HARTFORD, Conn. — The FBI said Monday it has paid
$2.1 million in reward money to people who provided information that
resulted in the capture in June of most-wanted fugitive James “Whitey”
Bulger and his girlfriend Catherine Greig.
The reward was paid to “more than one individual,” the bureau said, but it would not identify them.
“To
protect the anonymity and privacy of those responsible for providing
information which directly led to the arrests of Mr. Bulger and Ms.
Greig, the FBI will not comment further regarding this matter,” the
bureau said in a press statement Monday.
A
telephone tipster, alerted by a televised, FBI publicity campaign, led
agents to Bulger and Greig on June 21. The couple was living
comfortably, after 16 years on the run, in a rent-controlled, seaside
apartment in an area near Los Angeles popular with retirees.
Authorities said Bulger had hidden a stockpile of guns and cash in the apartment.
Bulger,
81, had been on the FBI’s most-wanted list for years. He was wanted for
decades of violence that included 19 killings and a long list of other
crimes — including making payments to a corrupt FBI agent for
information he used to stay ahead of the law.
Bulger
and Greig, one of his longtime girlfriends, disappeared in early 1995
after the corrupt FBI agent tipped the mob boss that he and other
members of his gang were about to be indicted for crimes that could put
them in prison for the rest of their lives.
In its
press announcement, the FBI said it received final authorization from
the Department of Justice on Sept. 19 to pay the reward. The government
had offered $2 million for information leading to the arrest of Bulger
and $100,000 for Greig’s arrest.
“As of Friday,
September 23, 2011, the FBI has paid this reward money to more than one
individual,” the bureau said in its statement.
It
appeared at the time the two were captured that Greig had inadvertently
led authorities to her boyfriend. She had been the subject of the FBI
publicity campaign that the bureau had launched just a day earlier.
At
the time of the arrests, the FBI said that a tipster, whom it would not
identify, called the bureau’s Los Angeles office about 8 p.m. on June
21, alerted by the bureau’s latest effort to use television messages to
generate leads on Bulger, who, if convicted, faces life in prison in
Boston and death sentences in Miami and Tulsa, Okla.
Unlike
a dozen or so past failures, an FBI publicity campaign targeted Greig.
By focusing on Greig in television spots in 14 cities, the FBI hoped
that she would be recognized by “a friend, co-worker, neighbor, hair
stylist, manicurist, doctor or dentist.”
Los Angeles wasn’t one of the targeted cities. But the plan worked, anyway.
A
multijurisdictional Bulger task force based in Boston, which had been
chasing ephemeral Bulger sightings around the globe since 1995, judged
the Los Angeles-area tip to be “credible.” Before the call came in, the
FBI said the last credible tip it had received placed Bulger and Greig
in London in 2002.
Bulger’s 16 years as a fugitive
were a chronic embarrassment to the FBI, and critics of the bureau from
other law enforcement agencies had questioned its commitment to finding
him.
In the 1980s and ’90s, the FBI’s Boston
office listed Bulger and one of his partners, Stephen “The Rifleman”
Flemmi, as “Top Echelon” informants who consistently provided
high-quality intelligence about organized crime in New England.
In
reality, testimony by Flemmi and another gangster in a variety of legal
proceedings has shown the opposite. Bulger effectively penetrated the
FBI’s Boston office and was paying at least two agents for information
that he used to neutralize rivals in the Mafia, kill potential
informants against his gang and become one of the nation’s most powerful
criminal figures.
In
a particularly audacious move, Bulger and his partners — including the
two former FBI agents — tried to penetrate the parimutuel gambling
industry through a murderous but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to take
over the World Jai Alai company. World Jai Alai once operated venues
called frontons in Hartford and south Florida where customers could bet
on the sport.
The attempted jai alai takeover
resulted in the 1981 shooting deaths of World Jai Alai owner Roger
Wheeler in Tulsa and former World Jai Alai President John B. Callahan in
Miami in 1982.
Before his death, Wheeler told
investigators in Connecticut, who were looking into jai alai gambling
irregularities, that New England mobsters were trying to take over his
jai alai fronton in Hartford. He was dead within months.
The
Connecticut investigators decided to fly to Miami in an effort to
obtain information from Callahan, but arrived just as authorities were
pulling his body out of the trunk of his Cadillac in an airport parking
lot.
In 2008, former Boston FBI Agent John
Connolly, who “handled” Bulger when he was an informant, was convicted
of participating in Callahan’s murder by tipping Bulger that Connecticut
investigators were looking for Callahan. Connolly was sentenced to 40
years in prison, an effective life sentence. Another Boston agent, H.
Paul Rico, died in a Tulsa jail before he could be tried for setting up
Wheeler’s murder for the Bulger gang.
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