By Mary Whitfill, News Staff

In her new tell-all book chronicling the life of Boston’s most notorious gangster, Shelley Murphy pulled together years of research and journalism experience to divulge to the public the details of Whitey Bulger, a man who spent 12 years on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives List.

On Wednesday in Snell Library, Murphy, a 1980 Northeastern graduate, spoke to a crowd of over 50 students and faculty members about her new book “Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice.”

Murphy, a metro reporter for The Boston Globe, has covered organized crime, homeland security, legal affairs and criminal and civil court cases for almost three decades. Murphy co-wrote the book with Pulitzer Prize winner Kevin Cullen, a fellow Globe reporter and columnist for the metro section.

“What our book does is it traces Whitey Bulger’s life in three parts: the rise, the reign and the run,” Murphy said. “We start with Whitey as a young boy and what Boston was like when he was a child – we did a lot of digging to find out more about the path he took and how he became the man that be became. Boston was a very different place when Whitey was a child.”

Unlike the plethora of articles Murphy and Cullen have written on Bulger, their book places a certain emphasis on Bulger outside of his hardened image as gangster.

“What we found is that, even as a young man, Whitey carefully cultivated this reputation as the neighborhood good guy – the ‘good’ bad guy,” Murphy said. “He deliberately cultivated this, there were two sides to him. As a teenager he would drive around in a car committing crimes, and then he would stop and pick up all the old ladies in the neighborhood walking home from the supermarket. In Southie there was this thought like, ‘Of course he’s a gangster, but he’s our gangster.’”

Bulger’s arrest in June 2011 created an eagerness for him to clear his name and shine up his reputation, Murphy said.

“He talks about how he is a noble patriot, how he is sending his friends photos of war memorials in South Boston that he donated money to,” Murphy said. “He is very anxious to portray himself in a very different light than most of us have seen him in.”

One of the things that sets this study of Bulger apart from the rest is the list of sources Murphy and Cullen were able to reach for information about the life of Whitey Bulger. Most notably is Richard Sunday, an inmate who served time with Bulger in prison decades ago.

“[Sunday] is still very sympathetic to Whitey, even though their time together was so long ago. He always knew [Bulger] as a friend,” Murphy said. “Richard received many letters from Bulger telling him not to talk to me, that I was a slimy reporter, but I always figured that if you tell the truth, people will respect that and Richard did. He knew that we were trying to do a fair portrait of Whitey, so he shared all of Whitey’s letters with us.”

As a former journalism student at Northeastern, Murphy took this anecdote as an opportunity to pass on advice to the next generation of reporters.

“When writing, it is important to be honest and fair. You have to keep your word and be true to your sources,” Murphy said. “When I interviewed Richard, he asked me to send him a copy of what I wrote and I did and he liked it. Then when I wanted to talk to him about the book, he remembered me and said ‘You’re the only one who kept your word, you did what you said you were going to do.’ It’s important.”

Journalism professor Bill Kirtz invited Murphy to the university and cites her groundbreaking reporting as something that students can look up to.

“[Murphy] and Kevin were really good reporters and what I liked about the book was that they didn’t just rehash the newspapers stories,” Kirtz said. “It has a good flow to it and they did a lot of re-reporting, they didn’t just take things other people said; it wasn’t a clip job. They went and found out those things on their own.”