Black Bird: One Man's Freedom Hides in Another Man's Darkness

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It turns out that the task Keene was given was the first and only time in American history that a dangerous mission as risky as this would be attempted to unravel twisted secrets. Keene comes off as a somewhat flawed character, though; after all, he was an admitted drug dealer, working with a Mexican drug lord and other gangsters, and he only took on his undercover mission to get out of jail, not because of any moral imperative to get justice for young murder victims. Hillel Levin has been an investigative reporter for The Nation , New York magazine, Metropolitan Detroit , Playboy , and editor for Chicago magazine. It reminded me more of rich, character-driven material like The Night Of than so many of the 'ripped from the headlines' mini-series of late. This chilling memoir will make you wonder whether you would befriend a killer if it got you a get-out-of-jail-free card.

At the same time, Larry makes foreboding comments towards his therapist, which she summarizes as him trying to project Jimmy's more confident attitude. After ten months I had just started to settle down to do my time in a Michigan federal prison when I got yanked back to Illinois again. Presented with a dangerous mission, Jimmy Keene risked it all to enter a maximum-security prison as an FBI operative tasked with keeping a deadly man locked up forever. Beaumont suspected that Hall was responsible for up to 20 more killings, and he wanted Keene to elicit a confession—and if he could get Hall to give him the specific location of another victim’s body, it would mean a get-out-of-jail-free card for Keene.I was kind of a natural for it with the charm I inherited from my parents, and the fearlessness that I felt from my experience in sports and martial arts.

Keene’s first book was adapted as a highly acclaimed miniseries titled Black Bird by Apple TV+ in July of 2022. In fact, they lost money, which put me back on my dealer treadmill, running that much harder to stay in place—until the Feds came “knocking” in 1996.

In April 2023, Keene released his newest book, The Chicago Phoenix: Jimmy Keene’s Untold Story, which details his dangerously thrilling early life, his efforts to survive and thrive in the hazardous Chicago drug world starting at thirteen years old, his rise to the top of a secret empire, and his path to success and redemption after leaving prison with nothing but a cleared name and a clean record. Jimmy asks James to retrieve a brick of cocaine from one of his houses, but learns that his friend Danny stole it. I’d rather be in a hard-core prison and have to worry about getting stabbed,” he says, “than be confined in that little, nasty ancient-history shit hole. Local police describe him as a harmless serial confessor, but detective Brian Miller manages to coax out of him that he has dreams about murdering women. But back then I discovered a way to put more money in my pocket than the richest kids had—selling drugs.