James J. Bulger led the Winter Hill Gang, a criminal organization based in South Boston that controlled much of the city and its surrounding area in the 1970s and 1980s. The federal case against it described loansharking, the extortion of business owners and bookmakers, drug trafficking and murder. In late 1994 he learned that an indictment was coming and left Massachusetts. For sixteen years he was one of the most wanted fugitives in the United States, and he was arrested in Santa Monica, California, on June 22, 2011, at the age of 81.
He was tried in the U.S. District Court in Boston in the summer of 2013. On August 12 the jury found him guilty on 31 of 32 counts, including racketeering and racketeering conspiracy. Within the racketeering count the jurors found proved that he had taken part in the murders of eleven people: Deborah Hussey, Paul McGonagle, Edward Connors, Thomas King, Richard Castucci, Roger Wheeler, Brian Halloran, Michael Donahue, John Callahan, Arthur Barrett and John McIntyre. Seven further murder-related acts that prosecutors had charged were found not proved, and on the eighth, the murder of Debra Davis, the jury reached no finding. On November 14, 2013, Judge Denise J. Casper sentenced him to two consecutive life terms plus five years. The First Circuit affirmed the convictions in 2016, and the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal later that year. He died in custody in West Virginia on October 30, 2018, aged 89.
James Joseph Bulger Jr. was born on September 3, 1929, in Dorchester, Massachusetts, one of six children in a Roman Catholic family. He grew up in a South Boston housing project and had his first brush with the law at the age of 14. He served in the Air Force and received an honorable discharge in 1952.
He then turned to crime. He was arrested for bank robberies and other offenses and served a federal sentence, part of it at Alcatraz. After his release he returned to the Boston area and joined the Winter Hill Gang, and in time he took over its leadership from its longtime head.
The 2001 indictment on which Bulger was eventually tried described a conspiracy running from about 1972 to 2000. It began, the indictment said, with an agreement to run a gambling business aimed at people who were not connected to the Mafia. In the 1970s and 1980s the group used violence to collect extortion payments. Later it moved to taking a share of drug profits from dealers and to buying real estate with money from illegal sources.
Bulger's closest partner in the organization was Stephen Flemmi. Flemmi was later indicted alongside him, and he became a witness for the prosecution. At trial he was described as an admitted FBI informant since the 1960s. Whether Bulger himself had been an informant became one of the central quarrels of the case.
The jury's findings on the murders ran in time order, and the earliest of those it found proved came in the mid-1970s. Paul McGonagle died in 1974. Edward Connors and Thomas King died in 1975, and Richard Castucci in 1976. For King the jury found proved both a conspiracy to murder and the murder itself.
The account of this period came largely from John Martorano, a former member of the organization who had admitted to killing twenty people. Martorano testified in June 2013 that Bulger had feared King was talking too much and had been the one to plan the act against him. He said Connors was killed because he was believed to have boasted about helping with another killing. Martorano, then 72, had served twelve years under a cooperation agreement and was released in 2007. He told the court that he had decided to testify after learning that Bulger and Flemmi were informants, which he said "broke my heart."
Roger Wheeler died in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1981. The jury found proved both a conspiracy to murder him and the murder itself, and it found a role for Bulger in the death. At the trial one of Wheeler's daughters testified on July 17, 2013, about the months before her father's death.
The next year brought three further deaths that the jury found proved. On May 11, 1982, Brian Halloran and Michael Donahue died together in Boston. Prosecutors alleged that Halloran had been the target, after he offered to cooperate with the FBI, and Donahue was killed with him. Kevin Weeks, a former associate who had worked with Bulger for some twenty years, testified on July 8, 2013, that Bulger had asked him to take part. Donahue's widow told the court that she had wanted to know why law enforcement took so long to tell her what had happened to her husband. John Callahan also died in 1982, and for him, as for King and Wheeler, the jury found proved both the conspiracy and the murder.
Arthur Barrett died in 1983, John McIntyre, who was 32, in 1984, and Deborah Hussey, who was 26, in 1985. For all three the jury found the murder proved, and the evidence on them came largely from Stephen Flemmi, testifying for the prosecution.
Debra Davis, who was 26 when she died in 1981, was the one charged death on which the jury could not agree. Her brother told the court on July 12, 2013, "She was a beautiful young woman."
In late 1994 Bulger was told that an indictment was imminent. A former FBI agent warned him, the First Circuit later recounted. He left Massachusetts, stayed briefly in New York and Chicago, and then settled in Santa Monica. Flemmi and Martorano were arrested in January 1995, and both later cooperated with the government.
For the next sixteen years Bulger lived under a false name. The FBI placed him on its Ten Most Wanted list and, in the end, offered a reward of up to $2 million, the largest it had ever offered for a domestic fugitive on that list. A publicity campaign by the FBI prompted a tip that led to his capture.
He was arrested by an FBI task force in Santa Monica on Wednesday, June 22, 2011.
The case that went to trial rested on a 2001 indictment of 32 counts. The racketeering count alleged 33 acts, among them nineteen murders, along with extortion, narcotics distribution and money laundering. Further counts concerned money laundering and five other offenses. Bulger pleaded not guilty to everything.
The case was first assigned to Judge Richard Stearns. After Bulger petitioned for his recusal, the First Circuit found in 2013 that there was no actual bias, but held that a reasonable person might question the judge's impartiality, and the judge stepped aside. The case then went to Judge Casper.
Before the trial Bulger's lawyers said he had been promised immunity by a former federal prosecutor, Jeremiah O'Sullivan, who had headed the New England Organized Crime Strike Force and who had died. The claimed grant dated from before 1984 and ran until O'Sullivan left the U.S. Attorney's Office in 1989. Judge Casper ruled that such a promise would not be a legal defense to crimes including murder, and the First Circuit later described how the claim had failed: there was only Bulger's assertion, with no evidence that the promise came from someone with authority to make it, and a senior Justice Department official had stated that O'Sullivan had no such authority. Bulger declined an evidentiary hearing.
Jury selection took more than a week, from a pool of more than 800 people, and produced twelve jurors and six alternates. Opening statements were made on Wednesday, June 12, 2013. Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Kelly described the defendant as a "hands-on killer" and said the case covered organized crime, public corruption, extortion, drug dealing, money laundering and murder. The defense lawyer, J.W. Carney Jr., denied that Bulger had ever been an informant and said he had paid a former top Boston FBI agent to protect an operation in bookmaking, loansharking and drug trafficking. "If he ever was going to be indicted," Carney said, "he wanted a heads-up so he could leave town." Families of those named in the indictment filled the courtroom. The trial had been expected to last about four months and to hear more than a hundred witnesses.
Martorano was the first major witness, on June 18. Under cross-examination by Carney, who pointed to the "extraordinary" plea agreements the government had made with witnesses, Martorano answered, "I think anyone who has to kill anyone has to lie." Weeks followed on July 8, and relatives of the dead testified on July 12. Wheeler's daughter was called on July 17. Flemmi testified later in July.
The defense case was short. A retired FBI supervisor told the jury that when he reviewed Bulger's informant file in 1979 he had judged it "worthless" and recommended that it be closed. On July 31 the question of whether Bulger would testify was still open. On Friday, August 2, he told the judge, outside the jury's presence, that his decision not to testify was made "involuntarily," that he had been "choked off from having an opportunity to give an adequate defense," and that the trial was a sham. The defense then rested. Martorano testified again that day, this time for the defense.
The jurors began deliberating on a Tuesday and returned their verdict on Monday, August 12, 2013, after more than 32 hours. Bulger, who was 83, showed no reaction. On the racketeering count the jury had to find only two of the alleged acts proved, and it found many more. It found him guilty on Count 2, racketeering, and on the racketeering conspiracy count, on Count 3, extortion conspiracy, on the money laundering conspiracy and money laundering counts, Counts 5 to 27, and on Counts 28 to 32. On Count 4, a charge of extortion, it found him not guilty.
On the murder acts the jury's findings were exact. It found proved the murders of Paul McGonagle, Edward Connors, Thomas King (with conspiracy), Richard Castucci, Roger Wheeler (with conspiracy), Brian Halloran, Michael Donahue, John Callahan (with conspiracy), Arthur Barrett, John McIntyre and Deborah Hussey. It found not proved the acts charged in connection with Michael Milano, Al Plummer, William O'Brien, James O'Toole, Al Notorangeli, James Sousa and Francis Leonard, and the conspiracy to murder the Notorangeli group. On the murder of Debra Davis it made no finding. It found proved extortion acts concerning five named people and a narcotics conspiracy, and it did not find proved two further extortion acts.
Sentencing took place on Thursday, November 14, 2013. Judge Casper imposed two consecutive life terms plus five years and ordered $19.5 million in restitution. She told Bulger that "the scope, the callousness, the depravity of your crimes are almost unfathomable." Bulger declined to take part in the two-day hearing, which his lawyers called a sham, and spoke only once, to answer "Yes" when asked whether he understood that he could appeal. A son of Michael Donahue said the sentence offered a start toward closure, and a son of Al Notorangeli, whose death the jury had not held Bulger responsible for, said he had wanted accountability and believed he had received it.
Bulger's appeal was argued before Circuit Judges Thompson, Kayatta and Barron, and on March 4, 2016, the First Circuit affirmed the convictions in an opinion written by Judge Thompson. His lawyers argued that the trial judge should have let him tell the jury about the claimed immunity, and that she had decided the issue before trial and wrongly. They argued that the government had withheld material about Martorano's agreement and had elicited misleading testimony, that a defense witness had been wrongly excluded, and that the prosecutors' objections during the trial were misconduct. The court found the immunity claim properly decided and rejected on the evidence, found the other claims unpersuasive or waived, found no prejudicial misconduct, and rejected a claim of cumulative error.
Bulger's lawyer filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court on August 11, 2016, repeating the immunity and disclosure arguments. On October 3, 2016, the justices declined to hear the case, without comment, leaving the convictions and the sentence in place. By then Bulger was 87.
Bulger died in custody in West Virginia on October 30, 2018. He was 89. The Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed the death.
The main count against Bulger was brought under the federal racketeering statute, which Congress enacted as part of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970. Section 1962 forbids, among other things, conducting or participating in an enterprise's affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity, and conspiring to do so. An enterprise includes any group of individuals associated in fact, even if it is not a legal entity. A pattern requires at least two acts of racketeering activity, the last within ten years of a prior act. The listed acts include any act or threat involving murder, extortion, gambling and other offenses. The penalty is up to twenty years for each violation, or life if one of the underlying offenses carries a life sentence.
This structure explains how the verdict was written. The jurors were not asked to return eleven separate murder convictions. They were asked to decide, act by act, which of the 33 alleged acts had been proved, knowing that two were enough for the racketeering count. The verdict form therefore lists murders as proved, not proved or not decided, while the counts themselves are for racketeering, extortion, money laundering and the offenses numbered 28 to 32.
Seven murder-related acts charged in the racketeering count, from the years 1973 to 1975, were found not proved, and Bulger is not convicted of those deaths. The FBI had once linked him with as many as twenty killings, and the indictment charged nineteen; the jury found eleven proved.
On Debra Davis the jury could not agree and made no finding, so Bulger is not convicted of her death.
Bulger's lawyers said he had never been an FBI informant and that he had instead paid a former agent for protection. The First Circuit's opinion describes the informant relationship, which it dates to about 1975, as an allegation.
The immunity claim was never put to the jury. The trial judge held that it could not be a defense to murder, and the First Circuit held that Bulger had offered no evidence that the promise existed or that it came from someone entitled to make it.
Bulger denied having killed either Deborah Hussey or Debra Davis. The jury found the death of Deborah Hussey proved as one of the acts on which it convicted him.
September 3, 1929: Born in Dorchester, Massachusetts.
1952: Honorable discharge from the Air Force.
1972: The indictment's conspiracy period begins.
1974: Death of Paul McGonagle (found proved).
1975: Deaths of Edward Connors and Thomas King (found proved).
1976: Death of Richard Castucci (found proved).
1981: Death of Roger Wheeler in Tulsa, Oklahoma (found proved); death of Debra Davis (no finding).
May 11, 1982: Brian Halloran and Michael Donahue die in Boston (found proved); John Callahan also dies in 1982 (found proved).
1983: Death of Arthur Barrett (found proved).
1984: Death of John McIntyre (found proved).
1985: Death of Deborah Hussey (found proved).
Late 1994: Leaves Massachusetts as an indictment is expected.
January 1995: Flemmi and Martorano arrested.
2001: Indictment of 32 counts.
June 22, 2011: Arrested in Santa Monica, California.
June 12, 2013: Trial opens in the U.S. District Court, Boston.
August 12, 2013: Jury verdict, guilty on 31 of 32 counts.
November 14, 2013: Sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus five years.
March 4, 2016: First Circuit affirms the convictions.
October 3, 2016: U.S. Supreme Court declines review.
October 30, 2018: Dies in custody in West Virginia, aged 89.