list, the only one honoured with a webpage in six different languages. Though charged with 18 counts of murder, among other things, the sign reads more like an ad for Matchmaker. com than an FBI 'most wanted' poster.

Bulger is an avid reader with an interest in history. He is known to frequent libraries and historic sitesf maintains his physical fitness by walking on beaches with his female companion, Catherine Elizabeth Greig. Bulger and Greig love animals and frequent animal shelters" Whitey Bulger, as James J Bulger is better known, has always been something of a paradox. For more than two decades he led the Winter Hill Gang . . . the organized mob of IrishAmericans who had grown up on the tough streets of South Boston known as 'Southie' . . . with partner Stephen Flemmi, now serving a life sentence, and sidekick Kevin Weeks.

He was seen as New England's most brutal mobster ever, butchering anyone who got in his way. As well as 18 murder charges, he's wanted on indictments of money laundering, extortion, racketeering and narcotic distribution.

Tipped off by a crooked and now imprisoned FBI agent, John Connolly, that he was about to be arrested, Bulger went on the run just before Christmas 1994. Agents searching his home found a library of books on the second world war and how to escape capture.

Now 77, he has languished on fugitive and most-wanted lists for years, despite a $1m bounty on his head. The FBI, at a loss as to his whereabouts, speculate it could be Europe, the US, Canada, Mexico or South America. For a time it was thought he might be in Ireland as he holds an Irish passport. The last definite sighting was in London in 2002, although agents were sent to Uruguay to investigate reported sightings there late last year.

His obsession with history, particularly the second world war and Nazi Germany, led US federal agents to stake out the V-Day celebrations in Normandy last year. He didn't show. Like everything else, Whitey Bulger had planned his escape, which he knew would one day have to be carried out, meticulously.

He'd taken a trip to Europe in late 1994 to open bank safe-deposit boxes in Dublin, London and Venice as a way to harbour and access his estimated $40m fortune. However, it's thought that he spent the first year simply driving around the US. The car he used was found 12 months after he disappeared with 65,000 miles on the clock.

Authorities are at a loss as to how or when he left the United States or if, in fact, he ever did.

While Whitey continued to indirectly terrorise authorities with his location, his younger brother by five years, William 'Billy', followed a lifepath of the polar opposite.

The six Bulger siblings had all grown up one step from destitution after their father lost an arm in a railroad accident at work. Among the first families to move into the south Boston projects called Old Colony Harbour in 1938, they established their place near the top of the pecking order and, from an early age, Whitey showed a talent with his fists while his brother coveted books.

Billy Bulger's love of reading took him off the streets and on a route through Boston's acclaimed schools and colleges. For almost 30 years he was a major player in Massachusetts' politics. As host of raucous St Patrick's Day breakfasts in the city, which were often attended by the glitterati of American politics, he was famed for his wit.

In 1978 he was appointed president of the Massachusetts State Senate where he served until 1996 when he became president of the University of Massachusetts. One controversial move there was when he invited Gerry Adams to speak to a surprised graduating class.

During his tenure as president, the university saw enormous increases in the academic abilities of their incoming students, in private donations and research funding, the latter two often said to be due to Bulger's political and occasionally nefarious connections.

Though their paths diverged for decades, it would be Whitey Bulger who effectively ended his younger brother's career. For almost a decade, Billy avoided questions as to whether he knew the whereabouts of his older fugitive sibling and pleaded the Fifth Amendment which protects from self-incrimination.

Then, in 2003, an investigation forced him to admit Whitey had called him shortly after his disappearance. It led to his resignation as president of the university. He received a severance package of almost $1m and continues to enjoy a pension estimated at over $200,000 a year, half what his salary was.

He now lives the retired life of a semi-disgraced politician and academic in Boston, surrounded by his wife of 44 years, nine children and 26 grandchildren, and is a guest lecturer at Boston College.

Kevin Weeks, author of the recently published Brutal, grew up in the same South Boston neighbourhood along with the Bulgers. Similarly two of Weeks's brothers dramatically escaped the street life, went to Harvard and on to successful . . . legtimate . . . careers. Kevin followed Whitey onto the streets at 18, and became his right-hand man.

In 1999 he was arrested and charged with racketeering. He agreed to cooperate with police and in 2000 led them to the burial grounds of eight of the bodies of Bulger's alleged victims.