A person charged within the prison killing of notorious Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger will stay behind bars whereas he awaits trial, a federal decide dominated Monday.
Sean McKinnon, 36, was on federal supervised launch when he was arrested Thursday in Florida on costs together with conspiracy to commit first diploma homicide.
Two different males charged in Bulger’s killing — Fotios “Freddy” Geas, 55, and Paul J. DeCologero, 48 — have been already locked up.
The males are accused of conspiring to kill Bulger hours after he was transferred to USP Hazelton in West Virginia from a prison in Florida in 2018. Bulger, who served as an FBI informant and later turned one of the nation’s most-wanted fugitives, had been serving a life sentence for 11 murders and different crimes.
Authorities say Geas and DeCologero struck Bulger within the head a number of occasions whereas McKinnon acted as a lookout. McKinnon is charged individually with making false statements to a federal agent. Prosecutors say he instructed federal brokers he wasn’t conscious of what occurred to Bulger.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Philip Lammens in Florida granted prosecutors’ request to hold McKinnon detained until trial, calling him each a flight threat and a hazard to the group.
Authorities haven’t revealed a attainable motive for Bulger’s killing, which has raised questions on why the 89-year-old was moved to the prison nicknamed “Misery Mountain” and positioned in its normal inhabitants as an alternative of extra protecting housing.
McKinnon, who was Geas’ cellmate at Hazelton, pleaded responsible in 2015 to stealing a dozen handguns from a Vermont firearms supplier. He was moved to a midway home in February earlier than being launched from there in July.
An electronic mail in search of remark was despatched to an lawyer who represented McKinnon at his detention listening to on Monday.
DeCologero, who was in an organized crime gang led by his uncle in Massachusetts, was convicted of shopping for heroin that was used to attempt to kill a teenage lady his uncle needed lifeless as a result of he feared she would betray the crew to police. The heroin did not kill her, so one other man broke her neck, dismembered her and buried her stays within the woods, court docket information say.
Geas, a Mafia hitman, and his brother have been sentenced to life in prison in 2011 for his or her roles in a number of violent crimes, together with the 2003 killing of Adolfo “Big Al” Bruno, a Genovese crime household boss in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Author Casey Sherman interviewed Gaes for his e book “Hunting Whitey.”
“Freddy Geas was an old-school gangster, and he lived by the code that you don’t – quote, unquote – rat on your friends,” Sherman instructed CBS Boston.
He stated Bulger ought to by no means had been transferred to the prison the place he died as a result of he was a identified FBI informant.
“It’s the most violent prison in the federal prison system,” Sherman stated.
In January, a federal decide dismissed a lawsuit filed by Bulger’s relations. The household had accused the Federal Bureau of Prisons and 30 unnamed staff of the prison system of failing to shield Bulger by transferring him to a prison with fixed inmate violence.Â
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