Dick Lehr (born May 3, 1954) is an American author, journalist and a professor of journalism atBoston University. He is known for co-authoringThe New York Times bestseller andEdgar Award winnerBlack Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI and a Devil's Deal, and its sequel,Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss with fellow journalistGerard O'Neill.
Lehr was aJohn S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford in 1991-1992. From 1985 to 2003, he was a reporter atThe Boston Globe,[1] where he was theGlobe's legal affairs reporter, magazine and feature writer, and a longtime member of the Spotlight Team, an investigative reporting unit.[2] He was aPulitzer Prize finalist in investigative reporting.[3] He was a Visiting Journalist-in-Residence at The Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism atBrandeis University in 2007.[4]
In January 1989, he co-authored his first book,The Underboss: The Rise and Fall of a Mafia Family, with Gerard O'Neill published first bySt. Martin's Press and later editions byPublicAffairs.[6]
In May 2000,Black Mass was released, which he also co-authored with O'Neill. Pulling from their investigations on the Spotlight Team,Black Mass detailed the illicit relationship between Boston crime bossJames "Whitey" Bulger and FBI special agentJohn Connolly.[7][8][9][10] The book became aNew York Times bestseller[11] and won the 2001Edgar Award for best fact crime. In 2015 the film adaptation ofBlack Mass premiered, withJohnny Depp playing the role of Whitey Bulger andBenedict Cumberbatch playing Whitey's brother Bill Bulger. In the movie, Lehr makes a cameo as a patron in a restaurant.[12][13]
Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders was published in September 2003 byHarperCollins, co-authored with fellowGlobe reporterMitchell Zuckoff.[14][15]
In June, 2009, Lehr published his first solo project,The Fence: A Police Cover-up Along Boston's Racial Divide published byHarperCollins, a non-fiction narrative aboutthe police beating of Michael Cox, an officer working in plainclothes who was mistaken for a fleeing murder suspect. It was the worst known case of police brutality in Boston history.[16][17]The Fence was an Edgar Award finalist for best non-fiction.[18]Lionsgate Television is developing a limited dramatic series based on the book.
In 2011, James "Whitey" Bulger was arrested inSanta Monica, California after successfully evading law enforcement for nearly two decades. After his capture, Lehr co-wrote with O'Neill the definitive biography of Bulger,Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss, which was published byCrown in February 2013.[19][20][21]
In 2014, Lehr authoredThe Birth of a Movement: How Birth of a Nation Ignited the Battle for Civil Rights published by PublicAffairs. In the book, Lehr recaptures the firestorm that ensued after the 1915 release ofThe Birth of a Nation, zeroing in on the parallel narratives of two men entrenched in the controversy: an African-American journalist and agitatorWilliam Monroe Trotter andD.W. Griffith who created the film.[22] In February 2017, Lehr was featured in aPBS documentary titledThe Birth of a Movement as part of itsIndependent Lens documentary series.[23]
In 2014, Lehr began penning his firstyoung adult novel,Trell, inspired by a series of articles he wrote from theGlobe about the questionable conviction for first-degree murder (later overturned) of a young drug dealer, Shawn Drumgold. The novel was published byCandlewick Press in September 2017. In it, a Boston teen named Trell teams up with a Globe reporter to try to uncover the evidence to show her father was wrongfully convicted for murder.[24][25] Feature film rights were acquired by Tonik Productions.[26]
In 2020, Lehr completed his first World War II nonfiction narrative for HarperCollins,Dead Reckoning: The Story of How Johnny Mitchell and His Fighter Pilots Took on Admiral Yamamoto and Avenged Pearl Harbor. The epic true story chronicles the high-stakes operation undertaken in April 1943 to shoot down the iconic Japanese commander and architect of the deadly Pearl Harbor attack – a longshot mission hatched hastily at the U.S. base on Guadalcanal.[27][28]
In 2021, HarperCollins' Mariner Books published Lehr's riveting account of a secret plot by white nationalists in 2016 to bomb Somali refugees living in Kansas that was averted when a local man infiltrated the militia group for the FBI.White Hot Hate: A True Story of Domestic Terrorism in America's Heartland foreshadowed the growing far-right militia movement in the U.S. that culminated in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.[29] In November 2021, Lehr was featured in documentary about the bomb plot produced by George Stephanopoulos Productions and ABC News.The Informant: Fear and Faith in America's Heartland debuted on Hulu on November 1, 2021.
