Mob boss James 'Whitey' Bulger found guilty of multiple murders
James "Whitey" Bulger, whose Winter Hill Gang ran a brutal protection racket on the city's south side, was found guilty of 11 killings, along with extortion, money laundering and other charges.
The 83-year-old will not be sentenced until November, but Boston's federal courthouse was last night left in no doubt that he would never again be a free man.
"I don't think there will be any mystery with what his sentencing guidelines will be," Brian Kelly, a govement prosecutor, said after the verdicts were reached. "They will be for life." A 12-person jury delivered their verdicts after almost 33 hours of deliberations over five days, following 35 days of gruesome testimony from Bulger's victims and former associates.
They chose not to convict Bulger of eight of the 19 murders with which he was charged, including the 1981 killing of Debra Davis, the girlfriend of Steve Flemmi, one of his most loyal lieutenants.
The court was told by Mr Kelly that Bulger "was no ordinary leader, because he did the dirty work himself He was a hands-on killer."
From the 1970s to the 1990s he and his mob ran a lucrative protection racket that spanned bookmakers, drug dealing, property and other businesses. And "at the centre of all this murder and mayhem" was Bulger, Mr Kelly told the court.
No longer sporting the shock of bright blond hair that eaed him his loathed nickname among police in the 1970s, a shaven-headed Mr Bulger usually sat quietly in court wearing spectacles.
However the court occasionally saw flashes of the venom that eaed him notoriety on the streets of "Southie".
"You're a f---in' liar," he said as one former FBI official testified against him. "I'm no f---in' informant," he said under his breath, as another agent told the court that Bulger had been a supergrass.
When Kevin "Two" Weeks, his former protege, testified to assisting Bulger in a lucrative campaign of mass-murder and intimidation, the veteran gangster shouted: "You suck!", prompting a volley of expletives from both men.
The story of Bulger inspired Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning 1996 film The Departed and runs through the folklore of working-class Boston, whose residents swore he would never be found.
He fled Boston in 1994 after receiving a tip-off that he was about to be arrested.
Yet he was caught in 2011 hiding in a flat in Santa Monica, Califoia with Catherine Greig, his girlfriend, following a tip-off to the FBI from a former neighbour.
Posing as married retirees from Chicago, the pair had stashed 30 weapons and $800,000 (£510,820) in cash inside their apartment. When the couple was captured, Greig was sentenced to eight years in prison for helping Bulger evade the law.
During 16 years on the run, Bulger was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list. His disappearance proved a major embarrassment to the FBI when it came out at court hearings and trials while he was missing that Bulger had been an informant from 1975 to 1990, feeding the bureau information on the rival New England Mafia as well as members of his own gang while he continued to kill and intimidate.
Bulger and his gang also paid off several FBI agents and state and Boston police officers, dispensing Christmas envelopes of cash and cases of fine wine to get information on search warrants, wiretaps and investigations and stay one step ahead of the law.
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