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Bulger Trial 'Anticlimactic' For Those Seeking New Information

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In this courtroom sketch, James "Whitey" Bulger sits at his sentencing hearing in federal court. (Jane Flavell Collins/AP)
In this courtroom sketch, James "Whitey" Bulger sits at his sentencing hearing in federal court. (Jane Flavell Collins/AP)

As we look back on 2013, we remember the conclusion of the decades-long effort to find and then try long-time Boston crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger.

Reporter David Boeri joined WBUR's Morning Edition to reflect on his summer in court at an event many thought would never happen — the racketeering trial of the 84-year-old Bulger.

Morning Edition Host Bob Oakes: David, Bulger was convicted of 31 of 32 counts he faced this summer. When we look back at the trial, was there ever any doubt that he would be convicted?


Brennan: How many agents were prosecuted? One. 2002, special prosecutor comes in to clean out and investigate the Department of Justice. How many people were prosecuted? One? John Connolly? We all know there’s much, much more.

John Connolly, the FBI agent who was Bulger’s handler, the only FBI agent to ever go to prison when in fact we know there were numbers of FBI agents without whom Bulger could never have operated. And then, he was also referring to the prosecutor who came in here and spent years and millions of dollars and a report that was supposed to lay out all the wrong-doing and never filed a report. When the government prosecutors said that “the FBI is not on trial; Bulger is,” there were a whole lot of people sitting in that courtroom — the families of Bulger’s victims — who were convinced otherwise.
You’ve spent a lot of time before, during and after the trial with the families of people murdered by Bulger or at Bulger’s direction. All the murders were actually elements of just one racketeering charge, and the jury found the government had proved Bulger responsible for only 11 of the 19 murder cases in front of it. So remind us about the family reactions.

Reactions vary. Those families who expected justice and found that the jury hadn’t proven that Bulger committed the murders of their loved ones were bitterly, bitterly disappointed. They criticized the prosecution for not spending enough time on those murders. The reality was these were early murders. The primary trigger man in them was John Martorano, an abhorrent witness, and that came out through the defense efforts. Then, you have other families who after years and years of struggle — like the Donahues, who filed civil suits against the government, and the government, the Department of Justice opposed them by attacking the credibility of government witnesses, who were the same witnesses that the Department of Justice was using in the criminal prosecution. So for the Donahues, especially, it was reassuring. It was vindication. Here’s Tommy Donahue, the son of Michael Donahue, an innocent man who was shot down when Bulger went out to assassinate another person.

Tommy Donahue: “After 31 years, after a lot of FBI cover-ups, deceits and lies, we finally have somebody guilty in the murder of my father.”

So that was Tommy Donahue. And on the day of Bulger’s sentencing, Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. prosecutor came out, and in fact, it was a hard-fought and deserved victory for the prosecutors who had been going after Bulger for years. But Carmen Ortiz called Bulger “ancient history,” and it was as if you could throw Bulger down a memory hole. And yet, even if he is down in that memory hole, what happened in this city because of the FBI’s corruption, and its dealings with Whitey Bulger has not been held to account. It’s still there. It still goes on. It hasn’t been laid out, and that doesn’t go down a memory hole.

And do you think we’ll ever learn the full truth about that sordid relationship

Probably not. Because the two people who know most about it are Whitey Bulger and John Connolly, the FBI agent. Connolly has proven to be the only person in this case who hasn't rolled over for the government. And Bulger’s not going to talk.

Do you think that we will hear from Bulger in at least some way down the road?

Absolutely. He’s writing letters, and he seems to spend his day writing letters. Will there be a book from Bulger? I expect there will be if he can get it through the Bureau of Prisons. I think he can. And it will be his story, his version, but untested. Because in the end, he never took the stand, and that was what we were expecting, perhaps hoping for that we would get some information.

This program aired on December 27, 2013.

Headshot of David Boeri

David Boeri Senior Reporter
Now retired, David Boeri was a senior reporter at WBUR.

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