Dick Lehr – författare

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A gripping true story of violence, double-cross and corruption, Black Mass takes us deep undercover, exposing one of the most outrageous scandals in FBI history.Boston, 1975. Under a harvest moon, 'Whitey' Bulger, godfather of the Irish Mob, waits for an old school buddy. Since they last met, Little John Connolly has become a high-ranking FBI agent. Connolly needs an informant - someone with a good view of Boston's dark side. Whitey needs certain priority treatment. Soon the die is cast.

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.

In 1915, two men,one a journalist agitator, the other a technically brilliant filmmaker,incited a public confrontation that roiled America, pitting black against white, Hollywood against Boston, and free speech against civil rights.Monroe Trotter and D. W. Griffith were fighting over a film that dramatized the Civil War and Reconstruction in a post-Confederate South. Griffith's film, The Birth of a Nation , included actors in blackface, heroic portraits of Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and a depiction of Lincoln's assassination. Freed slaves were portrayed as villainous, vengeful, slovenly, and dangerous to the sanctity of American values. It was tremendously successful, eventually seen by 25 million Americans. But violent protests against the film flared up across the country.Almost fifty years earlier, Monroe's father, James, was a sergeant in an all-black Union regiment that marched into Charleston, South Carolina, just as the Kentucky cavalry,including Roaring Jack Griffith, D. W.'s father,fled for their lives. Monroe Trotter's titanic crusade to have the film censored became a blueprint for dissent during the 1950s and 1960s. This is the fiery story of a revolutionary moment for mass media and the nascent civil rights movement, and the men clashing over the cultural and political soul of a still-young America standing at the cusp of its greatest days.