New movie depicts real-life mob hit at Southern Hills Country Club

Black Mass is a new movie about an old Irish-American mobster, James (Whitey) Bulger of South Boston, played by Johnny Depp with psychotic, see-through eyes and fast-twitch muscles he uses to murder people. About a dozen different men — and one drug-addicted female prostitute with loose lips — are gruesomely killed in the film’s 122 minutes, either by Bulger or on his order. But the film, much like the nonfiction book on which it is based, depicts one execution that goes far beyond the we’ve-seen-this mobster-on-mobster hit. That scene, a reasonable facsimile of an actual event that changed innocent lives forever, is the assassination of a businessman-golfer named Roger Wheeler in the parking lot of Southern Hills Country Club, in Tulsa, on May 27, 1981, after his regular Wednesday game.