Just as he died, Bulger lived life of violence and cruelty
James Joseph Bulger Jr. was born Sept. 3, 1929, the eldest son of impoverished immigrants making due in a hardscrabble South Boston housing development.
Bulger, nicknamed “Whitey” in boyhood for his platinum-colored hair, died a convicted serial killer yesterday, hours after arriving at a maximum-security federal prison in West Virginia.
At age 89 and in failing health, he was a victim of violence reportedly similar to the fate of the 11 men and women he was convicted of either throttling to death, gunning down or having killed on his order as leader of the Winter Hill Gang.
Many of their bodies would not be found for years, dumped in mass graves beside the Southeast Expressway and Neponset River.
His prison stints for lesser crimes were few, but included time served at Alcatraz.
Bulger was feared yet admired for Thanksgiving meals he would deliver to his Southie neighbors. He was a fitness buff long before exercising was trending. His bar, Triple O’s, was a popular watering hole in South Boston.
Bulger lived 63 years longer than his youngest victim.
His siblings include William Bulger, 84, former president of both the state Senate and the University of Massachusetts, but it was Whitey’s psychotic reign of terror that captured Hollywood’s fancy. He was Jack Nicholson’s inspiration for the character Frank Costello in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning Best Picture “The Departed.” Johnny Depp later portrayed Bulger in “Black Mass.”
Bulger fathered just one known heir, Douglas G. Cyr, with former girlfriend Lindsey Cyr, a legal secretary. The child, blond like his dad, died in 1973 at age 6 of Reye’s syndrome.
Of all his unions, none was more lasting than his partnership with fellow serial slayer Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi.
But when Bulger, secretly an informant for the FBI, fled in 1995 as the feds were about to pounce with a massive racketeering indictment, he took with him a dental hygienist named Catherine Greig.
The lovers were on the lam until June 22, 2011, when they were captured living in a rentcontrolled apartment as Charles and Carol Gasko in sunny Santa Monica, Calif. Federal authorities said they lived there with $800,000 in cash and dozens of firearms hidden inside.
Bulger was convicted in 2013 of 11 of 19 murders. He received two life sentences.
Refusing to testify in his own defense, he told U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper, “Do with me what youse want.”