Whitey: The Life of America’s Most Notorious Mob Boss

From the bestselling authors of Black Mass comes the definitive biography of Whitey Bulger, the most brutal and sadistic crime boss since Al Capone.

Drawing on a trove of sealed files and previously classified material, Whitey digs deep into the mind of James J. "Whitey" Bulger, the crime boss and killer who brought the FBI to its knees. He was an American original --a psychopath who fostered a following with a frightening mix of terror, deadly intimidation and the deft touch of a politician who often helped a family in need meet their monthly rent. But the history shows that despite the early false myths portraying him as a Robin Hood figure, Whitey was a supreme narcissist, and everything--every interaction with family and his politician brother Bill Bulger, with underworld cohorts, with law enforcement, with his South Boston neighbors, and with his victims--was always about him. In an Irish-American neighborhood where loyalty has always been rule one, the Bulger brand was loyalty to oneself.

Whitey deconstructs Bulger's insatiable hunger for power and control. Building on their years of reporting and uncovering new Bulger family records, letters and prison files, Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill examine and reveal the factors and forces that created the monster. It's a deeply rendered portrait of evil that spans nearly a century, taking Whitey from the streets of his boyhood Southie in the 1940s to his cell in Alcatraz in the 1950s to his cunning, corrupt pact with the FBI in the 1970s and, finally, to Santa Monica, California where for fifteen years he was hiding in plain sight as one of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted. In a lifetime of crime and murder that ended with his arrest in June 2011, Whitey Bulger became one of the most powerful and deadly crime bosses of the twentieth century. This is his story.

DICK LEHR is a professor of journalism at Boston University and a former reporter at the Boston Globe, where he won numerous awards and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for investigative reporting. He is the author of The Fence: A Police Cover-up Along Boston’s Racial Divide, which was an Edgar Award finalist and a Boston Globe bestseller. He is the co-author of several other books, including the national bestseller and Edgar Award-winning Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI, and a Devil’s Deal.

GERARD O’NEILL has won the Pulitzer Prize in journalism as well as many other national journalism awards. He was the longtime editor of the Boston Globe’s award-winning investigative team. He co-authored Black Mass and also, with Lehr, The Underboss, as well as Rogues and Redeemers (Crown 2012), a political history of the Boston Irish focusing on the city’s most famous mayors.