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.
[h=6]U.S. Marshals Service/U.S. Department of Justice, via Associated Press[/h]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.
[h=6]U.S. Marshals Service/U.S. Department of Justice, via Associated Press[/h]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.