ABOUT THE AUTHORT.J. English
T.J. English has been a professional writer for more than three decades.
Thomas Joseph “T.J.” English comes from a large Irish Catholic family of ten brothers and sisters. Early in his writing career, English worked as a freelance journalist in New York City during the day and drove a taxi at night. He often refers to cab driving as a metaphor for what he does as a writer – cruising the streets, interviewing strangers, exploring the unknown, reporting on what he sees and hears from his sojourns in and around the underworld.
In 1990, English published his first book, The Westies, an account of the last of the Irish Mob in the infamous Manhattan neighborhood known as “Hell’s Kitchen.” The book was the result of a series of reports English wrote for a weekly Irish American newspaper based in New York.
His second book, Born to Kill (1995), was an unprecedented inside account of a violent Vietnamese gang based in New York’s Chinatown, that operated up and down the East Coast. In 2005, English published Paddy Whacked, a sweeping history of the Irish American gangster in New York, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, and other U.S. cities. In 2008, English hit bestseller lists with Havana Nocturne, his account of U.S. mobster infiltration of Havana, Cuba in the years before the Revolution swept Fidel Castro into power. The book became something of a publishing phenomenon, rising to #7 on the New York Times bestseller list and also making the following lists: Wall Street Journal, USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Independent Booksellers. Havana Nocturne is currently in development as a television series for AppleTV.
In 2011, English published The Savage City, a blistering account of racial hostilities between the NYPD and the Black Liberation movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. This book also became a New York Times bestseller. The author published Where the Bodies Were Buried in 2015, an in-depth account of the Whitey Bulger scandal, with particular emphasis on the universe of corruption in the criminal justice system that helped to make possible the notorious Boston mobster's twenty-year criminal reign.
The Corporation (2018) and Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld (2022) have added even more luster to T.J.’s reputation as “our premier chronicler” of the underworld, as acclaimed novelist Richard Price called English. Historian and author Luc Sante called English “one of the best reporters of our time.”
As a journalist, English has written for Vanity Fair, Esquire, Playboy, New York magazine, The Village Voice, Los Angeles Times Magazine, the New York Times, and JazzTimes. In the mid-1990s, he wrote a three-part series for Playboy entitled “The New Mob” that explored the changing face of organized crime in America. Also for Playboy, he wrote “Narco Americano,” an investigation into the narco war in Mexico and how the violence has affected the Juárez-El Paso borderland. His article for Playboy about a DEA agent alleged to have framed innocent people on bogus narcotics charges won the prestigious New York Press Club Award for Best Crime Reporting. These and other articles were published in the book Whitey’s Payback (2013), a collection of the author's crime journalism over a twenty-year period.
A bonafide jazz aficionado, T.J. in 2019-20 hosted a popular Latin jazz music series in Manhattan. His writings on jazz culture and music appear semi-regularly in JazzTimes magazine.
His work as a writer has taken him to Cuba, Colombia, Jamaica, Hong Kong, Mexico, Ireland, and all around the U.S. Most of his articles are on the subject of crime and criminal justice, though English writes on a wide variety of subjects including music, politics, and movies. He has published full-length interviews with actor Bill Murray, former Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, director Martin Scorsese, and comedy legend George Carlin, to name a few.
In 2021, English was presented with an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Lehman College, part of the City University of New York (CUNY) educational system in the state of New York.
He lives in New York City and also Albuquerque, New Mexico.