Dick Lehr – författare

Inspired by the true story of a young man's false imprisonment for murder, this is a gripping novel about a daughter’s fight for justice against the odds.In his first book for teenagers, Dick Lehr, a former reporter for the Boston Globe’s famous Spotlight Team, has re-imagined a case he investigated to create a compelling story about a daughter determined to prove her father’s innocence. On a hot summer night in Boston, a thirteen-year-old African-American girl became the innocent victim of gang-related gunfire. Amid public outcry, an immediate manhunt was on to catch the murderer, and a young African-American man was quickly apprehended, charged, and – wrongly – convicted of the crime.Trell was only a baby when her father was imprisoned, but she has always been certain of his innocence. Twelve years after his conviction, she persuades a down-on-his-luck reporter and a determined lawyer to help clear her father’s name. As they attempt to uncover back-door deals, track down crucial witnesses and unearth vital evidence that will prove her father’s innocence, it becomes clear that some people in the neighbourhood want to keep this information hidden – at any cost.

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.

Now a major motion picture starring Johnny Depp A New York Times Bestseller A Boston Globe Bestseller An ABA Indie Bestseller James Whitey" Bulger became one of the most ruthless gangsters in US history, and all because of an unholy deal he made with a childhood friend. John Connolly a rising star in the Boston FBI office, offered Bulger protection in return for helping the Feds eliminate Boston's Italian mafia. But no one offered Boston protection from Whitey Bulger, who, in a blizzard of gangland killings, took over the city's drug trade. Whitey's deal with Connolly's FBI spiraled out of control to become the biggest informant scandal in FBI history. Black Mass is a New York Times and Boston Globe bestseller, written by two former reporters who were on the case from the beginning. It is an epic story of violence, double-cross, and corruption at the centre of which are the black hearts of two old friends whose lives unfolded in the darkness of permanent midnight.

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.