Notorious Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger earned the moniker he loathed – a nickname criminal cohorts never dared say to his face – from the shock of platinum hair he perpetually slicked back from his forehead. And despite the “millions upon millions” of dollars his lawyer told a federal jury Bulger made in the rackets he ran in the insular Irish neighborhood of South Boston, the mobster never bothered to fix a blackened front tooth.

Still, many crime-watchers worldwide have been intrigued by the powerful stronghold on South Boston – and multiple cold-blooded killings – attributed to Bulger and his band of criminals known as the Winter Hill Gang. In the new film Black Mass, actor Johnny Depp, 52, portrays Bulger and told reporters at a screening of the movie in Brookline, Massachusetts this week that he approached the role by looking at Bulger as “a human being and not only as a man in that business.”

“There’s a kind heart in there,” Depp told reporters. “There’s a cold heart in there. There’s a man who loves. There’s a man who cries. There’s a lot to the man.”

However, Bulger himself has no interest seeing how Depp portrays him, his defense attorney Hank Brennan tells PEOPLE.

“Johnny Depp might as well have been playing the Mad Hatter all over again as far as James Bulger is concerned,” Brennan says. “Hollywood greed is behind the rush to portray my client, and the movie missed the real scourge created in my client’s case, the real menace to Boston during that time and in other mob cases around the country – the federal government’s complicity in each and every one of those murders with the top echelon informant program.”

Bulger, now 86, refused to meet or even correspond with Depp, and has no plans to watch the film, even if it ever becomes one of the films piped into the maximum security federal prison in Florida where he is serving two life sentences, Brennan says.

But Black Mass director Scott Cooper says he captured the real Bulger by relying on a lot of archival footage – and that he wanted to depict Bulger in a way that “doesn’t romanticize or glamorize him.”

“It was really important for me to get that right, but also get the city right and to get the men right who had fostered a lot of heartbreak for the city,” Cooper tells PEOPLE. “Emotional wounds have yet to heal.”

Dick Lehr, who co-authored Black Mass says Depp didn’t back away from portraying the gangster.

“Yeah, I think Johnny nailed it,” says Lehr. “Johnny didn’t back away from the fact that he’s a monster.”

Jay Carney, another one of Bulger’s attorneys, was present briefly on set of the movie. He attended the recent Boston premiere of the film.

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