Feds: They Tried To Slice Off Whitey Bulger's Tongue

UPDATED
If they weren't trying to gouge out his eyes, they definitely tried to cut out his tongue. That's the latest news from a federal source speaking on condition of anonymity.

Freddy Geas at 2003 trial.


The attackers who killed notorious mob boss/FBI informant James "Whitey" Bulger at a West Virginia federal prison tried to cut his tongue off, a federal law enforcement official said.

Bulger, 89, was beaten beyond recognition in the fatal attack Tuesday, one day after he was transferred there from another facility. Officials have said that federal investigators are eyeing several potential suspects in the murder, including Fotios “Freddy” Geas who is currently in solitary




The New York Times reported that "At least two inmates were quickly sent to solitary confinement after Mr. Bulger was found, according to three employees of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, who requested anonymity because the investigation was not public. Mr. Geas was among those sent to solitary, according to prison documents obtained by The New York Times."

Freddy Geas was a career criminal who, with his brother, was known to be in the middle of a murderous plot to kill a capo at the behest of the then-acting boss of the Genovese crime family. He's now a prison lifer — and he hates informants.

“Geas had layers of possible motives to go after Bulger, if he did,” as the Boston Globe reported.

“He was friendly with and served time at a Massachusetts prison with Frederick Weichel, who spent 36 years in prison for a murder he says he didn’t commit. Weichel had long maintained that Bulger had helped frame him and had been reluctant to provide information that could help prove his innocence in the 1980 murder of Robert LaMonica in Braintree.

“After years of refusing to help, and after his 2011 capture after spending 16 years on the run, Bulger finally supplied a series of letters to Weichel’s lawyers in 2013 that suggested another man killed LaMonica. However, Bulger refused to sign an affidavit or testify on Weichel’s behalf, as Weichel and his defense team had repeatedly requested.”

Geas is serving a life sentence at the prison in Hazelton for his role in the assassination of Adolfo “Big Al” Bruno, the onetime boss of the Genovese crime family's Springfield crew, essentially the Massachusetts branch of the Genovese franchise. Geas was in the unenviable position of having both the man who ordered him to kill Bruno and the hitman he himself dispatched to do the deed flip and testify against him

Freddy Geas, 51, and his brother Ty, 46, were a tag team pair of criminals from West Springfield who were well known, and feared, in Western Massachusetts.

Both have long rap sheets and were known for violent impulsiveness. When Ty Geas was 17, he was sentenced to a year in jail for firing an assault rifle into the air during a high school hockey game.

Freddy Geas exhibited what would become a lifelong, violent animosity toward those who cooperate with the authorities, eventually pleading guilty to threatening to kill a witness against his brother.

Freddy Geas’s reputation for sudden, impulsive violence is long established. When a fight at Sh-Booms, a bar in Spingfield, spilled onto the street in 1989,  Freddy, then 22, wrecked an expensive vintage car parked outside.

In 2006, he went to jail for beating two men with a baseball bat at a strip club.

By that time, the Geas brothers were well known to local authorities as the hired muscle for an aspiring mobster named Anthony (Bingy) Arillotta. Because they were Greek, the Geas brothers could not be made, but they both carried a full "Mafia license," so to speak.

“Nobody screwed with them,” a source who knew them said. “Freddy, especially.”

In 2009, Freddy Geas was charged with a series of crimes, including the Bruno murder. He also was charged in the 2003 murder of Gary Westerman, Arillotta’s brother-in-law. He was also charged with being the getaway driver in the botched hit on Frank Dabado, a cement union boss in the Bronx. Dabado was marked for death after he and Genovese boss Arty Nigro had a fight over Tony Bennett concert tickets.

Freddy Geas was reportedly crushed to learn that the star witness against him was Bingy, who had been his Mafia mentor.

Arillotta’s testimony described "a chaotic scene right out of a Martin Scorcese movie," as someone put it. After Freddy Geas shot Westerman in the head twice, the mortally wounded Westerman tried to break free from the Geas brothers as they dragged him to a grave. Arillotta testified that he and Emilio Fusco, a Genovese soldier, then beat him to death with shovels.

Freddy Geas was convicted of hiring the hitman who killed Bruno so Arillotta could become boss of Springfield. Geas met that hitman, Frankie Roche, in prison and was his friend, police said.

In a 2007 statement to Springfield police, Roche admitted that he shot Bruno outside the Mount Carmel Society social club in Springfield.

“Freddy had called me earlier in the day and told me that Al was definitely going to be there,” Roche told police. “I killed Al Bruno because I was paid to do it. Freddy Geas is the person who paid me to do it.”


In 2016, Taylor Geas, Freddy’s daughter, wrote an opinion piece for Springfield's The Republican in which she recalled that as a child she thought her father was never around because he was in the Army.

“My dad led a double life,” she said.

“The person I know is the father that would tuck me in at night, and tell me funny stories until I fell asleep,” she wrote. “He was the person that taught me how to throw a baseball, and got me my first pair of soccer cleats. When I look in the mirror I see his smile because I have the same one.”

Read the entire piece here: Freddy Geas case viewed with a daughter's eye: Reader viewpoint


Freddy Geas is extremely personable and a good conversationalist, and was known to drink at the Cafe Manhattan in downtown Springfield.


At the time of the killing, Bulger was in the general prison population, which gave inmates easy access to him.

Bulger was found unresponsive at 8:20 a.m., and was pronounced dead after failed lifesaving measures, prison officials said.

Bulger, 89, was struck repeatedly when several inmates attacked him in the morning at Hazelton federal penitentiary in West Virginia.



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