Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, Whitey: The Life of America’s Most Notorious Mob Boss
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A masterful biography of a mobster folk hero that disentangles his convoluted history
Some Bostonians used to like to paint James Joseph “Whitey” Bulger, Jr. as a wicked-awesome folk hero. “He robbed and murdered drug dealuhs and mobstuhs!” they said. “Whitey kept Southie safe!” They seemed to forget Bulger was a mobster himself, a man who robbed and killed lots of regular people, burying them all over Beantown since the ’60s.
The authors of this masterful new biography, Boston Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, dispel the modern-day-Robin Hood storyline early, kicking things off with the sickening strangulation of the young and happy Debra Davis — just a lady who got in Whitey’s way. That kind of thing sticks with you, even as the book loops back to the beginning to trace his immigrant roots, working-class upbringing and cruel treatment as a guinea pig in the CIA’s program testing LSD on prisoners. Once he’s out of jail (thanks in part to his politician brother Billy Bulger), Whitey becomes America’s most wanted man — part criminal genius, part reckless psychopath. And the most amazing thing? Until going on the run in the mid ’90s, he was moonlighting as an FBI informant. Turns out the feds were almost as crooked as he was.
Lehr and O’Neill have made a career out of mining Boston’s colorful criminal underworld; in Whitey they make equal use of the official paper trail and anecdotal interviews to turn a would-be procedural into a thriller. Clinical and precise, they lead you through every confrontation, close call and corpse disposal, right up to the worldwide manhunt and his heart-pounding arrest in 2011. By now even Southie has to be happy about that.
