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ss. It is even thought ed arms to the IRA in Whitey’s work as a ler that gave him his tation. example, he chained n McIntyre to a chair, was an informant, him for hours and le him with a rope. idn’t work, he shot d. He then buried the corpse under the cellar of a house where he had already buried another victim, Arthur “Bucky” Barrett, who had been killed a year earlier in a similar fashion.
Another victim was gambling boss Roger Wheeler, shot between the eyes in a parking lot.
In 1985 he also callously strangled Deborah Hussey, 26, the stepdaughter of associate Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi, worried that she would let information slip about the gang. Her teeth were prized from her mouth to avoid identification. Then, as was his habit, Whitey went upstairs for a nap!
He was also believed to have strangled a second woman, Debra Davis.
Yet Whitey was once said to have cried over a puppy being put down.
A physically-fit lothario who dated a stripper in his teens, he was also seeing another woman by the time the mother of his only son, Lindsey Cyr, was pregnant.
Tom Foley, who later worked on the Bulger case for the Massachusetts State Police, described Whitey as a “sociopathic killer” and “one of the hardest and cruellest individuals that operated in the Boston area” – summing him up as “a bad, bad, bad guy”.
A former henchman, Keen Weeks, said: “We made millions through extortion and loansharking and protection.
“And if someone ratted us out, we killed him. We were not nice guys.”
It would later emerge that by the mid-1970s Whitey was working as an FBI informant, though he always denied it.
This allowed him to get away with a string of crimes in return for information that would help agents snare Whitey’s rivals in New England’s Italian Mafia and other figures in organised crime.
But by 1995 the law was catching up with Whitey. He was handed a lifeline by corrupt former FBI agent John J Connolly, who tipped Whitey off about pending charges, allowing him to go on the run.
Together with his long-term partner, dental hygienist Catherine Elizabeth Greig, Whitey would elude the authorities for the next 16 years. He also spent nearly 30 years simultaneously seeing Teresa Stanley, who refused to to leave her family to go on the run with him.
Brazen
But she did accompany the criminal back to Alcatraz, where he brazenly posed for a photo in criminal get-up.
Following the death of terror warlord Osama Bin Laden, Whitey even topped the FBI’s most wanted list, described as having a violent temper and known to carry a knife at all times.
A £1.25m reward was offered for information leading to his arrest but Whitey was only caught by chance in 2011 when a former Icelandic beauty queen, Anna Bjornsdottir, saw him on a TV report.
She realised that he was living next door to her in an apartment complex in Santa Monica, California.
He and Greig had been posing as a retired couple. Investigators found 30 weapons in the apartment and thousands of dollars in cash hidden in the walls. Charged with 19 counts of murder, Whitey was eventually convicted of racketeering and 11 murders in 2013. Former criminal associates gave evidence against him and he received two life sentences. Greig was also convicted of harbouring Bulger and sentenced to eight years in prison. Whitey had plenty of enemies on the inside and on October 30 he was found dead after being transferred to Hazelton prison, in West Virginia. Three inmates are believed to have rolled his wheelchair to a corner out of view of surveillance cameras before beating him round the head and gouging his eyes with a knife.
Whitey, also the inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s gangster in the 2006 film The Departed, never showed any remorse for his crimes but did once admit in a letter: “My life was wasted and spent foolishly, and will end soon.”
He added: “If you want to make crime pay – go to law school.”