James Joseph "Whitey" Bulger Jr. was an American organized crime boss who led the Winter Hill Gang, an Irish Mob group 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, United States, 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 was 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.
The Gustin Gang was one of the earliest Irish-American gangs to emerge during the Prohibition era and dominate Boston's underworld during the 1920s. The name "Gustin Gang" came from a street in South Boston ("Southie"), which was off of Old Colony Avenue, not from the name of any "members."
Monster, published April 21, 1999 by HarperCollins, is a young adult drama novel by American author Walter Dean Myers. It was nominated for the 1999 National Book Award for Young People's Literature, won the Michael L. Printz Award in 2000, and was named a Coretta Scott King Award Honor the same year.
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 and the memoirs 'Widow Basquiat' (2001)and 'The Promised Party'(2024). She is the first and only woman president of PEN International, elected 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 building’s 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 an American 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.
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.
