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WITH balding hair, a grey beard and confined to his wheelchair, James Bulger looked anything but a brutal mob boss.
But one thing about Bulger – nicknamed Whitey because of his former blond locks – was the same as it has always been: his chilling death stare!
It was a look Johnny Depp tried to capture when he played the notorious American gangster – convicted for his part in 11 murders – in the 2015 film Black Mass.
Bulger hated his nickname and the movie… almost as much as some fellow criminals hated him!
For this week the legendary cruel mobster, who strangled and tortured his victims, was himself murdered in jail by fellow prisoners at the age of 89.
Gouged
Bulger was reportedly beaten to death with a lock contained in a sock and his eyes were gouged out for good measure.
It was a suitably bloody end to the life of the former head of Boston’s Winter Hill gang whose life story was as extraordinary as any movie.
Born in 1929 to poor Irish immigrants in the city he soon fell into a life of crime.
At first Whitey, as police dubbed him, was a petty thief who preferred to be called Boots because of the knife he kept in his Cowboystyle footwear.
By the time he was a teenager he had joined a local crime gang called the Shamrocks and been in trouble for assault and armed robbery.
In 1956 he was sent to federal prison for a bank heist and truck hijacking.
But after wardens found he was planning a break-out he was transferred to Alcatraz – the island prison off California famed for housing the nation’s most dangerous men.
In 1965, while his younger brother William was starting a stellar political career, Whitey was released and back to his old ways, soon working his way up to the top of the Winter Hill gang.
For the next 30 years he would carry out a campaign of “murder and mayhem” alongside a multimillion racketeering, loan sharking, gambling, extortion and drug dealing busine that he traffick the 1980s.
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