Hollywood Buys WITSEC for TV Drama

 

 

My good friend, Gerald Shur, and I have received lots of inquires from Hollywood about  our nonfiction book, WITSEC: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program since it was published ten years ago. For those of you who have not read it, Gerald is the Justice Department lawyer who came up with the idea of creating a government program that would protect mobsters and give them new identities in return for their testimony against their Mafia Godfathers.

 By the time Gerald retired in 1995, he had overseen the handling of such famous gangsters as Joseph Valachi, “Jimmy the Weasel” Fratianno and “Sammy the Bull” Gravano.  The witness protection program that he created helped shatter the mob’s code of silence.

Interested screenwriters and producers would call us and ask about WITSEC. But for a variety of reasons, we never sold the dramatic rights — until now.  The trade magazine, Publisher’s Weekly, announced the sale.

Click to continue…

Of Your Books, Which Is Your Favorite?

Which book that you’ve written is your favorite?
It’s a question I get asked a lot. 
Answering it isn’t as easy as you might think. For an author, picking a favorite book is a little like asking a father if he loves one of his children more than the others. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but when you spend several years of your life consumed in writing a book, the finished manuscript becomes much more to its creator than ink, paper, or in today’s world, electronic text.