A courageous FBI agent recounts his battle against a corrupt law-enforcement culture that protected one of the nation’s most notorious criminals.

By the time he was ordered to Boston in 1980, Fitzpatrick had already distinguished himself, handling 1960s KKK bombings in Mississippi and uncovering crucial evidence relating to the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, but putting the Boston FBI office on the “straight and narrow” proved impossible. Fitzpatrick and novelist Land (Strong at the Break, 2011, etc.) trace the breakdown of discipline and order there back to the ’50s and the beginning of the furious effort to bring down La Cosa Nostra. Out of greed and ambition, agents went “native,” choosing their “Boston Irish roots…over loyalty to the organization.” In exchange for what turned out to be worthless information about the Italian gangsters, they leaked to and protected Irish mob chieftain James “Whitey” Bulger and his right-hand man, Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi, allowing them literally to get away with murder. (BUY THE BOOK)