James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, 89; longtime Boston crime boss found dead in prison

At the peak of his nefarious career, James “Whitey” Bulger, the long-ago murderous Boston mob boss, wasn’t one to dwell on his mistakes, even when he killed the wrong guy a few times. For back then, as whispers had it, Whitey was untouchable.

However, in 2015, after three schoolgirls wrote to him in prison as part of a history project, seeking his views on “leadership” and “legacy,” the octogenarian ex-gangster, a ninth-grade dropout, responded with a rueful letter.

In the Coleman II federal penitentiary in Florida, he filled a sheet of college-ruled notebook paper with tidy cursive, lamenting, “My life was wasted and spent foolishly, brought shame + suffering on my parents and siblings and will end soon.”

Now it has.

Bulger, whose bloody reign in the Boston underworld was aided by crooked FBI agents in the 1980s, and who later went on the lam for 16 years, living incognito by the California seashore, was found dead Oct. 30 while completing the first of his two life sentences. He was 89.

The Bureau of Prisons confirmed Tuesday that Bulger, 89, was found unresponsive at a penitentiary in Bruceton Mills, West Virgina. Responding staff attempted life-saving measures and he was pronounced dead by the county medical examiner. No other details were immediately available.

Although notorious in Boston, Bulger was largely unknown to the wider world until after he disappeared in 1994. In his absence, his darkest secrets, including his corrupt ties with FBI agents, were gradually laid bare in court hearings, media exposés and a congressional inquiry. He became a nationwide curiosity, sharing space with Osama bin Laden on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list.

Captured in Santa Monica, Califorina, in 2011, Bulger was sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus five years after a Boston jury convicted him of 31 racketeering offenses. The indictment against him cataloged 19 alleged murders, and he was found guilty of ordering or carrying out 11 of them.

The verdicts, in 2013, climaxed a gangland opera of fealty and betrayal that spanned half a century and combined two of Boston’s abiding fixations: ethnic crime and politics.

Bulger, dubbed “Whitey” in his fair-haired youth, was a brother of William “Billy” Bulger, a longtime Democratic state lawmaker and iron-fisted boss of Massachusetts government.

Theirs was a family epic – a tale of two siblings, each ruthless in his own way, and each ever loyal to the other, who climbed to power by different means from a hardscrabble beginning in insular, working-class South Boston.