Former reputed mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger, who escaped prosecution for 16 years until he was captured last month in California, is set to return to federal court in Boston to enter a plea on 19 murder charges.
Bulger is to be arraigned before U.S. Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler, formally responding to criminal charges for the first time in nearly two decades.
Prosecutors allege that the 81-year-old former head of Boston's notorious Winter Hill Gang was involved in the killings to eliminate rivals, silence potential witnesses and divert investigators' attention from other slayings.
Bulger was caught in Santa Monica, Calif., on June 22.
He was an FBI informant who provided information on his gang's main rivals and fled after an agent leaked to him word of an impending indictment.
Bulger was given a taxpayer-funded attorney Thursday after a judge concluded that he is unable to pay for his own lawyer.
Prosecutors argued that Bulger's family — including his brother William Bulger, the former Massachusetts Senate president — have the means to help pay for Whitey Bulger's defense. Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Kelly also suggested that Bulger could have lied about his assets on the financial form he filed with the court.
"This defendant is facing a veritable avalanche of charges," Kelly said. "He could care less" about the truthfulness of his financial disclosure, Kelly said.
But Bulger's provisional attorney, Peter Krupp, said no one in Bulger's family had come forward and offered to help him financially. He also said authorities have seized all of Bulger's assets as the proceeds of illegal activity, leaving him with no way to pay for his defense.
Bowler agreed.
"I find at this time that the defendant is unable to retain counsel privately," Bowler said.
She appointed J.W. Carney Jr., a prominent Boston defense attorney, to represent Bulger.
Carney has represented a long list of high-profile defendants, including John Salvi III, who was convicted of killing two people and wounding five others in a shooting rampage at two Planned Parenthood clinics in Brookline, Mass., in 1994. He also represents Tarek Mehanna, a Sudbury, Mass., man now awaiting trial in an alleged terror plot to shoot shoppers at U.S. malls, assassinate two politicians and kill American troops in Iraq.
Krupp said he believes it will be "profoundly difficult" for Bulger to receive a fair trial, given the pervasive media coverage Bulger received during his years on the run and the recent flood of coverage since his capture last week in Santa Monica, Calif.
Carney said it is too early to say whether he will ask for the trial to be moved out of Boston.
"Our constitution guarantees every defendant the right to a fair trial, and we're going to see that he gets it," he said.
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