Three Men Indicted in Notorious Gangster Whitey Bulger’s Prison Murder
Nearly four years after notorious Boston mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger was beaten to death in his cell with a padlock stuffed in a sock, three men have been indicted in connection with his murder.
Fotios “Freddy” Geas, 55, Paul J. DeCologero, 48, and Sean McKinnon, 36, were charged Wednesday with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, federal prosecutors announced Thursday.
Geas and DeCologero allegedly hit Bulger, 89, in the head “multiple times,” killing him in his cell at United States Penitentiary Hazleton in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia, on Oct. 30, 2018. They also face charges of aiding and abetting first degree murder, along with assault resulting in serious bodily injury, the Department of Justice said in a press release.
A June 23, 2011 booking photo of James “Whitey” Bulger, then 81 years old.
Geas is facing an additional charge of murder by a federal inmate serving a life sentence. He is already behind bars at USP Hazelton, having been convicted of a slew of mob-related crimes in 2011, including the violent murder of Springfield boss Adolfo “Big Al” Bruno.
A ruthlessly loyal hitman for the Genovese crime family, Gaeas has long been considered the primary suspect in Bulger’s murder. He notoriously carried a near-pathological loathing for mobsters who flipped to cooperate with law enforcement. In 1975, Bulger began cooperating with the FBI as a Top Echelon Informant—a secret that was revealed 13 years later in a report from The Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team.
“Freddy hated rats. Freddy hated guys who abused women. Whitey was a rat who killed women. It’s probably that simple,” private investigator Ted McDonough mused to the Globe in 2018.
DeCologero, also known as “Pauly,” also “remains housed in the federal prison system,” according to the Justice Department. He is on the tail end of a 25-year sentence for racketeering, as well as the conspiracy that ended in the murder of a 19-year-old girl in 1996.
McKinnon had been on supervised release and was arrested in Florida on Thursday. He now faces a separate charge of making false statements to a federal agent, the Justice Department said.
An 81-year-old Bulger, who had cut his teeth as the leader of Boston’s Irish mob, went on the run in 1994. He was arrested more than 16 years later in Santa Monica, California. Convicted on 31 of the 32 counts he faced, including involvement in 11 murders, Bulger received multiple life sentences.
A wheelchair-bound Bulger was subsequently shuttled between a number of federal facilities before landing at USP Hazelton. Within hours of his arrival on Oct. 29, 2018, a prison guard found his bleeding body in his cell. He was declared dead soon after.
“They apparently tuned him up to the point where he was unrecognizable,” a senior law enforcement official said in 2020, according to The New York Times, going on to describe how the 89-year-old’s eyeballs had either been gouged or beaten out of his skull.
“I hate to be morbid, but knowing the way of person he was, it’s probably a long time coming,” a man friendly with one of Bulger’s brothers told the newspaper, “seeing that he was responsible for so many other families’ and people’s misery over the years.”
“There’s an old saying,” the man added, “‘What goes around comes around.’”
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