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| FILE - This June 23, 2011 booking file photo provided by the U.S. Marshals Service shows James "Whitey" Bulger, who fled Boston in 1994 and was captured 2011 in Santa Monica, Calif., after 16 years on the run. A jury found Bulger guilty on several counts of murder, racketeering and conspiracy Monday, Aug. 12, 2013 in federal court in Boston. |
BOSTON (AP)
-- James "Whitey" Bulger, the feared Boston mob boss who became one of
the nation's most-wanted fugitives, was convicted Monday in a string of
11 killings and dozens of other gangland crimes, many of them committed
while he was said to be an FBI informant.
Bulger,
83, stood silently and showed no reaction to the verdict, which brought
to a close a case that not only transfixed the city with its grisly
violence but exposed corruption inside the Boston FBI and an overly cozy
relationship between the bureau and its underworld snitches.
Bulger
was charged primarily with racketeering, which listed 33 criminal acts -
among them, 19 murders that he allegedly helped orchestrate or carried
out himself during the 1970s and `80s while he led the Winter Hill Gang,
Boston's ruthless Irish mob.
After 4 1/2 days
of deliberations, the federal jury decided he took part in 11 of those
murders, along with nearly all the other crimes on the list, including
acts of extortion, money laundering and drug dealing. He was also found
guilty of 30 other offenses, including possession of machine guns.
Bulger
could get life in prison at sentencing Nov. 13. But given his age, even
a modest term could amount to a life sentence for the slightly stooped,
white-bearded Bulger.
As court broke up,
Bulger turned to his relatives and gave them a thumbs-up. A woman in the
gallery taunted him as he was led away, apparently imitating
machine-gun fire as she yelled: "Rat-a-tat-tat, Whitey!"
Outside the courtroom, relatives of the victims hugged each other, the prosecutors and even defense attorneys.
Patricia
Donahue wept, saying it was a relief to see Bulger convicted in the
murder of her husband, Michael Donahue, who authorities say was an
innocent victim who died in a hail of gunfire while giving a ride to an
FBI informant marked for death by Bulger.
Thomas
Donahue, who was 8 when his father was killed, said: "Thirty-one years
of deceit, of cover-up of my father's murder. Finally we have somebody
guilty of it. Thirty-one years - that's a long time." He said that when
he heard the verdict, "I wanted to jump up. I was like, `Damn right.'"
"Today
is a day that many in this city thought would never come," said U.S.
Attorney Carmen Ortiz. "This day of reckoning has been a long time in
coming." She added: "We hope that we stand here today to mark the end of
an era that was very ugly in Boston's history."
She
said Bulger's corrupting of law enforcement officials "allowed him to
operate a violent organization in this town, and it also allowed him to
slip away when honest law enforcement was closing in."
Bulger
attorney J.W. Carney Jr. said Bulger intends to appeal because the
judge didn't let him argue that he had been granted immunity for his
crimes by a now-dead federal prosecutor.
But
Carney said Bulger was pleased with the trial and its outcome, because
"it was important to him that the government corruption be exposed, and
important to him to see the deals the government was able to make with
certain people."
"Mr. Bulger knew as soon as
he was arrested that he was going to die behind the walls of a prison or
on a gurney and injected with chemicals that would kill him," Carney
said. "This trial has never been about Jim Bulger being set free."
Bulger,
the model for Jack Nicholson's sinister crime boss in the 2006 Martin
Scorsese movie "The Departed," was seen for years as a Robin Hood figure
who bought Thanksgiving turkeys for fellow residents of working-class
South Boston and kept hard drugs out of the neighborhood. But that image
was shattered when authorities started digging up bodies.
Prosecutors
at the two-month trial portrayed Bulger as a cold-blooded, hands-on
boss who killed anyone he saw as a threat, along with innocent people
who happened to get in the way. Then, according to testimony, he would
go off and take a nap while his underlings cleaned up.
Among
other things, Bulger was accused of strangling two women with his bare
hands, shooting two men in the head after chaining them to chairs and
interrogating them for hours, and opening fire on two men as they left a
South Boston restaurant.
Bulger skipped town
in 1994 after being tipped off - by a retired FBI agent, John Connolly,
it turned out - that he was about to be indicted.
He
spent 16 years on the run and was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list
before he was finally captured in 2011 in Santa Monica, Calif., where he
had been living in a rent-controlled apartment near the beach with his
longtime girlfriend, Catherine Greig. She was sentenced to eight years
in prison for helping Bulger.
His
disappearance proved a major embarrassment to the FBI when it came out
at court hearings and trials that Bulger had been an informant from 1975
to 1990, feeding the bureau information on the rival New England Mafia
and members of his own gang while he continued to kill and intimidate.
Those
proceedings also revealed that Bulger and his gang paid off several FBI
agents and state and Boston police officers, dispensing Christmas
envelopes of cash and cases of fine wine to get information on search
warrants, wiretaps and investigations and stay one step ahead of the
law.
At his trial, Bulger's lawyers tried to
turn the tables on the government, detailing the corruption and accusing
prosecutors of offering unconscionably generous deals to three former
Bulger loyalists to testify against him.
The
defense portrayed the three key witnesses - gangster Stephen The
Rifleman" Flemmi, hit man John Martorano and Bulger protege Kevin Weeks -
as pathological liars who pinned their own crimes on Bulger so they
could get reduced sentences.
But overall, the
defense barely contested many of the charges against Bulger. In fact,
his lawyers conceded he ran a criminal enterprise that took in millions
through drugs, gambling and loansharking.
His
lawyers did strongly deny he killed women, something Bulger evidently
regarded as a violation of his underworld code of honor. The jury
ultimately found he had a role in the strangling of one woman - Flemmi's
stepdaughter - but it could not reach a decision on the other woman,
Flemmi's girlfriend.
Prosecutors said the women were killed because they knew too much about the gang's business.
Bulger's
lawyers also spent a surprising amount of time disputing he was a "rat"
- a label that seemed to set off the hotheaded Bulger more than
anything else, causing him to erupt in obscenities in the courtroom.
His
attorneys argued that the now-imprisoned Connolly, Bulger's supposed
handler inside the FBI, fabricated Bulger's thick informant file to
cover up his corrupt relationship with the gangster and advance his own
career.
The prosecution's witnesses also
included drug dealers, bookmakers and legitimate businessmen who
described terrifying encounters with Bulger in which he ordered them to
pay up or take a beating or worse.
Real estate
developer Richard Buccheri said Bulger threatened to kill him and his
family if he did not pay $200,000. Buccheri related how Bulger slammed
his hand on a table in anger.
"With that, he
takes the shotgun that was on the table - he sticks it in my mouth,"
Buccheri said as spectators in the courtroom gasped.
Before
the trial, Bulger's lawyers said he would take the stand and detail
wrongdoing inside the FBI. But after Judge Denise Casper disallowed his
claim of immunity, Bulger did not testify.
"As
far as I'm concerned, I didn't get a fair trial, and this is a sham,
and do what youse want with me," he complained to the judge as the trial
wound down. "That's it. That's my final word."
Bulger's
life story fascinated Bostonians for decades. He grew up in a South
Boston housing project and quickly became involved in crime, while his
brother William rose to become one of the most powerful politicians in
Massachusetts as state Senate president.
William
Bulger was forced to resign as president of the University of
Massachusetts system in 2003 after it was learned that he got a call
from his brother while he was on the run and didn't urge him to
surrender.
In court papers last week, Whitey
Bulger offered to forfeit the guns and $822,000 in cash that officials
found in his California apartment, but he wanted to keep one thing: a
Stanley Cup ring that he said was a gift from someone.
