MOB BOSS
‘Bid to cut out’ traitor’s tongue
MURDERED mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger may have been killed by a former Mafia hitman as part of a macabre punishment for being a grass.
Fotios “Freddy” Geas, 51, is the prime suspect in the brutal death of the 89-year-old gangster in a US jail.
Bulger was bludgeoned with a lock wrapped in a sock.
The killers are also said to have tried to cut his tongue out – a punishment for mob snitches.
Private investigator Ted McDonough said: “Freddy hated rats.”
Sources close to Geas say he has not disputed his role in the murder but has not named his accomplices.
CCTV shows four men entering Bulger’s cell where they are understood to have carried out the hit.
It was just hours after he had been transferred to the jail.
The gangster – believed to have been in his wheelchair – was beaten around the head before a killer is thought to have used a home-made knife to try to cut his eyeballs out.
Gouging eyes is Mafia retribution for spying. Irish-American mobster Bulger had been an FBI informant for decades.
The former head of South Boston’s Winter Hill Gang, played by Johnny Depp in movie Black Mass, was convicted in 2013 of killing at least 11 people.
Bulger had talked about being under constant threat in jail. His lawyer JW Carney Jr said: “He was sentenced to life in prison, but as a result of decisions by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, that sentence has been changed to the death penalty.”
Sources say that in recent months Bulger had been talking about outing people in the top tier of the FBI informant programme to get himself better privileges in prison.
Geas is serving a life sentence after he was ratted on for the murders of a mob boss and an associate in 2003. Officials have not said who else may have been involved in the murder of Bulger at the high security jail – United States Penitentiary Hazelton – in Preston County, West Virginia.
Mobster Paul Weadick, 63, was sent there after being convicted this year of murder alongside Francis “Cadillac Frank” Salemme.
Bulger’s one-time right-hand man Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi was the star witness in the prosecution of Weadick and Salemme.
Though Flemmi also testified against Bulger in 2013.
Flemmi, 84, does not appear in the online Federal Bureau of Prisons’ inmate locator, suggesting he is being held under an alias to protect him from reprisals. ROLE Depp in film DEATH JAIL Hazelton Penitentiary