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The Manuscript, the Wrong Man, and Who Really Ran Bulger
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Whitey Bulger's suppressed handwritten manuscript alleged that FBI supervisor John Morris — not John Connolly — was the deeper corruption at the heart of Boston's most notorious law enforcement scandal. This chapter traces the South Boston origins, nineteen murders, and the question the federal system never cleanly answered.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's what nobody fully resolved: a man convicted of helping a killer escape justice left behind a handwritten manuscript that may have named the wrong man as the real FBI source. And that manuscript was suppressed.
James Joseph Bulger grew up in the Old Harbor Housing Project in South Boston. So did his younger brother William.
In nineteen seventy-five, the FBI formally recruited Whitey Bulger as a top-echelon informant. The idea, from the bureau's perspective, was straightforward.
The murder count attached to Bulger's name eventually reached nineteen. He was convicted of eleven.
Bulger's handwritten account, written in custody and never officially published, alleged that Morris, not Connolly, was the agent who functioned as the true insider source. Bulger's argument, and it's important to state this carefully, was not that Connolly was innocent of everything.
In late nineteen ninety-four, Connolly warned Bulger that a federal indictment was imminent. Bulger left Boston with his longtime companion Catherine Greig, approximately eight hundred thousand dollars in cash, and roughly twenty firearms.
The trial in federal court in Boston in twenty thirteen was, in some ways, a structured confrontation with everything the city had tried not to see for thirty years. The prosecution used testimony from confessed killers, men who had committed multiple murders and received dramatically reduced sentences in exchange for cooperation.
Bulger was transferred to the Hazelton federal penitentiary in West Virginia in October twenty eighteen. He was eighty-nine years old, in a wheelchair, and medically frail.
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