Oct 2, 2007 10:46 pm US/Eastern
New England Tourist Mistaken For Whitey In Italy
by Christina Hager
BOSTON (WBZ) ―
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Italian police questioned Robert Dowdy for hours after photos were taken of a man who appears to be White Bulger.
CBS
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The bureau released new photos and a video of an unknown couple that was taken in Taormina, Sicily.
FBI
The search for Whitey Bulger remains active and aggressive after Italian police got the wrong man when they suspected a New England tourist was the wanted mobster.
"Nobody would have looked at me in downtown Boston," said Robert Dowdy.
Dowdy learned the hard way that it's not easy being an elderly Irish man in Italy -- not as long as Whitey Bulger is on the loose.
"In Perugia, Italy at nine in the morning coming out of mass, there was only one gray-haired Irish guy. They zeroed in on me," Dowdy said.
To the Italian police, the tourist from Wakefield, R.I., apparently looked a little too much like the man in a video the FBI had made public just two days earlier.
The man in the video still has not been identified, but the FBI says it may be south Boston's most famous fugitive gangster.
Dowdy sat through hours of police questioning, fingerprinting and picture-taking before getting in contact with someone from the U.S. Embassy.
"I said, 'They think I'm Whitey Bulger, and it's gone beyond the point of laughing because now I'm in a police station,'" Dowdy said.
A U.S. investigator snapped a photo on April 10 in Taormina, Sicily. Dowdy was in Perugia -- far away and five months later -- when police spotted him.
"I have to believe that a professional police officer looking at the spec on this criminal, seeing that he's 5 feet 6 inches, 5 feet 7 inches, 160 pounds and 10 years older than me," Dowdy said.
"There's a lot of inconsistencies," he added. "Would Whitey Bulger wear a Yankee hat? I don't think so."
Dowdy was released after being questioned by Italian police.
Bulger has been on the FBI's 10 most wanted list since 1999.
There's a $1 million reward for information leading to his capture.
(© 2007 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
Raw Video: Video Of Possible Whitey Sighting
Slideshow: A Whitey Sighting In Italy?
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