John Red Shea, 40, was a top lieutenant in the South Boston Irish mob run, led by James Whitey Bulger.
Holding fast to the code of his upbringing, he remained a man of honor..
Red Shea did his crime, then did his time--and never informed, unlike Henry Hill of Wiseguy, Sammy The Bull Gravano of Underboss, and so many others.
RAT BASTARDS was the first-ever, firsthand account of mob life that wasn\'t told by a rat.
At twenty, initiated into Bulger\'s inner circle at the point of an Uzi, he was running a multimillion-dollar narcotics operation for his mentor.
At eighteen he was loan sharking and laundering Bulger\'s money.
At seventeen he was handling Bulger\'s cocaine.
At fifteen he was selling marijuana .
From the age of thirteen, When he started robbing delivery trucks, to the age of twenty-seven, When he began serving a twelve-year federal sentence for drug trafficking, Shea was a portrait in American crime - a bantam-weight, red-headed terror, brutal with his fists and deadly with a lead pipe, a baseball bat, or a knife.
A major feature film project is now in development.
When the actor and producer Mark Wahlberg, raised in nearby Dorchester, learned of a script based on Shea\'s life circulating in Hollywood, he immediately committed to playing the gangster on screen.
An ice-cold enforcer with a red-hot temper, Shea was a legend among his peers in the 1990s South Boston, as much as John Gotti, Bugsy Siegel, and Al Capone were in their time and place.
John Red Shea, 40, was a top lieutenant in the South Boston Irish mob run, led by James Whitey Bulger
