James "Whitey" Bulger, the mobster who terrorised South Boston in the 1970s and 1980s and ran the city's notorious Winter Hill Gang, was found guilty yesterday of gangland crimes, including murder.
Bulger (83) faces a sentence of life in prison. He showed no reaction and looked away from the jury as the verdicts were being read. Judge Denise Casper set sentencing for November 13th.
The verdict delivered long-delayed justice to Bulger, who disappeared in 1995 after a corrupt agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation told him he was about to be indicted. When he fled, he left behind a city that wondered if he would ever be caught – and even if the FBI, which had been complicit in many of his crimes, was really looking for him.
Bulger ran the “Winter Hill” crime gang after coming to power in a mob war that resulted in the death of members of rival gangs. He cemented his grip on Boston’s crime scene through ties with corrupt FBI officials who shared his Irish ethnicity and turned a blind eye to his crimes in exchange for information they could use against the Italian Mafia.
Bulger was on the run for 16 years, until the authorities found him in 2011 in Santa Monica, California, with an arsenal of weapons and $822,000 in cash secreted in the walls of his retirement bungalow. His capture was the beginning of the end of the Bulger saga. The trial was the final reckoning for a man small in stature but large in legend, who held the city in his thrall even in his absence, even after ruining hundreds of lives and deepening the stain on Boston’s already corrupt federal law enforcement bureaucracy.
After the verdict was read Bulger stood with his hands folded, watching the jurors leave the courtroom. He had spent much of the trial scribbling on a yellow legal pad, perhaps for an appeal or a memoir, or maybe just for something to do. Some of the witnesses, particularly those who were testifying against him, had made him bristle with anger and, on a few occasions, he exchanged obscenities with them, as if the courtroom were a schoolyard.
In his last few appearances in court, after deciding that he would not take the stand in his own defence, Bulger seemed defeated. He slumped more in his chair. He did not take notes as vigorously. The guilty verdicts bring down the curtain on the city's most notorious gangster and a reign of terror enabled by the FBI. – (New York Times/Reuters)