Whitey: The Life of America Most Notorious Mob Boss

Chuck Leddy offers a review of Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss at the Boston Globe.

Much has been written about Whitey Bulger in the past three decades, but in “Whitey: The Life of America’s Most Notorious Mob Boss’’ Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill (who already wrote about Bulger and his unholy alliance with the FBI in “Black Mass”) have put together a comprehensive life and times of the mobster, beginning with his 19th-century Irish ancestors to his present perch in the Plymouth County Correctional Facility awaiting trial.

In recounting this epic, horrific tale, the authors have mined a rich vein of sources that include Bulger’s federal prison file, interviews with Bulger associates, government documents released through Freedom of Information Act requests, court records, and more.

Lehr, a former Globe reporter, and O’Neill, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Globe editor, make it clear that Bulger’s life and career were shaped by a multitude of factors that begin with an upbringing in a dysfunctional family and an apparent personality disorder amid a South Boston culture of tribalism, violent internecine struggles in the heyday of Boston mobs, and morally-bankrupt FBI agents.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2013/02/18/book-review-whitey-the-life-america-most-notorious-mob-boss-dick-lehr-and-gerard-neill/i8CAaqANDLe3O280GBq70L/story.html

You can also read the Daily Mail's coverage of the book via the below link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2277193/Americas-wanted-fugitive-James-Whitey-Bulgers-outward-hatred-Obama-led-capture.html

Note: Dick Lehr and Gerald O' Neill's Black Mass was a very good book and I look forward to reading Whitey.