Raised in a South Boston housing project, James "Whitey" Bulger became the most wanted American criminal of his generation. In this dark and riveting story, rich with family ties and political intrigue, Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy, award-winning Boston Globe reporters who have broken more stories on Whitey Bulger than any other reporter, tell the sweeping story of Whitey's life-from teenage thievery to bank robberies to Alcatraz to the building of his underworld empire. After Whitey's triumph in the bloody Boston gang wars, the FBI approached him to become a mob informant. This clandestine and manipulative relationship made Whitey untouchable; the FBI sanctioned gambling, drugs, and even murder to protect him. With access to previously undisclosed information, Cullen and Murphy reveal Bulger's lifelong paranoia developed in the CIA's MKULTRA program, his support of the IRA, his hitherto-unknown role in the Boston busing crisis, and an intimate understanding of his mindset while on the lam and in prison. A richly detailed, impeccably reported story that climaxes in a sixteen-year manhunt and Whitey's dramatic capture in Santa Monica in June 2011, Whitey Bulger is destined to become a true-crime classic.