Boston Globe’s Black Mass Journalist Tackles A Glaring Injustice In His New Novel, Trell
Summary: With Dick Lehr, Co-author of <a href="https://amzn.to/2y0c8JU">Black Mass</a>, Author of <a href="https://amzn.to/2xhHQU0">Trell</a>, Professor of Journalism at Boston University, Former Reporter at Boston Globe’s Spotlight team, Pulitzer Prize finalist<br> Dick Lehr<br> Steve’s guest, Dick Lehr is a <a href="https://www.bu.edu/experts/profiles/richard-lehr/">professor of journalism</a> at Boston University’s College of Communication and former reporter at the Boston Globe’s investigative “Spotlight” team where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in investigative reporting. Lehr was co-author of the New York Times bestseller and Edgar Award winner <a href="https://amzn.to/2y0c8JU">Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI and a Devil’s Deal</a> and its sequel, <a href="https://amzn.to/2xg2jIJ">Whitey: The Life of America’s Most Notorious Mob Boss</a>. Black Mass was made into a film starring Johnny Depp.<br> Trell<br> In conversation with Steve, Lehr discusses his latest book, <a href="https://amzn.to/2xhHQU0">Trell</a>, a page-turning novel that was inspired by the true story of a young man’s false imprisonment for murder, his daughter’s quest to prove her father’s innocence, and the lawyer and reporter who fought to free him.<br> Trell is based on the story of a drive-by, gang-related shooting death of 12-year-old Tiffany Moore in 1988, and the daughter of the wrongly accused convicted man who persuaded a reporter and a lawyer to help her prove her father’s innocence.<br> In Dick’s words, <a href="https://amzn.to/2xhHQU0">Trell</a> is a novel largely aimed at young adults. The protagonist, Trell Taylor, is a 14-year-old girl from the Roxbury neighborhood in Boston, who has grown up with her father, Romero Taylor, in prison for a murder that occurred when she was a newborn baby girl. She marked her time by going to the prison to visit her father and always asking him, “Daddy, when are you coming home?”<br> The main action in the novel happens when Trell is 14-years-old and all legal appeals have been exhausted. Her father’s lawyer throws up her arms and says the only recourse she can think of is to find a reporter willing to poke around and maybe uncover some new evidence.<br> Trell is determined to help her father get home and so picks out the best reporter at The Boston Globe, Clemens Bittner, and convinces him to look into her father’s case in spite of his initial resistance. Over the course of the main action in the plot, the two of them work the streets of Boston gathering evidence to show that her father was wrongfully convicted of murder.<br> Fact Versus Fiction<br> Steve asks Dick to break down the difference between the novel, <a href="https://amzn.to/2xhHQU0">Trell</a>, and the true story on which it is based. Dick Lehr says one of his last stories for The Globe was on an investigation into a wrongful conviction case involving a man who in prison for a murder he did not commit. When the man was first arrested in the late 1980s, he had a newborn baby girl, and the case made headlines in Boston at the time. Dick used that backdrop as a scaffolding, a framework, on which to develop his novel, <a href="https://amzn.to/2xhHQU0">Trell</a>, which is largely fictionalized but inspired by that last case that he had worked on as a reporter at The Boston Globe.<br> The Economics Of Crime And Punishment<br> Having set the stage, Steve pivots the conversation towards the theme of his show and asks Dick about the economics of the case and how much poverty was a factor in the real-life wrongful conviction on which his novel is based. He asks to what degree economics factor in preventing poor families from getting fair trials.<br> Dick answers that economics was a major factor because the convicted man and his family were struggling financially and lacked the resources to hire a high-powered law firm to defend him. He reflects that the economics angle in his novel,
