James 'Whitey' Bulger's life laid bare in courtroom 11: 'no ordinary leader' You suck! Bulger shouted. "---- you, OK?," Weeks replied. "---- you, too," said Bulger. What do you wanna do? Weeks asked, as if starting a pub brawl, before Judge Denise Casper restored order. It was only the latest extraordinary episode in the life of "Whitey," whose trial for 19 murders as part of an alleged multi-million-dollar racketeering operation has shed light on a bygone era of US mobsters. Over the past five weeks, courtroom 11 of the federal court house beside Boston harbour has heard from government prosecutors how Bulger's Winter Hill Gang "ran amok" through the city for decades. "He was no ordinary leader, because he did the dirty work himself," said Brian Kelly, an assistant district attorney. He was a hands-on killer. Bulger and his lieutenants are alleged to have extorted millions from local businesses, while running drug-dealing and illegal property empires. Anyone in their way was allegedly buried under beaches or basements around their South Boston headquarters. With fellow Irish-Americans, Bulger also helped raise millions for the IRA, according to a former partner due to testify in his defence - and orchestrated the infamous seven-ton shipment of arms to the paramilitaries that was intercepted as it was landed from the Valhalla fishing boat in 1984. So notorious were Bulger's exploits that they inspired Martin Scorsese's 2006 film The Departed, in which Jack Nicholson played Frank Costello, a mob boss based on "Whitey." On the gritty streets of "Southie" that Bulger ruled for 20 years, disbelief still reigned last week that this villain-cum-folk-hero had finally been outsmarted by the authorities. Styled by some as a Robin Hood who lavished Thanksgiving dinners on poorer neighbours, Bulger fled Boston in 1994 after a tip-off that he was about to be arrested. But in June 2011, after 12 years on the FBI's most wanted list, he was found in a flat, allegedly packed with a small arsenal of weapons and more than $800,000 (£520,000) in cash, in Santa Monica, California. A renewed publicity drive by the FBI had led a neighbour to suspect and report the apparently genteel retirees, Charlie and Carol Gasko. Bulger was arrested with Catherine Greig, his 62-year-old longtime girlfriend, who was last year sentenced to eight years in prison and fined $150,000 for helping him to avoid capture. While Greig had undergone plastic surgery to look younger, Bulger had grown a neatly-trimmed full white beard - an uninspired disguise compared to those from his glory days. Kevin Weeks, the former protege, told the court last week that his boss had donned a wig and floppy moustache and used a Batmobile-style "hit car" during a brutal drive-by double-shooting in 1982. He allegedly killed Brian "Balloon Head" Halloran, a mobster he suspected of working for the FBI, after Weeks, who was keeping watch, radioed to say "the balloon is rising" as Halloran left a bar. Wearing his disguise, Bulger - who banned associates from using the "Whitey" nickname given to him by police for his youthful shock of blond hair - pulled up and shot both Halloran and his driver. "Brian Halloran went down, and Jim Bulger just kept shooting," Weeks, 57, told the court. His body was bouncing on the ground. Bulger fled in a 1975 Chevrolet Malibu, which had been customised to send out a smokescreen or an oil slick to throw off potential pursuers, the court heard. Weeks said that three years later he was with Bulger and Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi when Bulger strangled Flemmi's stepdaughter Deborah Hussey, 26, who they feared would disclose their activities. After Bulger sat atop Ms Hussey to choke the life from her, Flemmi made sure of it by looping a rope around her neck and twisting it tight with a stick, according to Weeks. Burying Ms Hussey in a shallow grave dug in the dirt floor of a basement, Weeks recalled, he put her body on top of an earlier victim. "We were kind of running out of room down there," he deadpanned. Bulger and Flemmi had already allegedly killed Flemmi's girlfriend, 26-year-old Debra Davis, fearing that she knew too much. Her remains were found in 2000 at a beach, part-preserved by the surrounding salt. Facing the prospect of whiling away the last of his days in prison, Bulger denies all the charges, which include murdering the safe-cracker Arthur "Bucky" Barrett, after torturing him with tooth-removal into disclosing the location of $40,000 stolen from a bank. He is also said to have arranged the assassination of Eddie "The Bulldog" Connors, a boxer-turned-barman close to the Winter Hill Gang, who had bragged openly about helping them organise a "hit." But of his 19 alleged murders, it is the accusation that he was behind the killings of two women that Bulger - who claims his moral code permitted him only to confront men - can least abide. Furthermore, he vehemently denies a prosecution claim, based on a 700-page informant file from the FBI's Boston bureau that he spent years as a top informant for the agency - further breaking his code. It is said that he was handled by John Connolly, an FBI agent who grew up with him in Southie, and who turned a blind eye to his gang's activities in exchange for help in pursuing their mafia rivals. Connolly is himself now serving a life sentence for murder. But Bulger claims the file was fabricated to conceal FBI corruption, and was secretly recorded reiterating this during a phone call from prison to one of his two Harvard-educated brothers. "I bought f---in' information, I didn't sell it," he told John Bulger in September last year. I never gave them f---in' information. Nothin. Nothin'. But among ex-associates now convinced that Bulger was indeed a "rat" is Patrick Nee, a 70-year-old Irishman, who boasts of his work to support the IRA during the 1970s and 80s. "Whitey loved being associated with the IRA," Nee, who is due to testify for Bulger's defence, recalled in his memoir, A Criminal and an Irishman. He liked the legitimacy a political cause gave him. Perhaps not auspiciously for the defence team, Nee describes Bulger as a "paranoid control freak with psychopathic and homicidal tendencies," a closeted homosexual who derived a visible sexual thrill from killing. Bulger's lawyers are expected to press Nee on his own involvement: after being sentenced to 37 years in jail in 1990, he was released after only 10, and has denied rumours that he himself enjoyed special treatment for helping the FBI. Indeed, as at several other points of the trial, the jury of 11 men and seven women may find it difficult to know which of Boston's leading rogues they should believe. Weeks, a key prosecution witness, served only five years for racketeering and aiding five murders, after leading investigators to several bodies and agreeing to testify against Bulger. Yet he furiously maintains he is not a "rat," asking one of Bulger's lawyers in court last week: "Why don't you call me one outside when it's just me and you, and see what I do?" Flemmi, who allegedly helped kill his stepdaughter and girlfriend, is serving a life sentence and escaped the death penalty after agreeing that he, too, would testify against Bulger. If you would benefit from telling a lie, you would tell a lie, wouldn't you? Mr Carney asked Weeks during cross-examination. "Yes - I've been lying my whole life," Weeks replied. I'm a criminal.