The DOJ Says Inmates Knew Whitey Bulger Was Being Transferred to Their Prison and Took Bets on How Long Before He'd Be Killed

Donaldson Collection. Getty Images.

I get the sense that if you took a poll of Americans from across the country asking which famous people they most associate with Boston, you'd get names like Mark Wahlberg, Tom Brady, David Ortiz, John Krazinski, Chris Evans, and a handful of others. And depending on when you asked, also on that short list would be James "Whitey" Bulger. 

Whitey's been dead for over four years now. While some famous people's death can be good career moves (it didn't hurt Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean or Princess Di's Q-ratings at all), old gangsters tend to fade from the public consciousness once they're no longer threats to gun you down over money you owe them. But for a while there, he was as big as they come. After over a decade on the lam, more time spent on the FBI's Most Wanted List than "Tainted Love" spent on the Billboard Charts, and dozens of books written about him, his eventual capture captured the public's imagination. 

And it would be hard to overstate just how big - I supposed notorious is a better word - he was around Boston. And the closer you lived to the epicenter of his gravitational pull in Southie, the larger Whitey loomed in your life. I used to work with a guy who lived next door to him. Another co-worker came from a family of cops. And for them, reading "Black Mass," which the Johnny Depp movie was based on: 

… was like you or me reading our high school year books. 

I grew up in the suburbs, safely away from any of that influence. And still, I graduated with someone whose father was part of the Irish Mob and went to jail for trying to rob an armored truck, that was actually being driven by an undercover FBI agent as part of a sting. My family worked at jobs like the phone company and the post office, so that was like an alien world to me. But still, Whitey's tentacles reached that far. 

There was a mystique about him. Not hurt in the least by the fact his brother Billy Bulger was the president of the Massachusetts, and basically ruled with absolute power. He could make or break you, just through fiat. I know people who got to retire on two pensions because he willed it. And have heard of others that he ruined to the point they took their own lives. And always there was the implied threat of what his brother the mob boss would do if anyone objected. By the same token, Whitey had the implied threat of what his brother would do if anyone tried to curb his power. It was a perfect symbiotic relationship. One that both never acknowledged because they didn't have to. And it was enough combined influence that Mike Barnicle, then of The Boston Globe, used to right these glowing, sickening hagiographies of "Jimmy" Bulger. How he kept the drugs out of Southie and always had a few extra bucks for the Poor Box at the local parish. The daily overdoses and multiple cold-blooded murders notwithstanding.

When Whitey was on federal trial, he was being housed a county jail that happened to service the sleepy little district court where I worked. And a day didn't go by without some prisoner brought in for his own court proceeding telling a story about how they saw Whitey. It was a degenerate reprobate's version of A Brush With Greatness. They'd talk about him like they'd just seen Bill Murray at a sports bar or something. Even behind bars, he was the king of all he surveyed for a while there. 

That is, until he wasn't. Until he was transferred to a new facility by the Feds and was dead as Hitler almost as soon as they took his leg irons off. And finally the Department of Justice has released a report on how that managed to happen:

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Source - Bulger was brutally murdered in 2018 were tipped off he would be transferred there, according to a Justice Department watchdog tasked with reviewing the killing. 

Though Bureau of Prison employees did not act with "malicious intent or an improper purpose," there were "serious job performance and management failures" that compromised Bulger's safety at Hazelton prison in West Virginia, the DOJ Inspector General's office said in a new report. 

He had been housed in the general population at Hazelton for less than 12 hours before he was found beaten to death Oct. 30, 2018. Three Hazelton inmates, including a Mafia hitman, were charged in his death Aug. 18, 2022. …

 It also presents troubling evidence that BOP officials had let slip to inmates that Bulger would soon arrive at the prison, apparently unaware of the obvious threat to Bulger's life that information would cause. 

More than 100 BOP officials were made known of Bulger's upcoming transfer to Hazelton. Some of those officials had openly discussed the transfer in the presence of Hazelton inmates. Additionally, news stories were reporting the details of Bulger's impending transfer. "Everyone knew" Bulger would be killed because he was a "rat," one inmate told prison officials, according to the report. 

The report indicated that prison officials decided to send Bulger to Hazelton because it was closer to his family in Boston, had appropriate medical care facilities and "took good care of the inmates." But investigators found the steps BOP personnel took to assess the threat to Bulger from other inmates were "lacking." Several BOP officials said they were unaware of Bulger's notoriety or did not consider his identity in making decisions about his transfer, the report said.

That's 99 pages that could've been summed up with:

Right. They didn't walk a guy who had eluded capture for over a decade into a kill zone intentionally. They never wanted anything bad to happen to a guy who had FBI agent John Connolly on his payroll, feeding him information any time someone reported him to the police. They didn't want him dead. The sudden move to West Virginia was so his loved ones could come for visits. Just pop by for a friendly chat. Because the Mountain State is so conveniently close to Boston. Having made that trip a few times when my son was going to WVU, I can report it's an easy, breezy, quick little 11 hour haul. On a good day. So they were just doing him a solid. And alerting the inmates, including that mob enforcer? That was just a big Oopsie. Loose lips sink snitches, and all that. Chalk it up to experience; it'll never happen again. Live and learn. 

Well I'm glad they cleared that up. Now we can all look forward to that report about how Jeffrey Epstein slipped on a bar of soap, slid across the floor, and inadvertently got a sheet wrapped around his neck at the exact same time the security cameras were on the fritz. 

As Michael Corleone put it so perfectly, "If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone." Here's further proof.