Author Description

From the Preface of Confessions of a Guerrilla Writer, 3rd Edition: For most of my adult life, I have worked as a fiercely independent investigative journalist, specializing on investigations of organized crime. Although my career-long obsession revolves around the 1975 disappearance of former Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, I was the first reporter to present the case that Hoffa--along with Carlos Marcello, the boss of the New Orleans Mafia, and Santo Trafficante, the Mafia boss of Tampa--had arranged and executed the murder of President John Kennedy in 1963, "a straight mob hit." A year after I revealed this in my 1978 book, The Hoffa Wars, the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations released its final report, insisting that Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante had the "motive, means and opportunity" to kill the President. The chief counsel of the committee flatly stated, "The mob did it. It's a historical fact." My subsequent news-breaking books about the contract killing of an Ohio businessman (1983), the Mafia's penetration of Hollywood and the corruption of Ronald Reagan (1986), and the influence of organized crime in professional football (1989) were equally controversial but also led to wider investigations. With regard to my 1995 book about the 1968 murder of Senator Robert Kennedy, I did conclude that the LAPD had arrested the right man. However, because of all the police errors, the existing evidence gave critics of the official investigation, like me, ample opportunity to claim that the senator had been killed by a conspiracy. In the end, twenty-seven years later, I solved that case--because, for the first time, I explained what the LAPD could not: Why the crime-scene evidence had given the illusion that two guns had been fired--when, in fact, Sirhan Sirhan, whom I interviewed extensively, had acted alone. I later wrote equally solid books, concluding that O.J. Simpson had als