After more than 16 years on the lam, notorious Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger was captured in 2011 and sent to prison for murder, conspiracy to commit murder, narcotics distribution, extortion and money laundering. That would explain his inclusion on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List.” Bulger served time in both Arizona and Florida, as well as Oklahoma, before his transfer to USP Hazelton in West Virginia on Tuesday, where he was found dead roughly 24 hours after he arrived, according to NBC Sports. Efforts to revive the former leader of the Winter Hill Gang proved unsuccessful. “One day I was teaching a class in one of the big clubs in South Boston and these two guys walked into the class and said, ‘Hey, we need to talk to you,’” White told FOX Sports. “At first I’m thinking, ‘Does this guy own the club?’ and when he asked me, ‘Do you know who I am?’ that was when I realized what was going on.” Related Dana White Goes Into Detail On His Boxercise Instructor Days ”He basically said, ‘You owe us money’. It was like $2,500, which was like $25,000 to me back then, and said, ‘You owe us money.’ It was actually a guy named Kevin Weeks, who if you saw the trial he’s Whitey’s right-hand man,” White continued. “This went on for a while and one day I was at my place and I got a call and they said, ‘You owe us the money tomorrow by 1 o’clock’. I literally hung up the phone, picked up the phone and called Delta and bought a ticket to Vegas.” If he didn’t, we may not have UFC or MMA on a global scale. The 89 year-old mobster, who later turned informant for FBI, was by portrayed by Johnny Depp in Scott Cooper’s 2015 film Black Mass, and also served as the inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s “Frank Costello” role in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar winner The Departed back in 2006. The FBI has opened a probe into his death, according to the report.<doc-sep>James J. “Whitey” Bulger Jr., the ruthless Boston mobster who topped the FBI’s most-wanted list and was found quietly living as a fugitive near the ocean in Santa Monica in 2011, has died in prison, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He was 89. Bulger was found unresponsive early Tuesday in his prison cell at United States Penitentiary Hazelton, a high-security prison in West Virginia where the aging mobster had been moved just the day before. A prison union official said Bulger’s death is being investigated as a homicide. The FBI is investigating. Bulger and his longtime girlfriend, Catherine Greig, lived under assumed names for nearly 16 years in a two-bedroom apartment near Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade. They were known as Charlie and Carol Gasko, and their acquaintances thought they were retirees from Chicago. In fact, Bulger had been the subject of a global manhunt since fleeing Boston in 1995 after he was tipped off to his federal indictment by a former FBI agent. Bulger claimed after his capture that federal authorities had secretly granted him immunity from prosecution for all crimes past and present, but his argument was thrown out of court in 2013 and a Boston jury found Bulger guilty of 11 murders and numerous counts of extortion and racketeering. Advertisement His case was the subject of a congressional inquiry on whether FBI agents in Boston enabled their underworld informants to do whatever they felt advanced their illicit businesses, including murder. John Connolly Jr., Bulger’s main FBI handler, was later sent to prison for his role in Bulger’s flight and in a Florida killing. Born in Boston on Sept. 3, 1929, James Joseph Bulger Jr. was raised in tough South Boston and dropped out of school in the ninth grade. He served in the Air Force and later did time at Alcatraz and other federal prisons for bank robberies. His brother William Bulger became one of the most powerful politicians in Massachusetts, serving 18 years as president of the Massachusetts Senate and eight years as president of the University of Massachusetts. Bulger inspired many TV and movie productions, including the 2006 Academy Award-winning film “The Departed.” Bulger managed for 16 years to elude federal authorities, who had targeted him with a $2-million reward and tracked down false leads of his fleeting presence on nearly every continent. When Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011, Bulger moved to the top of the FBI’s most-wanted. Two years later, Bulger was convicted in Boston of 11 murders as well as extortion and racketeering schemes that allegedly netted him more than $25 million. Greig was sentenced to eight years in prison for helping Bulger in his flight. An additional 21 months was added to her sentence in 2016 when she refused to testify before a grand jury. Since 1996, Bulger had hidden in plain sight as Charlie Gasko, an avuncular geezer who handed out miniature flashlights to neighbors but also warded them off with a “Do Not Disturb” sign on his apartment door. Bulger as Gasko was cantankerous, but friendly enough to give a black Stetson hat to his guitar-playing apartment manager. He loved to stroll Santa Monica’s busy Third Street Promenade and he was lucky enough to rent an affordable apartment just blocks away. Ultimately, the charismatic hoodlum who ran a criminal empire under the nose of federal authorities and whose lavish gifts to FBI agents were exposed in criminal and congressional hearings, was brought down by his girlfriend’s concern for a stray cat. Advertisement In 1995, Bulger and Greig fled Boston after former FBI agent Connolly, an old family friend who grew up in Bulger’s tough South Boston neighborhood, tipped him to his coming federal indictment. Traveling around the country for more than a year under various aliases, the couple found their apartment in a Santa Monica building called the Princess Eugenia. Agents who raided Apartment 303 on June 22, 2011, found 30 guns and more than $822,000 in cash stashed in holes Bulger had cut neatly in the walls. An unfinished memoir was on the nightstand. Bulger had been featured 15 times on the “America’s Most Wanted” TV show. An FBI task force had sought him for years. But in 2011, when authorities ran daytime TV ads that focused on Greig, an acquaintance named Anna Bjornsdottir responded immediately. Bjornsdottir, a yoga instructor and former Miss Iceland, knew Greig as Carol Gasko, the nice woman from across the street who befriended an abandoned tabby named Tiger. She knew Bulger as Charlie Gasko, a sour, bigoted old man who dropped no hints about his past. Bulger’s story had epic qualities. He grew up poor in a family that became one of the most powerful in Massachusetts. Younger brother William was forced out of his university post by his fugitive brother’s notoriety. Advertisement Meanwhile, Whitey, whose nickname reflected his boyhood shock of blond hair, had become a bank robber and served time in Alcatraz. Drifting back to the neighborhood after his parole in 1965, he was seen by some as a kind of Robin Hood, a criminal who protected his weaker neighbors and stole mostly from those who were thought not to deserve deserve their good fortune. “You had a husband giving a wife a hard time, that’s the stuff you went to him for,” Peggy Davis-Mullen, a Boston City Council member from Bulger’s old neighborhood, told The Times in 1999. “You knew that he was a guy involved in organized crime but you also had — I’ve got to be honest with you — regard for the man. I don’t know what he did when he was doing his business, whatever his business was, but I know that he was a guy on the street and that he was good to people who were poor.” The portrait of him that emerged at his 2013 trial wasn’t quite so exemplary. Bulger was convicted of fatally shooting rival gangsters, suspected informants and bystanders who simply got in the way. He chained alleged jewel thief Arthur “Bucky” Barrett to a chair, interrogated him about hidden cash and then shot him in the head. He strangled Deborah Hussey, the daughter of his henchman Stephen Flemmi’s girlfriend, because he thought she had a big mouth and would implicate him in crimes. Advertisement In testimony and court filings, witnesses described Bulger’s murders not only as business decisions but also as acts that he relished, sometimes taking a nap while Flemmi yanked out the teeth of the dead to make identifying them more difficult. Others spoke of threats: Bulger telling a restaurant owner that he’d cut off his ears and stuff them in his mouth if he didn’t come up with his loan payments; Bulger taking over a South Boston liquor store after plunking his gun on a table, hoisting the owner’s 2-year-old daughter onto his lap, and saying it would be a shame to not see her grow up. Over the years, Bulger’s cinematic life story drew interest from Hollywood. With Jack Nicholson portraying a Boston mob boss based partly on Bulger, “The Departed” won four Academy Awards in 2006, for best picture, screenplay, editing and directing by Martin Scorsese. In 2015, Johnny Depp played the Bulger-inspired character in “Black Mass.” Bulger was the son of a laborer who lost an arm hopping a train. As a boy, Bulger fought constantly and broke into homes. A year after he left reform school in 1948, he enlisted in the Air Force and, despite a spotty disciplinary record, was honorably discharged in 1953. Advertisement Back on the streets, he robbed banks in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Indiana, and did time in several federal prisons, including one in Atlanta where he participated in a researcher’s LSD experiments. He served nine years of a 20-year sentence, securing an early release with the help of his brother William, then a Massachusetts state representative, lobbying U.S. House Speaker John McCormack, according to Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, authors of a 2013 biography, “Whitey: The Life of America’s Most Notorious Mob Boss.” Returning to Boston, Bulger became a leading light in the underworld.<doc-sep>James (Whitey) Bulger, the South Boston mobster and F.B.I. informer who was captured after 16 years on the run and finally brought to justice in 2013 for a murderous reign of terror that inspired books, films and a saga of Irish-American brotherhood and brutality, was found beaten to death on Tuesday in a West Virginia prison. He was 89. Two Federal Bureau of Prisons employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the information was not yet public, said Mr. Bulger was beaten unrecognizable by inmates shortly after he had arrived at the prison, the Hazelton federal penitentiary in Bruceton Mills, W.Va. He had been moved from prison to prison in recent years and was incarcerated in Florida before being transferred to Hazelton, which has been rife with violence. One of the workers said that the inmates were thought to be “affiliated with the mob.” A law enforcement official who oversees organized crime cases said he was told by a federal law enforcement official that a mob figure was believed to be responsible for the killing. Mr. Bulger, who was serving two life sentences for 11 murders, was found unresponsive at 8:20 Tuesday morning and pronounced dead by the Preston County Medical Examiner, the Federal Bureau of Prisons said in a statement. It did not indicate a cause of death.<doc-sep>
A Boston mobster in prison on a life sentence is suspected by local police to have been involved in the suspected murder of Whitey Bulger Tuesday, according to local reports. Fotios "Freddy" Geas, 51, also from the Boston area, was reported by the Boston Globe as being a part of an operation targeting Bulger, though the paper did not detail if he was responsible for planning or physically carrying out the attack in which four men are believed to have brutally beaten Bulger to death in his wheelchair at a West Virginia prison. Geas grew up in Springfield, Mass., and was sentenced to federal prison in 2009 for his role in the assassination of mob boss, Adolfo "Big Al" Bruno, the murder of Gary Westerman, and the failed murder attempt of Frank Dabado. Following Bruno's murder, the man who was sent to carry it out and another man who had ordered Geas to find someone to do it both testified against him in court. Ted McDonough, who once worked as a private investigator for Geas, said the man "hated rats," or people who snitched on their fellow comrades. “Freddy hated rats,” McDonough told the Boston Globe. “Freddy hated guys who abused women. Whitey was a rat who killed women. It’s probably that simple." David Hoose, the lawyer who represented Geas during his trial, agreed his former client "wouldn't rat on anybody" and "had no respect for anyone who would." Geas was serving his time at the Hazelton federal prison in Bruceton Mills, W. Va., where Bulger had just been transferred from a Florida prison. Bulger had been serving two life sentences for 11 murders. He was on the FBI's most-wanted list for more than a decade and was captured in 2011. He was also a secret informant to the FBI. McDonough said if Geas was responsible for Bulger's death, it could improve his status in the mob scene despite his being behind bars.