The Underboss: The Rise and Fall of a Mafia Family - Softcover

Lehr, Dick; O'Neill, Gerard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1586481088 ISBN 13: 9781586481087

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2002

Synopsis

On February 26, 1986, Mafia underboss Gennaro Angiulo was convicted of racketeering and sentenced to forty-five years in prison. In The Underboss, bestselling authors Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill tell the story of the fall of the house of Angiulo. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, aided in part by the Irish Mob's Whitey Bulger, entered the Boston Mafia's headquarters in Boston's North End early one morning in 1981 and began to compile the evidence that would lead to the entire upper tier of one of the most profitable and ruthless criminal enterprises in America.

Originally published in hardback by St. Martin's in 1989, The Underboss became a national bestseller. Information uncovered during the course of Lehr and O'Neill's Black Mass investigations adds new dimensions to the story and the authors include this new material-including Whitey Bulger's cagey manipulation of the FBI-in The Underboss's revised text and in a new preface and afterword.

About this title

About the Author:

Gerard O'Neill recently retired as the editor of The Boston Globe's Spotlight Team, one of the nation's top investigative reporting units. He has won a Pulitzer Prize, been a Pulitzer finalist, won the Hancock Award, the Loeb Award, and many others. Dick Lehr joined The Boston Globe in 1985. Lehr has been a Pulitzer finalist, and has won a number of national and regional journalism awards. In 1991, he was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. O'Neill and Lehr are also the authors of Black Mass: The Irish Mob, The FBI, and a Devil's Deal, winner of the 2001 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime. Both men live in the Boston area with their families.

From Publishers Weekly:

The undoing of a Mafia underboss related with underdone flair or tension, this picks up momentum halfway through with the re-creation of the FBI's bugging surveillance, Operation Bostar, conducted in 1981 in Boston's ethnic North End, where Gennaro J. Angiulo's bookmaking operation was headquartered. Case agent was Edward Quinn, romanticized by the authors, reporters at the Boston Globe , to heroism. Still, the tale is not without a measure of real valor, especially given the ennui endured by the agents monitoring 850 hours of often boring, frequently garbled tape recordingstedium that caused them all to gain weight from gobbling donuts. An interesting aspect of the case proves to be the successful prosecution of Angiulo under the challenged federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Actby which he was ultimately convicted. And when he has served his 45-year term, there is a mandatory life sentence awaiting him for his conviction for accessory to murder. Photos.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1586481088
• ISBN 13: 9781586481087
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272