Whitey Bulger

It’s Life Behind Bars for Whitey Bulger

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE 

Published: November 14, 2013

BOSTON — James (Whitey) Bulger, Boston’s most notorious gangster, was condemned Thursday to spend the rest of his life in prison, receiving two consecutive life sentences plus five years.

James (Whitey) Bulger was convicted in August for 11 murders and multiple racketeering charges.

Before announcing her sentence, Judge Denise J. Casper of Federal District Court told Mr. Bulger that the “scope, callousness and depravity of your crimes are almost unfathomable.” She said they were made “all the more heinous because they were all about money.” 

“It takes no business acumen to take money from people at the end of a gun,” the judge said, recounting the grim list of his murders, and how the victims were left to expire at the scene of the crime or stuffed in a trunk. 

“Unfathomable acts conducted in unfathomable ways,” she said.

Mr. Bulger, 84, wearing his orange prison jumpsuit, stared straight ahead and showed no emotion as Judge Casper explained her sentence. He was convicted in August of a sweeping array of gangland crimes, including 11 murders and 31 counts of racketeering, extortion, money laundering, trafficking in cocaine and marijuana and weapons possession. 

Judge Casper also spoke of Mr. Bulger’s notoriety and how he had dominated the news media here for so long, and in an unusual addendum, she seemed to speak not as a judge but as a guardian of Boston’s civic image. “You have over time and in certain quarters become the face of this city, and that is regrettable,” she said. “You, sir, do not represent this city.”

Given the year’s other highly emotional events, “both tragic and triumphant,” she said, referring to the Marathon bombings in April and the Red Sox World Series win in October, Mr. Bulger and his partners in crime should not be perceived as part of the face of Boston. If anything represents the city, she said, it is that after an orderly trial, “a jury did the hard work and rendered a fair and just verdict.” 

Judge Casper also ordered Mr. Bulger to pay $19.5 million in restitution to his victims’ families and to forfeit $25.2 million to the government. It is not clear that Mr. Bulger has the money, and the order seemed more a hedge against his trying to profit from a memoir or a screenplay. 

The sentence was expected, given Mr. Bulger’s murderous reign of terror, which held his South Boston turf in its grip from the 1960s through the 1990s. Tipped off by a corrupt F.B.I. agent that he was about to be indicted, Mr. Bulger went on the lam for 16 years. he was captured in California in 2011. 

Mr. Bulger’s lawyer, J. W. Carney Jr., has said he would appeal the conviction, arguing that the judge had not allowed Mr. Bulger to mount the defense he wanted: that he was given immunity for his crimes — in essence, that he had a license to kill. Legal experts have said this argument would have little chance of success, especially since Mr. Bulger has maintained that he was never an informant. 

Mr. Bulger never took the stand in his defense, but did tell the court in August that the proceedings were a “sham.” On Wednesday, his lawyers said that, at the direction of their client, they would not make a recommendation on his sentencing because he still believed the process was a charade. 

Mr. Bulger “did not want to validate the trial by participating directly, or indirectly, through us in the sentencing process,” Mr. Carney told reporters outside the courthouse on Wednesday. “And so to have made a statement at the trial or to have turned directly and faced the people who testified today, would have been part of validating the trial.” 

He was referring to the relatives of Mr. Bulger’s murder victims who spoke in court Wednesday about how his actions and altered their lives forever.