“I just thought justice wasn’t being served,’’ Keating said in a telephone interview yesterday. “I know if it was my family, I wouldn’t feel comfortable sleeping at night until every possible avenue was pursued.’’
Donahue’s son, Tom, 32, said he wants Congress to know “my father was an innocent man in all this and so far in all these [court] proceedings an innocent man’s death doesn’t seem to count for nothing.’’
New Hampshire lawyer William E. Christie, who represents Halloran’s widow, said the FBI was quick to pay a $2 million reward to the woman in Iceland whose tip led to Bulger’s capture in June, yet the government “fights tooth and nail the judgment that was awarded to families that have actually been harmed by their conduct.’’
The bills were filed under a rarely used provision that allows the government to compensate those who have exhausted all remedies in court.
US Representative Stephen F. Lynch, a Democrat from South Boston, said last week that he too would support legislation to compensate the Halloran and Donahue families.
Bulger, 82, is awaiting trial on federal racketeering charges that include allegations he killed 19 people, including Halloran and Michael Donahue.
Donahue, a 32-year-old Dorchester truck driver, was giving Halloran, a 41-year-old Bulger associate, a ride home from a bar on Boston’s waterfront on May 11, 1982, when Bulger and an unidentified associate allegedly opened fire, killing them.
Bulger’s longtime sidekick and fellow informant, Stephen “The Rifleman’’ Flemmi, testified during court proceedings that former FBI agent John J. Connolly Jr. warned him and Bulger that Halloran was cooperating with the FBI and had implicated the gangsters in an earlierslaying. Flemmi said the tip prompted Bulger to kill Halloran and that Donahue was just an innocent bystander.
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