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Don Stradley is the author of The War: Hagler-Hearns and Three Rounds for the Ages (Hamilcar Publications), Berserk: The Shocking Life and Death of Edwin Valero (Hamilcar Publications), Slaughter in the Streets: When Boston Became Boxing's Murder Capital (Hamilcar Publications), A Fistful of Murder : The Fights and Crimes of Carlos Monzon (Hamilcar Publications), Schooled, a dual biography of Lebron James and Jim Morris (Scholastic), and a chapter in The Ultimate Book of Boxing Lists by Bert Sugar and Teddy Atlas. Stradley is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in publications, including The Ring, Ringside Seat, and ESPN.com. Along with his boxing coverage, he's written about baseball, NASCAR, and professional wrestling. When not writing about sports, he's written about the movies for such magazines as Cinema Retro and Noir City. T.J. English is a noted journalist, screenwriter, and author of the New York Times bestsellers Havana Nocturne and Paddy Whacked, as well as The Westies, a national bestseller, and Born to Kill, which was nominated for an Edgar Award. He has written for Esquire, Playboy, and New York magazine, among other publications. His screenwriting credits include episodes for the television crime dramas NYPD Blue and Homicide, for which he was awarded the Humanitas Prize. He lives in New York City.
Explore[s] boxing's seedy underside by presenting readers with a gallery of biographical portraits from a period in Boston history when the sport and mob violence were frequently linked. Delivering staccato and cinematic details, the author looks at the 20th-century thugs, waterfront rats, and promising local youths whose lives became entangled with the gangsters, sharklike cops, and backroom politicians who created and sustained the old world of Boston ward politics. In economical passages, Stradley shows how surprisingly often the thread connecting all these men was boxing...[A] gritty, true-crime narrative...with hard-edged prose and a total absence of cheap moralizing...[A] stark and gripping account. -Kirkus Reviews [A] book that stands at the intersection of boxing and murder. These are the true-crime stories of men in Boston in the first half of the 20th century who dreamed of being great fighters but couldn't make it past the fringe of the sport, and in their desperation chose criminal plots, resulting in grim ends. Boston itself, morphing into something new, in part by the violent actions of these boxer criminals, is a key feature of the book, which demonstrates that the confluence of boxing, poverty, crime, and the urban landscape is not the realm of fiction alone. -Crime Reads, The Classics of Boxing Literature
