By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, June 2012
In late June 2012, Gideon Brower’s half-hour radio documentary The Couple in 303 debuted on KCRW’s Unfictional. The piece was about the experiences of the neighbors at the Princess Eugenia apartments in Santa Monica — the building where James “Whitey” Bulger and his partner Catherine Greig had lived as Charles and Carol Gasko for sixteen years before their 2011 arrest. The documentary was one of the more substantive pieces of public-radio crime-and-place journalism KCRW produced that year.
Then
Bulger — the Boston-based mob boss who had been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list since 1999 — had been arrested in Santa Monica in June 2011 along with Greig. The couple had been living quietly at the Princess Eugenia for years; neighbors had known them as “Charlie and Carol Gasko,” a polite elderly couple. The June 2012 KCRW documentary, produced one year after the arrest, interviewed the neighbors about what they had observed and what they had not.
The Unfictional format at KCRW was distinctive — half-hour single-subject radio documentary pieces, structured around a specific story with detailed sourcing. Gideon Brower’s piece on the Bulger neighbors was characteristic of the format: place-grounded, neighbor-voiced, focused on the question of how a major fugitive had sustained the cover-identity for so long.
The original FishbowlLA framing — Richard Horgan’s pickup — was admiring of the radio production. KCRW’s Unfictional was producing the kind of crime-and-place documentary work that the broader public-radio system supported but few stations executed at this level.
Now
Bulger was tried in 2013 in federal court in Boston and convicted of multiple counts including racketeering and involvement in eleven murders. He was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences plus five years. In October 2018, at the age of 89, Bulger was killed by fellow inmates within 24 hours of being transferred to USP Hazelton in West Virginia. The murder was widely covered and became one of the most-cited federal-prison-administration scandals of the decade.
Catherine Greig pleaded guilty in 2012 to harboring a fugitive and was sentenced to eight years. She has since been released.
KCRW’s Unfictional has continued as a recurring KCRW documentary feature across the years since. Gideon Brower has continued in audio-documentary production, with subsequent pieces across multiple public-radio outlets. The Princess Eugenia apartments in Santa Monica remain a residential building; the broader Bulger-on-the-run story has been the subject of multiple books, films, and television series, including the 2015 film Black Mass and the 2024 limited series projects.
The 2012 KCRW documentary reads now as one of the better-aged pieces of the Bulger-aftermath coverage cycle. Most of the immediate-arrest journalism focused on the Boston side of the story; KCRW’s piece captured the Santa Monica side that the rest of the press had under-covered.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.