Synopsis
Explores the relationship between FBI agent John Connolly and Irish mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger, chronicling a corrupt arrangement of information, racketeering, and murder.
Reviews
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 Agent John Connolly, who was Whitey's handler, and Agent John Morris, Flemmi's handler, "coddled, conspired and protected the mobsters in a way that for all practical purposes had given them a license to kill." FBI agents looked the other way while Bulger and Flemmi went on a 1980s crime spree that, according to witnesses, included extortion, bank robberies, drug trafficking and a string of unsolved murders. This complex, dramatic tale climaxes with a 1998 federal hearing that found that Connolly and Morris had essentially fictionalized FBI internal records to downplay the stoolies' crimes while overstating their value to the Bureau. In 1999, a grand jury probe launched by Attorney General Janet Reno led to Connolly's arrest on charges of racketeering and obstruction of justice (he's now out on bail). Also named in the indictment were Flemmi, already arrested by state police in 1995, and Bulger, now a fugitive on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. This in-depth look at the FBI's war against the Mafia includes the first-ever secret recording of a Mafia induction ceremony, complete with pricking of fingers and blood oaths. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
An eye-opening true-crimer that recounts a cooperative arrangement in which two Boston mobsters, in exchange for acting as informants for an FBI agent and his supervisor, were permitted to take over most of Boston's organized crime.Boston Globe reporters Lehr and O'Neill can be forgiven some of their caustic bitterness in their second book about Boston's organized crime. Their first, The Underboss (1989, not reviewed), portrayed FBI Agent John J. Connolly Jr. as a sharp-dressing South Boston scrapper whose audacious bugging of a Mafia headquarters ended the Italian mob's control of Boston street crime. Unknown to the reporters, Connolly and his boss, Dick Morris, were relying on information about the Italians from James Whitey Bulger, an Irish Southie street punk with a penchant for rape and robbery who was also the older brother of rising political star William Bulger (who would go on to become president of the Massachusetts Senate, is currently president of Massachusetts State University, and has maintained that he has no involvement with his brother's criminal life). In 1975 Connolly recruited Whitey and fellow hood Steve Flammi. Connolly and Morris then shielded their informants from a federal racetrack-fixing indictment; in return, Whitey fingered competing crooks and possibly saved the life of an undercover FBI agent who had infiltrated a truck-hijacking ring. For the next two decades the FBI made many publicized arrests while Whitey Bulger reigned as Boston's organized crime boss until 1995, when he escaped arrest and has been missing ever since. In a sensational 1999 corruption investigation, the disgraced Morris admitted to taking bribes from Whitey and, with Connolly's alleged assistance, aided and abetted criminal activities involving narcotics, extortion, and murder. Connolly, now a lobbyist currently awaiting trial on this matter, has maintained his innocence.With enough unanswered questions for two sequels, the authors offer a pile of evidence that (in South Boston at least) politics is all too local. (photos and illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Lehr and O'Neill, an editor and reporter, respectively, at the Boston Globe, have worked closely on many pieces of investigative journalism as well as on their 1989 book, The Underboss: The Rise and Fall of a Mafia Family. Their new book is another work of crime reporting, this time centering on FBI agent John Connolly's acquiring the legendary Irish gangster James "Whitey" Bulger as an informant in 1975 and some of the more regrettable consequences of their collaboration. In a highly detailed text, complete with an extensive notes section, the authors vividly capture the turbulent culture and conflicting loyalties of the Boston underworld. This is essential for Boston-area libraries because of its local focus, but elsewhere it will be of interest only to libraries with extensive criminal justice collections elsewhere in the country. [Whitey Bulger is still at large and high on the FBI's "10 Most Wanted" list.DEd.]DCharlie Cowling, SUNY at Brockport Lib.
-DCharlie Cowling, SUNY at Brockport Lib.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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