Dick Lehr
Dick Lehr
Contributor

INSTITUTION: Boston University

LOCATION: Boston, MA,

Websites : Personal Website, Books, Faculty Page

AMAZON: Author Page

Associated with The Nexus (Text Edition), part of Encyclopaedia Britannica's Publishing Partner Program.
BIOGRAPHY

Dick Lehr is an author and professor of journalism at Boston University. Previously he was a reporter at the Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in investigative reporting and won numerous regional and national journalism awards. He served as the Globe's legal affairs reporter, magazine and feature writer, and as a longtime member of the newspaper's investigative reporting unit, the Spotlight Team. Before that, Lehr, who is also an attorney, was a reporter at The Hartford Courant.

Lehr is the author of The Fence: A Police Cover-up Along Boston's Racial Divide, a non-fiction narrative about the worst known case of police brutality in Boston, which was an Edgar Award finalist for best non-fiction. He is coauthor of the New York Times bestseller and Edgar Award winner Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI and a Devil's Deal, and its sequel, Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss.

Lehr was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University in 1991-1992. He lives outside Boston with his wife and four children.

Primary Contributions (2)
Whitey Bulger
Whitey Bulger was an American crime boss who, as head of the Boston-area Winter Hill Gang, was a leading figure in organized crime from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s. For more than a decade, until his capture in June 2011, he was listed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as one of its…
READ MORE
Publications (3)
The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America's Civil War
The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America's Civil War (November 2014)
By Dick Lehr
In 1915, two men -- one a journalist agitator, the other a technically brilliant filmmaker -- incited a public confrontation that roiled America, pitting black against white, Hollywood against Boston, and free speech against civil rights.Monroe Trotter and D. W. Griffith were fighting over a film that dramatized the Civil War and Reconstruction in a post-Confederate South. Almost fifty years earlier, Monroe's father, James, was a sergeant in an all-black Union regiment that marched into...
READ MORE
Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI, and a Devil's Deal
Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI, and a Devil's Deal (May 2012)
By Dick Lehr, Gerard O'Neill
When the FBI turned an Irish mobster into an informant, they corrupted the entire judicial system and sanctioned the worst crime spree Boston has ever seen. This is the true story behind the major motion picture.James "Whitey" Bulger became one of the most ruthless gangsters in US history, and all because of an unholy deal he made with a childhood friend. John Connolly a rising star in the Boston FBI office, offered Bulger protection in return for helping the Feds eliminate Boston's Italian...
READ MORE
The Fence: A Police Cover-up Along Boston's Racial Divide
The Fence: A Police Cover-up Along Boston's Racial Divide (June 2010)
By Dick Lehr
“The Fence is a monumental account of an urban travesty. Dick Lehr’s depiction of one of the darkest chapters in recent Boston law enforcement history and the savage injustices perpetrated on two hero cops—one black, one white—has all the earmarks of a classic.” — Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic RiverThe Boston police officers who brutally beat Michael Cox at a deserted fence one icy night in 1995 knew soon after that they had made a terrible mistake. The badge and handgun under Cox's bloodied...
READ MORE