Street Soldier My Life as an Enforcer for Whitey Bulger and the Boston Irish Mob Written by Edward J. Mackenzie Jr. and Phyllis Karas True Crime eBook ISBN 978-1-58642-182-3 (1-58642-182-4) 256 PAGES $14.95 (CANADIAN $14.95) April 2010

ABOUT THIS BOOK
For decades the FBI let James “Whitey” Bulger get away with murder, allowing him continued control of his criminal enterprise in exchange for information. He went on the lam in 1995 and today follows top-ranked Osama bin Laden on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.
Edward J. MacKenzie, Jr. was a drug dealer and enforcer who would do just about anything for Bulger. In this compelling eyewitness account, Eddie Mac delivers the goods on his one-time boss and on such former associates as Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi and turncoat FBI agent John Connolly.
Street Soldier is also a story of the search for family, for acceptance, for respect, loyalty, and love. Abandoned by his parents at the age of four, Mackenzie became a ward of the state, suffered physical and sexual abuse, and eventually drifted into Bulger’s orbit.
The Eddie Mac who emerges in these pages is complex: An enforcer who was also a national kick-boxing champion; a womanizer who fought for custody of his daughters; a kid never given much of a chance who went on, as an adult, to earn a college degree in three years; a man who lived by a strict code of loyalty but also helped set up a sting operation that would net one of the largest hauls of cocaine ever seized.
Street Soldier is as disturbing and fascinating as a crime scene, as heart-stopping as a bar fight, and at times as darkly comic as Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction or Martin Scorsese’s Good Fellas.


From the Hardcover edition.

PRAISE
“Eddie MacKenzie’s graphic account of his life as a violent street criminal in South Boston is almost unspeakably brutal, coldblooded, ruthless, merciless, callous, cruel — and fascinating. Reading it is like happening upon a street crime and entering the perpetrator’s mind.” — John W. Dean in the New York Times Book Review

“An almost unbeatable insider’s account of the mob.”— Library Journal


“MacKenzie is the first ‘predator’ (his description) from the murderous Irish mob in Boston to come forward without an indictment hanging over his head and attempt to tell the ugly truth about an organized crime group that plagued Boston for much of the past 30 years.”— Jonathan Wells in the Boston Herald 

“Americans love their bad guys and . . . books about criminal gangs proliferate and prosper. One of the best is Street Soldier.”— Les Roberts in the Washington Post


“In my 25 years of studying crime and criminals, I have never come across a book quite like Street Soldier. One-third of the way through, I had to put it down, because I was so shaken by the depraved life and gruesome events that it openly describes.” — Richard Moran in the Chicago Tribune

“This memoir is more than just true crime sensationalism or conscience-cleansing confessional. . . . It contains the edginess of a great thriller.”— Publishers Weekly


“A tour of life on the edge with a charming and terrifying rogue.”— Kirkus Reviews

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
EDWARD J MACKENZIE JR. is a single father raising his two daughters near his hometown of South Boston. 

PHYLLIS KARAS is coauthor of The Onassis Women. A contributor to People magazine and an adjunct professor at the Boston University School of Journalism, she lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts. 

ROSS A. MUSCATO is a strategic communications consultant who lives in the Boston area.