James Joseph "Whitey" Bulger Jr. was an American organized crime boss who led the Winter Hill Gang in the Winter Hill neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts, a city directly northwest of Boston. On December 23, 1994, Bulger fled the Boston area and went into hiding after his former FBI handler, John Connolly, tipped him off about a pending RICO indictment against him. Bulger remained at large for sixteen years. After his 2011 arrest, federal prosecutors tried Bulger for nineteen murders based on grand jury testimony from Kevin Weeks and other former criminal associates.
South Boston is a densely populated neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, located south and east of the Fort Point Channel and abutting Dorchester Bay. It has undergone several demographic transformations since being annexed to the city of Boston in 1804. The neighborhood, once primarily farmland, is popularly known by its twentieth century identity as a working class Irish Catholic community. Throughout the twenty-first century, the neighborhood has become increasingly popular with millennial professionals.
Nick Flynn is an American writer, playwright, and poet.
The Winter Hill Gang was a loose confederation of organized crime figures in the Boston, Massachusetts, area. It is generally considered an Irish Mob organization, with most gang members and the leadership consisting predominantly of Irish-Americans, though some notable members, such as Johnny Martorano, are of Italian-American descent.
The Irish Mob is a usually crime family–based ethnic collective of organized crime syndicates composed of primarily ethnic Irish members which operate primarily in Ireland, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, and have been in existence since the early 19th century. Originating in Irish-American street gangs – famously first depicted in Herbert Asbury's 1927 book, The Gangs of New York – the Irish Mob has appeared in most major U.S. and Canadian cities, especially in the Northeast and the urban industrial Midwest, including Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Chicago.
Robert George Wahlberg is an American actor who has appeared in films such as Southie, Mystic River and The Departed.
Southie is a 1999 American crime thriller film directed by John Shea starring Donnie Wahlberg, Rose McGowan, Anne Meara, Jimmy Cummings, Lawrence Tierney, Robert Wahlberg, Will Arnett, Shea, and Amanda Peet. The film centers around Danny Quinn, a former "street kid" from South Boston, returning home to find his family deeper into organized crime than when he left, and his struggles not to fall back into his previous life.
Kevin Weeks is an American former mobster and longtime friend and mob lieutenant to Whitey Bulger, the infamous boss of the Winter Hill Gang, a crime family based in the Winter Hill neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts.
The Mullen Gang was an Irish-American gang operating in Boston.
Jennifer Clement is an American-Mexican author. Clement has written several novels, including Gun Love (2018) and Prayers for the Stolen (2014), and published several collections of poetry. She was the first woman president of PEN International in 2015.
Adrian McKinty is a Northern Irish writer of crime and mystery novels and young adult fiction, best known for his 2020 award-winning thriller, The Chain, and the Sean Duffy novels set in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. He is a winner of the Edgar Award, the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, the Macavity Award, the Ned Kelly Award, the Barry Award, the Audie Award, the Anthony Award and the International Thriller Writers Award. He has been shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière.
The Old Colony Housing Project is a 16.7-acre public housing project located in South Boston, Massachusetts. First built in 1940 as a cluster of 22 three-story brick buildings housing 873 low-income units, it is one of the Boston Housing Authority's oldest developments.
Alison Bass is an American journalist and author of three books: her memoir, Brassy Broad: How one Journalist helped pave the way to #MeToo (2021); Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law and Side Effects: A Prosecutor, A Whistleblower and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial.Side Effects won the National Association of Science Writers' Science in Society Award and its film rights were recently optioned.
Melissa Febos is an American writer and professor. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (2010), and the essay collections, Abandon Me (2017) and Girlhood (2021).
Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence is a memoir by American social activist Geoffrey Canada. Beacon Press published the book on January 31, 1995.
David M. Kennedy is a criminologist, professor, action researcher, and author specializing in crime prevention among inner city gangs, especially in the prevention of violent acts among street gangs. Kennedy developed the Operation Ceasefire group violence intervention in Boston in the 1990s and the High Point Model drug market intervention in High Point, North Carolina, in 2003, which have proven to reduce violence and eliminate overt drug markets in jurisdictions around the United States. He founded the National Network for Safe Communities in 2009 to support cities using these and related strategies.
Sam Quinones is an American journalist from Los Angeles, California. He is best known for his reporting in Mexico and on Mexicans in the United States, and for his chronicling of the opioid crisis in America through his 2015 book Dreamland, followed by, in 2021, his book, The Least of Us. He has been a reporter for 35 years. He is now a freelance journalist. Prior to that he was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times from 2004 to 2014.
Kit Yan is a queer, transgender, and Chinese-American award-winning poet. He also writes plays and screenplays. Yan lives in New York.
Franklin E. Zimring is an American criminologist, law professor, and the William G. Simon Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law.
John George Pipkin is an American author, born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1967. He holds a PhD in British Romantic Literature from Rice University in Houston, TX, an MA in English from UNC-Chapel Hill, and a BA from Washington & Lee University in Lexington, VA. His first novel, Woodsburner, won the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Massachusetts Center for the Book Fiction Prize, and the Texas Institute of Letters Steven Turner Award.
