Most Wanted by Thomas J. Foley

Most Wanted by Thomas J. Foley is a highly interesting read about the mob, the FBI, corrupt agents, and the former head of the Massachusetts state police. Crime sprees, murders, and more await you with this telling story about a real life mobster.

Book Description

“June 23, 2011. The news of the notorious gangster Whitey Bulger’s capture—after sixteen years on the FBI’s Most Wanted list—swept the nation. Many breathed a sigh of relief. But for Thomas J. Foley, a former Massachusetts state police colonel and the investigator who sparked Bulger’s flight from Boston, the moment was bittersweet. The FBI may have caught Bulger, but as Foley had painfully discovered almost two decades before, they were also responsible for his escape. 

It has been known that Whitey Bulger was a secret informant for the FBI, but it has never been revealed—until now—that the FBI was actually actively protecting Bulger from Foley, effectively derailing Foley’s efforts to stop Bulger’s horrific crime sprees time and again. At one point, the FBI even presented Foley with a plaque at a holiday party that read “the Most Hated Man in Law Enforcement,” a not-so-subtle suggestion that he and his team should lay off their investigation. 

Most Wanted is a true-life thriller, and Foley is the hero at its center. His investigative efforts resulted in criminal convictions of a half-dozen of Boston’s most notorious thugs and also led to the conviction of John Connolly, one of the FBI agents who abetted Bulger; Connolly is now serving a forty-year prison sentence. In this book, Foley, a cop’s cop, honestly recounts how his wide-eyed admiration for the nation’s top law enforcement agency was gradually transformed by dark realities he didn’t want to believe. ” – Most Wanted

My Thoughts

Most Wanted will pull you in and make you continue to read it, almost as if you had a gangster forcing you to read it until late into the night. Of course, it is much more pleasant than that, which you’ll read about in many details throughout the book about how mobsters do work.

I never heard about Whitey Bulger or Thomas Foley until reading this book. According to this book, his neighborhood may have thought of him as a local hero, but he was a criminal who made money through extortion, intimidation, and even murder. He was #1 on the FBI’s most wanted list on June 23, 2011. Heroes shouldn’t be on this list, should they?

The hero of this book is the author, Col. Thomas J. Foley, the former head of the Massachusetts State Police. He spent twenty years investigating and forming a case against Whitey Bulger. The resistance he faced with the FBI led him to uncover the FBI’s protection of this criminal and also led to the arrest of an FBI agent that helped Bulger.

This book and real life story is better than some movies about the mafia, so I really hope that this is turned into a movie. If it does, I predict that it will be a box office hit!

* Thank you to the publisher of Most Wanted, Touchstone, for providing me with a copy of this book for review. All opinions expressed are my own.