Thursday, March 28

Two inmates charged with killing James ‘Whitey’ Bulger could face the death penalty – The Boston Globe


A third inmate, Sean McKinnon, 36, who is from Vermont, allegedly “acted as a lookout,” outside Bulger’s cell during the early morning assault, then claimed to know nothing about it when later questioned by FBI agents, according to the indictment.

Geas and DeCologero face the maximum possible sentence — death or life in prison — if convicted of aiding and abetting first-degree murder. Geas also faces the death penalty on an additional charge of committing murder while already serving a life sentence.

The US Attorney’s office for the Northern District of West Virginia declined to comment on whether prosecutors will seek the death penalty, according to a Stacy Bishop, a spokeswoman for the office.

“There has been this sort of general reluctance to seek the death penalty,” said David Hoose, a Springfield attorney who has experience in death penalty cases and has previously represented Geas.

The Biden Administration declared a moratorium on federal executions in 2021, yet successfully urged the US Supreme Court to reinstate the death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev earlier this year.

There have been 50 federal executions since 1927, including 13 by lethal injections in a six-month period between July 2020 and January 2021, according to the Bureau of Prisons.

“The real issue is are they going to want to seek the death penalty and is Freddy and his lawyer willing to take a plea to a life sentence,” Hoose said. “And if they are, is that something that the Department of Justice would sign off on just to wrap it up and avoid all the endless litigation as to how and why Whitey was placed there.”

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Bulger, who spent 16 years on the run and was a fixture on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list, was sentenced to life in prison in 2013 for killing 11 people while running a sprawling criminal enterprise from the 1970s to the 1990s. He was publicly identified in the late 1990s as a longtime FBI informant who provided information against local Mafiosi.

Yet he was transferred under questionable circumstances from a Florida prison to Hazelton, one of the nation’s most violent prisons, and placed in general population alongside Massachusetts organized crime figures, including Geas and DeCologero.

Bulger was in a wheelchair, had suffered numerous heart attacks, and had previously been held in units designated for inmates, such as informants or pedophiles, who were believed to need protection from other inmates. He had spent his last months before the transfer at USP Coleman II in Florida in solitary confinement after a verbal confrontation with a nurse. Prison officials changed his medical classification, claiming his health had dramatically improved, paving the way for his transfer to Hazelton, which provided fewer medical services.

When the cell doors throughout the unit were unlocked on the morning after his arrival so inmates could leave for breakfast, Geas and DeCologero were captured on video surveillance entering Bulger’s cell about two hours before he was found dead, according to several people briefed on the attack.

In January, a federal judge dismissed a wrongful death suit filed by Bulger’s family against the Bureau of Prisons and prison officials alleging they caused his death by “intentional or deliberately indifferent actions.”

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The indictment also charges Geas, DeCologero, and McKinnon with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and charges McKinnon with making false statements to the FBI when he claimed he was unaware of what happened to Bulger and hadn’t discussed Bulger with Geas and DeCologero before the slaying.

Bulger’s attorney, Hank Brennan, called the three arrests “inconsequential” and said, “It’s the persons who allowed it to happen that need accountability most.”

On Friday, Brian Kornbrath, a federal public defender in West Virginia, said he was trying to find lawyers with death penalty experience to represent Geas and DeCologero. He said they are each entitled to have two attorneys appointed to represent them, including at least one who has handled multiple death penalty cases.

As of late Friday, neither Geas nor DeCologero had been appointed counsel or given a date to appear in court to face murder charges, but Geas’s former attorney, Daniel D. Kelly of Springfield, said he expected to take his case and raised questions about the “culpability” of prison officials for “dropping Bulger in that environment.”

Kelly said Bulger’s slaying “was maybe inevitable” after the Bureau of Prisons sent him to Hazelton. “I guess we’ll see, but maybe they should be an unindicted co-conspirator.”

The US Bureau of Prisons has declined to provide any information about Bulger’s medical reclassification or transfer to Hazelton in response to public records requests, citing the ongoing investigation.

Geas was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 2003 murders of Springfield mob boss Adolfo “Big Al” Bruno and an associate. He remains at Hazelton, where has been held in solitary confinement since Bulger’s slaying.

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DeCologero, a member of a North Shore organized crime group that robbed rival drug dealers and killed a teenage girl they feared might give them up, has four years left on a 25-year sentence and is currently at a Virginia penitentiary.

McKinnon, who was recently released after serving an eight-year sentence for stealing a dozen guns, was arrested in Ocala, Fla. Thursday and is being held pending a detention hearing Monday.

Efforts to reach him, his family or lawyer Friday were unsuccessful. But during a brief telephone interview in May, McKinnon said FBI agents tried to question him at the prison a few hours after Bulger was killed and again after he was transferred out of Hazelton last year.

Both times he declined to talk and asked for a lawyer, McKinnon said.


Shelley Murphy can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @shelleymurph.



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