Pulling from their investigations on the Spotlight Team, Black Mass detailed the illicit relationship between Boston crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger and FBI special agent John Connolly.
After his capture, Lehr co-wrote with O'Neill the definitive biography of Bulger, Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss, which was published by Crown in February 2013.
In the book, Lehr recaptures the firestorm that ensued after the 1915 release of The Birth of a Nation, zeroing in on the parallel narratives of two men entrenched in the controversy: an African-American journalist and agitator William Monroe Trotter and D.W. Griffith who created the film.
[26] In 2020, Lehr completed his first World War II nonfiction narrative for HarperCollins, Dead Reckoning: The Story of How Johnny Mitchell and His Fighter Pilots Took on Admiral Yamamoto and Avenged Pearl Harbor.
The epic true story chronicles the high-stakes operation undertaken in April 1943 to shoot down the iconic Japanese commander and architect of the deadly Pearl Harbor attack – a longshot mission hatched hastily at the U.S. base on Guadalcanal.
[27][28] In 2021, HarperCollins' Mariner Books published Lehr's riveting account of a secret plot by white nationalists in 2016 to bomb Somali refugees living in Kansas that was averted when a local man infiltrated the militia group for the FBI.
White Hot Hate: A True Story of Domestic Terrorism in America's Heartland foreshadowed the growing far-right militia movement in the U.S. that culminated in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S.