The Freedom Bulletin

Two hearings took place today in Boston’s federal courthouse having to do with Irish mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger and his girlfriend Catherine Greig.

Greig’s motion hearing

The first, in Courtroom 1 with Judge Douglas Woodlock, was a very brief hearing postponing the date of Greig’s trial. Greig’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, requested a delay from the previously-set date of April 23 to May 7 because of a conflict with an environmental case in state court. Prosecutors Jack Pirozzolo and Jamie Herbert were fine with this, as was Judge Woodlock. As reported previously, the government is considering filing a superseding indictment, charging Greig with more offenses in addition to harboring Bulger. Pirozzolo assured Judge Woodlock, “we’re going to make sure we do it with ample time.” That was it for that hearing.

Civil case appeal

Meanwhile, in the sixteen years Bulger was on the lam with Greig, family members of his alleged victims sued the FBI for their cooperation with Bulger, who was allowed to remain free and allegedly commit additional crimes while being an FBI informant against the Italian mob. Bulger’s “handler,” FBI agent John Connolly, is in jail for racketeering for being a little too friendly with Bulger and tipping him off to the indictment against him.

Late this morning, oral arguments took place in the FBI’s appeal of wrongful death damages that district judge William G. Young awarded to the estates of Louis Litif, Deborah Hussey, and Debra Davis, who were allegedly killed by Bulger and/or his associates in the 1980s. Litif was allegedly killed by Bulger after Connolly tipped him off that he was an FBI informant, and his estate was awarded $1.15 million. Hussey, the stepdaughter of Bulger’s henchman Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi, was killed by him and Bulger because she became “an annoyance,” and her estate was awarded $1.35 million. Davis was Flemmi’s girlfriend and was killed by Bulger and Flemmi when she broke up with him; her estate was awarded $220,000.

Before a three-judge appellate panel, Department of Justice lawyer Thomas Bondy, representing the FBI, said that there was no definitive evidence showing who killed Litif or why. “The Litif murder is an unsolved crime,” he said. “We don’t know who did it.” Any evidence that Bulger did it, he claimed, was inadmissible hearsay. Additionally, Bondy argued that the Litif family’s claims should be barred by the statute of limitations. Information about Litif’s murder was available in media reports beginning in 1997-8, enabling them to file a lawsuit then, but they didn’t until 2001. And Bondy argued that no evidence directly established that Connolly tipped Bulger off about Litif being an informant.

As for Davis and Hussey, Bondy argued that although they were killed by Bulger and Flemmi, their homicides were of a personal nature as opposed to part of the business of the mob. He called the murders “common, banal crimes of domestic violence” and said, “We don’t see how there’s a connection between these crimes and any act or omission committed by the United States.” Although he called Connolly’s acts “venal and malignant,” he said these acts “cannot be casually connected to the murders…There are acts by Stephen Flemmi for which the U.S. government can be held liable in tort, but these two murders are not among them.”

On the other side, Ann Donovan, a lawyer for the Hussey estate, asked the court to not just affirm, but increase the damages for pain and suffering. “For decades the FBI actively…protected their top echelon informants, Bulger and Flemmi,” she said. “It was reasonably foreseeable that they would murder.” She cited corruption among law enforcement as the main reason why Bulger and his Winter Hill gang were able to avoid detection and prosecution for so long.

Michael Heineman, representing the Davis estate, argued, “the death here was exactly the type of risk…that made this negligence to begin with.” Bulger had been involved with 30-40 murders before Davis, he pointed out, comparing the FBI’s negligence to firing a gun in the air, in which case you would be responsible if the bullet landed on someone and killed them. “The failure here,” he said, “was not the passive failure to prosecute but the active involvement…when you put murderers on the street, when you act in concert with them, you’re responsible for the murders they commit.”

Edward Berkin, a lawyer for the Litif estate, defended the decision not to sue until 2001, saying that “the publicly available information…never went beyond innuendo.” Kevin Weeks, one of Bulger’s henchmen, only began to cooperate with the FBI in December 1999, and Flemmi only began to cooperate in 2003. Only then, he said, did concrete information come out about Litif’s death. With respect to the hearsay testimony indicating that Bulger committed the murder, Berkin claimed that the government never objected to this evidence in the district court. He also argued that the estate deserved damages for torture that Litif suffered. “Mr. Litif was stabbed 38 times, 10 times penetrating his liver,” he said. “It’s common sense that being stabbed 38 times is clearly torture.”

Bondy fired back at the suggestion that the government had not objected. “That suggestion is utterly meritless…there were ad nauseam objections,” he said, listing the page numbers of these objections in the trial transcript and pointing out that Judge Young even told the government lawyers, “I’ll give you a standing objection.”

The appeals court took the case under advisement.