James Joseph “Whitey” Bulger Jr. (September 3, 1929 – October 30, 2018) was an American organized crime boss and FBI informant who led the Winter Hill Gang in the Winter Hill neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts, a city directly northwest of Boston. Listen to an audiobook on Whitey Bulger for free: https://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8&tag=tra0c7-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=72cf442f293aa9c43f5d1803934cd95a&camp=1789&creative=9325&index=books&keywords=whitey%20bulger%20audiobook Books: Street Soldier; My Life as an Enforcer for “Whitey” Bulger and the Boston Irish Mob by Edward MacKenzie and Phyllis Karas, Steerforth, https://amzn.to/2ZKu1wz Rat Bastards: A Memoir of South Boston’s Most Honorable Irish Mobster by John “Red” Shea https://amzn.to/3nHCSHq Paddy Whacked; The Untold Story of the Irish-American Gangster by T. J. English, 2005. https://amzn.to/3pVPw8q Hitman: The Untold Story of Johnny Martorano: Whitey Bulger’s Enforcer and the Most Feared Gangster in the Underworld by Howie Carr, 2011. https://amzn.to/3w92scbOn December 23, 1994, Bulger fled the Boston area and went into hiding after his former FBI handler, John Connolly, tipped him off about a pending RICO indictment against him. Bulger remained at large for sixteen years. After his 2011 arrest, federal prosecutors tried Bulger for nineteen murders based on the grand jury testimony from Kevin Weeks and other former criminal associates.Although Bulger adamantly denied it, the FBI revealed that he had served as an informant for several years starting in 1975. Bulger provided information about the inner workings of the Patriarca crime family, his Italian-American Mafia rivals based in Boston and Providence, Rhode Island. In return, Connolly, as Bulger’s FBI handler, ensured that the Winter Hill Gang effectively went ignored. Beginning in 1997, the news media exposed various instances of criminal misconduct by federal, state, and local officials with ties to Bulger, causing embarrassment to several government agencies, especially to the FBI.Bulger was added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in 1999, and was considered the most wanted person on the list behind Osama bin Laden. He was finally apprehended along with his longtime girlfriend Catherine Greig outside an apartment complex in Santa Monica, California, on June 22, 2011. By then he was 81 years old. Bulger and Greig were then promptly extradited to Boston and taken under heavy guard to the United States Courthouse, which had to be partially closed for their arrival. In June 2012, Greig pleaded guilty to conspiracy to harbor a fugitive, identity fraud, and conspiracy to commit identity fraud, receiving a sentence of eight years in prison. Bulger declined to seek bail and remained in custody. The 2014 documentary film Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger, made by Joe Berlinger, is based on Bulger’s trials. The film Black Mass—released September 18, 2015 in the US—stars Johnny Depp as Bulger and was directed by Scott Cooper. The film’s screenplay, by Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth, is based on the 2001 non-fiction book Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob, by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill. The film chronicles Bulger’s years as an FBI informant, and his manipulation of his FBI handler as a means to eradicate his rivals for control of the Boston underworld, the Italian Mafia. Bulger is mentioned considerably in the book All Souls: A Family Story from Southie by Michael Patrick MacDonald – a memoir about the author’s life growing up in Boston during the 1970s and 1980s. The character of Frank Costello (played by Jack Nicholson) in the 2006 Martin Scorsese film The Departed is loosely based on Bulger, though the plot of the movie is adapted from the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs. The 2006–2008 Showtime TV series Brotherhood, about two Irish-American brothers on opposite sides of the law, was inspired by the relationship between Whitey and Billy Bulger, although the show takes place not in Boston but in nearby Providence, Rhode Island. In the TV series Rizzoli & Isles, which premiered in 2010, the character of Paddy Doyle, an Irish-American mobster who is the biological father of lead character Maura Isles, is based on a romanticized vision of Bulger. In season one of the Showtime series Ray Donovan, the character of Patrick “Sully” Sullivan, played by James Woods, is loosely based on Bulger. The 2013 television drama The Blacklist starring James Spader about a career criminal who turns himself in to work with the FBI on his own terms was initially inspired by Bulger’s arrest and trial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_Bulger

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