US organized crime has long held a tight grip on America’s popular imagination, sustaining entire industries of books, television series and Hollywood movies, as well as countless breathless headlines in tabloid newspapers.
But few names have been as famous as the south Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger, who for decades presented himself as a benevolent gangster who protected his community and was given Hollywood treatment by Johnny Depp in Black Mass and Jack Nicholson in The Departed.
But the truth behind Bulger’s violent death in prison – where he finally languished after years on the run successfully evading law enforcement – has not yet been written and recent revelations have only fueled speculation that some form of plot lay behind the gangster’s brutal demise.
Last week, a court heard that the notorious Irish-American head of the Winter Hill gang was beaten to death within minutes of his cell door sliding open at 6am on 30 October 2018 – less than 12 hours since he had been transferred to a penitentiary at Bruceton Mills in West Virginia.
Prosecutors said the implement used end to Bulger’s life of crime – that established him as one of the most notorious 20th century gangland figures and, for a time, second only to Osama bin Laden on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list – was a lock attached to a belt.
It took less than five minutes to kill him, and his assailants may have tried to gouge his eyes out.
Now, the circumstances of Bulger’s murder are raising more questions than have so far been answered. Certainly it was mob justice meted out for Bulger’s role as an eventual FBI informer who had been shielded from prosecution while running a notoriously violent criminal enterprise. But was it just bureaucratic incompetence that left Bulger so vulnerable to attack or something more sinister?
Bulger, 89, was serving two consecutive life sentences after being convicted on 31 criminal counts, including racketeering charges and involvement in 11 murders in 2013. He had been picked up two years earlier in Santa Monica, California, after 16 years on the run following a tip-off from his FBI handler of a pending federal indictment.
Sean McKinnon, who is accused by the government of acting as a lookout during the beating, had told his mother a day earlier that everyone on the prison unit had been alerted that Bulger was about to be transferred there.
“You should know the name … Whitey Bulger,” he said on the call. “Oh Jesus,” McKinnon’s mother said. “Stay away from him please.” The 36-year-old inmate said he couldn’t – his cellmate was “a henchman for a mob family out of New York and Boston”.
One of those accused of beating Bulger to death in his bed, Fotios “Freddy” Geas, 55, was a mafia enforcer serving a life sentence for the 2003 gangland murders of mob boss Adolfo “Big Al” Bruno and an associate. A third accused inmate, Paul J “Pauly” DeCologero, 48, was a member of an organized crime group on Boston’s North Shore that robbed rival drug dealers and killed a teenage girl they thought might give them up.
“It all goes back to an element of corruption, using him as an informant and protecting him so he could commit crimes,” said Kevin Cullen, a columnist for the Boston Globe and co-author of a bestselling biography of Bulger. “It doesn’t make any sense that the Bureau of Prisons would put him within striking distance of people like Freddy Geas or Pauly DeCologero.
“Any organized crime or mafia guy would have a beef with Whitey because he was a rat,” Cullen said. “But there are any number of prisons where there aren’t any Boston-area gangsters. It was like, ‘Whitey’s coming and we’re going to kill him.’”
Bulger had previously been held in units designated for inmates, such as informants or pedophiles, who needed protection from other inmates. He was known to be a difficult prisoner and Cullen has theorized that the Florida prison where he had been held simply wanted him off their books.
The Bulger family has said it holds the Bureau of Prisons responsible. A wrongful death lawsuit, which described Bulger as “perhaps the most infamous and well-known inmate” in federal prison since Al Capone, claimed that Bulger was “deliberately sent to his death” at a prison nicknamed “Misery Mountain”.
But the action was dismissed in January. US district judge John Preston Bailey said in his decision that the Bureau of Prisons “must provide for the protection, safekeeping, and care of inmates, but this does not guarantee a risk-free environment”.
Hank Brennan, Bulger’s lawyer, told the Boston Globe that “the mechanism used to murder him was really irrelevant. It’s the persons who allowed it to happen that need accountability most”.
But some family members of Bulger’s victims have said they are unhappy that anyone was even charged in connection with Bulger’s death. Steve Davis, brother of Debra Davis, who was allegedly strangled to death by Bulger and an associate in 1981, told the Globe that given the opportunity, he would kiss Geas’s hand “like he was the godfather”.
In a statement last week, US attorney Rachael Rollins, who won Bulger’s 2013 conviction, welcomed the indictments against the three men. “In the truest of ironies, Bulger’s family has experienced the excruciating pain and trauma their relative inflicted on far too many, and the justice system is now coming to their aid,” Rollins said.
The issue with that, indicates Cullen, is that the very system seeking to hold Bulger’s alleged killers accountable is the same one that allowed Bulger to extort, intimidate and murder across two decades of gangland rule since becoming an FBI informer in 1975.
“Whitey was able to thrive as a gangland leader because the FBI tipped him off to potential witnesses. He killed people that the FBI told him might rat him out. So the government had its hand in all this shit. They were deciding who’d live or die. It’s a horrible, corrupt system and is to this day. They still make deals with informants all the time,” Cullen said.
