David Lender's Blog, page 2

Arab Summer - Sasha Del Mira Thriller #3

My last Sasha Del Mira thriller, Arab Summer, released in early 2013, is about an Arab Spring uprising in Saudi Arabia led by fundamentalist Shiite Muslims whose goal is to topple the Sunni Saudi regime and use its oil riches to hold the West hostage.  It's the third installment of the Sasha Del Mira series.  Sasha, the heroine of Trojan Horse and Sasha Returns, is a former concubine to the Saudi royal family who was recruited by the CIA as an informant, and later as an assassin.The uprisings in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt that brought down Ben Ali, Qaddafi and Mubarak—dictators who brutally persecuted, repressed and murdered their citizens—started Arab Spring in 2011.  Since then, over a dozen other Arab states witnessed at least some level of civil unrest challenging their governments, including the ongoing civil war in Syria between the al-Assad regime and opposition forces.  The darker side of the Arab Spring movement surfaced in the form of murderous acts by Islamic fundamentalists, not against repressive governments, but against innocents.  ISIS grew out of disparate groups of armed fundamentalists, the vacuum created by the fall of some of the governments during Arab Spring, and the civil war in Syria.Saudi Arabia is considered one of the most stable regimes in the Arab states, but the notion of an Arab Spring uprising there isn't so far-fetched.  Protests, some with 70,000 participants, over anti-Shiite discrimination, labor rights, release of prisoners held without charge or trial, and for equal representation in key government offices began in Saudi Arabia in 2011 and continue today.Imagine this: a group of disaffected Shiite Muslim extremists seizes the Grand Mosque in Mecca—Islam’s holiest site—during the final days of the Hajj, the annual Muslim holy pilgrimage, and takes thousands of hostages.  Their leader says that among them is the Mahdi, the prophesied “Redeemer of Islam” who will drive out all infidels from holy Saudi soil and lead Muslims into a new era.  They broadcast their demands from loudspeakers on the mosque’s minarets, including ceasing oil exports to the US and the expulsion of foreign civilians and military personnel from Saudi Arabia.  Saudi forces try unsuccessfully for weeks to retake the mosque, sustaining heavy casualties.  The Saudis ultimately enlist the help of foreign military forces to drive out the militants.That actually happened in 1979.In Arab Summer something like that does again.  Saif Ibn Mohammed al-Aziz, a ruthless terrorist, leads a Muslim fundamentalist group bent on a bloody coup of the Saudi Arabian government via an Arab Spring uprising.  As a prelude to his plan, he has Sasha Del Mira’s husband, Daniel, murdered.  Sasha comes out of retirement to avenge Daniel’s death and to help Tom Goddard, her old mentor at the CIA, stop the plot, putting her face to face with Saif, her former ally—and lover.
I've just released the fourth installment in the series, On Home Soil, in which Sasha must stop an ISIS plot to bring its jihad to US soil. I hope you'll give all the Sasha Del Mira thrillers in the series a try.

The Sasha Del Mira Series (click on covers to buy on Amazon):



CIA assassin Sasha Del Mira and Tom Goddard, her CIA cohort, are involved in a steamy romance, and are questioning their motivation to continue in the spying game, when they’re thrust into an all-out effort to thwart ISIS’ plans to bring their jihad and terror to the U.S.
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Former CIA spy Sasha Del Mira comes out of retirement to avenge her husband’s murder by Islamic terrorists and stop their Arab Spring uprising to topple the Saudi government.
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A young Sasha Del Mira must stop multiple attempts to topple the Saudi regime by murdering a Saudi prince, who is like a father to her, and replacing him with one of his sons as a puppet of a Muslim terrorist group.
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Daniel Youngblood, a world-weary investment banker falls in love with an exotic spy and then teams up with her to stop a Muslim terrorist plot to cripple the world’s oil capacity.
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Old Friends are the Best Friends

My birthday was yesterday and I got a call with birthday wishes from George, one of my friends from our kindergarten days back in Mt. Tabor, the tiny town in New Jersey where we grew up. He calls me every year, and in the days before smart phone calendars I sometimes didn’t set a reminder anyplace and missed calling him back on his birthday exactly two months after mine in January. I don’t miss anymore. Our other joined-at-the-hip-since-kindergarten friend, Bob, has a birthday in March, and George and I talked about Bob, as well as other things.
Other things included reminiscences about the old days, of course, but after a bit of that we just settled into what old friends usually do: chatting about what’s going on in our lives like it was only a week ago, or less, that we last talked. It always strikes me with old friends that you don’t have to lament how long it’s been since you’ve contacted each other, or either of you feel bad about it, or even one of you give the other a hard time because of it. (I have some friends that get all bitchy if too much time passes without a word, who blame me for it, even though they hadn’t picked up the phone or emailed either. Old friends don’t do that.) With old friends you pick up like you’ve never left. You slide back in together like you’re sitting in George’s room listening to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for the first time, or smoking your first joint behind the church again, or gaping once more at Playboys that Bob found in the woods off the fourth fairway on the golf course.
What was going on with George most recently was the evening concert he produces for Children’s Day, the town celebration of children in Mt. Tabor—morning Olympics, an afternoon parade with costumes and floats, a midway with arcade games and food, an evening parade with all the local fire trucks and an evening concert and fireworks—on the first Saturday of August every year; the fact that the bands were supposed to be somebody I didn’t remember opening for Arlo Guthrie, but the town elders decided that even though the first Saturday of August this year was the 1st of the month, that for the first time in 140-something years they had to invoke some rule that Children’s Day was on the first Saturday after the first full week of August, so it fell on August 8th, and Arlo Guthrie wasn’t available, so it was Badfinger (the last one still alive backed by other musicians) opening for Peter Noone featuring Herman’s Hermits instead; that Finn, local Tabor kid who made it big in real estate and finances the concert each year, couldn’t even make it on the 8th.
Then after mentioning Badfinger we went into a long digression about Harry Nilsson (he made a hit out of Badfinger’s song, Without You), me saying that I could never find Nilsson’s version of I Like New York in June that ran with the closing credits of the movie The Kingfisher on any of his albums, so I had to buy the soundtrack of the movie for that one song. We talked for a while about all of Nilsson’s albums, trying to figure out if I Like New York in June was on one of them and finally gave up. I resolved to order the CD for A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night because I haven’t heard it in years: I only have it on vinyl and have no idea where my turntable might be.
What was going on for me was that Manette and Zac were out of town so I had birthday dinner with Jack and Cindy, my in-laws, and of course Styles, our wonderdog pitbull; that I’ve finished my latest novel and am waiting for my editor to free up to work with him on it; that I’m working on another Sasha Del Mira story; that we closed up the pool and the fountain a little early this year; that our taxes went up yet again and as much as I love our house I’m thinking of arranging to have a plane crash on it some weekend we’re up in Milford because it’s worth more dead than alive (replacement cost insurance vs. market value); and that I would take responsibility for contacting Bob to set up an annual hard date for the three of us to get together instead of calling each other randomly and not having it happen for months.
I have a pillow in the den of our weekend house in Milford that I got from my old friends, Jimmy and Charle, that has, “Old Friends are the Best Friends” embroidered into it. So true. If I don’t see George first, I’m looking forward to talking to him on his birthday.

From Antigua to Morocco

My latest novel, Spin Move, is about a guy named John Rudiger who’s a fugitive financier living under an alias in Antigua.  How Rudiger wound up in that position is a long story, which I laid out in a series of short stories and novellas called Rudiger Stories .
Click cover to buy on AmazonThe 60-second summary is that Rudiger is basically a good guy who was a money manager in New York named Walter Conklin with a $1 billion hedge fund around the time of the Internet boom.  He specialized in technology stocks, so as you might guess, he was considered a wunderkind there for a while.  The guy puffed himself up, in more ways than one, along with the markets. He married a sassy, big-busted social climber from Long Island, developed a taste for high-priced wines, bought a Park Avenue coop, opened a Park Avenue office with a personal Cordon Bleu-trained French chef, and even got pretty puffed up physically—ballooning from his All-American college football weight to over 300 pounds.
When the Internet bubble popped and the NASDAQ crashed, things fell apart for Conklin.  It turns out his wife, Angela, was screwing one of his best friends and his CFO and partner at his hedge fund was screwing him even worse: he cooked the books to pump up Conklin’s already phantasmagorical returns in order to suck in more investors, and then when the market tanked he panicked, turned state's evidence and blamed it all on Conklin. That's what put Conklin on the run to South America for plastic surgery, a gastric bypass, and his John Rudiger alias in the Caribbean.
So now you’re caught up with how Rudiger wound up in Antigua.
Enter Katie Dolan.
Katie, a petite strawberry blonde with a lithe body and washboard abs, was raised tough-as-nails in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, and had worked her way up from the streets to become a lawyer, first for the Manhattan DA’s office and then for Assistant U.S. Attorney Charlie Holden in Manhattan.  Holden was the guy who arrested Conklin's CFO, and the reason Conklin skipped the country when he realized Holden was hot on his trail.
Katie landed in Antigua at Holden’s behest to try and get the goods on Rudiger, prove he was really Conklin and extradite him back to the U.S. for trial and jail.  Pheromones flew when she saw his 6’2’’ tanned and muscled body and ski-slope nose.  His hormones responded in kind.
Rudiger did Holden one better and co-opted Katie to go with him back to New York to pose as his ex-wife Angela to help him recover $50 million in bearer bonds he’d stashed in a safe deposit box.
Katie did Rudiger still one better, screwing him out of $30 million of the bonds, and thus begins our story, Spin Move.
It’s a year after Rudiger and Katie’s tryst in New York, and now the Antiguan officials are demanding ever more exorbitant payouts to maintain his cover. He’s running out of money.  Katie is holed up with her ailing father in Cape Verde, an Island paradise off the coast of Africa that conveniently lacks an extradition treaty with the U.S., an idea she took right out of Rudiger’s playbook.  Despite her double cross, Rudiger is still hot for Katie, and he knows just where to find her when he leaves Antigua.  But U.S. Attorney Charlie Holden is still hovering in the background, dead set on catching them both.  Even worse, Katie’s been sucked in by a dashing, disreputable Swiss banker and he’s conned her out of Rudiger’s $30 million.  Can they get it back and escape before it’s too late?
I gave Spin Movethe elements of a classic thriller, with pace and jump cuts from Antigua to Morocco to Geneva to the UK, some secondary characters I had a lot of fun with, ongoing fireworks between Rudiger and Katie, a sneaky villain in a murderous Swiss banker, and some action that will hopefully stand up the hairs on the back of your neck.
I hope you’ll give Spin Move a try.

Read a sample of Spin Move
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A Downy Woodpecker Christmas

When the weather starts to get cold we drain our fountain, cover it and move the bird feeder into the backyard in front it, where we can watch the birds better.  The bird feeder creates quite a spectacle, attracting not only the usual sparrows, but mourning doves, blue jays and pairs of cardinals.  They feed in groups from it, cluster around it on the ground and sit on top of the fountain before swooping in.  This year we bought suet with nuts embedded in it to put into the wire cages on the sides of the bird feeder, to see if we could attract woodpeckers.  We did.
A large red-bellied woodpecker (oddly named—they have a distinctive red head but their bellies are tan) is a regular customer, and just recently a downy woodpecker showed up.  I’ve been trying to get close enough to get a good photo of the bird feeder with the downy woodpecker on it, but they’re temperamental things, and every time I so much as step outside the little guy flies off.  I had to settle for the shot through the window at left.
The downy woodpecker, pictured in the stock photo at right, isn't considered a truly exotic bird, but I haven’t seen one in many years.  It was certainly exotic for me as a kid growing up in my small town of Mt. Tabor in New Jersey.  Mrs. Stickel, our second grade teacher, gave our class an art and nature project in the fall of that school year, in which we were charged with making the bird of our choice out of papier-mâché.

We were to use the cardboard center of a toilet paper roll as a form, so that meant the bird had to be fairly small.  (Although Neil Hutchinson settled upon a flicker, which is about the size of a small crow.  I have no idea what he used for the center of it because paper towel rolls weren’t that common back in the day.  Maybe he just used a ton of papier-mâché.)
Mrs. Stickel marched us down to the library where we scoured reference books of different birds.  Inside Audubon's The Birds of America I found a plate with the downy woodpecker.  I’d never see anything like it: a white back; checks and spots of black and white on its wings; a distinctive red dot on the back of a black cap atop its head; the sides of its head white with black ovals around its eyes like Petey, the dog on the Little Rascals; and a tiny beak the bird books call a “bark-sticker.”  The downy woodpecker was to be my fall project.
I seem to recall the project took us the better part of two months, working in the back of the school room for about an hour every other day, applying layers of papier-mâché and waiting the requisite time for it to dry before reapplying.  Then attaching the wings and beak, and finally painting.  By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, I was the proud owner of a decent replica of a downy woodpecker.
About two weeks before Christmas that year I woke up to an early snowfall.  I came downstairs and looked out a side window of 89 St. Johns Avenue, itching to get at six inches of wet snow, perfect for making snowballs.  And on mom’s bird feeder in the backyard, there it was in the flesh—my first downy woodpecker.
He perched on the suet, poking his beak into it, working with frenzied movements of his head as if he was afraid another bigger bird would run him off before he got enough to eat.  He pecked at a few sparrows to shoo them away and returned to jabbing at his food.  I ran into the kitchen to bring mom into the dining room to show her, but it had flown off by the time we got there.  I didn’t see it again that entire winter, but I’ve always remembered that first look at a downy.  Even today, seeing one reminds me of the beginning of the Christmas season.  Happy Holidays.

Downy Woodpecker

When the weather starts to get cold we drain our fountain and move the bird feeder into the backyard in front it, where we can watch the birds better.  The bird feeder creates quite a spectacle, attracting not only the usual sparrows, but mourning doves, blue jays and pairs of cardinals.  This year we bought suet with nuts embedded in it to put into the wire cages on the sides of the bird feeder, to see if we could attract woodpeckers.  We did.
A large red-bellied woodpecker (oddly named—they have a distinctive red head but their bellies are tan) is a regular customer, and just recently a downy woodpecker showed up.  I’ve been trying to get a photo of the bird feeder with the downy woodpecker on it, but they’re temperamental things, and every time I get close enough the little guy flies off.  I had to settle for the stock photo of one at left.
The downy woodpecker isn't considered a truly exotic bird, but I haven’t seen one in many years.  It was certainly exotic for me as a kid growing up in my small town of Mt. Tabor in New Jersey.  Mrs. Stickel, our second grade teacher, gave our class an art and nature project in the fall of that school year, in which we were charged with making the bird of our choice out of papier-mâché.
We were to use the cardboard center of a toilet paper roll as a form, so that meant the bird had to be fairly small.  (Although Neil Hutchinson settled upon a Flicker, which is about the size of a small crow.  I have no idea what he used for the center of it because paper towel rolls weren’t that common back in the day.  Maybe he just used a ton of papier-mâché.)
Mrs. Stickel marched us down to the library where we scoured reference books of different birds.  Inside Audubon's Birds of America I found a plate with the downy woodpecker.  I’d never see anything like it: a white back; checks and spots of black and white on its wings; a distinctive red dot on the back of a black cap atop its head; the sides of its head white with black ovals around its eyes like Petey, the dog on the Little Rascals; and a tiny beak the bird books call a “bark-sticker.”  The downy woodpecker was to be my fall project.
I seem to recall the project took us the better part of two months, working in the back of the school room for about an hour every other day, applying layers of papier-mâché and waiting the requisite time for it to dry before reapplying.  Then attaching the wings and beak, then painting.  By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, I was the proud owner of a decent replica of a downy woodpecker.
About two weeks before Christmas that year I woke up to an early snowfall.  I came downstairs and looked out a side window of 89 St. Johns Avenue, itching to get at six inches of wet snow, perfect for making snowballs.  And on mom’s bird feeder in the backyard, there it was in the flesh—my first downy woodpecker.
He perched on the suet, poking his beak into it, working with frenzied movements of his head as if he was afraid another bigger bird would run him off before he got enough to eat.  He pecked at a few sparrows to shoo them away and returned to jabbing at his food.  I ran into the kitchen to bring mom into the dining room to show her, but it had flown off by the time we got there.  I didn’t see it again that entire winter, but I’ve always remembered that first look at a downy.  Even today, seeing one reminds me of the beginning of the Christmas season.  Happy Holidays.

Prayers for Russ

August 7th was the last time I went for a run with my workout buddy, Russ.  We did four miles in a local park, then had breakfast afterward at a diner.  Ironically, one of the things we talked about over breakfast was accidents and health insurance—in the previous weeks I had fallen off a ladder, my father-in-law, Jack, had broken his leg, and my wife, Manette, had badly pulled a muscle, all doing mundane things in our backyard.
That afternoon, Russ took his daughter to the beach on Long Island.  Russ went for one last dip in the water, dove in and hit a sand bar.  He fractured his C-1 and C-2 vertebrae and now he’s paralyzed from the neck down.
I met Russ about six years ago shortly after I joined Mr. Bill Fitness, the local gym where we both work out.  You get to know everybody at MBF right away, even if you don’t want to.  You don’t have much choice; it’s a small gym.  More than that, it’s social, and Mr. Bill is a great motivator and trainer.  He’s created an environment in which everybody both razzes each other and pulls together to support each other’s fitness and health goals.
Russ and I became workout buddies about 5 1/2 years ago.  Mr. Bill held an evening meeting, attended by most of the core group of gym rats, for each of us to figure out some way to support Russ’ goal of quitting smoking.  My commitment was for Russ and me to do a buddy workout together every other week with Mr. Bill.  Ever since, every other Wednesday Mr. Bill has put us through the ringer for an hour with a series of exercises—free weights, floor exercises, aerobics, weight machines, calisthenics—that make our muscles feel like wet noodles by the time we’re finished.
Most recently, Russ and I were teammates in MBF’s Summer Meltdown Challenge, in which a group of two-person teams kept track of our aerobic minutes, buddy workouts, weight training sessions, etc. for about a month, in friendly competition that kept us all motivated.  Russ and I were always team members in MBF’s annual Holiday Weight Maintenance Challenge in which four- or five-member teams keep up our fitness goals and our weight from getting out of control from just before Thanksgiving until the first week of January.  And Russ and I were always team members on the Jersey Shore Relay Marathon run from Seaside Heights to Asbury Park each spring.  That’s Russ in the photo at left, mugging for the camera as he finished his 6.2-mile leg of this year’s race.
The first time a group of us from MBF saw Russ after his accident he was still flat on his back in the hospital out on Long Island, pretty doped up from one of his many surgeries, with ventilator and feeding tubes coming out of his mouth.  He was unable to speak but was responsive to us with his eyes.  Now he’s at a world-class rehab facility in northern New Jersey, sitting up in a wheelchair and the tubes have been inserted directly into his trachea and stomach, so he’s able to talk by timing his words with the rhythm of his ventilator.  He’s still Russ: his self-effacing sense of humor, his positive attitude.  He can move his neck and has his normal facial expressions.  Most important, his mind is 100%.
All of us at Mr. Bill Fitness have gotten over the initial shock but are still quietly heartsick.  We’re all pulling for him, visiting as often as we can, sending cards and goofy gifts, and Mr. Bill films videos on his iPhone of us cheering him on.  Even those of us who aren’t much at praying are giving it our all in the effort for his recovery.

That’s the reason for this blog: if you have prayer circles, prayer chains or whatever you call them, and if you’re particularly good at it, or even if you’re not very good at it all, any and all prayers would be appreciated.  I’m still shooting for the moon in mine, asking for a miraculous full recovery, but I confess I’d settle for him breathing on his own and being able to use his upper body again.  Please pass this link around for others to pitch in.  Our buddy needs the help.

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was on a roll until earlier this month.  He’d successfully prosecuted 85 insider trading cases, including sending Raj Rajaratnam, head of the Galleon Group of hedge funds, to jail for 11 years.  This month, Bharara lost against Rajaratnam’s younger brother, Rengan.  He lost in part because the judge threw out two insider trading counts, and along with them much of the evidence.  Commentators suggest that evidence would've caused jurors to convict Rengan if they had been allowed to hear it.

Still, think about it: 85 to 1.  That’s an amazing batting average.  It’s also startling that Bharara had 85 cases for which he was able to amass enough evidence that he could prosecute them.

I can remember back to a time when, as a young investment banker in the 1980s, I thought I'd seen everything with insider trading cases.  That was during the era when Rudy Giuliani had Bharara’s job as top Wall Street prosecutor.  It was the era when Ivan Boesky paid a $100 million fine and went to jail for trading on inside information.  When Dennis Levine got sent up the river for trading on inside information on his investment banking firm‘s deals, and for cutting his friends in on the action.  When Marty Siegel, who had tipped Boesky on his firm's deals—and took a (big) briefcase containing $700,000 in cash from Boesky for it one night—went to jail and lost everything in fines.  When Mike Milken paid a $600 million fine as part of a plea bargain on securities and tax violations.
In those days I was naïve enough to think that after that era’s firestorm of public outrage, fines and the perp walks that Giuliani invented—dragging traders out of their offices in handcuffs, or from their apartments at 6 a.m. to the sound of press cameras snapping away—that anybody with a brain would know the rewards for stepping over the line weren’t worth the penalties if you got caught.
It didn't take me long to get slapped awake to the fact that it's all part of human nature.  The combination of old-fashioned greed and thinking you're smarter than anybody else is a powerful cocktail that can induce entranced walks to the dark side.  People can’t help themselves.
I was still working on Wall Street when I started writing novels.  I relied on my experiences for most of my material, but I made up a lot of it.  In one of my early novels, Bull Street, I had the Feds use wiretaps to catch insider traders, a technique until then reserved for trying to snare Mafia dons.  Recently, wiretaps were an essential weapon in Bharara 's arsenal in bringing down Rajaratnam and his co-conspirators.  Also in Bull Street, I had the SEC use a sophisticated MarketWatch computer program, run on Cray supercomputers, to analyze an insider trading ring’s stock trades.  That’s the equivalent of a hand-held calculator compared to what the Feds are using today against insider trading activity.
In my current novel, Mickey Outside , Mickey Steinberg is getting out of a cushy white-collar federal prison camp after a slap-on-the-wrist sentence because he turned state's evidence.  His short sentence notwithstanding, he's been stripped of his securities licenses, banned from Wall Street for life, divorced by his wife and he's broke.  Has he learned his lesson?  He hatches a scam with another ex-con to sell a near-perfect forgery of a stolen van Gogh masterpiece in the shadowy underground market for stolen art.  Human nature.
I'm not going to spoil Mickey Outside for you, but there's a point where Mickey has to decide if he stays on the other side of the line or goes straight.  What does he do?
Somebody who's read my Rudiger Stories , another installment in my White-Collar Crime Thrillers, called a book to my attention entitled How to Become a Professional Con Artist .  It’s an eye-opener.  I knew that Three Card Monte wasn't invented on the streets of New York in the 1980s, but I had no idea that scams like the Pigeon Drop, Change Raising, the Lotto Scam, the Oak Tree Game, or the Double-Play had been around for centuries.
So I guess I'm never going to run out of material as long as human beings are greedy enough to cheat, and suckers are equally greedy enough to allow themselves to get duped by con artists.  You can’t make this stuff up; you don’t have to.

Wall Street Crooks: You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was on a roll until earlier this month.  He’d successfully prosecuted 85 insider trading cases, including sending Raj Rajaratnam, head of the Galleon Group of hedge funds, to jail for 11 years.  This month, Bharara lost against Rajaratnam’s younger brother, Rengan.  He lost in part because the judge threw out two insider trading counts, and along with them much of the evidence.  Commentators suggest that evidence would've caused jurors to convict Rengan if they had been allowed to hear it. U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara
Still, think about it: 85 to 1.  That’s an amazing batting average.  It’s also startling that Bharara had 85 cases for which he was able to amass enough evidence that he could prosecute them.
I can remember back to a time when, as a young investment banker in the 1980s, I thought I'd seen everything with insider trading cases.  That was during the era when Rudy Giuliani had Bharara’s job as top Wall Street prosecutor.  It was the era when Ivan Boesky paid a $100 million fine and went to jail for trading on inside information.  When Dennis Levine got sent up the river for trading on inside information on his investment banking firm‘s deals, and for cutting his friends in on the action.  When Marty Siegel, who had tipped Boesky on his firm's deals—and took a (big) briefcase containing $700,000 in cash from Boesky for it one night—went to jail and lost everything in fines.  When Mike Milken paid a $600 million fine as part of a plea bargain on securities and tax violations.
In those days I was naïve enough to think that after that era’s firestorm of public outrage, fines and the perp walks that Giuliani invented—dragging traders out of their offices in handcuffs, or from their apartments at 6 a.m. to the sound of press cameras snapping away—that anybody with a brain would know the rewards for stepping over the line weren’t worth the penalties if you got caught.
It didn't take me long to get slapped awake to the fact that it's all part of human nature.  The combination of old-fashioned greed and thinking you're smarter than anybody else is a powerful cocktail that can induce entranced walks to the dark side.  People can’t help themselves.
I was still working on Wall Street when I started writing novels.  I relied on my experiences for most of my material, but I made up a lot of it.  In one of my early novels, Bull Street, I had the Feds use wiretaps to catch insider traders, a technique until then reserved for trying to snare Mafia dons.  Recently, wiretaps were an essential weapon in Bharara 's arsenal in bringing down Rajaratnam and his co-conspirators.  Also in Bull Street, I had the SEC use a sophisticated MarketWatch computer program, run on Cray supercomputers, to analyze an insider trading ring’s stock trades.  That’s the equivalent of a hand-held calculator compared to what the Feds are using today against insider trading activity.
In my current novel, Mickey Outside , Mickey Steinberg is getting out of a cushy white-collar federal prison camp after a slap-on-the-wrist sentence because he turned state's evidence.  His short sentence notwithstanding, he's been stripped of his securities licenses, banned from Wall Street for life, divorced by his wife and he's broke.  Has he learned his lesson?  He hatches a scam with another ex-con to sell a near-perfect forgery of a stolen van Gogh masterpiece in the shadowy underground market for stolen art.  Human nature.
I'm not going to spoil Mickey Outside for you, but there's a point where Mickey has to decide if he stays on the other side of the line or goes straight.  What does he do?
Somebody who's read my Rudiger Stories , another installment in my White-Collar Crime Thrillers, called a book to my attention entitled How to Become a Professional Con Artist .  It’s an eye-opener.  I knew that Three Card Monte wasn't invented on the streets of New York in the 1980s, but I had no idea that scams like the Pigeon Drop, Change Raising, the Lotto Scam, the Oak Tree Game, or the Double-Play had been around for centuries.
So I guess I'm never going to run out of material as long as human beings are greedy enough to cheat, and suckers are equally greedy enough to allow themselves to get duped by con artists.  You can’t make this stuff up; you don’t have to.

The Theft of the Mona Lisa

In 1911, an Argentinian con man, the Marques Eduardo de Valifierno, came up with the idea for the signature scam of his life: the theft of the Mona Lisa.
But that was only half of it.  The other half was that, before the theft, he commissioned a famous French art forger named Yves Chaudron to paint six perfect copies of the Mona Lisa and had them shipped to different cities around the world.
Next, de Valifierno hired an Italian carpenter working in the Lourve Museum named Vincenzo Peruggia to steal the Mona Lisa.  On the day of the theft, Peruggia hid in a broom closet until closing, then stepped out of his closet and lifted the Mona Lisa off the wall.  He hid it under his smock and simply walked out of the museum.
After the sensational publicity about the theft, de Valifierno lined up six wealthy art buyers who fell all over themselves to buy his copies for millions, each thinking they’d bought the genuine article.
Peruggia hid the original in the false bottom of a chest in his spartan Paris apartment for two years until the Paris police dragnet ran its course.  Then he took it back to Italy with him.  Once there, he contacted a Florentine art dealer, Alfredo Geri, saying he had the Mona Lisa and wanted to sell it. Geri agreed to meet Peruggia, bringing the director of the Uffizi Gallery with him to authenticate the painting.  Once Geri knew he was looking at the real thing, he phoned the police and Peruggia was arrested.  By the time the world learned that the Mona Lisa had been recovered, de Valifierno had disappeared and it was too late for the buyers of his forgeries to do anything about it.
Some of that story is true, at least the part about Peruggia stealing the Mona Lisa in 1911, his means of accomplishing it, the fact he tried to resell it two years later and his arrest for it.  The stuff about de Valifierno, the forgeries and his wealthy art buyers are legend, and no one is sure whether or not any of that is real.  But it’s a story often retold, and probably embellished upon with each retelling.
That story inspired my new novel, Mickey Outside, about an art scam featuring Mickey Steinberg, one of the characters in my third novel, Bull Street.  And since novels are made-up stories, why shouldn't I use de Valifierno's apocryphal scam as the basis for Mickey Steinberg's story?
Click on Cover to Buy on AmazonIn Mickey Outside, Mickey Steinberg, the financier of his generation and the mastermind behind a $2 billion insider trading ring, is getting ready to get out of Yankton, the cushy minimum-security Federal Prison Camp where he's been serving a reduced three-year sentence for cooperating with the Feds.  He's broke, banned from the securities industry for life, divorced by his wife, and none of his old hoity-toity friends from the world of high society and finance in New York will take his calls.
So he needs to come up with a creative way to get back on top.  He's always been a behind-the-scenes genius, but he's not much of a face man, so he recruits another Yankton con, Paul Reece, a good-looking, smooth-talking car-salesman type to help him put together his new con.  He knocks off de Valifierno's idea, researches famous art thefts and settles on Vincent van Gogh's View of the Sea at Scheveningen, a stolen masterpiece that’s never been recovered.  He hires an expert forger to copy it and he's off to the races.
After his release from Yankton and his return to New York, he contacts wealthy buyers in the shadowy underground art market for stolen masterpieces and embarks upon an auction process to sell the painting to the highest bidder.
Then things begin to come unraveled, and the real story begins.
Mickey Outside is caper steeped in the art world, the glamor of New York, mega-rich luminaries, and some good fun.  I hope you'll give it a try.
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Rudiger Stories

About two years ago I wrote a short story, Rudiger, and a blog about it, Mark Knopfler, Rüdiger and Me (read it here), that introduced the character of John Rudiger, fugitive financier. I titled the story and created John Rudiger based on emotions evoked by a song called "Rüdiger" by Mark Knopfler (See Knopfler perform it here.) In Rudiger, John Rudiger is living under an alias in Antigua.  He ran off with close to $100 million from his hedge fund and is now down to his last $2 million. Katie Dolan, a lawyer with the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York, is sent to Antigua to try to get enough evidence to extradite Rudiger back to the U.S. to stand trial. Rudiger recruits her to help him retrieve $50 million of bearer bonds from a safe deposit box in New York.
Since then I’ve gotten to know Rudiger better, including writing a novel about Rudiger’s exploits after the Rudiger short story, which is finished but still in editing process.  I’ve also released two short stories and a novella that are prequels to the Rudiger short story.  The short stories are Rudiger Comes Alive and Rudiger in the Islands.  The novella is Rudiger in Peril.
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All four Rudiger stories are available in the collection, Rudiger Stories, or individually.  The collection is priced at $2.99 and the individual stories are $0.99 each. I hope you'll give them a try. I had great fun writing them, including enjoying some oddball secondary characters in Rudiger's new home in Antigua.
The four Rudiger stories are a total of 71,000 words.

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Click on cover to buy on AmazonIn Rudiger Comes Alive, hotshot Wall Streeter Walter Conklin is a wunderkind hedge fund manager who runs a $1 billion technology fund. He’s on a roll until his CFO cooks the books to overstate their results to raise more money. The only way out for Conklin is to insist his CFO keep cooking them until he can equal those returns. But the Feds are on to him, so Conklin needs to act fast before they can throw him in jail—just as the NASDAQ crashes from its historic highs. In the end, Conklin needs to come to terms with the markets, his smart-mouthed wife, and Charlie Holden, Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York.
Rudiger Comes Aliveis a 13,000 word short story, chronologically the first of the Rudiger stories.
Read a sample of Rudiger Comes Alive
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Click on cover to buy on AmazonIn Rudiger in the Islands, Rudiger adopts Antigua as his new home: he’s building a house and settling in to the islands way of life.  Then Charlie Holden, Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York, gets a tip and sends one of his staff lawyers down to get the goods on Rudiger and extradite him to stand trial.  In order to outwit Holden and his man, Rudiger needs to establish his credentials as an Antiguan national, so he enlists the help of the double-dealing local police—who will sell their allegiance to the highest bidder.  Rudiger is forced to think on the fly to adapt to the machinations of both parties as he improvises to try to stay out of jail.

Rudiger in the Islands is a 20,000 word short story, chronologically the second of the Rudiger stories.
Read a sample of Rudiger in the Islands
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Click on cover to buy on AmazonIn Rudiger in Peril, Rudiger has settled into Antigua as his new home. He gets a surprising phone call from Charlie Holden, Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York, who’s been trying to extradite Rudiger back to the U.S. to stand trial.  Holden tells Rudiger his former partner and CFO has been murdered in the U.S. by one of Rudiger’s hedge fund investors who lost millions and is out for revenge.  And the investor’s hired killer is now in Antigua stalking Rudiger.  Rudiger is forced to align himself with Holden as an unlikely ally as he tries to figure out which of his investors could be after him and help Holden stop him—before the hitman catches up with Rudiger.

Rudiger in Peril is a 28,000 word novella, chronologically the third of the Rudiger stories.
Read a sample of Rudiger in Peril
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Click on cover to buy on AmazonIn Rudiger, John Rudiger is now a long-term fugitive financier who's been living under his alias in Antigua for 10 years.  He's down to his last $2 million. Katie Dolan, a lawyer with the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York, is sent to Antigua to try to get enough evidence to extradite Rudiger back to the U.S. to stand trial. Rudiger recruits her to help him retrieve $50 million of bearer bonds from a safe deposit box in New York.

Katie is no dope, and neither is Rudiger, and each one has to figure out who's scamming who as they work their plan to sneak the bonds out from under the nose of Charlie Holden, Katie's boss, the Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York, who's wise to both of them.

Rudiger is a 10,000 word short story, chronologically the fourth of the Rudiger stories.
Read a sample of Rudiger
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