3 Longtime Suspects Charged in Whitey Bulger's Killing

2 are in prisons, and the third has been arrested in 2018 slaying
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 2, 2021 2:12 AM CDT
Updated Aug 18, 2022 6:05 PM CDT
Here's the Latest Twist in the Whitey Bulger Murder Case
This undated photo released by the FBI on Dec. 30, 1998 shows Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger.   (FBI via AP, File)

Update: Almost four years after the prison slaying of Whitey Bulger, three men have been charged in the Boston crime boss' death. The Justice Department on Thursday announced that Fotios "Freddy" Geas, Paul J. DeCologero, and Sean McKinnon are charged with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and other counts. They've long been publicly identified as suspects, the AP reports, but the investigation has been going on all this time. DeCologero and Geas are in separate federal prisons, while McKinnon was arrested Thursday in Florida. Our story from August 2021 follows:

Last week, two of the four inmates who were placed in solitary confinement after Whitey Bulger was found beaten to death in his prison cell were transferred out of the West Virginia federal prison. As of Friday afternoon Paul DeCologero, 47, was at a federal prison in Atlanta and Sean McKinnon, 35, was at a federal facility in Oklahoma that serves as an inmate transfer point, reports NBC News, which spoke to family members and reviewed online records. A third prisoner, Fotios “Freddy” Geas, is still in solitary confinement at the West Virginia facility, while a fourth prisoner was released to state custody after more than five months in solitary. It's not clear why DeCologero and McKinnon were moved.

No one has yet been charged in the October 2018 crime, and relatives of the prisoners placed in solitary have long protested the "inhumane" conditions. Geas and DeCologero are, like Bulger, Massachusetts gangsters, and it's still not clear how Bulger ended up in the same prison unit as them; he was dead within 12 hours of transferring to the general population of the notoriously violent facility from a Florida penitentiary. McKinnon, who insists he knows nothing about Bulger's death, was Geas' cellmate when Bulger was killed; the fourth inmate who was held in solitary more briefly was Bulger's cellmate. McKinnon is scheduled to be released July 2022, while DeCologero has five years left on his sentence. See NBC for the full story. (More Whitey Bulger stories.)

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