(CNN) James "Whitey" Bulger, the notorious and much-feared former Boston mob boss, was killed Tuesday morning at the US Penitentiary Hazelton in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia, officials told CNN.

"He lived violently and he apparently died violently," said Dick Lehr, author of "Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss."

"It marks the full circle of a terrible life."

The FBI is investigating the death, which occurred a day after his transfer to the West Virginia facility, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

"Hopefully the seven years he spent in prison as well as his recent death brings some closure to the families of his many victims," Brian Kelly, one of the former federal prosecutors who tried Bulger, said in a statement.

Bulger, 89, was found unresponsive at 8:20 a.m., according to a statement from the prisons bureau. He was pronounced dead by the Preston County medical examiner after failed lifesaving measures. No staff or other inmates were injured, the prisons bureau said.

The circumstances of this week's transfer remain unclear. Bulger had also been housed at federal penitentiaries in Oklahoma and Tucson, Arizona.

"He was sentenced to life in prison, but as a result of decisions by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, that sentence has been changed to the death penalty," defense attorney J.W. Carney Jr. said in a statement, referring for his former client. He declined further comment.

This mugshot shows James "Whitey" Bulger in March 1953.

Bulger, who eluded federal authorities for more than 16 years before his arrest in June 2011, was serving the rest of his life in prison for a litany of crimes that included his role in 11 murders.

He was sentenced in November 2013 to two life terms plus five years as architect of a criminal enterprise that, in the words of a federal judge, committed "unfathomable" acts that terrorized a city.

A federal jury convicted Bulger that year of 31 counts, including racketeering, extortion, money laundering, drug dealing and weapons possession. The jury found him culpable in 11 killings from 1973 through 1985.

His death marks a final chapter in the life of one of the country's most infamous criminals, federal informants and fugitives.

"We received word this morning about the death of James 'Whitey' Bulger," US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Andrew Lelling said in a statement. "Our thoughts are with his victims and their families."

Former US Attorney Carmen Ortiz, who led Bulger's prosecution said, "Now with his death, I hope the notoriety of Whitey Bulger does not take away the focus from the victims and their families. I am hoping this is the end of a very sad chapter in Boston's history, during which this man caused so much harm to many through his brutal crimes."

"It's a happy day," Steven Davis told CNN on Tuesday. His sister Debra was the girlfriend of Bulger partner Steve "The Rifleman" Flemmi , who testified that he lured her to a house where Bulger strangled her.

"He had it coming to him and it's just sad that it took so long," Steven Davis said of Bulger. "He didn't have the right to live as long as he did."

A man who lived by violence, vengeance and intimidation, Bulger would not make eye contact at his sentencing with the relatives of the people he'd killed, nor those who were slain by his accomplices in the treacherous Winter Hill Gang.

As they called him a coward, a rat, a punk and Satan, Bulger kept his head down and showed no emotion as he scribbled on a pad. The statements of victims chronicled some of the darkest years of Boston history.

"The testimony of human suffering that you and your associates inflicted on others was at times agonizing to hear and painful to watch," US District Judge Denise Casper said at the hearing. "At times, I wish we were watching a movie, that what we were hearing was not real. But as the families of victims know all too well, it's not a movie."

At his trial, Bulger snarled, hissed and scowled at prosecutors and witnesses. At one point, he and onetime enforcer Kevin Weeks shouted obscenities at each other when Weeks called Bulger a "rat" during his testimony.

Bulger was captured in California a decade and a half after skipping town ahead of a pending indictment.

His girlfriend, Catherine Greig, was sentenced to eight years in federal prison in 2012 for identity fraud and helping the mob boss avoid capture. They lived as Charlie and Carol Gasko in Santa Monica, in what Bulger would later describe as a "16-year honeymoon."

After fleeing Massachusetts, investigators learned that the longtime South Boston gang leader had been an FBI informant and that Bulger's FBI handler had not only tipped him off to the charges but also gave up another informant, who was later killed.

Bulger's brother William, meanwhile, had risen from the family's blue-collar Irish neighborhood to become president of the Massachusetts Senate and head of the University of Massachusetts. But he was forced to resign from the school in 2003 after admitting to a congressional committee he had spoken to his brother while he was on the run, though he denied any knowledge of his sibling's whereabouts or alleged criminal activity.

Whitey Bulger denied being an informant, even as he insisted he'd had an immunity deal with the former head of the Justice Department's Organized Crime Strike Force in New England. Prosecutors countered that with a 700-page file outlining how Bulger provided information on murders, drug deals, armed robberies and criminal fugitives that led to several arrests.

Bulger's story became the partial inspiration for the 2006 Oscar-winning film "The Departed," which starred Jack Nicholson as a character modeled on Bulger. In 2015, actor Johnny Depp played Bulger in the film "Black Mass."

In 2016, auctioned items seized from Bulger's Santa Monica apartment raised almost $110,000 to compensate victims' families.

Bulger was born September 3, 1929, in Boston.

The US Penitentiary Hazelton is a high-security facility housing 1,270 male offenders at Federal Correctional Complex Hazelton.</s>At the peak of his nefarious career, James “Whitey” Bulger, the long-ago murderous Boston mob boss, wasn’t one to dwell on his mistakes, even when he killed the wrong guy a few times. For back then, as whispers had it, Whitey was untouchable.

However, in 2015, after three schoolgirls wrote to him in prison as part of a history project, seeking his views on “leadership” and “legacy,” the octogenarian ex-gangster, a ninth-grade dropout, responded with a rueful letter.

In the Coleman II federal penitentiary in Florida, he filled a sheet of college-ruled notebook paper with tidy cursive, lamenting, “My life was wasted and spent foolishly, brought shame + suffering on my parents and siblings and will end soon.”

Now it has.

Mr. Bulger, whose bloody reign in the Boston underworld was aided by crooked FBI agents in the 1980s and who later went on the lam for 16 years, living incognito by the California seashore, was found dead Oct. 30 while completing the first of his two life sentences. He was 89.

The Bureau of Prisons confirmed Tuesday that Mr. Bulger was found unresponsive at a penitentiary in Bruceton Mills, W.Va. After responding staff members attempted lifesaving measures, he was pronounced dead by the county medical examiner. No other details were immediately available.

Although notorious in Boston, Mr. Bulger was largely unknown to the wider world until after he disappeared in 1994. In his absence, his darkest secrets, including his corrupt ties with FBI agents, were gradually laid bare in court hearings, media exposés and a congressional inquiry. He became a nationwide curiosity, sharing space with Osama bin Laden on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list.

Captured in Santa Monica, Calif., in 2011, Mr. Bulger was sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus five years after a Boston jury convicted him of 31 racketeering offenses. The indictment against him catalogued 19 alleged murders, and he was found guilty of ordering or carrying out 11 of them.

The verdicts, in 2013, climaxed a gangland opera of fealty and betrayal that spanned half a century and combined two of Boston’s abiding fixations: ethnic crime and politics.

Mr. Bulger, dubbed Whitey in his fair-haired youth, was a brother of William M. “Billy” Bulger, a longtime Democratic state lawmaker and iron-fisted boss of Massachusetts government. Theirs was a family epic — a tale of two siblings, each ruthless in his own way, and each ever loyal to the other, who climbed to power by different means from a hardscrabble beginning in insular, working-class South Boston.

On Boston’s Beacon Hill, William Bulger, an erudite lawyer schooled in classic literature, dominated the statehouse as Senate president for 18 years, while the shadowy, menacing Whitey, once a bank robber and Alcatraz inmate, loomed over the streets below, a czar of bookmaking, loan-sharking, extortion and drug distribution.

After Whitey skipped town in late 1994, a step ahead of an indictment, it came to light that throughout the 1980s, in his racketeering heyday, he had been listed in FBI records as a confidential “top echelon informant” for agents in Boston.

The Irish Godfather, recruited to snitch on his competitors in the Mafia, had also regularly lavished his FBI handlers with illicit cash and gifts. And the agents, for their part, had connived to shield him from law enforcement interference, allowing a homicidal mob kingpin to operate with virtual impunity for years.

The news that America’s top crime-fighting agency had been in cahoots with Boston’s most vicious gangster embroiled the FBI in scandal. Meanwhile, the revelation that Whitey had trampled on the underworld’s cherished conceit about a code of silence ruined the ex-boss’ good name among his peers.

Testifying at Whitey’s 2013 trial, his former chief leg-breaker, Kevin Weeks, voiced the hoodlum community’s dismay at Mr. Bulger’s perfidy.

To Whitey’s old cronies, it made no difference that he had supposedly dished dirt only on their Italian American rivals. As a matter of principle, “we used to kill people that were rats,” Weeks told the jury, evincing disgust that, unbeknown to him in the 1980s, one of “the biggest rats” had been “right next to me.”

Hearing this, Whitey interrupted from the defendant’s table, yelling at the much younger Weeks, “You suck!”

“F--- you!” retorted the erstwhile henchman, who had once been like a sociopathic son to Mr. Bulger.

“F--- you, too!” Whitey shouted, before the judge barked, “Hey!”

Most of Mr. Bulger’s murder victims were enemy thugs or duplicitous underlings, but some of the 19 killings he was accused of were collateral damage or cases of mistaken identity. Whitey, a blue-collar Godfather, often rolled up his sleeves and did the dirty work himself. “He stabbed people; he beat people with bats; he shot people, strangled people, run them over with cars,” Weeks said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in 2006.

There were innocent “civilians” among the slain, as well, notably Roger Wheeler, a wealthy Oklahoma entrepreneur who refused to sell his East Coast jai alai frontons to cohorts of Mr. Bulger. After a round of golf one day in 1981, Wheeler, 55, was ambushed by a Bulger hit man in the parking lot of a Tulsa country club and shot between the eyes.

The FBI agents in league with Whitey back then effectively ignored the continuing bloodshed.

Mr. Bulger had stashed away a fortune in cash in case he had to retire from organized crime in a hurry. Starting in 1997, a few years after he vanished, he and a Boston girlfriend, Catherine Greig, lived comfortably in an apartment near the Santa Monica beach, posing as Midwest retirees Charlie and Carol Gasko.

Then, in 2011, a favorite South Boston guessing game — “Where’s Whitey?” — abruptly ended with a phone call to authorities from an ex-beauty queen: Anna Bjornsdottir, Miss Iceland 1974, had seen age-enhanced images of Mr. Bulger and his moll on TV and recognized the couple as neighbors of hers in Santa Monica.

Bjornsdottir collected a $2 million federal reward. As for Greig, now 67, she got prison terms totaling nearly a decade for helping Whitey dodge justice and for dutifully keeping her mouth shut afterward — refusing to testify before a grand jury about others who might have aided Mr. Bulger as a fugitive.

[Charles Manson, cult leader and murder-rampage mastermind who terrified nation, dies at 83]

James Joseph Bulger Jr. was born Sept. 3, 1929, in Everett, Mass., across the Mystic River from Boston. When he was a child, his family moved to public housing in South Boston, or “Southie,” as it’s known. For most of his life, the neighborhood was a hard-knocks Irish American stronghold steeped in an ethos of us-against-the-world.

His father, who had one arm, eked out a living in low-end jobs while young Whitey went around stealing with both hands. He graduated to bank robbery in the mid-1950s and landed behind bars, eventually in Alcatraz, with a 20-year sentence.

Not long afterward, his kid brother Billy began a career in the state legislature that would last 35 years and make him the most enduringly powerful figure of his era in Massachusetts government. “What Whitey does with a gun, Billy does with a gavel,” a political foe once remarked.

William Bulger steadfastly looked out for his incarcerated brother’s well-being, enlisting help from another son of Southie, John W. McCormack, the neighborhood’s 21-term Democratic congressman who was U.S. House speaker for most of the 1960s.

In Washington, McCormack, who died in 1980, made it clear to federal prison officials that he was keenly interested in the welfare of his constituent James Bulger, according to a stack of books about Whitey. The authors include current and former Boston Globe journalists Kevin Cullen, Shelley Murphy, Dick Lehr and Gerald O’Neill, all prolific chroniclers of the Bulger clan.

With the two politicians, one a titan, advocating for him, Whitey was transferred out of Alcatraz in 1962 and paroled three years later. Back home, he found a niche as an entry-level enforcer in the Southie rackets and rose fast. Through treachery, intimidation and murder, he muscled his way to criminal dominion over a large share of the region.

When his secret alliance with the FBI began, in 1975, two rival groups stood supreme in the Boston underworld: the local Mafia franchise, ruled by brothers named Angiulo in the city’s North End, and Mr. Bulger’s fearsome outfit, known as the Winter Hill Gang.

In those days, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was intent on crushing the Italian American mob nationwide. Whitey was recruited to inform on the Angiulos by a Southie-bred agent, John J. Connolly Jr., who was a protege and longtime friend of soon-to-be Senate President William Bulger. Over the years, while the crime boss was on the FBI’s books as a snitch, the relationship devolved into one of payoffs and protection.

Prosecutors said Connolly, who pocketed about a quarter-million dollars in bribes, schemed to thwart investigations of the Winter Hill crew and alerted the boss to turncoats in his midst, occasionally with lethal results. Finally, in December 1994, as a grand jury was about to indict Mr. Bulger, Connolly gave him a heads-up, and the gangster beat feet, eventually to his West Coast hideaway.

The disgraced former agent, now 78 , got a 10-year prison term for racketeering and other crimes and was sentenced to an additional 40 years for complicity in a 1982 mob hit. In that one, a potential witness against Whitey wound up dead in a Cadillac trunk at Miami International Airport.

Mr. Bulger’s survivors include three siblings, one of them William Bulger, who retired from the legislature in 1996 and became president of the state’s University of Massachusetts system. He has always been publicly reticent about Whitey, saying little more than that “Jim” was his brother and he loved him.

After invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination at a 2002 congressional hearing on the FBI scandal, William Bulger was granted immunity by a House committee and forced to answer questions. His grudging testimony, ridiculed in Massachusetts, sparked months of political warfare between him and then-Gov. Mitt Romney (R), who pressured the ex-lawmaker into resigning his university post.

William Bulger told the House panel that he had spoken by phone with his fugitive brother but didn’t know where he was. And in the tight-lipped manner of an old-school Southie stalwart, he professed to know little about Whitey’s former livelihood.

“It was vague to me,” he said at the hearing.

As for Whitey, in a documentary produced after his arrest, he acknowledged bribing federal agents but indignantly denied being “a rat.” Despite a 700-page FBI informant file bearing his name, he insisted that the underworld ethic against snitching was sacred to him and that the file was a pack of lies, a big smear by the feds.

At his trial, though, when he could have taken the witness stand to defend his integrity as a gangster, Mr. Bulger opted not to testify, telling the judge, “Do what youse want with me.”</s>
• Bulger was listed as a transfer to the high-security USP Hazelton in West Virginia, earlier on Tuesday.
• Bulger, 89, was serving a life sentence after being convicted of killing at least 11 people.

Notorious Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger has been found dead in a West Virginia prison, according to multiple reports.

Bulger was listed as a transfer to the high-security USP Hazelton in West Virginia earlier on Tuesday.

The news was first reported by Boston-based reporter Michele McPhee, and later confirmed by NBC News.

President of the corrections officers' union at Hazelton, Richard Heldreth, told WVNews that a male inmate had been killed over night but did not confirm the man's identity.

Bulger, 89, was serving a life sentence after being convicted of killing at least 11 people.

He had recently been moved from Florida to a transfer facility in Oklahoma City before moving to West Virginia, according to DailyMail.com.</s>BRUCETON MILLS, W.Va. — James "Whitey" Bulger, the murderous Boston gangster who benefited from a corrupt relationship with the FBI before spending 16 years as one of America's most wanted men, died in federal prison. He was 89.

Bulger was found unresponsive Tuesday morning at the U.S. penitentiary in West Virginia where he'd just been transferred, and a medical examiner declared him dead shortly afterward, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Authorities did not immediately release a cause of death but said the FBI was notified and is investigating.

Bulger, the model for Jack Nicholson's ruthless crime boss in the 2006 Martin Scorsese movie, "The Departed," led a largely Irish mob that ran loan-sharking, gambling and drug rackets. He also was an FBI informant who ratted on the New England mob, his gang's main rival, in an era when bringing down the Mafia was a top national priority for the FBI.

Bulger fled Boston in late 1994 after his FBI handler, John Connolly Jr., warned him he was about to be indicted. With a $2 million reward on his head, Bulger became one of the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted" criminals, with a place just below Osama bin Laden.

There was no love lost for Bulger on the Boston streets he once ruled.

Patricia Donahue's husband, Michael, was killed in 1982 when he offered a ride home to a man allegedly targeted for death by Bulger because he was talking to the FBI. "I'd like to open up a champagne bottle and celebrate," she told WBZ-TV on Tuesday.

Tom Duffy, a retired state police detective who searched for Bulger and was a consultant on "The Departed," called word of Bulger's death "celebratory news."

When the extent of his crimes and the FBI's role in overlooking them became public in the late 1990s, Bulger became a source of embarrassment for the FBI. During the years he was a fugitive, the FBI battled a public perception that it had not tried very hard to find him.

After more than 16 years on the run, Bulger was captured at age 81 in Santa Monica, California, where he had been living in a rent-controlled apartment near the beach with his longtime girlfriend, Catherine Greig.

In 2013, he was convicted in the slayings, as well as extortion, and money-laundering after a sensational racketeering trial that included graphic testimony from three former Bulger cohorts: a hit man, a protege and a partner. He was sentenced nearly five years ago to two consecutive life sentences plus five years.

Bulger had just been moved to USP Hazelton, a high-security prison with an adjacent minimum security satellite camp in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia. He had been in a prison in Florida before a stopover at a transfer facility in Oklahoma City. Federal Bureau of Prisons officials and his attorney had declined to comment on why he was being moved.

Bulger, nicknamed "Whitey" for his bright platinum hair, grew up in a gritty South Boston housing project and became known as one of the most ruthless gangsters in Boston. His younger brother, William Bulger, became one of the most powerful politicians in Massachusetts, leading the state Senate for 17 years.

In working-class "Southie," Bulger was known for helping old ladies across the street and giving turkey dinners to his neighbors at Thanksgiving. He had a kind of Robin Hood-like image among some locals, but authorities said he would put a bullet in the brain of anyone who he even suspected of double-crossing him.

"You could go back in the annals of criminal history and you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone as diabolical as Bulger," said Duffy.

"Killing people was his first option. They don't get any colder than him," Duffy said after Bulger was finally captured in June 2011.

Bulger was accused of strangling Debra Davis, the 26-year-old girlfriend of his partner, Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi, and Deborah Hussey, also 26, the daughter of Flemmi's common-law wife. In both cases, Bulger insisted on pulling out the women's teeth so they would be difficult to identify, Flemmi testified.

During a search of his Santa Monica apartment, agents found over $800,000 in cash and more than 30 guns, many hidden in holes in the walls. A property manager at the building said Bulger and Greig, who used the names Charles and Carol Gasko, had lived there for 15 years and always paid the rent-controlled rate of $1,145 a month in cash.

They were caught days after the FBI began a new publicity campaign focusing on Greig. The daytime TV announcements showed photos of Greig and noted that she was known to frequent beauty salons and have her teeth cleaned once a month.

A woman from Iceland who knew Bulger and Greig in Santa Monica saw a report on CNN about the latest publicity campaign and called in the tip that led agents to them. The Boston Globe identified the tipster as a former Miss Iceland, a former actress who starred in Noxzema shaving cream commercials in the 1970s.

Greig is still serving her sentence at a federal prison in Minnesota.

Bulger, a physical fitness buff, had been taken to a Boston hospital from his jail cell at least three times, complaining of chest pains, since being brought back to Boston to stand trial.

Associated Press writers Eric Tucker in Washington, John Raby in Charleston, West Virginia, and William J. Kole in Boston contributed to this report.

Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.</s>James "Whitey" Bulger, the notorious Boston mob boss and one-time FBI informant, died Tuesday after being found unresponsive at a West Virginia federal prison, authorities said.

Life-saving measures were initiated on Bulger, 89, after he was found at 8:20 a.m. at the high-security Hazelton federal prison in Bruceton Mills.

There was no immediate word on the cause of death, but a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice noted that "no staff or other inmates were injured, and at no time was the public in danger."

Bulger died a day after he was transferred to the Hazelton prison. Up until recently, he had been serving his life sentence at a federal prison in Sumterville, Florida.

Bulger was convicted in 2013 of murdering 11 people, as well as extortion, money laundering and weapons charges.

The trial came nearly 20 years after he went on the run after being tipped off to a pending federal indictment by a corrupt FBI agent.

He spent 16 years on the lam and was arrested in 2011 in Santa Monica, California.

Before his capture, Bulger was second only to Osama Bin Laden on the FBI's Most Wanted List.

This story is developing. Please check back for more updates.</s>BRUCETON MILLS, WV. - Infamous Boston mobster James "Whitey" Bulger was killed at a maximum security prison in West Virginia, according to The Boston Globe.

Bulger had just been moved to Hazelton Penitentiary in West Virginia, known as one of the roughest prisons in the country.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons online inmate log on Tuesday listed Bulger as an inmate at USP Hazelton, a high-security prison with an adjacent minimum security satellite camp in Bruceton Mills.

The 89-year-old Bulger had recently been moved from a prison in Florida to a transfer facility in Oklahoma City.

Bureau of Prisons officials and his attorney declined last week to comment on why he was being moved.

Bulger was serving a life sentence after being convicted in 2013 of a litany of crimes, including participating in 11 murders. He was one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives for 16 years until his 2011 arrest in Santa Monica, California.

Copyright 2018 by WDIV ClickOnDetroit. The Associated Press contributed to this report. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.</s>This June 23, 2011, file booking photo provided by the U.S. Marshals Service shows James “Whitey” Bulger. (U.S. Marshals Service via AP, File)

James “Whitey” Bulger, the murderous Boston gangster who benefited from a corrupt relationship with the FBI before spending 16 years as one of America’s most wanted men, died in federal prison. He was 89.

Bulger was found unresponsive Tuesday morning at the U.S. penitentiary in West Virginia where he’d just been transferred, and a medical examiner declared him dead shortly afterward, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Authorities did not immediately release a cause of death but said the FBI was notified and is investigating.

Bulger, the model for Jack Nicholson’s ruthless crime boss in the 2006 Martin Scorsese movie, “The Departed,” led a largely Irish mob that ran loan-sharking, gambling and drug rackets. He also was an FBI informant who ratted on the New England mob, his gang’s main rival, in an era when bringing down the Mafia was a top national priority for the FBI.

Bulger fled Boston in late 1994 after his FBI handler, John Connolly Jr., warned him he was about to be indicted. With a $2 million reward on his head, Bulger became one of the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” criminals, with a place just below Osama bin Laden.

When the extent of his crimes and the FBI’s role in overlooking them became public in the late 1990s, Bulger became a source of embarrassment for the FBI. During the years he was a fugitive, the FBI battled a public perception that it had not tried very hard to find him.

After more than 16 years on the run, Bulger was captured at age 81 in Santa Monica, California, where he had been living in a rent-controlled apartment near the beach with his longtime girlfriend, Catherine Greig.

In 2013, he was convicted in the slayings, as well as extortion, and money-laundering after a sensational racketeering trial that included graphic testimony from three former Bulger cohorts: a hit man, a protege and a partner. He was sentenced nearly five years ago to two consecutive life sentences plus five years.

Bulger had just been moved to USP Hazelton, a high-security prison with an adjacent minimum security satellite camp in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia. He had been in a prison in Florida before a stopover at a transfer facility in Oklahoma City. Federal Bureau of Prisons officials and his attorney had declined to comment on why he was being moved.

Bulger, nicknamed “Whitey” for his bright platinum hair, grew up in a gritty South Boston housing project and became known as one of the most ruthless gangsters in Boston. His younger brother, William Bulger, became one of the most powerful politicians in Massachusetts, leading the state Senate for 17 years.

In working-class “Southie,” Jim Bulger was known for helping old ladies across the street and giving turkey dinners to his neighbours at Thanksgiving. He had a kind of Robin Hood-like image among some locals, but authorities said he would put a bullet in the brain of anyone who he even suspected of double-crossing him.

“You could go back in the annals of criminal history and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone as diabolical as Bulger,” said Tom Duffy, a retired state police major who investigated Bulger.

“Killing people was his first option. They don’t get any colder than him,” Duffy said after Bulger was finally captured in June 2011.

Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter</s>(Reuters) - James “Whitey” Bulger, who lived a double life as one of Boston’s most notorious mobsters and as a secret FBI informant, was found dead at age 89 on Tuesday a day after being transferred to a federal prison in West Virginia, the Federal Bureau of Prisons said.

Federal officials did not give a cause of death, saying an investigation was under way. CNN and the Boston Globe reported that Bulger was killed after being transferred to the Hazelton penitentiary from another prison in Florida, without giving further details.

The Bureau of Prisons also said that no other inmates or staff were injured and the Federal Bureau of Investigation is now investigating his death.

Henry Brennan, a defense lawyer for Bulger, said in an email he could not confirm or deny the reports.

Bulger was convicted in August 2013 of 11 murders, among other charges including racketeering, and sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus five years.

Prison had been something Bulger had gone to great lengths to avoid - killing potential witnesses, cultivating corrupt lawmen and living as a fugitive for 16 years. It all ended when a tip from a former Icelandic beauty queen led to his capture in June 2011 in Santa Monica, California, where he was living with a long-time girlfriend.

Bulger and his Winter Hill gang had operated for more than two decades in the insular Irish-dominated South Boston neighborhood, engaging in loan sharking, gambling, extortion, drug dealing and murder. They did so with the tacit approval of an FBI agent who looked the other way when it came to Bulger’s crimes so that he would supply information on other gangsters.

Bulger, portrayed by Johnny Depp in a 2015 film “Black Mass,” was feared for his short temper and brutality. Prosecutors said he strangled two women with his hands and tortured a man for hours before shooting him in the head with a machine gun.

“We took what we wanted,” Kevin Weeks, a former Bulger lieutenant who would eventually testify against him, wrote in his memoir, “Brutal.”

“We made millions through extortion and loansharking and protection. And if someone ratted us out, we killed him. We were not nice guys.”

Bulger was born Sept. 3, 1929, and grew up in South Boston. He was called “Whitey” because of his light blond hair but was said to detest the nickname and preferred being called Jimmy. As a teenager he joined a gang known as The Shamrocks, compiled an arrest record for assault and armed robbery and ended up in a juvenile reformatory.

Bulger was in prison from 1956 to 1965 for robbing banks and upon his release he fell in with the Irish mob in South Boston. He worked his way through the ranks as a bookie and loanshark, survived a gang war between two Irish mobs and was a leading figure in Boston’s underworld by the early 1970s.

His career was boosted by his relationship with rogue FBI agent John J. Connolly, who Bulger had known since they were boys. Connolly was supposed to be in charge of getting information out of him and Bulger did provide information that helped the FBI go after his main rival, New England’s Italian Mafia, as well as local criminals.

In return, Connolly let Bulger know about working investigations while Bulger and close associate Steve “The Rifleman” Flemmi carried on with impunity. After he retired from the FBI, Connolly tipped off Bulger about a coming indictment, sending the mobster on the run in 1995.

Connolly was convicted in 2008 of racketeering, taking bribes and second-degree murder for his role in the slaying of an accountant who Bulger and Flemmi feared would testify against them.

Bulger’s former associates turned on him while he was at large and their information led to a 2000 indictment that originally charged him with 19 murders.

“The guy is a sociopathic killer,” Tom Foley, who worked on Bulger cases for the Massachusetts State Police, told CNN. “He loved that type of life. He’s one of the hardest and cruelest individuals that operated in the Boston area. He’s a bad, bad, bad guy.”

When Bulger fled, he first took Teresa Stanley, his girlfriend of 30 years, with him. After a few weeks at large, however, Stanley wanted to go home so Bulger dropped her off in the Boston area. He picked up another of his girlfriends, Catherine Greig, and disappeared again.

Bulger spent his final years of freedom in No. 303 of the Princess Eugenia apartment complex in Santa Monica with Greig.

One of their neighbors, Anna Bjornsdottir, a former U.S. television actress and Miss Iceland of 1974, earned a $2 million reward for turning in Bulger. She was watching a television news report about the Bulger manhunt when she recognized the man she knew by the name Charlie Gasko and notified the FBI.

At first he denied his identity but eventually told authorities, “You know who I am. I’m Whitey Bulger.” More than $800,000 in cash and a cache of weapons was found hidden in the walls of his apartment.

Greig was sentenced to eight years in prison and fined $150,000 for helping Bulger evade capture. She is scheduled for release in September 2020.

Bulger’s two-month trial for murder, extortion and drug dealing in 2013 was sometimes raucous. A parade of former associates testified against him, giving brutal details about how Bulger would kill enemies and then take a nap.

Sometimes Bulger sat silently at the defendant’s table and at other times he engaged in profane shouting matches with witnesses such as Flemmi.

Bulger, who denied ever being an FBI informant, refused to testify on the grounds that the trial was a sham.

The U.S. Justice Department paid more than $20 million in damages to families of people killed by Bulger on the grounds that he was operating under government supervision while killing.

While Bulger was robbing banks and killing people, his younger brother Billy was acquiring political notoriety and power.

Billy served in the Massachusetts legislature for 35 years, including several years as president of the Senate, and then was president of the University of Massachusetts. He was forced to resign the latter job in 2003 after it was learned that eight years earlier he had spoken by phone with Whitey, who was a fugitive at the time, and did not report it to authorities.</s>BRUCETON MILLS, W.Va. -- Notorious Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger has died in federal custody nearly five years after being sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison, the U.S. Department of Justice confirms.

Officials with the Federal Bureau of Prisons say he died Tuesday in West Virginia. Bulger, 89, had just been transferred on Monday to USP Hazelton, a high-security prison with an adjacent minimum security satellite camp in Bruceton Mills.

Sources told WBZ-TV I-Team chief correspondent Cheryl Fiandaca that Bulger was killed. Richard Heldreth, president of Local 420 of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents workers at USP Hazelton, told WVNews there was a homicide overnight, but he wasn't told who was killed.

The Department of Justice says Bulger was found unresponsive in his cell around 8:20 a.m. Prison staff attempted life-saving measures, but Bulger was later pronounced dead by the Preston County Medical Examiner.

Bulger had recently been moved from a prison in Florida to a transfer facility in Oklahoma City.

Bureau of Prisons officials and his attorney declined last week to comment on why he was being moved.

Bulger had been serving a life sentence after being convicted in 2013 in a sweeping racketeering indictment, which included counts of participating in 11 murders. He was one of the FBI's most wanted fugitives for 16 years until his 2011 arrest in Santa Monica, California.

Patricia Donahue, the wife of 1982 Bulger murder victim Michael Donahue, told CBS Boston the news brought closure for her and her family.

"We're very happy that the man is not here any longer, because we don't have to hear his name ever again," Donahue said. "Myself, I'd like to open up a champagne bottle and celebrate."</s>BRUCETON MILLS, W.V. (WHDH) — Notorious Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger was found dead in a West Virginia prison on Tuesday.

Bulger was found unresponsive around 8:20 a.m. at the United States Penitentiary Hazelton, in Bruceton Mills, according to a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Although life-saving measures were initiated, Bulger was pronounced dead soon after by the Preston County Medical Examiner.

Bulger, 89, was serving a life sentence for his role in 11 murders and had recently been transferred to USP Hazelton.

Richard Heldreth, head of the U.S. Penitentiary Union in Hazelton tells 7’s Steve Cooper that Bulger was murdered.

READ MORE: Statement from the Federal Bureau of Prisons

Heldreth said it was the third murder at the high-security prison in seven months and he attributed the violence to a lack of staffing.

The former leader of the Winter Hill Gang, Bulger was one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives for 16 years until his 2011 arrest in Santa Monica, Calif.

No additional information was immediately available.

This is a breaking news story; stay with 7News on-air and online for the latest developments.
Boston convicted organized crime boss and former FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitive Whitey Bulger dies in the United States Penitentiary at Hazelton, West Virginia.