The Devil to Pay

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What to expect

Goodfellas meets the Irish mob in The Devil to Pay, the incredible true story of one man‘s unconventional upbringing in the criminal gangs of Boston and his eventual road to redemption.

Growing up in South Boston, Sean Scott Hicks was running jobs for the Irish mob before his voice changed. Mistreated by his drug-addled mother, Hicks found sanctuary with his adoptive family of felonious uncles—known to law enforcement officials as the Winter Hill Gang. These crooks knew where all the bodies were buried—because they’d done the burying—but they also looked out for young Sean. Even the notorious gangster known worldwide as Whitey Bulger was simply “Uncle Jim” to him.

After such an upbringing, a life of crime was a given. In this unprecedented memoir, Hicks talks about everything from his experience running illegal goods up and down the coast of Massachusetts to his theory about what really happened the night three hundred million dollars’ worth of art went missing from Boston’s Isabella Gardner Museum. Terms like money laundering and assault insufficiently describe his daily tasks, a brash existence that alternated with stints behind bars. This knuckles-close look at mobster life chronicles the greed and avarice, tenderness and brutality, and the reckoning all gangsters must eventually face.

Hicks tells a story of blood and vengeance but also—surprisingly—of hope. The Devil to Pay: A Mobster’s Road to Perdition is an extraordinary memoir that illuminates the reality of what it’s really like in the dark, dangerous, and insidious places of the world, and what it takes to bring a person there and back again.

Critics Review

  • “The Devil to Pay is as raw, and deep, as it gets. If one believes the past, one should also acknowledge the present. If you’ve got the courage, salvation can be a real thing.”

    Tom Lange, retired LAPD officer and co–lead detective in the O. J. Simpson murder case

  • “Sean Scott Hicks has written about the kind of criminal life that very few people live through. How he survived and emerged on the other side is amazing, nothing short of a miracle. This book is hard to put down.”

    Rod Englert, forty-four-year veteran of law enforcement, graduate of the FBI National Academy, and author of Blood Secrets

  • “[A] bracing debut memoir…Told with all the foul-mouthed philosophizing of a Scorsese antihero, this is sure to appeal to anyone fascinated by mob life.”

    Publishers Weekly

  • “Sean Scott Hicks’s The Devil to Pay tells a true Boston mob tale that packs a punch from the opening sentence. A born storyteller, Hicks takes the reader inside the Winter Hill Gang and puts us next to deadly gangsters like Whitey Bulger with razor-edged prose that cuts like the January wind off Boston Harbor. Set aside a weekend for this book, because you won’t be able to put it down once you start.”

    Steve Huff, crime writer for New York Magazine and author of Get off the Grid: Saul Goodman's Guide to Staying off the Radar

  • “Hicks makes no excuses for his past in this gripping, unvarnished memoir. It colors a world already vivid in the popular imagination, in which money and power are gained by those willing to take risks.”

    Booklist

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