The disgraced topicsagent who tipped off reputed Boston crime James “Whitey” Bulger is reportedly returning to us-regions several months after being granted medical release form a Florida lock-up.
John “Zip” Connolly, now 81, was convicted of second-degree murder in 2008 for wearing his FBI-issued sidearm while meeting up with Bulger in Boston to warn him that businessman John Callahan knew too much about his gang.
Callahan, former president of World Jai Alai, was later shot to death by John Martorano, one of Bulger’s hitmen, and his body was left in the trunk of a car in a Miami airport in 1982. Bulger ordered Callahan’s killing because he feared the businessman could implicate him in a 1981 murder of another World Jai Alai executive. Callahan’s widow, Mary Callahan, told the Boston Herald Monday night that Florida prison officials have informed her that Connolly will soon return to Massachusetts.
“It must be great to get back to where you started,” Mary Callahan said. “I wish my husband could come back to where he once was.”
This comes after the Florida Commission on Offender Review voted 2-1 in February to grant Connolly “medical release” because he is terminally ill with multiple melanomas and diabetes. Connolly was moved to the Reception and Medical Center in Lake Butler, Fla., for processing.
A former Massachusetts Convention Center official and family friend agreed to drive Connolly back to a south Florida condo where he was to remain at-home medical care and remain under house arrest.
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Bulger, once on a Top 10 Most Wanted fugitive, was accused of 19 murders and convicted of 11. He was finally nabbed in 2011 in Santa Monica, Calif., where he skirted the law for years with his lover. He was fatally beaten on Oct. 30, 2018, by fellow inmates at a federal prison in West Virginia.
Fox News previously reported in May that one of the men accused of killing the reputed mobster has been held in solitary confinement ever since. Bulger was in a wheelchair when he was bludgeoned with what reports and court papers have identified as a lock in a sock.
