Bureau of Prisons/Getty Images
It’s been a week since the Boston mobster turned FBI informant James “Whitey” Bulger was brutally murdered in his prison cell by a couple of ex-Mafia associates who weren’t too keen on rats.
Bulger, who in November 2013 was sentenced to two life terms plus an extra five years for committing “unfathomable” acts that contributed to the most violent period in Boston’s history, planned to live at least two more years so he could know his longtime girlfriend had been released from prison.
While fugitives in Santa Monica under the aliases Charlie and Carol Gasko, Bulger and girlfriend Catherine Greig became close with their neighbor. Bulger penned letters to the woman in prison and she has since released the contents of a letter dated November 3, 2011 with the Boston Globe.
“I want to live until she is free,” Bulger wrote in a letter with a Nov. 3, 2011 postmark. “After that I will refuse all medical care. I have a family member, a lawyer, who I wrote for final instructions — No autopsy. I want to be buried next to Catherine and that’s it — Simple.”
The 67-year-old Greig was sentenced to nine years in prison for helping Bulger escape and evade authorities and for refusing to testify against him.
Bulger girlfriend Catherine Greig should serve 37 months in prison, prosecutors say https://t.co/fNihtAGo2N pic.twitter.com/bNyD2HxKii
— The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) April 26, 2016
In another letter, dated September 2011, Bulger wrote:
“I must wait for a natural death — my family has suffered enough because of my wild life, and suicide is taboo in old-time Catholics — also it wouldn’t be fair to Cathy,” he wrote. “I want to see her free and one day be side by side forever. I don’t talk this way to my family — they hope for better days.”
Better days, they never came.
[h/t NY Post]