Whitey Bulger's Girlfriend Sentenced to 8 Years
Catherine Greig was also fined $150,000 for helping the reputed mobster evade capture for more than a decade.
| Posted Tuesday, June 12, 2012, at 3:37 PM
Photograph by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images.
A Massachusetts judge on Tuesday sentenced the long-term girlfriend of James "Whitey" Bulger to eight years in prison for helping the reputed Boston mobster stay on the run for 16 years, the Associated Press reports.
Bulger and Catherine Greig went on the lam together in 1995, shortly after Bulger went into hiding to avoid a pending racketeering indictment. The couple spent time in Chicago, New York City, and Louisiana before ultimately being apprehended by the FBI last June in their home on a palm-lined street in Santa Monica, where they posed as married retirees from Chicago. More than $800,000 in cash and 30 weapons were found in their home. They were located shortly after the FBI put out an ad describing Greig.
As part of her plea bargain with prosecutors, Greig, 61, admitted to helping Bulger use false identities to evade capture and to obtaining prescription medications for him by pretending to be his wife. But Greig’s attorney pushed for a shorter sentence of 27 months by making the case that her only real crime was falling in love, the New York Times reports. "Why people fall in love has been debated since before Shakespeare’s sonnets," the attorney wrote in a legal filing Monday.
"This isn’t poetry," retorted prosecutors, who described Greig as Bulger’s "partner" and suggested a decade-long sentence for her part in delaying justice for the families of the murdered victims. The judge included a $150,000 fine in her sentence.
The case is a prelude to the one authorities are building against Bulger, 82, who is currently being held without bail and faces 19 murder charges.
