Patrick's Nee's memoir A Criminal and an Irishman: The Inside Story of the Boston Mob-IRA Connection has been in print for a couple of years, but even so it remains a must read for anyone who enjoys a good crime story. This books gives a very personalized glimpse into Boston Irish Mob when James “Whitey” Bulger dominated the underworld. A Criminal and an Irishman has the virtues and vices of a true memoir. It should not be taken as a history, but neither is it fiction. Congruent time-lines and supporting research are not on Nee agenda. Broader socio-cultural events remain untouched except in the ways in which they personally influence Nee and for the most part remain unexamined.
Nee's intention in A Criminal and an Irishman is to tell an exciting story, and he delivers. The memoir retains a personalized narrative quality reminiscent of older memoirs. Personal opinions and tangents are part of the color of this book. Though A Criminal and an Irishman can hardly be described as long, Nee shows no pressing desire to get to the point. The reader can almost feel that he or she is sitting at a pub just chatting with Patrick Nee. He tells his story the way he wants too and that is that.
Wild and thrill seeking, Nee presents a picture of himself in A Criminal and an Irishman as a man attracted uncommonly bad trouble. More than once the reader finds it simply amazing that Nee has survived long enough to write a memoir. From one of his fellow Marines bring an alarm clock on an ambush in Vietnam to sitting next to Whitey Bulger when a gang war was erupting between their rival gangs.
However, beyond choice examples of his exciting career, Nee presents the human side of the story as well. One also sees his love of family and attachment to South Boston. The neighborhood of Southie figures so prominently in A Criminal and an Irishman that one can fairly say that it is almost a character in its own right.
From Nee's description of being a Marine in Vietnam to gunrunning for the IRA and robbing banks and gang wars, Nee's adrenaline filled life makes for a book that is genuinely hard to put down.
Though at times gritty and brutal, A Criminal and an Irishman refrains from reveling in descriptions of torture and execution. Both things are presented in this memoir several times. Nee certainly doesn't sanitize his memories for an appeal to a broader audience, but the bloody cost of crime is presented as part of the job not one of its thrills.
Given that the name of the memoir it is no surprise that Nee expresses unequivocal support for the Provisional Irish Republican Army and Irish Republicanism in general. One of his chapters is dominated by a description of Republican history and thought, elucidating the reasons why the IRA has garnered the support among Citizens of Ireland and the Irish diaspora.
Nee's stories about his work with the IRA are fascinating. It shows nascent beginnings of how organized crime became intertwined with international terrorism. No longer are gangsters exclusively local muscle-men taking advantage of business opportunities in the black-market. Professional crime has become ideological and transnational, and Nee worked at a time in which that shift was occurring.
However, one would not have a very detailed picture of the Boston Underworld without an appearance of Whitey Bulger, and Nee does not disappoint. Nee despised Bulger throughout his professional life and that sentiment is a re-occurring theme that appears throughout Nee's stories.
Right from his first association with Bulger, Nee found Bulger a repulsive individual. Although Nee keeps the focus of his memoir on his own personal criminal life and avoids superfluous cameos of his associates, he doesn't hide his opinion that Whitey Bulger was a egotistical psychopathic pervert.
In the light of Whitey Bulger's trial the ubiquitous question that one finds it hard not to ask while reading A Criminal and an Irishman is: what was the purpose of the FBI's Top Echelon Program with which Bulger notoriously collaborated? Nee does not address this question, but he does paint a detailed enough pictures of Bulger and Stevie Flemmi to allow the reader to see the mentality of a couple of people that participated in that program.
Was the Bureau keeping organized crime under control by acquiring information from the best connected mobsters? Or was the FBI simply culling the criminal classes by protecting vicious murderers? If Bulger was typical of gangsters that participated in the Top Echelon Program, irrespective of what the FBI intended, it seems likely that the later was the case.
Though Nee and Bulger were contemporaries and Nee would have been remiss to avoid mentioning Bulger, A Criminal and an Irishman is not about Whitey Bulger, and the book is better for it. Nee presents a picture of crime in Boston in the 60's, 70's, and 80's that is more dynamic than just the villainy of James Bulger.
Edith Piaf's song “Je ne regrette rien” that she wrote for the Foreign Legion is a fitting mantra for Patrick Nee. Neither pleased nor displeased with the events of his life, but regretting nothing, certain in the knowledge that if he had it do over again he would do it all the same, Nee gives his reader a honest and unapologetic tour de force in A Criminal and an Irishman.
Patrick Nee's A Criminal and an Irishman can be found on Amazon or Barnes and Noble by selecting either of these links.
