Past Blog Posts May  Past Blog Posts April   Past Blog Posts 2020

May 26, 2021

Spinning Whitey Bulger's Grave

In a story this week, the Boston Globe reported that Whitey Bulger "had been publicly identified as a longtime FBI informant." When and by whom? The story leaves that out.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/23/metro/three-inmates-implicated-slaying-whitey-bulger-face-inhumane-conditions-during-31-months-solitary-confinement-relatives-say/

As some of us may remember, it was federal prosecutors, in court during his trial for several murders that Bulger was publicly identified as an informant. "The prosecution introduced a 700-page document that suggests Bulger was an informant," CNN reported. The "document" was his informant case file.
https://www.cnn.com/2013/07/29/justice/massachusetts-bulger-trial

Before that, in 1988, FBI agent John Morris, who confessed to corruption charges, and a corrupt relationship with Bulger specifically, told the Globe that Whitey was an informant. "Morris said he eventually leaked Bulger's identity as an FBI informant to The Boston Globe, in the hope that it would force the FBI to stop using him as an informant."
https://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20020510/News/305109966

Some speculate that Morris hoped to extricate himself from his corrupt relationship with Bulger, by neutralizing him as a criminal force, within Boston organized crime world, fatally so.

In any case, it appears that this move by Morris was not sanctioned by the Bureau. In fact, the FBI put pressure on the Boston Globe and one of the reporters who wrote it, to kill the story.

"The [FBI] agent told me that, 'It's not true, and that if you report something that's not true Whitey will not live with that.' He said, 'He would think nothing of clipping you, Kevin [Cullen], and you know - you lived there.' "
https://www.npr.org/2013/02/25/172012353/whitey-bulger-bio-profiles-bostons-most-notorious-gangster

The Boston Globe went ahead and reported the story anyway, although the informant charge against Bulger did not stick. He continued to operate his criminal enterprise in the same manner as before, until he went on the lam six years later in 1994, and was not unenrolled as an FBI informant until 1990 when his handler, FBI Agent John Connelly retired from the Bureau.

But a quarter century later, after Bulger was captured in 2011, federal prosecutors showed that the corrupt Morris may have had the right idea all along, at least in how best to deal with Whitey Bulger, since during his murder trial, with the full force of the federal government behind it, the prosectuion made the case that Bulger had indeed been an FBI informant.

During Bulger's trial the Star Tribune reported that: "The jury spent the day listening to James Marra, a special agent with the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General, read excerpts from Bulger's 700-page FBI file. Bulger's attonrye Hank "Brennan argued that Marra has no firsthand knowledge of whether Bulger was an informant. And the defense claims that Connolly fabricated all the reports in the FBI file to cover up his own corruption. But Wyshak argued that the file shows that Bulger provided information not just to Connolly, but to other FBI agents, including John Morris and James Ring, Connolly's supervisors. 'I understand that for whatever reasons — whether it's the ego of the defendant or attempting to preserve his reputation — he does not want to be called an informant, but I am not going to tailor my questions in a manner that preserves that ridiculous contention,' Wyshak said."
https://www.startribune.com/jury-shown-fbi-informant-file-on-bulger/212813621/?refresh=true

There was little justice to be had for Bulger's victims or society, in outing him as an informant, if all that was on the line was Bulger's pride. As it turned out there was more at stake than his ego or reputation on the line, which was very obvious at the time, as the prosecution carefully drew a bullseye on Bulger's back.

This time they made "the charge" stick with the public. The sentence —death— was carried out five years later. Bulger was slain in Hazelton Penitentiary a high-security prison in Bruceton Mill, West Virginia "only a few hours after arriving" at the facility. "Several prison workers questioned why so many people at Coleman and in the Texas office would have approved a transfer of Mr. Bulger to Hazelton, a facility that houses some inmates tied to organized crime and that has a reputation for being dangerous for snitches." "'That was a monumental failure,” said one prison worker, 'and a death sentence for Whitey.'”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/us/whitey-bulger-murder-mystery-hazelton.html

Interestingly, Bulger's "attorneys have said Bulger was ready to negotiate giving up some information about the [stolen Gardner Museum] paintings in exchange for safer prison digs just weeks before he was murdered."
https://www.thedailybeast.com/did-whitey-bulger-pull-off-the-isabella-stewart-gardner-museum-art-heist-for-the-ira

But was Bulger offering, or threatening, to share information about the Gardner heist? The government certainly did nothing to offer him anything in the way of extra protection for his offer. In fact what he received was the exact opposite of protection — a death sentence.

Take heed anyone who may want to offer a serious alternative to the preposterous, state-sponsored, disinforming narrative about the Gardner heist, which broadly hints, quite heavy handedly, that (this week anyway) it was Bobby Donati, who took the Gardner art. The motive was to use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card for his boss, Mafia capo Vincent Ferraro. who at the time, was being held on murder charges, and was one of the high ranking mobsters recorded in an FBI wiretap of the historic Mafia induction ceremony in Medord, MA on October 29, 1989. Serve the state-sponsored narrative and be assured of more and better media gigs, free publicity for your book, or law practice, even be transformed, like Myles Connor from pariah, into an unfactchecked, fabulist, folk legend. Or you can go the Whitey Bulger route.

Nobody raised objections or questioned federal prosecutors about snitching on their own snitch, during his trial for murder in 2013. If Bulger's lawyers had objected, and had tried to suprress this element of the prosecution's case, it would have looked like an admission of guilt, by Bulger, so they were forced to argue the truth of a matter completely unrelated to the charges Bulger faced.

An opinion piece, by the Boston Globe editorial board, in the 5/24/21 Boston Globe, deployed the same incomplete, passive voice phrasing as the 5/23/21 news story, about the lack of progress in the Bulger murder investigation. Bulger had been publicly identified as a longtime FBI informant." Again they duck a key issue of the Bulger slaying, concerning who outed him as an informant in the first place, while at the same time opining that "a need for "getting to the bottom of the killing, and the incomprehensible decisions by federal officials that led up to it, does not seem to be a high priority for the bureau [of prisons]."
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/24/opinion/murderer-who-was-murdered-still-deserves-justice/

By putting the onus solely on the Bureau of Prisons, however, and not acknowledging how a target was put on Bulger's back, when they outed him as an informant at his trial, in Boston, the Boston Globe shows that it also does not place a high priority on getting to the bottom of this matter, and prefers to frame the needs for answers in way of that encompasses only some of the questions.

The Globe's actions on this are not incomprehensible. Just as first establishing in court in a highly publicized trial, that Bulger was an informant, and then putting him in a general prison population that includes a Massachusetts Mafia hit man is not incomprehensible. But it is very concerning.

Edging closer to incomprehensible, though, is how Sean McKinnon, the cellmate of Fotios "Freddy" Geas, the prime suspect in the Bulger, murder, but not himself a suspect, has had to endure the torture of solitary confinement for over 2/1/2 years, because he has not cooperated with the Bulger slaying "investigation."

McKinnon is faced with the choice of either being tortured and irreparably harmed by the federal government, through solitary confinement, or informing on a Mafia hitman accused of murdering an informant, Whitey Bulger.

Meanwhile the people who set the table for the hit on Whitey Bulger in Boston in 2013 and in the Bureau of Prisons in 2018 are drawing fat federal paychecks and pensions, while McKinnon is rationed an insufficient amount of toilet paper to get through the week. And the Boston Globe is too timid to even remind readers, -inform - about who it was, that outed Bulger in the first place, the very institutions, that hired him as an informant in the first place.

The fact that the Boston Globe in two pieces, this week, about the White Bulger murder investigation, states that Whitey Bulger had been publicly identified as an FBI informant," is an acknowledgement that it was a factor in his slaying. Leaving out who was responsbile for his being publicly identified, in both pieces shows that the Globe has no intention of holding accountable, those who outed him, the act which led to his killing

By Kerry Joyce

Copyright © 2021 All Rights Reserved