Whitey on Trial: Secrets, Corruption, and the Search for Truth - Softcover

McLean, Margaret; Leiberman, Jon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765337770 ISBN 13: 9780765337771

Publisher: Forge, 2015

Synopsis

A criminal prosecutor and award-winning investigative reporter offer their insider account of the 2013 trial and conviction of James "Whitey" Bulger, Jr., the infamous mob boss behind the Winter Hill Gang.

The Whitey Bulger trial: nineteen gruesome murders, a dead witness, government secrets, FBI corruption, an unbelievable love triangle. This nonfiction thriller features courtroom drama and behind-the-scenes exclusives from Whitey himself, the cops and U.S. attorneys who brought him down, jurors, the defense team, an imprisoned FBI agent, Whitey's victims, two former lovers, and high ranking members of both the Italian and Irish mobs. Whitey's machine guns and gangland-style violence will never be seen in Boston again.

Margaret McLean weaves an intricate tale of deceit, violence and love based on trial testimony. Jon Leiberman offers his first-person experience traveling the world with the FBI Bulger Task Force when Whitey was on the lam for sixteen years. Both authors have developed intimate and personal relationships with Whitey and the key players in this saga. Whitey on Trial is the definitive firsthand account of the Whitey Bulger trial.

Includes exclusive interviews and a never-before-seen letter from Whitey Bulger

About this title

About the Authors

Margaret McLean was born and raised in Rome, New York. She graduated magna cum laude from Boston College and earned her law degree from Boston College Law School. McLean practiced law as a criminal prosecutor and is now a legal analyst on numerous national television and radio shows. She has cowritten a dramatic courtroom play based on her second novel, Under Oath, and she also has a nationally syndicated weekly radio show called It's a Crime Radio.

In 2010, she was hailed as one of the next faces of Boston crime fiction by The Boston Globe. She lives in Norwell, Massachusetts, with her three children.

JON LEIBERMAN is an award-winning investigative correspondent, host, producer and victim advocate. He is the co-author of Whitey on Trial along with Margaret McLean. He is currently an investigative reporter for the Howard Stern Show on Sirius XM. Jon hosts "Leiberman Live" on Sirius XM and is a crime contributor for CNN HLN and WildAboutTrial.com and a crime blogger for Huffington Post.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Whitey on Trial

Secrets, Corruption, and the Search for Truth

By Margaret McLean, Jon Leiberman

Tom Doherty Associates

Copyright © 2015 Margaret McLean
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7653-3777-1

chapter
1
CONFLICTS
 
 
At the center of all this murder and mayhem is one man, the defendant in this case, James Bulger.
—Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Kelly, opening statement
It was a note from a killer. A handwritten letter, nestled between bills in the mailbox, and postmarked ten days after a jury rendered a verdict at his trial. From: Whitey Bulger. The man accused of murdering nineteen people had written to us, wanting to tell his side of the story.
We couldn’t open it.
We, Margaret McLean and Jon Leiberman, had joined forces to cover the sensational trial and write about it. Margaret is a former Boston-area prosecutor, legal analyst, and law professor at Boston College. Jon reported for America’s Most Wanted and traveled around the world with the FBI task force searching for Whitey while he was a fugitive from justice.
Why couldn’t we open that letter? We had formed intimate bonds with victims’ relatives and members of law enforcement who had pursued Whitey for decades. They had helped us for months with this complicated case, given us their time.
Including a letter from Whitey in our coverage of the story felt like a betrayal. We fought about it. Was it the right thing to do? Our friends had experienced the murder of loved ones. Other friends had been tortured and beaten by Whitey. Those memories were painful for them, but they had learned to trust us and had shared private moments and feelings. Allowing Whitey to have his say felt wrong.
The trial itself had been overwhelming. Another friend and key prosecution witness had been murdered mid-trial. Silenced. He never had the chance to testify.
We became aware of the conflicts raging beneath the surface before the trial even started. Victims’ relatives came to us for advice, torn over which side to root for at trial. We wondered how could that be? Don’t victims always want the prosecution to win? Neither of us had seen that. We knew the trial would reveal decades of terror, extortion, and bodies buried in unmarked graves. Machine guns. A beautiful girl, strangled and buried in the basement. A brown-stained, grinning skull … and she was known for her smile.
The evidence of violence was overwhelming, so why weren’t the victims rooting 100 percent for the prosecution? The government typically upholds the principles of truth and justice, right?
We learned that Whitey’s trial was far from black-and-white. It contained murky layers involving government leaks of top secret information that had caused innocent people to be killed. The massive-scale cover up and corruption went all the way up from Boston to the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. Top echelon FBI informants were murdered while the government looked the other way.
We opened that letter, and we are sorry for the pain it will inflict on some of our friends. We did it to expose the truth, and sometimes we need to hear it from all angles. A copy of Whitey’s letter has been included toward the end of the book.
What follows is an eyewitness account of the Whitey Bulger trial and countless interviews with people intimately connected to the case.
 
 
Copyright © 2014 by Margaret McLean and Jon Leiberman

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Whitey on Trial by Margaret McLean, Jon Leiberman. Copyright © 2015 Margaret McLean. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Forge
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0765337770
• ISBN 13: 9780765337771
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384