UMass president subpoenaed to testify about mobster brother
BOSTON (AP) – University of Massachusetts President William M. Bulger, who has maintained a steadfast silence about his mobster brother, must decide how to respond to a congressional committee subpoena summoning him testify about his infamous sibling. Bulger’s attorney, Thomas R. Kiley, said Monday he was “looking at all our options” after the House Government Reform Committee issued the subpoena instructing Bulger to testify about James “Whitey” Bulger.
Meanwhile, reports published Tuesday said Bulger testified before a grand jury that he has been in contact with his fugitive brother once since the mobster fled Boston nearly eight years ago.
William Bulger said he spoke with his brother over the phone in January 1995, according to a copy of William Bulger’s testimony on April 5, 2001, obtained by The Boston Globe. Bulger said his brother was seeking legal advice, and that he didn’t urge him to surrender to authorities “because I don’t think it would be in his interest to do so.”
Bulger, 68, said he does not know where his brother is hiding.
The Boston Herald, citing an unnamed “investigative source,” also reported Bulger had been in touch with his brother since the mobster fled.
The Boston office of the U.S. Marshals Service delivered the subpoena Monday afternoon to Kiley. It requires Bulger to testify at a hearing in Boston on Friday.
“I don’t think there’s any course to quash the subpoena,” said spokesman Blain Rethmeier.
“If Mr. Bulger does not appear on Friday, he runs the risk of being held in contempt of Congress.”
The committee’s chief lawyer, Jim Wilson, said over the weekend that the committee would issue a subpoena “because Mr. Kiley was so emphatic in his message that Mr. Bulger will not appear” at the hearing.
The committee has not revealed what it will ask Bulger, but he could be questioned about what, if any, influence he had with law enforcement while his brother was an FBI informant.
The committee originally scheduled Bulger to testify at a hearing Thursday in Boston, but added the Friday hearing when he said a scheduling conflict prevented his appearance earlier.
The committee, chaired by Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., scheduled the hearings as part of its ongoing investigation of the Justice Department’s handling of mob informants.
It has trained its sights on the relationship between Boston FBI agents and the hit men and mob leaders they cultivated – and sometimes protected from prosecution for crimes as serious as murder.
Documents released to the committee indicated such relationships were known to FBI headquarters in Washington.
James Bulger, 73, fled in 1995 just before he was indicted on racketeering and extortion charges. He has since been indicted on additional charges related to 18 murders, and is on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.
During the trial earlier this year of retired FBI agent John Connolly, confessed hit man John Martorano testified that William Bulger asked the FBI to protect his brother.
Martorano testified that when Connolly asked William Bulger what he could do in return for his help as a youngster growing up in the same neighborhood, the reply was: “Just keep my brother out of trouble.” Bulger has denied that claim. He has publicly discussed his brother on only a handful of occasions.
graphs in his autobiography.