While the true story of the devil’s bargain that the FBI entered into with the vicious murderers Whitey Bulger and Stephen Flemmi, leaders of Boston’s Irish Mafia, is a compelling one, Spinale’s book adds little to previous accounts. He traces the roots of one of the worst scandals in FBI history, stemming from a single-minded pursuit of La Cosa Nostra that led veteran federal agents to coddle criminals at least as culpable as those they sought. The catalogue of Bulger and Flemmi’s crimes is a truly gruesome one, and the number of "good guys" caught up in protecting them once they began providing information on their Italian counterparts is disillusioning. Students of John Dean’s bestseller Worse Than Watergate will find the section detailing recent Bush administration efforts to keep the full story from reaching congressional oversight committees of interest. Despite Spinale’s presumed access to insider secrets by virtue of his admitted status as a La Cosa Nostra associate, there’s not much here that a reader of the many newspaper stories will learn. Those looking for better-written, less repetitive overviews of the whole sorry story—ones that do justice to its decades-spanning drama—should turn to Dick Lehr’s Black Mass or Edward J. Mackenzie’s Street Soldier.
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Review
"Dominic always had a big mouth. Now his big mouth is going to cause real trouble for the G-Men." -- Oscar B. Goodman - Mayor City of Las Vegas
"It's a riveting story expertly told of one of the darkest chapters in FBI and federal law enforcement history." -- Jeffrey Denner - Prominent Boston Attorney involved in both criminal and civil cases against the FBI and Irish Mob
A hard look into how the FBI lost control of their informants and more importantly their own agents. -- Karl Kretser, Homicide Detective, Lieutenant and author of The Night Runner
A shocking documentary of human weakness and disloyalty. Indeed a sad chapter in the history of our great FBI. -- Rick Porrello is a police lieutenant with a suburban Cleveland police department, and author of The Rise and Fall of the Cleveland Mafia and To Kill the Irishman.
The FBI has 1.9 billion reasons not to find "Whitey". That's the dollar amount of lawsuits against our government. -- Allan May, organized crime historian, AmericanMafia.com
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