Whitey Bulger Confided in Lawyer Before His Murder

Ex-gangster said he wasn't happy with prison transfer. 'I don't trust them'
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 10, 2018 2:10 PM CST
Whitey Bulger Before His Murder: 'I Don't Trust Them'
This 2011 booking photo provided by the U.S. Marshals Service shows James "Whitey" Bulger.   (U.S. Marshals Service via AP, File)

Whitey Bulger smelled a rat. A month before the 89-year-old former gangster was murdered in prison, he told his lawyer that he wasn't happy about an upcoming transfer, reports the Wall Street Journal. “The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t,” attorney Hank Brennan remembers Bulger telling him. “I don’t trust them.” During the call, Bulger said he'd been informed he was being sent from a federal prison in Florida, where he spent his time in solitary confinement, to a medical facility. Instead he ended up in a notoriously violent prison in West Virginia and was beaten to death inside his own cell within 24 hours.

“It’s important for the family and the public to know why the prisons decided to wheel an 89-year-old man with a history of heart attacks into one of the most dangerous prisons in the country,” says Brennan. The attorney tells the AP that he plans to begin filing multiple lawsuits over the next month on behalf of Bulger's estate. No charges have yet been filed in Bulger's death, but two mobsters from his home state of Massachusetts are under suspicion. (The killers used a padlock in a sock.)

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