Prison drops visits after Whitey slaying
The high-security federal prison in West Virginia where mobster James “Whitey” Bulger was killed announced yesterday it has suspended inmate visitations until further notice. The deferment was posted in red on USP Hazelton’s website. No explanation was provided by officials there. The Bureau of Prisons did not immediately respond to a request for comment on why inmates were being denied visitations and if it had anything to do with Bulger’s death. Bulger, 89, and five years into two life sentences for the murders of 11 men and women in Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Florida, was reportedly beaten beyond recognition with a padlock Tuesday morning, hours after the BOP relocated him to Hazelton’s general population from a transfer center in Oklahoma City. He had been incarcerated at the Coleman Federal Correction Complex in Florida for four years before that. CNN, citing a federal law enforcement official, reported yesterday Bulger’s assailants tried to cut out his tongue. Bulger was reportedly in a wheelchair at the time. The U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Northern District of West Virginia and FBI acknowledged Wednesday Bulger had in fact been killed and they are investigating his death as a homicide. “To protect the integrity of the investigation, no further details will be released at this time,” the authorities said in a joint statement. Death certificates are not public record in West Virginia, according to the state’s Department of Health and Human Services. One suspect in Bulger’s death is Mafia hitman Fotios “Freddy” Geas Jr., 51. Geas is doing life at Hazelton for arranging the 2003 assassination of Springfield crime boss Adolfo “Big Al” Bruno. Geas helped orchestrate the hit on Bruno “to prevent his communicating to a law enforcement officer and a judge of the United States information relating to the commission and possible commission of federal offenses, including, among other things, crimes committed by members and associates of the Genovese Organized Crime Family,” federal court documents state. Bulger, while leader of South Boston’s Winter Hill Gang, was secretly an informant for the FBI, providing information that helped destroy his rivals in La Cosa Nostra. It remains unclear why Bulger was transferred out of Coleman. Just last week, five members of Congress wrote to Attorney General Jeff Sessions about what they called “dangerous continual understaffing” at federal prisons in West Virginia and Pennsylvania and stated their alarm about inmate deaths at Hazelton.