Three BOP Prisoners Sentenced for Murder of “Whitey” Bulger at West Virginia Lockup
The last of three federal prisoners was sentenced on September 6, 2024, for the murder of fellow prisoner James “Whitey” Bulger, the 89-year-old former boss of Boston’s “Irish Mafia,” who was killed within hours after he arrived in October 2018 at the U.S. Penitentiary in Hazelton, West Virginia. For his role in the slaying, Fotios “Freddy” Geas, 57, was given another four years on top of the life sentence he was already serving.
As PLN reported, Geas and fellow prisoner Paul J. DeCologero, 50, were accused of murdering Bulger, while a third prisoner, Sean McKinnon, 38, was charged with acting as lookout for the other two. Their captors at the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) were called out by the Office of the Inspector General for its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Justice, in a December 2022 report that blamed Bulger’s killing on BOP’s “bureaucratic incompetence” plus its “flawed, confusing and insufficient” policies and procedures. [See: PLN, June 2023, p.16.]
DeCologero got a four-year sentence on July 31, 2024, after prosecutors decided he had merely stood watch while Geas bludgeoned Bulger with a padlock in a sock. That pushed back DeCologero’s earliest possible release to the end of 2031, five years beyond the sentence he was serving on a 2006 conviction for buying heroin used in the attempted murder of a teenage girl whose testimony threatened his crime ring, which was also based in Massachusetts. McKinnon was sentenced in June 2024 to the 22 months he had served since his arrest for Bulger’s killing.
Geas’ original sentence was handed down in 2011 for the contract killing eight years earlier of another Massachusetts mobster, Adolfo “Big Al” Bruno, which Geas carried out for an associate who was reportedly angered that Bruno had talked to the FBI.
Sources: NBC News, New York Times
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