Whitey Bulger, the South Boston mob boss, emerged from prison in the 1960s after gang wars left more than 60 corpses strewn along the city’s streets.
His timing was fortuitous, because the demise of so many gangsters cleared his rise to the top.
He also learned an important lesson from the gang wars. Leaving bodies on the street was a timeworn tradition of gangsters, akin to big game hunters mounting their prey on the walls of their studies as trophies.
But Whitey was smarter than most gangsters. Leaving bodies where the authorities could find them meant they might make a case against you. So Whitey began disappearing bodies, burying them on a beach in Dorchester, under the train bridge that connects Neponset and Quincy, or in the cellar of a house near his bigshot politician brother’s home in Southie.
Whitey’s gangster tactics were simple and malevolent: no body, no case.
ICE, the gangsters of law enforcement, have adopted a similar philosophy when it comes to bodies and body cams: no video, no case.
No case meaning no case against them, the ICE agents who, after a pause to let national outrage die down after they shot and killed two protesters in Minneapolis, have resumed shooting people with reckless abandon.
Gangsters wear masks to avoid identification. So do ICE agents.
The latest fatal shooting by ICE agents was in Biddeford, Maine, on Monday. As was the case with a Mexican man ICE agents gunned down in Houston last week, there was no body cam video of the fatal encounter.
The excuse is always the same: the dead guy had weaponized his car and aimed it at agents.
But the ICE tactical mistakes are always the same, too: they stand in front or behind vehicles that might accelerate at any moment.
Law enforcement 101 says you don’t stand in the path of a vehicle you have stopped. And you don’t shoot into that vehicle, even if it tries to flee, because if you do, you will have weaponized that vehicle.
Just like the administration, which has unleashed an undertrained, unaccountable paramilitary force, every accusation by ICE is a confession about themselves.
As is their wont, the trigger-happy ICE agents apparently got the wrong guy in Biddeford. They were looking for someone else, according to Maine Senator Angus King, just as they were when they shot and killed the wrong guy in Houston last week.
But for ICE, and the administration in Washington that sends them out like dogs on a hunt, there is no wrong guy. Anyone who looks, to them, like they don’t belong in America will do. And the people who look, to them, like they don’t belong here are almost always Black or brown people.
With this administration, the rule of law is not the point. It is never the point. Cruelty is always the point. In their twisted minds, they believe gunning people down in cold blood will act as a deterrent to Black and brown people crossing the border without authorization.
The man shot dead in Maine was 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a Colombian national who, according to immigrant advocacy groups, had a Social Security number and was authorized to be in this country. They said he was on his way to work around 7 a.m. when ICE stopped him, mistaking him for some other guy they had orders to arrest.
Another gangster tactic is to approach your target early in the morning, when they’re not as alert, and, just as important, there are fewer witnesses.
ICE agents routinely approach when their targets are on their way to work. Of course, that they do this gives away the store; it exposes the lie that the Trump administration is prioritizing the worst of the worst, the gang members who terrorize immigrant communities, the murderers, and the rapists, etc.
That’s not what ICE is doing, and it’s not what ICE was doing when they shot Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford on Monday or Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston last week or the next guy they shoot somewhere else.
Because there will be a next guy, or a next woman. Gangsters don’t stop killing people until they are arrested, charged, tried, convicted, and put in prison.
That will not happen to any federal immigration agent, for any reason, while this administration remains in power and is enabled by a Congress controlled by Republicans that has abandoned any pretense of being a check on the executive branch. Because Republicans are not interested in justice, as they claim in backing aggressive immigration enforcement. They are only interested in retaining power.
Which raises another point: If ICE and other immigration agents must be held accountable for their reckless actions, so, too, should those who enable them.
That brings us to US Senator Susan Collins of Maine.
Collins, a Republican, dodged a bullet — the political kind, not the kind that ICE fires into unarmed people with disturbing regularity. Her Democratic challenger, Graham Platner, was forced to withdraw from the race after multiple women came forward to allege he had abused, and in one case raped, them.
A bevy of Democrats are scrambling to fill Platner’s place, and while the identity of that person is yet to be established, whoever emerges from that pack will have a built-in metaphorical stick to beat the incumbent with: ICE.
ICE has re-established its presence in places like Maine because they have more money than they know what to do with.
They have a blank check because Republicans, including Collins, voted last month to give them $70 billion, with no strings attached.
No guarantee that ICE agents will be better trained. No guarantee that immigration agents stop wearing masks like gangsters. No guarantee that they must always wear and use operable body cams. No guarantee that they stop shooting at moving cars, or that they stop putting themselves and the public in danger by standing in front of or approaching cars they stop from the front or rear.
No guarantee for accountability, or for anything. Just $70 billion to spend creating needlessly dangerous and sometimes fatal encounters like the one in Biddeford.
When you pay for a lawless, unaccountable government, it’s guaranteed you’ll get one.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at kevin.cullen@globe.com.