Whitey Bulger

For nearly three decades, starting in the early 1970s, James “Whitey” Bulger led the Winter Hill Gang, a brutal confederation of the Irish Mafia in South Boston. He fled town in 1994, tipped off by a corrupt FBI agent that he was about to be indicted, and remained one of the most wanted fugitives in America until he was found in 2011, living under an alias in Santa Monica, Calif. He was then brought back to face trial in the city he once terrorized.

On Aug. 12, Bulger was convicted on 31 of 32 counts–including extortion, conspiracy, money laundering and murder. In a trial that exhumed some of the grimy interconnected history of the Boston underworld and the FBI, the federal jury found Bulger responsible for killing 11 people–including strangling a young woman. While the verdicts brought relief for many, the families of some victims are still raging. “Thirty-eight years ago when my father died, we always knew who killed him,” said Connie Leonard, daughter of Francis “Buddy” Leonard, after the jury didn’t find enough evidence to link Bulger to her father’s death. “We still can’t get any justice.”