In 2023, English received a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld (William Morrow, 2022).
[citation needed] In 2010, English wrote "Dope", an article for Playboy, about a DEA agent in Cleveland who was indicted for framing innocent African Americans on bogus narcotics charges.
The author’s crime journalism was collected in the book “Whitey’s Payback: And Other True Stories of Gangsterism, Murder, Corruption, and Revenge” (2013), published by Mysterious Press/Open Road Media.
With his three published volumes on differing aspects of Irish American involvement in the underworld (“Paddy Whacked,” The Westies” and “Where the Bodies Were Buried”), English covers more ground than any previous writer or historian on this subject.
“The Last Kilo: Willy Falcon and the Cocaine Empire that Seduced America” (2024) completes the author’s trilogy of non-fiction books covering history from the time of the American Mob’s economic exploitation of Havana in the 1940s and 1950s, to the formation of the Corporation in Union City, New Jersey, New York City and Miami in the 1970s and 1980s, to the cocaine era of the 1970s and 1980s that changed America.
These books show how the Cuban Revolution, which brought Fidel Castro into power in Cuba in 1959, had a major impact on American society — and the criminal underworld — over the following half a century.
Also a screenwriter, English has written episodes of the television crime dramas NYPD Blue and Homicide: Life on the Streets.