Whitey Bulger

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 22nd of June 2011, agents in Santa Monica, California, used a ruse to lure an 81-year-old man out of his apartment. They arrested him without incident. He was James Joseph "Whitey" Bulger Jr., who had once led the Winter Hill Gang, an Irish mob group based in a neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts, northwest of Boston. The FBI had offered a reward of $2 million for him, a figure second only to the one for Osama bin Laden. He had been a fugitive for sixteen years.

  How does a man run a city's underworld for decades yet go years without a single arrest? Who inside the law kept him informed, and what did they receive in return? What did he do with that protection, and who paid for it? And what happened once the machinery that sheltered him finally stopped working? This documentary follows Bulger from the streets of South Boston to the courtroom that finally judged him.

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• 2. From Southie to Alcatraz

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  James Joseph Bulger Sr. came from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, the son of Irish parents. After settling in Everett, Massachusetts, he married Jane Veronica McCarthy, called Jean, a first-generation Irish immigrant. Their second child, James Joseph Bulger Jr., was born on the 3rd of September 1929. He was one of six children. The father worked as a union laborer and occasional longshoreman, until an industrial accident cost him an arm and the family slid into poverty.

  In May 1938, the Mary Ellen McCormack Housing Project opened in South Boston, an insular, working-class Irish American neighborhood. The Bulgers moved in, and the children grew up there. His younger brothers William and John P. Bulger did well at school. James was pulled toward the street instead. Early in his criminal career, police called him "Whitey" because of his blond hair. He hated the name. Close friends said Jim, Jimmy, or even Boots, a nickname that came from the cowboy boots in which he hid a switchblade.

  In 1943, fourteen-year-old Bulger was arrested and charged with larceny. He had already joined a street gang called the Shamrocks. Later arrests followed for assault, forgery and armed robbery, and he was sentenced to a juvenile reformatory. Shortly after his release in April 1948, he joined the United States Air Force. There he earned his high school diploma and trained as a mechanic. Military discipline did not change him. He served time in military prison for assaults, and Air Force police arrested him in 1950 for going absent without leave. In June 1951, at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, he was charged with rape after being caught in a hotel with a fifteen-year-old girl. He had also been arrested months earlier for bar fights. Even so, he received an honorable discharge in 1952.

  In 1956, Bulger entered Atlanta Penitentiary for armed robbery and truck hijacking, his first federal term. He later told Kevin Weeks that he had been used there as a human test subject in the CIA-sponsored MKUltra program. Inmates, he said, were "recruited by deception" and told they were helping to find "a cure for schizophrenia," when the real aim was research into mind control. CIA documentation later confirmed his account. Bulger and eighteen other inmates volunteered in exchange for shorter sentences. Over eighteen months they were given LSD and other drugs. Bulger called the experience "nightmarish" and said it took him "to the depths of insanity." In his notebooks he wrote that he heard voices and feared being "committed for life" if he told anyone.

  In 1959, he was briefly sent to maximum security at Alcatraz in California. He lifted weights there and took correspondence courses in typing, bookkeeping and business law. He also became a voracious reader of poetry, politics and military history. Later transfers took him to Leavenworth and, in 1963, to Lewisburg. His third petition for parole was granted in 1965, after nine years behind bars. He would not be arrested again for forty-six years.

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• 3. War on the Waterfront

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  After his release, Bulger worked as a janitor and construction worker before becoming a bookmaker and loan shark for Donald Killeen. The Killeen gang had dominated South Boston for more than twenty years. Its leaders were three brothers, Donnie, Kenny and Eddie, along with Billy O'Sullivan and Jack Curran. Their base was the Transit Cafe, which later became Whitey's Triple O's.

  In 1971, Kenny Killeen, the youngest brother, allegedly shot and mauled Michael "Mickey" Dwyer of the rival Mullen Gang during a brawl at the Transit Cafe. A gang war followed, with killings across Boston and its suburbs. The younger Mullens outgunned and outmaneuvered the Killeens. According to Weeks, Bulger set out during this war to commit his first murder, aiming at Mullen member Paul McGonagle. He shot McGonagle's law-abiding brother Donald by mistake. Weeks recalled that Bulger drove to O'Sullivan's house and said, "I shot the wrong one. I shot Donald." O'Sullivan answered, "Don't worry about it. He wasn't healthy anyway."

  Patrick Nee, a former Mullen boss, said Paul McGonagle ambushed and murdered O'Sullivan, assuming he was responsible. Sensing his side was losing, Bulger is alleged to have approached Howie Winter, leader of the Winter Hill Gang. He supposedly promised to end the war by killing the Killeen leadership. On the 13th of May 1972, Donald Killeen was gunned down outside his home in Framingham, Massachusetts. The killing was attributed to Bulger, but Nee disputed that. He said Mullen enforcers James Mantville and Tommy King did it.

  Bulger and the Killeens fled Boston, fearing they were next. Nee then arranged a mediation with Winter and Joseph "J.R." Russo, a caporegime in the Patriarca crime family. At a sit-down in Chandler's nightclub in Boston's South End, Nee and King spoke for the Mullens and Bulger spoke for the Killeens. The gangs merged under Winter. Soon afterward, Bulger called the last Killeen brother, Kenny, over to a car while Kenny jogged in the City Point section. Kenny testified that Winter Hill enforcers Stephen Flemmi and John Martorano sat inside. Bulger told him, "It's over. You're out of business. No more warnings."

  FBI Special Agent Dennis Condon noted in his log in September 1973 that Bulger and Nee were heavily shaking down the neighborhood's bookmakers and loan sharks. Winter later said, in a 2004 interview, that the highly intelligent Bulger "could teach the devil tricks." Weeks described how Tommy King's trouble began at Triple O's, where King clenched a fist and Bulger noticed. A week later King was dead, after climbing into a car with Bulger, Flemmi and Martorano. In 1974, Bulger and Flemmi became partners as enforcers for the gang. Soon the gang joined Anthony "Fat Tony" Ciulla in a horse race-fixing scheme, bribing and threatening jockeys and drugging horses across the East Coast. Bulger and Flemmi placed bets with bookmakers around the country.

  In late August or early September 1974, Bulger and an accomplice reportedly set fire to an elementary school in Wellesley. The target was U.S. District Court Judge Wendell Arthur Garrity Jr., who had ordered busing to desegregate Boston schools. On the 8th of September 1975, Bulger and an unidentified person threw a Molotov cocktail into the John F. Kennedy birthplace in Brookline, angry at Senator Ted Kennedy's support for desegregation. Bulger then spray-painted "Bus Teddy" on the sidewalk outside the national historic site.

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• 4. A Special Relationship

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  John Connolly, an FBI special agent who had also grown up in South Boston, was sent in 1971 to recruit Bulger as an informant against the Patriarca crime family. He failed to win Bulger's trust. Three years later Bulger partnered with Flemmi, not knowing Flemmi had informed for the FBI since 1965. The FBI later said Bulger followed his partner's example. How and why remain debated, and Bulger adamantly denied it.

  Connolly boasted to fellow agents about a late-night meeting on Wollaston Beach, where he recruited Bulger in the agency car. He allegedly offered FBI help in Bulger's feud with Patriarca underboss Gennaro "Jerry" Angiulo. Bulger is said to have replied, "if they want to play checkers, we'll play chess." Connolly claimed Bulger also told him, "I will not be called an informant. I will be your strategist." Weeks thought it more likely that Flemmi had betrayed Bulger to the FBI after being threatened with losing his informant status.

  In 1997, Weeks met Connolly, who showed him a photocopy of Bulger's file. Connolly explained the arrangement this way: "The Mafia was going against Jimmy and Stevie, so Jimmy and Stevie went against them." He also said 90 percent of the information came from Flemmi. He had to put Bulger's name on the files, he said, to keep Bulger's file active and justify their meetings. Weeks noticed that the reports named not only Italians but also Polish and Irish associates, some of whom were later arrested.

  The FBI's Organized Crime Program in the 1970s and 1980s treated the Mafia as a greater threat than all other groups combined. The Boston office saw the Winter Hill Gang as far less dangerous, particularly after a 1979 horse race-fixing case sent several members to prison or on the run. In December 1977, John Morris took charge of the Boston Organized Crime Squad. He could not rein in Connolly's protection of Bulger and soon began assisting it. Under pressure to produce informants against the Mafia, both men presented Bulger and Flemmi as invaluable sources and advanced their careers. Flemmi said in a 2011 interview that they gave the agents little and received a great deal. Connolly and Morris also accepted bribes. By 1982, Morris was so compromised that Bulger bought plane tickets for Morris's girlfriend, Debbie Noseworthy, to visit him in Georgia.

  In February 1979, federal prosecutors indicted twenty-one Winter Hill members for fixing horse races, including Winter. Bulger and Flemmi were meant to be among them. Connolly and Morris persuaded prosecutor Jeremiah T. O'Sullivan to drop the charges at the last minute, and the pair were named only as unindicted co-conspirators. They took over the gang and moved its headquarters to the Lancaster Street Garage in Boston's West End, near the Boston Garden. The Massachusetts State Police stumbled on the garage while investigating an auto theft ring. Troopers watched from a neighboring flophouse and, in summer 1980, obtained a warrant to bug the premises. Connolly warned Bulger and Flemmi, so the bug captured nothing. A later bug on payphones outside a Dorchester Howard Johnson's also failed. In November 1980, troopers learned that Morris had mentioned the investigation to a Boston police detective at a bachelor party. That exposed the FBI as the leak, and the state police probe ended in March 1981.

  The pair used their informant status to eliminate rivals. In November 1980, they helped the FBI plant a microphone in Angiulo's headquarters on Prince Street in the North End. Bulger and Flemmi were only two of nine informants used to win court approval, but Connolly and Morris inflated their role in reports. The bug produced enough evidence to bring down the Boston Mafia leadership. After the 1983 racketeering indictments of Angiulo and his associates, Bulger and Flemmi stepped in to control organized crime in the Boston area. That summer, a Coin-O-Matic employee was kidnapped, tortured for more than six days and found hanging from a beef rack in a South Boston butcher shop co-owned by Bulger. Law enforcement called him Butch, and he never testified. Three low-level Winter Hill members were executed over the following months, and the fallout prompted an internal FBI investigation of Morris.

  In 1988, the Globe's Spotlight team, led by Gerard O'Neill, published articles detailing crimes committed under Bulger's supposed protection. Rumors had circulated for years, since a criminal of his stature going so long without an arrest was unheard of. Morris, burdened by guilt, spoke anonymously to the paper about a "special relationship" between Bulger and the FBI. Bulger told his underlings the paper had invented the story. Given his street credibility, the gang believed him.

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• 5. Rackets and Rifles

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  In 1984, Bulger acquired Stippo's Liquor Mart beside the Old Colony Housing Project by forcing the owner, Stephen "Stippo" Rakes, to sell at gunpoint for $67,000. He renamed it the South Boston Liquor Mart and used the backroom as gang headquarters. Local bars were forced to buy their alcohol from him.

  Federal prosecutor Brian Kelly said Bulger "made a ton of money selling drugs," despite his Robin Hood image as a protector who kept narcotics out of the neighborhood. Bulger entered the trade in 1981 while pretending otherwise. He profited from marijuana and cocaine but banned heroin sales in South Boston. In the mid-1980s he began summoning dealers to his headquarters, flanked by Weeks and Flemmi. He told each that someone had offered a large sum to have them killed, and demanded cash to refrain. In April 1983, he learned that Charlestown smuggler Joseph Murray was bringing marijuana into South Boston without approval. Bulger tipped Connolly, and the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration seized fifteen tons of marijuana from a warehouse and arrested Murray and six others. Murray then paid Bulger monthly for storage rights and protection. When Murray retired, Bulger demanded a $500,000 "severance package."

  In spring 1983, the DEA, state police, Quincy police and the U.S. attorney's office launched Operation Beans against Bulger and Flemmi. The FBI declined to join or to close either man as an informant. In December 1984, prosecutor Gary Crossen won permission to wiretap Bulger. A bug in the windowsill of his condominium at the Louisburg Square complex in Quincy picked up little more than television noise. A second bug in his car door was drowned out by the radio. On the 11th of March 1985, Bulger had a mechanic take the door apart and found the microphone. When the operation ended in mid-1985, DEA agent Steven Boeri mailed Bulger and Flemmi a congratulations card.

  By the late 1980s, mobster John Shea's crew controlled most cocaine and marijuana trafficking in South Boston. Bulger briefly considered killing Shea, according to Weeks, then chose to take a weekly cut. His rules forbade PCP and sales to children. In August 1990, Shea and fifty others were arrested after an investigation by the DEA, state police and Boston police. The crackdown, aimed at rings led by Shea, Paul Moore and Hobart Willis, ended Bulger's drug business. Shea served a long sentence in silence and fought inmates who called Bulger "a rat." Weeks estimated that Bulger made about thirty million dollars, mostly by shaking down dealers. In the summer of 1991, Bulger, Weeks and brothers Patrick and Michael Linskey held a winning Massachusetts Lottery ticket bought at a store Bulger owned. The four shared a prize of around $14 million, and many suspected Bulger had obtained his share illegitimately.

  South Boston during the Troubles sympathized with Irish nationalism and the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Money and weapons flowed toward Northern Ireland. Bulger refused to betray the IRA to the FBI. In the early 1980s he donated to NORAID and shipped weapons across the Atlantic in a van, only to learn that the IRA had burned the van. After meeting IRA Chief of Staff Joe Cahill, Bulger and Nee raised $1 million by shaking down drug dealers in South Boston and Charlestown. The money bought weapons for the trawler Valhalla. On the 13th of September 1984, Bulger, Weeks and Nee supervised its loading. The cargo included 91 rifles, 8 submachine guns, 13 shotguns, 51 handguns, 11 bullet-proof vests and 70,000 rounds of ammunition, plus grenades and rocket heads.

  Valhalla left Gloucester and met the IRA ship Marita Ann 120 nautical miles off Ireland's west coast. On the return voyage, the Irish Navy stopped Marita Ann and seized the arsenal, arresting Martin Ferris, Mike Browne and John Crawley. IRA member Sean O'Callaghan, an informant for the Irish police, had compromised the operation. U.S. Customs seized Valhalla in Boston on the 16th of October but found no weapons. Days later, crew member John McIntyre was arrested for drunk driving in Quincy and confessed. His account implicated Bulger and led the DEA to seize thirty-six tons of marijuana from the Norwegian freighter Ramsland on the 16th of November.

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• 6. Graves in the Basement

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  In 1980, Louis Litif, a Lebanese-American bookmaker, approached Bulger in Triple O's. Litif had stolen from his bookmaking partners and used the money to traffic cocaine. He refused Bulger a cut and had committed two murders without permission. He also planned to kill his partner, "Joe the Barber." Bulger refused to approve that murder. When Litif insisted, Bulger told him, "You've stepped over the line. You're no longer just a bookmaker." Litif said they were friends. Bulger answered, "We're not friends anymore, Louie." Shortly before Weeks's wedding, Weeks said he could not find Litif a seat at the reception. Bulger replied, "He probably won't show." About a week before the wedding, Litif's body was found in the South End, in a garbage bag in the trunk of his car. He had been stabbed with an ice pick and shot.

  In 1982, Edward Brian Halloran, a South Boston cocaine dealer nicknamed "Balloonhead," told the FBI he had seen Bulger and Flemmi kill Litif. Connolly kept Bulger informed of what Halloran was saying. On the 11th of May 1982, Weeks watched Anthony's Pier 4 restaurant, where Halloran was dining. Halloran's friend Michael Donahue ran into him there and offered him a ride home. As their blue Datsun left the lot, Weeks said over a walkie-talkie, "The balloon is in the air." Bulger pulled alongside in a Chevrolet Malibu, disguised in an Afro wig and a fake moustache, carrying a .30 carbine rifle. His accomplice used a silenced MAC-10. Donahue was killed instantly. Halloran was shot about twenty times, and before dying he wrongly named Jimmy Flynn, who was later tried and acquitted. Flynn stayed the prime suspect until Weeks began cooperating in 1999.

  Donahue left a wife and three sons. The families of Donahue and Halloran sued the U.S. government after learning Connolly had told Bulger of Halloran's informant status. They were awarded several million dollars, but an appeals court overturned the verdict because the claims were filed late. Thomas Donahue, eight years old when his father died, became a spokesman for families of the gang's alleged victims.

  World Jai Alai, a betting company operating in Connecticut and Florida, was another prize. Executive John "Jack" Callahan wanted to buy it from Tulsa businessman Roger Wheeler and offered Bulger, Flemmi and Martorano a $10,000 weekly skim for protection. Wheeler refused to sell, and on the 27th of May 1981 Martorano shot him in the face in a Tulsa country club parking lot. When the FBI wanted to question Callahan, Bulger and Flemmi decided he too had to die. Martorano shot him in a car at Fort Lauderdale airport on the 1st of August 1982. Callahan's body turned up two days later in a Miami airport garage. Bulger was furious. "There's plenty of sand down there," he said of Martorano, who should have buried the body. The gang then learned Callahan had Swiss accounts holding up to $600,000. His partner Michael Solimando emptied them and delivered $480,000, split into shares of $60,000.

  On the 30th of November 1983, safecracker Arthur "Bucky" Barrett was lured to a house at 799 East Third Street in South Boston, owned by Nee's brother Michael. Bulger greeted him with a machine gun, yelling "Bucky Barrett, freeze!" Barrett had refused Bulger a cut of a bank theft and instead paid the Patriarca family for protection. Chained to a chair, he led the gangsters to $57,000. Bulger then announced, "Bucky's going to go downstairs and lie down for a while," and shot him in the back of the head on the basement stairs. The body fell against Flemmi, who snapped, "You could have shot me!" Flemmi removed Barrett's teeth, and Weeks and Nee dug a grave in the dirt floor.

  On the 30th of November 1984, McIntyre was lured to the same house and confronted by Bulger with a MAC-11. Weeks said Bulger offered to send him to South America with money, if he cut all ties. Bulger concluded McIntyre lacked the discipline. He tried to strangle McIntyre with a boat rope, but it was too thick. He asked, "Do you want one in the head?" McIntyre answered, "Yes, please." Bulger shot him, and McIntyre was buried like Barrett. On the 5th of September 2006, Judge Reginald C. Lindsay ruled the FBI's mishandling of Bulger and Flemmi had caused the killing. He awarded the family $3.1 million and said the Bureau had "stuck its head in the sand."

  On the 14th of January 1985, Bulger strangled Deborah Hussey, Flemmi's 26-year-old stepdaughter, whom he saw as a liability. She knew the gang's dealings and had been naming Bulger and Flemmi to get money from frightened gangsters. Flemmi finished the killing with a rope and a stick. When Michael Nee put the house up for sale, the gangsters exhumed the three bodies and reburied them in a vacant lot on Hallett Street in Dorchester. While Weeks stood guard with a rifle, a young man stopped nearby to urinate and left without noticing. Bulger scolded Weeks for not shooting him, saying there was "plenty of room in the hole."

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• 7. Life on the Run

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  Connolly retired from the FBI in December 1990, and Bulger and Flemmi were closed as informants. In April 1994, the DEA, state police and Boston police formed a task force to probe Bulger's gambling operations, keeping the compromised FBI in the dark. Bookmakers agreed to testify that they had paid him protection money, and a racketeering case took shape. Weeks recalled that in 1993 and 1994 Bulger and Flemmi toured Europe, including the French and Italian Riviera. Weeks saw it as preparation for another life. Bulger had built a false identity, Thomas Baxter, with credit cards and association memberships. He also kept safe deposit boxes of cash, jewelry and passports in Florida, Oklahoma, Montreal, Dublin, London, Birmingham and Venice.

  In December 1994, Connolly warned Bulger that sealed indictments were coming and arrests were planned for the Christmas season. Bulger fled Boston on the 23rd of December 1994 with his common-law wife, Theresa Stanley. In 1995, he and Flemmi were indicted for racketeering, together with Boston mafiosi Frank Salemme and Bobby DeLuca. While listening to a tape from a roving bug, Salemme and DeLuca overheard agents joking about a list of questions to give an informant. Their lawyer, Tony Cardinale, realized the FBI had lied about the bug's basis to protect an informant. Judge Mark L. Wolf ordered informant identities disclosed on the 22nd of May 1997. On the 3rd of June, Justice Department official Paul E. Coffey admitted in a sworn statement that Bulger had been an FBI informant. Press reports soon exposed misconduct by federal, state and local officials with ties to him, embarrassing several agencies.

  Bulger and Stanley spent four days in Selden, New York, then New Year's Day in a New Orleans hotel. On the 5th of January 1995, Bulger prepared to return, believing the warning had been a false alarm. That night, the DEA arrested Flemmi outside a Boston restaurant. Boston police detective Michael Flemmi, Stephen's brother, told Weeks, who passed it to Bulger. After three weeks of travel, Stanley wanted to go home to her children. Bulger collected his Baxter identification in Clearwater, Florida, and dropped her in Boston. At Malibu Beach in Dorchester he met Weeks, who had brought Catherine Greig, Bulger's longtime girlfriend. The two left together. Five years after his flight, Bulger joined the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.

  In Chicago, Weeks met Bulger and Greig. Bulger told him, "If anything comes down, put it on me," and admitted over dinner how tired he was. "Every day out there is another day I beat them," he said. "Every good meal is a meal they can't take away from me." In mid-November 1995, they met for the last time at the lion statues of the New York Public Library's main branch. Bulger repeated that a rolling stone gathers no moss. Weeks sensed he had accepted that he would never come back to South Boston. On the 7th of July 1996, a federal grand jury returned a twenty-nine-count indictment naming Bulger and four other leaders of the Winter Hill Gang and the Patriarca family. On the 23rd of May 2001, a forty-eight-count indictment charged him with Stephen and Michael Flemmi.

  On the 17th of November 1999, the DEA and state police arrested Weeks. He meant to keep South Boston's code of silence even at the risk of dying in prison. In the Wyatt Detention Facility in Rhode Island, a made man from the Patriarca family urged him to cooperate: "Remember, you can't rat on a rat." Weeks struck a deal and revealed the gang's secrets. Writing in 2006, he said Bulger had always declared, "Let's all go to hell together," and meant it.

  The first confirmed sighting came in London in 2002. A businessman watching the film Hannibal recognized Bulger in a photograph during a scene showing the FBI's most wanted website. Agents went to Uruguay on one lead and staked out the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Normandy, since Bulger loved military history. A reported April 2007 sighting in Italy proved false. Two people filmed in Taormina, Sicily, were identified as German tourists. In 2010, the FBI turned to Victoria, British Columbia, visiting bookstores because Bulger was a known book lover. After his arrest, Bulger said he had traveled frequently rather than hiding. An off-duty Boston police officer reported a sighting after a San Diego screening of The Departed, prompting a search in southern California that lasted a few weeks.

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• 8. Capture and Last Days

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  The Bulger Fugitive Task Force, made up of FBI agents and a Deputy U.S. Marshal, finally closed in on him. Retired FBI agent Scott Bakken said a successful fugitive must cut every contact with his previous life, and that Bulger had the means and kept a low profile. The television show America's Most Wanted had featured Bulger sixteen times, first in 1995 and last on the 2nd of October 2010. Authorities said the arrests were a direct result of an FBI media campaign in fourteen television markets where Bulger and Greig had reported ties. It focused on Greig, describing her as an animal lover who often visited beauty salons.

  A tip came from a woman in Iceland, identified by the Boston Globe as Anna Bjornsdottir, a former model and actress who was Miss Iceland 1974. She lived in Bulger's neighborhood and reported him living near a beach in Santa Monica. Agents found more than $800,000 in cash, 30 firearms and fake IDs in the apartment. Carmen Ortiz, U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, said she believed the death penalty was not an option in her district but could apply in two cases elsewhere. Tulsa County District Attorney Tim Harris vowed to hold Bulger accountable for the murder of Roger Wheeler. Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said she wanted a Miami jury to look Bulger in the eye.

  Back in Boston, Bulger began talking to authorities. He said he had often crossed into Mexico to buy medicine for his heart disease. He also said that if he believed he was dying, he planned to hide his body so that authorities would never stop searching. Many expected him to trade information about corruption at every level of government for leniency. On the 6th of July 2011, he pleaded not guilty to 48 charges, including 19 counts of murder. Weeks, surprised by his chattiness, said, "I don't understand because he's not the same as I remember him." In June 2012, Greig pleaded guilty to conspiracy to harbor a fugitive, identity fraud and conspiracy to commit identity fraud. She was sentenced to eight years in prison. Bulger declined to seek bail.

  Bulger's trial began in June 2013 on thirty-two counts of racketeering, money laundering, extortion and weapons charges, including complicity in nineteen murders. Prosecutors relied on grand jury testimony from Weeks and other former associates. On the 12th of August, jurors found him guilty on thirty-one counts, including both racketeering charges, and found him involved in eleven murders. On the 14th of November, Judge Denise J. Casper sentenced him to two consecutive life sentences plus five years. He was held at the United States Penitentiary Coleman II in Sumterville, Florida.

  In October 2018, Bulger was moved first to the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma and then to the United States Penitentiary, Hazelton, near Bruceton Mills, West Virginia. He used a wheelchair. Within hours of arriving at Hazelton on the 30th of October 2018, inmates beat him to death. In 2022, Fotios Geas, Paul DeCologero and Sean McKinnon were charged with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in his death.

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