STORY OF IRISH-AMERICAN GANGSTER TO BE FILMED

Award-winning Irish film director Tom Collins is set to bring the story of Irish-American gangster Pat Nee to the big screen.
He plans to film the story of Nee's failed 1984 attempt to smuggle seven tons of assault rifles to the IRA with the help of his former colleague James “Whitey” Bulger, according to the Boston Globe.
Collins, who directed the 2007 film Kings, and whose latest work, the RTE/BBC documentary the Boys of St Columb's, screened at the Galway Film Festival in July, is currently in Boston talking to Nee, 66, who emigrated to the United States from Co Galway with his parents when he was nine.
Nee became involved with South Boston's Mullen Gang when he was just 14 and rejoined them in 1966 after serving in Vietnam as a US Marine.
The gang's main rival was the Killeen crime family, which was headed by Bulger after the Mullens killed boss Donald Killeen in 1972.
The two gangs reached a truce, brokered by Winter Hill Gang boss Howie Winter, who headed the enlarged mob.
When Bulger took over the leadership of the Winter Hill Gang when Winter was jailed in 1979, Nee moved to Charlestown, Massachusetts and concentrated on raising money and guns for the provisional IRA.
His ambitious plan for the 1984 shipment on board a trawler called Valhalla based in Gloucester, Massachusetts, was foiled by a tip-off by an informant in the IRA's Kerry Brigade and the boat was intercepted by the Irish Navy and the Garda.
Nee cut his ties with Bulger over his disgust at the torture and killing of a crew member of the Valhalla and staged a series of armed robberies, again to raise money for the IRA.
He was arrested in 1990 and sentenced to 37 years in prison, but was freed after eight.
Nee wrote a memoir, A Criminal and an Irishman: The Inside Story of the Boston Mob – IRA Connection.
Bulger's story is also headed to the big screen.
Oscar-nominated Irish director Jim Sheridan will make a film based on Black Mass, a book about the 80-year-old fugitive, who is wanted for 19 murders, by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill.
He has already scouted locations in Boston and is expected to start shooting when he finishes work on the Daniel Craig thriller Dream House.