The main suspect in the killing of James ‘Whitey’ Bulger believed the mobster had framed his friend for murder, a lawyer has claimed.
Bulger, 89, was killed in the high-security Hazelton penitentiary in West Virginia on Tuesday a day after he was transferred from Oklahoma.
The 89-year-old, who was a longtime FBI informant, had been savagely beaten and had his tongue cut out.
Fotios ‘Freddy’ Geas, a Mafia hitman who is said to hate ‘rats’, is under investigation for Bulger’s murder. Geas and at least one other inmate are believed to have been involved in the killing.
Today, Geas’ former lawyer said he did not know if Geas was involved but said Geas believed Bulger had helped frame his friend Frederick Weichel.
James ‘Whitey’ Bulger was found dead on Tuesday after being transferred a day earlier to the high-security Hazelton penitentiary in West Virginia. He is pictured above in 2011
Fred Weichel arrives in a courtroom in Brockton Superior Court on Aug. 15, 2016, as his lawyers present evidence seeking to overturn his 1981 murder conviction
Weichel, who operated on the fringe of Bulger’s South Boston criminal gang, was convicted in the 1980 shooting of Robert LaMonica on a street in Braintree and served 36 years behind bars.
A witness saw a man fleeing the scene and later picked out Weichel from a police array.
Fotios ‘Freddy’ Geas, a Mafia hitman who is said to hate ‘rats’, is under investigation for Bulger’s murder
Last year Weichel’s conviction was overturned when a judge ruled the witness was unreliable and officials failed to give the defense a police report suggesting another possible suspect.
Weichel’s release was not to be considered an acquittal, the judge said, but prosecutors decided against a re-trial because six witnesses had died.
While Weichel was behind bars, Bulger wrote letters from jail to Weichel’s lawyers claiming he knew Weichel didn’t kill LaMonica.
In the letters Bulger, said a friend of Weichel’s told him he was afraid because he had beaten up a man in a fight and the man’s friend, LaMonica, was promising retribution. Bulger said he told the man to ‘get him first, kill him.’
Bulger said what Weichel was going through was a ‘fate worse than death’. He wrote that LaMonica’s killer is a boxer who was friendly with Weichel.
But Bulger refused to sign an affidavit or testify on Weichel’s behalf. He told Weichel’s defence team: ‘I have never testified against any man, have never caused any man to be put in prison.’ He called it a ‘waste of time’ to testify.
Bulger, who led the Boston’s Winter Hill Gang for more than 20 years, said he didn’t even testify in his own case, let alone Weichel’s.
He also claimed he had been ‘falsely accused’ of crimes and was able to empathize with Weichel but could help no further.
When he was released last year, Weichel said: ‘I think everybody in the world knew that Whitey screwed me.’
Weichel and Geas spent time together in a Massachusetts prison but Weichel said he didn’t think he spoke to Geas about Bulger during that time.
Daniel Kelly, a lawyer who represented Geas, told the Boston Globe: ‘He referenced that [Weichel] was framed.’
It comes after an ex-con claimed federal officials wanted to ‘get rid of’ Bulger and transferred him to a violent prison on purpose just 24 hours before he was found beaten to death.
Many questions remain unanswered in relation to his death, including why Bulger was moved to the prison and why he was placed in the general population.
Ex-con Richard Stratton, who is now a TV producer, told the New York Post it was hard to believe that Bulger would not have been placed in protective custody given he was a known snitch.
‘He’s going to be exposed in a way where he can easily be killed, and then one day later he’s murdered,’ Stratton said.
‘It’s not like Whitey’s going to stop f**king scamming because he’s in prison.
‘It’s so obvious that they wanted to get rid of him, that he was a pain in the a** to them.’
Stratton, who was jailed for eight years for drug smuggling, once had a contract put out on him but he went to Bulger for help and he squashed it.
Cameron Lindsay, a former federal prison warden who now works as a jail security consultant, also expressed concern about placing Bulger in the general population.
Ex-con Richard Stratton (right), who is now a TV producer, said it was hard to believe that Bulger (left) would not have been placed in protective custody given he was a known snitch
Bulger had just arrived Monday at USP Hazelton, a high-security prison in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia before he was killed
‘What I don’t understand is why the Federal Bureau of Prisons would transfer a super high-publicity inmate, who is a known snitch, to general population of a high-security prison,’ he said.
‘You’ve got to be smarter than that.
‘If I was the warden of Hazelton, I would have never, ever allowed him to be put within my general population. It is just too risky.’
Bulger had lived a double life as one of Boston’s most notorious mobsters and as a secret FBI informant before going on the run for 16 years.
He was convicted in August 2013 of 11 murders, among other charges, and sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus five years.
Bulger had just arrived Monday at USP Hazelton, a high-security prison in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia. He had previously been in a prison in Florida, with a stopover at a transfer facility in Oklahoma City.
Federal Bureau of Prisons officials and his attorney declined to comment on why he was being moved.
These 1980s FBI handout file photos show Massachusetts mobster James ‘Whitey’ Bulger
A police evidence photo shows a car riddled with bullet holes in connection with one of the 19 murders Bulger was charged with. He was convicted of 11 murders
Two men were seen on surveillance footage entering Bulger’s cell, according to a prison employee. Bulger’s body was later discovered wrapped in a sheet and had been beaten so badly that blood had come out of his ears.
Attorney Hank Brennan, who represented Bulger during his 2013 trial, said Bulger had a hip injury and was in a wheelchair when he was attacked.
Authorities have not disclosed the cause of death.
An FBI spokeswoman in Pittsburgh declined to comment on Geas and federal officials said only that they are investigating the death as a homicide.
Geas and his brother were sentenced to life in prison in 2011 for their roles in several violent crimes, including the 2003 killing of Adolfo ‘Big Al’ Bruno, a Genovese crime family boss who was gunned down in a Springfield, Massachusetts, parking lot.
Private investigator Ted McDonough, who knew Geas, told The Boston Globe: ‘Freddy hated rats.’
‘Freddy hated guys who abused women. Whitey was a rat who killed women. It’s probably that simple,’ McDonough told the newspaper, which first reported that Geas was under suspicion.
Bulger’s death was the third killing in the past six months at the prison with two inmates being killed in fights with other prisoners in September and April.
INSIDE ‘MISERY MOUNTAIN’: Whitey was the THIRD inmate murdered just this year at the troubled West Virginia prison
Whitey Bulger is the third inmate to be killed in USP Hazelton just this year.
In April a 48-year-old inmate named Ian Thorne was killed after he got into a fight with another prisoner. Both used homemade weapons during the altercation.
Five months after Thorne was killed, another inmate was murdered.
Demario Porter, 27, was killed in September during a fight with another prisoner. He had only arrived at Hazelton days beforehand.
USP Hazelton is seen in an aerial shot. Bulger was found dead there on Tuesday
Richard Heldreth, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 420, blamed the deaths on understaffing at the prison.
He called it part of a ‘very disturbing trend with increases in drugs and weapons being found at the complex’.
Since January 2018, there have been more than 60 documented violent incidents at the prison, which has also been locked down nine times this year ‘due to violence’, Heldreth told the Preston County News & Journal.
An interior is seen of FCI Hazelton, the minimum security camp attached to USP Hazelton. Bulger was found bludgeoned to death in the higher security facility on Tuesday
‘It has become an every day occurrence,’ he added. ‘For example, there have been at least 11 weapons confiscated at the facility in the last two days that I have seen documentation of.’
Heldreth argued that the prison had become far less safe since the Trump administration announced a federal hiring freeze in January 2017 and the Bureau of Prisons was asked to eliminate 6,000 unfilled jobs – including 127 at Hazelton.