JAMES 'WHITEY' BULGER GETS PUBLIC DEFENDER

TOO POOR?

FORMER mob king pin James 'Whitey' Bulger is to get a public defender for his multiple murder trial, because he can't afford to pay for his own lawyer, a court ruled yesterday.
Despite being caught with more than $800,000 in cash, when his Santa Monica apartment was busted last week, the taxpayer will fund his defense.
His provisional attorney Peter Krupp, 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.
And although prosecutors argued that his family including his brother and former Massachusetts Senate president, William Bulger could pay, he said no relatives had come forward and offered to help him financially.
A former member of the Boston underworld said: "Whitey's bound to have cash stashed away somewhere, but he's not going to make it easy for them. If they want to try him, he's going to make them pay through the nose for it."
Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler however agreed that the one time leader of Boston's notorious Winter Hill Gang couldn't afford a defense lawyer.
She said: "I find at this time that the defendant is unable to retain counsel privately."
So she appointed J.W. Carney Jr., a prominent Boston defense attorney, to represent him.
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 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.
Bulger, the former leader of the Winter Hill Gang, is accused of participating in 19 murders during his decades as one of Boston's most notorious gangsters.
Carney said it is too early to say whether he will ask for the trial to be moved out of Boston.