Alain Guillot

Life, Leadership, and Money Matters

Dick Lehr

779 Dick Lehr: A True Story of Domestic Terrorism in America’s Heartland

About Dick Lehr

Dick Lehr

Dick Lehr, a professor of journalism at Boston University, is the author of seven award-winning works of nonfiction and fiction. They include Dead Reckoning: The Story of How Johnny Mitchell and His Fighter Pilots Took on Admiral Yamamoto and Avenged Pearl Harbor, and Trell: Nothing But the Truth, a novel for young adults and his first work of fiction.

His nonfiction book, The Birth of a Movement: How Birth of a Nation Ignited The Battle for Civil Rights. Lehr coauthored Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI and a Devil’s Deal, and its sequel, a biography titled Whitey: the Life of America’s Most Notorious Mob Boss.

His other books include two finalists for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime: The Fence: A Police Cover-up Along Boston’s Racial Divide, and Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind The Dartmouth Murders, which he wrote with Mitchell Zuckoff.

Lehr previously wrote for the Boston Globe, where he was a member of its Spotlight Team, a special projects reporter, and a magazine writer. While at the Globe he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in investigative reporting.

Before that, Lehr, who is also an attorney, was a reporter at The Hartford Courant. Lehr has degrees from Harvard College and the University of Connecticut School of Law. He was a Visiting Journalist at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University and a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. He lives near Boston.

Where to find Dick Lehr

Website

White Hot Hate: A True Story of Domestic Terrorism in America’s Heartland

In the spring of 2016, as immigration debates rocked the United States, three men in a militia group known as the Crusaders grew aggravated over one Kansas town’s growing Somali community. They decided that complaining about their new neighbors and threatening them directly wasn’t enough.

White Hot Hate: A True Story of Domestic Terrorism in America's Heartland by Dick Lehr

The men plotted to bomb a mosque, aiming to kill hundreds and inspire other attacks against Muslims in America. But they would wait until after the presidential election so that their actions wouldn’t hurt Donald Trump’s chances of winning.

An FBI informant befriended the three men, acting as law enforcement’s eyes and ears for eight months. His secretly taped conversations with the militia were pivotal in obstructing their plans and were a lynchpin in the resulting trial and convictions for conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.

White Hot Hate will tell the riveting true story of an averted case of domestic terrorism in one of the most remote towns in the US, not far from the infamous town where Capote’s In Cold Blood was set. In the gripping details of this foiled scheme, we see in intimate focus the chilling, immediate threat of domestic terrorism—and racist anxiety in America writ large.

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