Inspector Fowler
10-17-2008, 10:05 PM
So, after nearly a year of working at a college I remembered that it has a simply enormous library. There was a book I wanted to track down, and I checked it out and read it.
It's called "Rat Bastards: The life and times of South Boston's most honorable Irish Mobster" If you've seen The Departed you may know that while the events are based off an Asian film trilogy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338564/), the character played by Jack Nicholson is more or less based off a real person, Whitey Bulger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_Bulger). He headed up the Boston Irish mob for some time. It was some old-school corruption - his brother was a Massachusetts senator. Unlike the movie, he's still on the run.
Anyway. One of the guys in his mob was John "Red" Shea, and he wrote a pretty interesting book about his time in the Irish mob in Boston. He talks about how he rose from being a troubled youth to being a small time drug dealer, to being Whitey Bulger's head of the South Boston drug trade. The main deal of the book is that he refused to rat out anybody else, and did 12 years while almost everybody else pled out in exchange for their testimony - Whitey is still on the run after spending years selectively feeding other mobsters to the cops and feds.
There isn't anything too gruesome, but he is pretty open about how violent he was, and how he wasn't afraid to dish out some wicked beatings. If you read carefully, you can notice how every time he describes somebody else, he either uses a pseudonym, or only discusses crimes that have been documented/brought to trial.
If you're into true crime/mob stuff, it's a very easy read, he's had help writing it in a very conversational style. Good stuff :)
It's called "Rat Bastards: The life and times of South Boston's most honorable Irish Mobster" If you've seen The Departed you may know that while the events are based off an Asian film trilogy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338564/), the character played by Jack Nicholson is more or less based off a real person, Whitey Bulger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_Bulger). He headed up the Boston Irish mob for some time. It was some old-school corruption - his brother was a Massachusetts senator. Unlike the movie, he's still on the run.
Anyway. One of the guys in his mob was John "Red" Shea, and he wrote a pretty interesting book about his time in the Irish mob in Boston. He talks about how he rose from being a troubled youth to being a small time drug dealer, to being Whitey Bulger's head of the South Boston drug trade. The main deal of the book is that he refused to rat out anybody else, and did 12 years while almost everybody else pled out in exchange for their testimony - Whitey is still on the run after spending years selectively feeding other mobsters to the cops and feds.
There isn't anything too gruesome, but he is pretty open about how violent he was, and how he wasn't afraid to dish out some wicked beatings. If you read carefully, you can notice how every time he describes somebody else, he either uses a pseudonym, or only discusses crimes that have been documented/brought to trial.
If you're into true crime/mob stuff, it's a very easy read, he's had help writing it in a very conversational style. Good stuff :)