Desperate to help his unemployed mother, seventeen-year-old Aiden O'Connor reluctantly begins working for the Irish mob in tough South Boston, despite his coach's efforts to convince him he could be a professional boxer.

“All Souls is the written equivalent of an Irish wake, where revelers dance and sing the dead person’s praises. In that same style, the book leavens tragedy with dashes of humor but preserves the heartbreaking details.”—The New York Times Book Review A 25th anniversary edition of the National Bestselling memoir, with a new afterword from Michael Patrick MacDonald, takes us deep into the South Boston housing projects during one of the city's most tumultuous times in history and tells the story of his family struggling the overcome the poverty, crime, addiction, and incarceration that overtook the neighborhood. A breakaway bestseller since its first printing, All Souls takes us deep into Michael Patrick MacDonald’s Southie, the proudly insular neighborhood with the highest concentration of white poverty in America. Rocked by Whitey Bulger’s crime schemes and busing riots, MacDonald’s Southie is populated by sharply hewn characters. We meet Ma, Michael’s mini-skirted, accordian-playing, single mother who endures the deaths of four of her eleven children. And there are Michael’s older siblings Davey, sweet artist-dreamer; Kevin, child genius of scam; and Frankie, Golden Gloves boxer and neighborhood hero whose lives are high-wire acts played out in a world of poverty and pride. Nearly suffocated by his grief and his community’s code of silence, MacDonald tells his family story here with gritty but moving honesty. All Souls is heartbreaking testimony to lives lost too early, and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be “the best place in the world.”

Featuring all the trappings of a Scorsese film, this first-hand account from one of Whitey Bulger’s enforcers is “one of the best” insider accounts of life inside the mob (Washington Post) During the 1980s, Edward J. MacKenzie, Jr., “Eddie Mac,” was a drug dealer and enforcer who would do just about anything for Whitey Bulger, the notorious head of Boston’s Winter Hill Gang. In this compelling eyewitness account—the first from a Bulger insider—Eddie Mac delivers the goods on his one-time boss and on such former associates as Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi and turncoat FBI agent John Connolly. Eddie Mac provides a window onto a world rarely glimpsed by those on the outside. Street Soldier is also a story of the search for family, for acceptance, for respect, loyalty, and love. Abandoned by his parents at the age of four, MacKenzie became a ward of the state of Massachusetts, suffered physical and sexual abuse in the foster care system, and eventually drifted into a life of crime and Bulger’s orbit. The Eddie Mac who emerges in these pages is complex: An enforcer who was also a kick-boxing and Golden Gloves champion; a womanizer who fought for custody of his daughters; a tenth-grade dropout living on the streets who went on, as an adult, to earn a college degree in three years; a man, who lived by the strict code of loyalty to the mob, but set up a sting operation that would net one of the largest hauls of cocaine ever seized. Eddie's is a harsh story, but it tells us something important about the darker corners of our world. Street Soldier is as disturbing and fascinating as a crime scene, as heart-stopping as a bar fight, and at times as darkly comic as Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction or Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.

A former rival and associate of Whitey Bulger tells all in this “profane, often brutal” true crime memoir about the inner workings of life in the Irish mob (The Boston Herald) After serving in Vietnam as a combat Marine, Irishman Pat Nee returned to the gang-filled streets of Boston. A member of the Mullen Gang since the age of 14, Nee rejoined the group to lead their fight against Whitey Bulger’s Killeen brothers. Years later, the two gangs merged to form the Winter Hill Gang, at first led by Howie Winter and then by Bulger. But by the time Bulger took over, a wide rift had opened up between the infamous crime boss and Pat Nee, who was disgusted by Bulger's brutality. A Criminal and an Irishman is the story of Pat Nee’s life as an Irish immigrant and Southie son, a Marine and convicted IRA gun smuggler, and a former rival-turned-associate of James “Whitey” Bulger. His narrative transports readers into the criminal underworld, taking them inside preparation for armored car heists, gang wangs, and revenge killings. Nee details his evolution from tough street kid to armed robber to dangerous potential killer, disclosing for the first time how he used his underworld connections as a secret operative for the Irish Republican Army. For years, Pat smuggled weapons and money from the United States to Ireland—in the bottoms of coffins, behind false panels of vans—leading up to a transatlantic shipment of seven and a half tons of munitions aboard the fishing trawler Valhalla. No other Southie underworld figure can match Pat’s reputation for resolve and authenticity.

I grew up in the Old Colony housing project in South Boston and became partners with James "Whitey" Bulger, who I always called Jimmy. Jimmy and I, we were unstoppable. We took what we wanted. And we made people disappear—permanently. We made millions. And if someone ratted us out, we killed him. We were not nice guys. I found out that Jimmy had been an FBI informant in 1999, and my life was never the same. When the feds finally got me, I was faced with something Jimmy would have killed me for—cooperating with the authorities. I pled guilty to twenty-nine counts, including five murders. I went away for five and a half years. I was brutally honest on the witness stand, and this book is brutally honest, too; the brutal truth that was never before told. How could it? Only three people could tell the true story. With one on the run and one in jail for life, it falls on me.

"This is the definitive story of Whitey Bulger…a masterwork of reporting." —Michael Connelly, best-selling author of The Wrong Side of Goodbye A New York Times Bestseller A #1 Boston Globe Bestseller An instant classic, this unforgettable narrative, rich with family ties and intrigue, follows the astonishing career of a gangster whose life was more sensational than fiction. Cullen and Murphy have broken more Bulger stories than anyone, and Whitey Bulger became front-page news, revealing the mobster's secret letters written from Plymouth Jail after the sixteen-year manhunt that led to his capture and offering unparalleled insight into his contradictions and complex personality. The afterword covering the results of the dramatic and emotional trial provides a riveting denouement to this "eminently fair and thorough telling of a life, which makes it all the more damning" (Boston Globe).

When the FBI turned an Irish mobster into an informant, they corrupted the entire judicial system and sanctioned the worst crime spree Boston has ever seen. This is the true story behind the major motion picture. 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 center of which are the black hearts of two old friends whose lives unfolded in the darkness of permanent midnight.