Irish True Crime

Brought to you by Penguin. Kinahan Assassins is the extraordinary story of how the killers used by Ireland’s most notorious drug gang, the Kinahan Cartel, were taken down. After an audacious assassination attempt on boss Daniel Kinahan's life, the Kinahan Cartel recruited an unprecedented...

Everyone knows where they were when Ray Houghton outfoxed the Italian goalkeeper in the 1994 World Cup finals. Every television in the country was tuned in to the match, and The Heights Bar in Loughinisland, Co. Down was no exception. But two miles down the road, three men with no interest in Ireland's footballing progress were planning a deadly massacre. Shortly after half-time they burst through the door of the bar and opened fire, spraying bullets indiscriminately. As they fled the scene, six innocent men lay dead or dying.

Annie Monahan was arguably the most successful "black widow" of the early twentieth century, when you factor in the time it took for authorities to finally catch up with her. She had killed three husbands and her own niece, garnering sizable payouts from life insurance companies as she acted as a beneficiary in all of the cases. She performed these acts of murder in the sleepy town of New Haven, Connecticut, dealing with police who always seem to be one step behind her.

In 2006 at Belfast Crown Court, William James Fulton, a principal in the outlawed Loyalist Volunteer Force, was jailed for life and sentenced to a minimum of 25 years after the longest trial in Northern Ireland’s legal history for the Rosemary Nelson killing. This unique story is told by former undercover officer Mark Dickens who was part of an elite team of undercover detectives who took part in "Operation George", one of the most remarkable covert policing operations the world has ever known.

How much do you know about the organized crime involvement of Irish descendants in the United States? How much do you know of the impact of British rule in Ireland? Religious conflicts? The backing of parliamentary and paramilitary groups by criminal gangs? Gun-running and drug-smuggling? A History of Irish Organized Crime is the perfect book to help you develop your knowledge and learn about social history, including the current impact of Brexit on the Irish border “backstop”.

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, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, 2011 followed top-ranked Osama bin Laden on the FBI'''s Ten Most Wanted List, and then was captured in Santa Monica, California weeks after Bin Laden's demise.

One sunlit evening, May 6, 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, Chief Secretary and Undersecretary for Ireland, were ambushed and stabbed to death while strolling through Phoenix Park in Dublin. The murders were funded by American supporters of Irish independence and carried out by the Invincibles, a militant faction of republicans.

Dock Boss: Eddie McGrath and the West Side Waterfront is the fascinating account of one gangster's ascension from altar boy to the leader of New York City's violent Irish Mob. Eddie McGrath's life and crimes are traced through the tail-end of Prohibition, the gang warfare of the 1930s that propelled him into the position of an organized crime boss, the sordid years of underworld control over the bustling waterfront, McGrath's involvement in dozens of gangland murders, and finally the decline of the dock mobsters following a period of longshoremen rebellion in the 1950s.

Let This Be Our Secret is a remarkable true crime story set on Ireland's north coast where the bodies of a couple were found in a car filled with carbon monoxide fumes - the apparent victims of a suicide pact....