Black Mass
Whitey Bulger, the FBI, and a Devil's Deal
-
-
4.5 • 33 Ratings
-
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times bestseller!
The gripping story of Whitey Bulger, the mobster turned FBI informant responsible for the worst crime spree Boston has ever seen.
“A powerhouse of a book. Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill ... write like veteran novelists, weaving scene after jaw-dropping scene into a tapestry of sickening American corruption.” -New York Post
John Connolly and James “Whitey” Bulger grew up together on the tough streets of South Boston. Decades later, in the mid-1970s, they met again. By then, Connolly was a major figure in the Boston office of the FBI and Bulger had become godfather of the local Irish American mob. What happened next—a dirty deal to bring down the Italian American mafia in exchange for protection for Bulger—would spiral out of control, leading to a rash of murders, Bulger's takeover of the neighborhood drug trade, and, ultimately, the biggest informant scandal in the history of the FBI.
In Black Mass, Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill, the two former Boston Globe reporters who were on the case from the beginning, take us deep undercover, exposing the bargain struck in darkness by two old friends, and the bloody consequences that ensued.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A triumph of investigative reporting, this full-bodied true-crime saga by two Boston Globe reporters is a cautionary tale about FBI corruption and the abuse of power. Gangster James "Whitey" Bulger ruled Boston's Irish mob, and his wary collaboration with the Italian Mafia, which he detested, was the cornerstone of the city's balkanized criminal underworld. (His younger brother, Billy Bulger, was the iron-fisted president of the state senate and later president of the University of Massachusetts.) Few suspected that Whitey Bulger and his partner, crime boss Stevie Flemmi, were both FBI informants; their squealing helped the FBI to put a score of mobsters in jail and wipe out the Angiulo crime family. Here O'Neill and Lehr (Pulitzer winner and Pulitzer finalist, respectively, and coauthors of The Underboss: The Rise and Fall of a Mafia Family) maintain that overzealous FBI
