The Devil to Pay: A Mobster’s Road to Perdition

In this bracing debut memoir, former mobster Hicks details his lurid life of crime in South Boston. Hicks’s biological father and stepfather both belonged to Boston street gangs, and his absent mother dabbled in drugs and sex work, setting the stage early for Hicks’s own transgressions. By age 11, he was running errands for the notorious Winter-Hill gang. Before he could legally drive, he was boosting cars, and by the time he was a teenager in the late 1980s, he was organizing a fleet of lobster boats for a smuggling operation. Throughout, Hicks balances accounts of his own crimes and other high-profile Boston cases (including the 1990 Isabella Steward Gardner Museum heist) with lighter sections about learning to read during his first stint in prison and experiencing tenderness from the likes of Whitey Bulger. Strikingly, however, a traditional redemption arc is not on the menu. “You can’t redeem an irredeemable character in a single story—which is to say, in a single lifetime,” Hicks writes near the end. “If you expected some fairy-tale happily-ever-after... you are reading the wrong book.” (Still, he ends the account with a partner, a dog, and a modest home improvement business.) Told with all the foul-mouthed philosophizing of a Scorsese antihero, this is sure to appeal to anyone fascinated by mob life. (Jun.)