GRISLY END FOR WHITEY BULGER
INFAMOUS MOBSTER KILLED IN JAIL
IRISH Mafia godfather James ‘Whitey’ Bulger has been killed in his cell, hours after being moved between prisons.
The 89-year-old Boston gangster, whose brutal career inspired several Hollywood films, is believed to have been murdered by an inmate with Mafia connections.
Bulger, serving two life sentences for 11 murders, was found unresponsive yesterday morning at Hazelton high security penitentiary in West Virginia.
A prison source told TMZ that wheelchair-bound Bulger was in general population when three inmates rolled him to a corner out of view of surveillance cameras, beat him in the head with a lock in a sock, and attempted to gouge his eyes out with a shiv.
Bulger – the former head of south Boston’s ‘Winter Hill Gang’ – was convicted in 2013 of killing at least 11 people. It emerged at his trial that he had served as an FBI informant as far back as 1975, although he always denied it. The deal gave Bulger virtual impunity to commit any crime he wanted for decades – except for murder.
Law enforcement sources told the Mail that Bulger had been talking about outing people in the top echelons of the controversial FBI informant program.
The sources said he hadn’t even been processed at the facility when he was killed. But someone who knew he was being transferred put the word out – the killer had to know he was coming.
Meanwhile, a fellow inmate with Mafia connections is being investigated in the homicide, three sources briefed on the investigation told the Boston Globe. It is unclear who the suspect might be. Notably, mobster Paul Weadick, 63, was sent to Hazelton this summer after his murder conviction alongside Francis ‘Cadillac Frank’ Salemme – Bulger’s co-defendant in a sweeping racketeering indictment in 1999.
Salamme and Weadick were convicted in June of the 1993 murder of Steven DiSarro, a nightclub owner in South Boston.
Bulger’s right-hand man, Stephen ‘The Rifleman’ Flemmi, was the star witness in the prosecution of Salamme and Weadick – though Flemmi also testified against Bulger himself in 2013.
Salamme, 85, is currently incarcerated in Brooklyn MDC. Bulger was one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives for 16 years until his 2011 arrest in Santa Monica, California.
Caught after 16 years on the run, Bulger’s life of crime was the subject of several books and movies including Black Mass, a 2015 biopic featuring Johnny Depp as the Irish-American mobster.
Bulger also provided the inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s Irish-American mob boss character in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning 2006 gangster film The Departed.
Bulger was born in Boston on September 3, 1929, the son of a longshoreman and his first-generation Irish immigrant wife.
The young crook was arrested as young as age 14, in 1943, when he began running with a street gang called the Shamrocks and was charged with larceny.
Police gave young Bulger the nickname ‘Whitey’ early in his criminal career, a reference to his blond hair. Bulger is said to have hated the moniker, but it stuck.
Impunity to commit crime