The Choir Boy: Why I Turned to a Life of Crime With the Whitey Bulger Gang After Being Raped By My Scoutmaster

Eric Schneider life of crime began after he was one of the young victims in the notorious Boy Scout sexual abuse case that rocked Boston in the mid-1980s. Most of the victims committed suicide. It’s a tragic fact that sex abuse instills such self-loathing many do not survive.  It was big news all over the country at the time. But then the news moves on and the victims lead lives  with long-term psychological effects of childhood sex abuse. Eric was no different.

Eric was a drug dealer, arsonist, and small-time thief from a very early age. The book begins with him buying a gun at the age of eleven.  By the age of twenty, he was a major crime figure, working under the umbrella of the notorious Whitey Bulger organized crime network. He specialized in armed robberies, with a focus on banks and armored cars transporting large sums of cash.

Schneider given a new identity by the Witness Protection Program testified for the prosecution, sending his partners in crime to prison. He has lived in silent about his past since the early 1990s. Now with his book  published, he has emerged from the safety to promote the book.

His book covers everything he went through from sex abuse to drugs to every kind of crime you can imagine. He writes as if he were sitting there telling you the story first hand. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine he experienced everything he writes. But his criminal record is verification enough. And it will make you sad, then make you mad that this could happen.

Schneider’s The Choir Boy is an inspirational story of a sexual abuse survivor. It is the author's hope that his story will help others who have suffered childhood abuse.  Not that you can excuse a life of excess and crime, but we can see how once down a deviant path it is hard to change course.

This is an interesting read and speaks to the issue of child sex abuse and how it impacts an entire life.