Prisoners charged with killing mobster 'Whitey' Bulger reach plea deals
Three men who were charged in the 2018 murder of notorious Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger in a federal prison have reached plea agreements, according to prosecutors.
Bulger, 89, was beaten to death in a West Virginia penitentiary on Oct. 20, 2018, allegedly as revenge for being a law enforcement informant, hours after he was transferred to the facility.
Fotios “Freddy” Geas, Paul DeCologero and Sean McKinnon were charged with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in the killing in 2022.
Geas and DeCologero beat Bulger while McKinnon acted as the lookout, prosecutors said.
Geas was already serving a life sentence for several violent crimes including the murder of Gary Westerman, another informant. DeCologero was behind bars for buying heroin to carry out a hit on a teenage girl. When the girl didn’t overdose, another gangster broke her neck and dismembered her.
McKinnon got paroled in 2021 but was rearrested in 2022. Prosecutors previously announced they would not seek death sentences for the three men.
No details about the plea deals were made public.
Bulger’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Department of Justice in 2019, claiming the government purposefully put him in harm’s way by transferring him to “one of the country’s most violent federal penitentiaries.”
A Justice Department Inspector General investigation found a series of bureaucratic missteps led to Bulger’s death.
Bulger ran the Winter Hill Gang in Boston in the 1970s and ’80s while also serving as an FBI informant, ratting on his rivals and cohorts. He spent a decade and a half on the lam after fleeing Boston in 1994 when his FBI handler tipped him off that he was about to be indicted. He was finally apprehended in California in 2011 and convicted of 11 homicides, as well as extortion and money-laundering. He was sentenced to life in prison in 2013.
Shortly before he was killed, the Bureau of Prisons announced Bulger was being transferred from a Florida facility to the high-security Hazleton prison in West Virginia.
Bulger may be dead, but his legacy lives on in streamable movie hits.
Jack Nicholson’s character in the 2006 Oscar-winning Martin Scorsese film “The Departed” was based on the mob boss’ exploits. Johnny Depp starred as Bulger in 2015’s “Black Mass,” which was made after Bulger was imprisoned.
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