Person of Interest (Authors on the Air)

The Death of Trostky by Josh Ireland

Do you think Russian secret police have only recently started to kill people in other countries? It started a long time ago. Josh Ireland has written a fascinating book, The Death of Trostky. I had the chance to speak with him on my podcast about one of the most far-reaching political assassinations of the 20th century.

Leon Trotsky was a leading Bolshevik organizer of the Russian Revolution with Vladimir Lenin. He was the intellectual force of the communist movement. But he also was a snooty intellectual. Joseph Stalin, on the other hand, was a networker who created relationships and quietly schemed for power. After Lenin’s death in 1924, a brutal internal struggle unfolded over the future of the Soviet Union. But Stalin outmaneuvered Trotsky for control and expelled him from the country in 1929.

Exile didn’t bring any safety. Stalin would kill anyone he thought might challenge his power. Look at this famous quote often attributed to him: “The greatest delight is to mark one’s enemy, prepare everything, avenge oneself thoroughly, and then go to sleep.”

The NKVD, his secret police, pursued Trotsky in Turkey, then France. France was in political upheaval with fascists, communists and democrats vying for power. The NKVD had spies everywhere. In France they recruited informants among Russian exiles who betrayed Trotsky and attempted to assassinate him.

By 1937 Stalin was executing thousands of generals and party leaders to consolidate his power. People were promised safety if they testified against others, and then were shot in the basement of Lubyanka Prison. It was dangerous for Trotsky and his whole family. One daughter was allowed to leave Russia and then prevented from returning home where her children were trapped. Another daughter was only spared because she died of tuberculosis. Her husband was eventually arrested and shot. Trotsky’s son, Lev, died during a surgery that some believed to be murder. Another son, Sergei, tried to remain politically inactive but was eventually executed. His brother Alexander, an agronomist, was shot. Several other family relations disappeared or were executed. It was so dangerous in France, no wonder Trotsky fled to Norway and then to Mexico.

There were many Trotskyites in Mexico, but also Stalinists. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo were Trotskyites and sheltered Trotsky for a time at Frida’s home, La Casa Azul. Frida even had an affair with him before she grew tired of Trotsky and rejected him. Then Kahlo and Rivera both turned against him. Trotsky had to leave her house and take up residence a few blocks down the street.

Trotsky was surrounded by Stalinist spies in Mexico. He knew he was going to be murdered by someone he trusted. But for him the impersonal forces of history mattered more than security. He was so filled with his own ideas that he insisted on silence whenever he spoke. David Álfaro Siqueiros, another Mexican muralist, was a Stalinist and organized an attempted assassination. The conspirators shot up Trotsky’s bed, but Trotsky and his wife were hiding on the floor beside it. Trotsky survived.

But he couldn’t survive Ramón Mercader. He was communist and Soviet agent, and fought in the Spanish Civil War against Francisco Franco. His Russian handler wanted to use him to assassinate Trotsky. Mercader assumed a false identity and romanced a woman named Sylvia Ageloff to get closer to Trotsky. Self-effacing and discrete, no one thought he was dangerous. Mercader was with Ageloff for two years pretending that he worked for a trading company. Eventually he wormed his way past Trotsky’s security in Mexico and could freely roam Trotsky’s compound. He killed Trotsky with an ice axe. Ageloff had been close to Trotsky’s wife and knew nothing about her lover’s deceit. When he was captured she shouted that he should be executed. Who could blame her? She returned to New York, left Trotskyism, and lived privately. Then remarried and adopted a new name.

Mercader spent 20 years in prison in Mexico. When he was released he was secretly transported to Moscow and welcomed as a hero. Some accounts say that his apartment was decorated with Rivera and Kahlo posters. He never regretted the killing. Here is his tombstone:

You can learn more about The Death of Trotsky and Josh Ireland’s research from our discussion on the Person of Interest Podcast:

( Trouble with the link? Copy & paste this into your browser: youtube.com/watch?v=MV6Ka7YH7jk )

Waves of Burden by Curtis Ippolito

I had a great time interviewing Curtis Ippolito about his fine book, Waves of Burden, yesterday at our Partners in Crime meeting. It’s always special when a member of our group gets a good book into print. Waves of Burden is a contemporary crime novel about two foster brothers, one trying to settle down and the other who gets him into trouble. The protagonist must reconcile his past, his feelings about family, and his relationship with his brother to save them all from a pair of nasty villains. It also takes place in San Diego with many familiar spots. I recommend it.

My son has a kitten

If you’re like me you’ve forgotten how cute a kitten can be. Here he is, six weeks old, nestled into my son’s hoodie, and as yet unnamed. His prior cat, Hendrix, had been with him for 18 years before he died.

A Free Primer on How to Tell a Story

Would you like a free training manual on how to tell a story? Picking the right story and telling it well are keys to making a sale or inspiring a donation. The primer in the link below divides elements of storytelling into 28 short sections. As a subscriber you can get it for free to download from this link:

https://carlvonderau.com/thank-you-for-subscribing/

Saving Myles

How about a good read for the summer?

Pick Up Saving Myles

Thanks for stopping by!

Until next time,
Carl

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One of the UK’s Biggest Frauds

I got to interview a journalist who wrote book about Mike Lynch, the man in the center of one of the largest fraud cases in UK history. Katie Prescott is the Technology Business editor for the Times in London, and we chatted via Zoom. I’m hoping the video and voice versions will be available any day.

Mike Lynch grew up in England the son of working class Irish parents. His Irish heritage made him a bit of an outsider, but he was a brilliant boy. Lynch got a scholarship to a private school and taught himself to program. He went on to Cambridge and earned a PhD in how computers could learn to recognize speech, images, and text. All the while there, he ran businesses and led a jazz band. Lynch seemed destined for greatness.

And in many ways he succeeded. He started various software companies and, when he was thirty, founded one called Autonomy. Autonomy helped businesses sort and wade through mountains of data. At one point it was one of the largest tech companies in the UK.

Lynch created a toxic work environment. Both brilliant and a bully, he shouted and screamed at employees. If any investment analyst wrote a word against him, he tried to destroy their career. He seemed to delight in his reputation for being a miscreant. The conference rooms in his office were named after James Bond villains. A tank of piranha sat in the reception area. He called bankers “twits in suits” and created a fake financial director who was always out when bankers called. The company was a sweat shop with a simple law for its employees: produce or die. Once Lynch said sales people were like dogs. Shoot one and the others fall in line. Yet he could tell a story so convincingly that he could sell to anyone. He also never let the facts get in the way.

You might think he was the devil incarnate, but he wasn’t. Lynch loved children and dogs, and was very close to his family. When the caretakers of his country estate got seriously ill, he took care of their bills. A former competitor transitioned to a woman and he was very supportive.

He was fixated on building the company. Reporting good quarterly revenue numbers was everything to Lynch because those numbers determined Autonomy’s stock price. So his people used accounting schemes to make them up. Lynch was powerful enough to withhold the information that would reveal the fakery. Somehow their auditor, Deloitte, let them get away with it. Later Deloitte was heavily fined for doing so. Does this sound like Arthur Anderson and Enron?

Stodgy Hewlett Packard was attracted to Autonomy’s booming growth. Their vision was to combine the HP hardware with Autonomy’s software into a one-stop package. Under a tight timeframe, HPO acquired Autonomy for $11B. But it was a cataclysmic clash of cultures: a bureaucracy that was process driven versus a run-and-gun start-up philosophy. HP soon discovered how Autonomy had cooked the books. They ultimately wrote down the acquisition by more than $8B and fired the CEO who’d pushed it forward. Meg Whitman, who subsequently ran for president, came in to run the company. The lawyers came with her.

Lynch was criminally charged in the US, which led to one of the largest criminal fraud trials ever. And he got off! Lynch not only had top notch lawyers but could sell a story on the stand like no one else.

There are many ironies here. Lynch was one of the few men who didn’t have physical fingerprints. He often mentioned sailing and weather metaphors when describing his company. His yacht was named the Bayesian. Bayesian analysis is a way of weighing probabilities that Lynch adhered to his whole life. His yacht was caught in a totally unpredictable storm off Italy and capsized. Lynch and his daughter both drowned.

Update on Cesar Chavez Service Clubs

I worked with the Cesar Chavez Service Clubs in San Diego for more than two years. Then came the devastating news of Chavez’s sexual abuse. Well, the clubs continue to do good work under a different name: La Causa Service Clubs. I went to their annual De Colores breakfast in April and it was packed with people. Some participants at the breakfast started with the clubs in elementary school and went on to college and successful careers. It was a great tribute to Linda and Carlos who founded the clubs more than 20 years ago. Their granddaughter, Natalie Legerrette, continues to expand their work in 21 schools. Kids learn to have confidence in themselves and to do all kinds of project to help their communities.

Person of Interest (Authors on the Air)

This is my podcast where I interview writers of true crime books. Tune in for some interesting discussion on my website: carlvonderau.com

A Free Primer on How to Tell a Story

Would you like a free training manual on how to tell a story?

Picking the right story and telling it well are keys to making a sale or inspiring a donation. The primer in the link below divides elements of storytelling into 28 short sections. As a subscriber you can get it for free to download from this link:

https://carlvonderau.com/thank-you-for-subscribing/

Saving Myles

How about a good read for the spring?

Grab Saving Myles Today!

Until next time,
Carl

Removal of Vaginal Meshes

A great number of women have problems with incontinence as they get older, particularly if they’ve had a number of children or had hysterectomies. Being male, I was, of course, clueless on this. It is such a big problem that large companies produced a mesh that could be surgically implanted in women to reinforce their organs and solve the issue. About 11 Million women have had these meshes inserted. But many have had problems.

Lawyers representing these clients didn’t go after the doctors who performed the surgery but the manufacturers of the mesh. These were big companies such as Johnson and Johnson, Boston Scientific, and American Medical Systems. There have been more than 100K plaintiffs and the total potential settlements estimated to be $11B. These kinds of mass torts are such a lucrative field that there is an annual conference in Las Vegas called Mass Torts Made Perfect, complete with expensive food and booze, strippers, prostitution, and drugs. You can imagine how attractive this would be to scammers.

Elizabeth Chamblee Burch has written a terrific and very complete account of some prominent players involved in the vaginal mesh scam in her book, The Pain Brokers. I recently interviewed her on Person of Interest, the Authors-on-the-Air podcast that I host.

Imagine you’ve had a mesh inserted to solve incontinence problems and get a call from a health professional. That person indicates that your implant may kill you, even if you are not feeling any pain. However, there is a solution. The health professional calling you can provide a free surgery to eliminate the risk. Travel and surgery expenses will be paid for out of the settlement that they and their associates will help you get from the big manufacturers. This is what the companies founded by Vineet and Michael Chhabra and their colleagues seemed to provide. Chhabra and some of his colleagues had previously spent time in prison, but you wouldn’t know that.

Chhabra and his colleagues apparently identified potential clients by purchasing illegal information from Indian companies managing healthcare systems for U.S. doctors and hospitals. The scheme involved an assembly line of steps, each step making money for the scammers. Victims were connected to lawyers who sent them agreements with hidden terms and who never spoke to them. The manufacturers paid the most money if surgery was needed, so that was always recommended. The Chhabras and their partners inflated travel expenses and charged several times the normal rates for surgery. They could get away with this because their clients didn’t have to pay anything up front. Instead other parties lent the women the funds for these expenses at predatory interest rates. Because the settlements could take years, the high costs and interest charges typically ate up all the funds the manufacturers paid out.

And what about the surgery? Women were flown to Florida or Georgia and ushered into walk-in clinics in shopping malls. They met their surgeons a few minutes before the surgery. These surgeons performed operations in as little as fifteen minutes. The procedure normally required several hours. As you might suspect, some of the doctors had malpractice and negligence claims against them.

Burch followed three unfortunate victims. Their surgeries made them worse off, and they got virtually no money from the settlements. All the money went to the Chhabras and their fellow investors, lawyers, and doctors.

Some well-meaning lawyers and government prosecutors pursued the cases but got virtually nothing. Did any of the scammers go to prison? No.

The Pain Brokers is a cautionary tale I’ve simplified here. If you want a thorough examination of this case, and all the ways bad actors suck out money from victims through mass tort lawsuits, read Elizabeth Chamblee Burch’s book. In the meantime, if anyone offers you free surgery—or any kind of mass tort opportunity to make money… BEWARE!

Listen in on our interview:

Cesar Chavez

I worked with the Cesar Chavez Service Clubs in San Diego for more than two years as a member of Social Venture Partners of San Diego (now called Amplified Impact Partners).

In that time I learned how Cesar Chavez inspired many people to reach beyond themselves to change their own lives and their communities. Starting in elementary school and going through high school, the Service Clubs use Chavez’s ten principles as the basis for teaching kids how to thrive. Most are children of immigrants and a majority go on to college because of the skills they’ve learned.

I was shocked at the news about Cesar Chavez’s sexual abuse. He was an icon for many of the people in the Clubs and throughout the Farm Workers Union. What has come out is that he sexually abused at least two children and raped one of his closest allies. He also pressured many other women to have sex with him. They all kept quiet until now because they didn’t want to diminish the reputation of the organization.

The Cesar Chavez Service Clubs was supposed to have their annual Las Mañanitas breakfast in March. Under the circumstances, they postponed it until April 28 and renamed the event De Colores. They are determined to continue inspiring kids to develop their powers to help their communities.

Person of Interest (Authors on the Air)

This is my podcast where I interview writers of nonfiction books.

April 14. I interviewed Janet Kintner, the third female judge to serve in San Diego, about her memoir, A Judge’s Tale.

April 28. I speak with Caitlin Rother, a bestselling true crime writer. Her book, Down to the Bone, investigates the mysterious murders of the McStay family in San Diego.

May 12. I will interview Josh Ireland about his book, The Death of Trotsky, where he researched Trotsky’s stay and murder in Mexico City.

A Free Primer on How to Tell a Story

Would you like a free training manual on how to tell a story? Picking the right story and telling it well are keys to making a sale or inspiring a donation. The primer in the link below divides elements of storytelling into 28 short sections. As a subscriber you can get it for free to download from this link:

https://carlvonderau.com/thank-you-for-subscribing/

Saving Myles

How about a good read for the spring?

Grab Saving Myles Now

Sometimes the wheels of justice are tragically slow. In 1976 a young Black man named Tyrone Woodruff was seventeen. He was called in for questioning about a murder of a white man in Buffalo. The police had gotten a tip that he and four friends had killed the man to rob him of $300. Woodruff swore that he knew nothing about the murder. The detectives told him if he didn’t cooperate that one of his friends would finger him for the killing. He would spend the rest of his life in jail. Woodruff, a scared teenager, believed he’d never be released from the police station unless he signed a statement that his friends had slain the man. When it came time for him to testify, the police coached him on what to say. Defense lawyers found all kinds of holes in his story, but three of his friends were convicted anyway. They were sent to an adult prison.

Woodruff was tortured with shame about what he’d done. Nine years after the murder he decided to rectify his mistake and recanted his testimony. An attorney filed a motion to vacate the convictions, but the judge ruled against them.

One of Woodruff’s imprisoned friends, John Walker, earned a degree from a community college and fought to overturn his conviction but never succeeded. Twenty-two years later Walker got out on parole. He contacted Woodruff and forgave him. Woodruff, still filled with remorse, volunteered to help erase Walker’s conviction in any way possible.

In 2012 Walker unearthed new information. The bartender where the victim had been drinking had suspected the victim’s neighbor. The police never released this information to Walker’s attorney. But now the original prosecutor was a Supreme Court judge and had a reputation to protect. He gave an affidavit certifying that he had never coached Woodruff to give a false statement. Detectives tracked down the neighbor. Now suffering from Alzheimers, the former neighbor still said the four boys had never killed the victim. But the motion to overturn the convictions was denied again.

Another motion was made in 2020 stating that the prosecutors had never given the defense attorney photographs that showed a single set of footprints—not the multiple sets that a gang of teenagers would have left. No one could find the photograph. This time the judge vacated their convictions. It was forty-six years after the crime.

Walker and another falsely accused man filed civil lawsuits against the city of Buffalo and Eerie County in 2025 and the case went to trial. Woodruff testified that the police had coerced him into lying. The trial determined that prosecutors had never turned over substantial evidence favorable to him. The original prosecutor, now eighty-four, continued to defend his actions. I guess he didn’t want to die with his character stained. The jurors sided with Walker and awarded him $28 million. Meanwhile the other falsely accused man had died. The civl lawsuit on behalf of his estate won $80 million. Another falsely convicted man had passed on less than a year after being released from prison.

Woodruff now drives an 18-wheeler and keeps in contact with Walker. Woodruff has a large extended family but still feels intense shame for what he did. John Walker suffers from lung and brain cancer. The $28 million he won has not been paid, and he is unlikely to be alive when it comes through.

Sometimes the legal process is the biggest financial scandal of all.

A Free Book: The Curious Case of Mike Lynch by Katie Prescott

I will soon be interviewing Katie Prescott about her book, The Curious Case of Mike Lynch. I have since gotten an extra copy and would be glad to send it to anyone who is interested. This was the largest financial fraud case in UK history. Reply to this email (carlvonderauauthor@gmail.com) if you want it. If more than one person replies, I will do a draw.

How do writers come up with these twisted ideas?

My writer friend, Tara Laskowski, gave my Facebook friends some insight on how she comes up with her dark ideas. She is an award winning mystery writer.

“An ‘idea’ always feels like such an abstract concept to me. I’ll get a flash of something here, a snippet there, and these things just kind of flit about in my brain, bouncing around and drifting until they attach to one another and begin to form something resembling maybe a story. But there’s no one place I go to for ideas. I might read a news article with some intriguing piece to it. Or I might think of a place that sounds interesting, where I can see something terrible happening. Or I might wonder about a kind of person—a mom with post-partum depression, a cleaner working at a shady motel, a wealthy businessman with a terrible secret—and how I might be able to put them in a situation where things begin to unravel. I’ve had ideas from vivid dreams, from overheard conversations, from something startling happening to me that compels itself to become a story.

“The pesky thing about ideas, though, is they never come fully formed. The hard work is making that place, character, scenario into an actual plot. I’m not great at plotting, so most of my dark ideas kind of appear as I’m writing. I may draft a chapter quickly and then go back and think, ‘How can I make this creepier?’ because it’s never creepy enough the first time. But for me at least, I never have all the details planned out. I think part of the fun of writing (is it fun??) is discovering along the way those little surprises that happen while you’re writing. And if something spooks me while I’m writing it, then I know I’m onto something.

“As for writing in dark worlds—yes, I think that can get very disturbing very quickly. I don’t go super dark in my novels. They are generally more atmospheric, slow-burn suspense novels, and a lot of that is because I don’t want to spend years immersing myself in anything overly dark and disturbing. If I was going to write something closer to horror, I’d probably keep it short—a story or a piece of flash fiction. The world is full of terrible things, especially now, so I don’t need to create more of it!”

Thank you, Tara. I know what you mean about getting too deep into dark ideas. That’s what happened to me when I wrote my first book, Murderabilia.

Here’s Tara’s latest book, Weekend Retreat. She’s a fabulous writer so you should go out and buy it.

Noir at the Bar

I had a great time with five other writers and many readers at the Kensington Club last Saturday. We each read a section from our books. Here is a picture of Caitlin Rother performing. She did a great job organizing the event. The other pictures show (in order) Barbara DeMarco Barrett, Debby Holt Larkin, myself, Matt Coyle, and Eric Beetner. Please buy our books.

A Free Primer on How to Tell a Story

Would you like a free training manual on how to tell a story? Picking the right story and telling it well are keys to making a sale or inspiring a donation. The primer in the link below divides elements of storytelling into 28 short sections. As a subscriber you can get it for free to download from this link:

https://carlvonderau.com/thank-you-for-subscribing/

Saving Myles

How about a good read for the spring?

Grab Your Copy Here!

All the Best,
Carl

I had a great interview with Scott Eden about his book: A Killing In Cannabis: A True Story of Love, Murder, and California Weed. Imagine you made a lot of money in the tech industry in Silicon Valley and wanted to start a company in one of the biggest growth industries in the U.S.: marijuana. That’s what Tushar Atre did. While trying to navigate a very difficult industry, he also fell in love with his female partner. Then he was murdered. The weed business is full of sketchy people and Tushar had offended many of them. That meant there were plenty of suspects. Scott’s book is a murder mystery and also a deep dive into the personalities and culture of processing marijuana. The New York Times gave it a fabulous review. Here is the link for my interview.

Youtube: https://www.scotteden.net/a-killing-in-cannabis

Soundcloud:

A podcast with Valerie Biel.

I had a great time talking with fellow author, Valerie Biel about the challenges of writing fiction. Here is the link:

Reading, Writing, & Roaming with Author Valerie Biel

The Aside: Conversations with authors just off the page - Episode 2 with Carl Vonderau

I’m an author (as you all know), but you might not know that I have a journalism degree . . . so here I get to channel my insatiable curiosity. (Some might call this nosiness!) I’m excited to ask authors about their work and the ideas that shape their writing—and it’ll be fun to ask some quirky questions, too…

Read more

5 months ago · 5 likes · 4 comments · Valerie Biel and Carl Vonderau

Cryptocurrency thieves may be teenagers

Sushil Chetal, a vice president at Morgan Stanley, and his wife were kidnapped in peaceful Danbury, Connecticut. Witnesses saw the attack, and the police closed in and caught the assailants. Chetal had a high paying job but not the kind of wealth that typically attracted kidnappers. So why did the kidnappers abduct him? It all connects to cryptocurrency that had nothing to do with Sushil and his wife.

A couple of weeks earlier a man who won’t release his name got a strange call from Google’s security team, and another call from security person at a prominent crypto exchange. His Google and crypto accounts had been hacked. The man had invested early on in crypto and his coins had a value of around $240 million. The caller from the crypto exchange persuaded him to download a program for additional security. Both calls had come from con artists. The program gave them control of his computer. Within minutes all his crypto was gone.

Did you know that there are now crypto private eyes? One of them has a monicker of ZachXBT and will not release his name or his facial image. He follows crypto movements and noticed the huge currency movement on the block chain. The man communicated with other crypto investigators and government entities that pursue crypto crime. They in turn contacted exchanges and all of them investigated. As it turned out, the perpetrators were bragging about their theft in chat rooms. One of them did a video which briefly showed his Windows home screen. Remember, Sushil Chetal, the stodgy Morgan Stanley executive? The person on the video was his eighteen-year-old son.

The son was part of a network called Comm, which is a loose organization of hackers who do all kinds of crimes. They are almost all young men in their teens and twenties who met and honed their skills through Minecraft. Some of them turned into millionaires overnight.

But with all that technical skill, it still wasn’t enough to steal so much crypto. What the hackers needed was an age-old con. They had people pretend to help the crypto owner. They got him to download spyware that revealed his login and password codes. The process is called social engineering. And it’s so common that hackers advertise for professional sounding people to play the part.

Once the young hackers stole the money, what did they do with it? One perpetrator spent more than $500K in a single night at an LA night club. He also bought cars, vacations, and homes. Sushil’s son showed up at high school in a Corvette, then a BMW, and then a Lamborghini. Talk about drawing attention! Sometimes it seems as if these people are both the smartest and the dumbest in the world. Wait until you hear what other young men did.

Sushil’s eighteen-year-old son bragged about his haul and word got out. That inspired another young man and his friends in Florida. They planned to kidnap the parents to force their son to give them the crypto that he’d stolen. The young man in Florida and his friends flew to Connecticut to make their fortunes. And immediately got caught.

What has happened to all these people? The kidnappers have been tried and one of them sentenced to 11 years. I don’t know what the other sentences were. Sushil’s son has pleaded guilty to theft and is awaiting sentence. Did the original victim get his crypto back? Unlikely. The currency was extensively laundered. All the luxuries that the thieves bought will never be sold for full value.

So be careful if you know a teenager who suddenly owns a Lamborghini.

My next Book

It’s tentatively called War Wounds and takes place in Cleveland in 1969. This book is a departure from my current-day crime books that have been based in the financial world. I’ve received some feedback from an editor and beta readers on the content. It’s amazing how ideas from other writers can help improve a book. Now I have the arduous process of revision. Revision never ends. But, as Ken Blanchard said, “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”

A Free Primer on How to Tell a Story

Would you like a free training manual on how to tell a story? Picking the right story and telling it well are keys to making a sale or inspiring a donation. The primer in the link below divides elements of storytelling into 28 short sections.

As a subscriber you can get it for free to download from this link:
https://carlvonderau.com/thank-you-for-subscribing/

Saving Myles

How about a good read for the New Year?

Saving Myles Is $.99 For a Limited Time

All the Best,
Carl

I’m starting a podcast called People of Interest. It is part of the Authors on the Air Network. We are a group of 40 authors who interview other authors. My podcast will be looking primarily at true crimes. I did an interview with William Mann on Tuesday about his book, Black Dahlia. He is a best selling author who thoroughly researched the infamous murder of a young woman in in LA in 1947. She became known as the Black Dahlia. Her grisly death inspired books and films and the creation of a myth about whom she was. The killer was never arrested, but Mann presents convincing evidence on who it was.

Our conversation is out now and available here:

Is Dubai the Wild West Financial Hub of the Middle East?

When I worked as a banker in Montreal, I would sometimes get letters of credit from Dubai (United Arab Emirates). These were payment mechanisms for exports of Canadian goods. The importer would be some company in Dubai. But the goods usually weren’t going there. That was just where the payment came from. Often the goods would be shipped directly somewhere else—like Iran. The letter of credit from Dubai was just a front to disguise the real purchaser. Why? Because the U.S. prohibited sales to Iran, and because banks didn’t want to be connected with those sales. Dubai was famous for permissive financial arrangements like this. It still is.

Here’s what Dubai apparently turns a blind eye to: CEOs fleeing fraud charges, cryptocurrency scam operators and scam artists, money stolen from governments, drug trafficking, tax evasion, and terrorist financing. If you’re a criminal it’s the place to vacation and do a deal. However, the U.A.E. will expel violent criminals or those who threaten their tourism industry. An exception was when Israeli assassins murdered a Hamas leader in his hotel in 2010. The U.A.E. policy reminds me of Tunisia. It is a beautiful country with extensive beaches, Roman history, and good food. Yasser Arafat lived there, so he welcomed terrorists but prohibited any violence in the country. Now that he is dead, that is no longer the case.

Dubai provides nice amenities like international flights, a sophisticated banking system, an extensive gold market, no income or capital gains taxes, and real estate that can easily be purchased and sold. That’s why criminals from Europe, Asia and even Latin America have chosen to live there, and to use Dubai to launder their money.

Heads of criminal organizations from the Netherlands, Eastern Europe, North Africa, and Latin America have established themselves in Dubai. The leaders get together and form joint investment ventures to spread the risk of big drug deals. Multi-ton shipments come from Latin America and go directly to European ports. The structure reminds me of how banks join together to do a syndicated loan, because the loan is too big for just one of them.

One of these families is the Kinahans from Ireland. They have been involved in drug smuggling for generations. The family has sourced cocaine and marijuana from Latin America and shipped it directly to Europe. The youngest son apparently concentrates on the sourcing and shipment part of the drug business. He also loves boxing and sponsored a gym and matches in association with the Top Rank company. On the side, he’s been accused of giving orders to murder his Irish competition. His brother concentrates on the more intellectual money-laundering side of the business. As for the father? He admires Putin and has done deals around the world, such as buying aircraft to sell to Iran. He apparently exported European currency hidden in cars to Africa, converted the currency into gold on the Zimbabwean black market, shipped the gold to Dubai, and sold it there. He used the proceeds to purchase real estate and companies throughout Europe. This is a multi-generational family business.

Do the rulers of Dubai know about this? It’s hard to believe they don’t. One son of the rulers invested in a real estate company associated with a Kinahan family member. European prosecutors have routinely filed extradition requests for the Kinahans that the authorities in Dubai ignored. The U.S. offered $5 million for information leading to the arrest of leaders of the cartel. So far, the family continues to live in luxury in Dubai. The two youngest are in their twenties and learning the business.

But all good things must come to an end. One of the associates for the Kinahans was arrested and extradited to Ireland, and the U.A.E. and Ireland now have a formal extradition treaty. Could extradition of the kingpins be possible? Maybe as a favor to Donald Trump or to someone in charge of a European country?

My Diet

Do you call this a meal? Hmm, this will take some training. And no one told me I’d have to give up pretzels. Well, I do cheat. But I’ve lost 10 pounds and need to lose a couple more. It’s been a life of salads and healthy food (thankfully cooked by my wife). But I was pre-diabetic so I had to do something. One saving grace. It’s now easier to do pull-ups at the gym.

A Free Primer on How to Tell a Story

Would you like a free training manual on how to tell a story? Picking the right story and telling it well are keys to making a sale or inspiring a donation. The primer in the link below divides elements of storytelling into 28 short sections. As a subscriber you can get it for free to download from this link:

https://carlvonderau.com/thank-you-for-subscribing/

Saving Myles

How about a good read for the New Year?

Don't Miss Out!

All the Best,
Carl

Not the best time to be on diet, but that’s where I am. I’ve lost 8 pounds and have to keep it off somehow.

Nonprofits and Storytelling

I was lucky enough to attend the Nonprofit Storytelling Conference here in San Diego in November. There were hundreds of people there. I had written a primer and wanted to see if I could improve it and possibly make presentations to nonprofits to help them with their storytelling. As you can guess, whether it is telling a story to entertain or to entice people to contribute money, the primary objective is to reach people emotionally. As it turns out a single story about a meaningful moment is far more effective than tables of numbers or discourses on programs and organization. At the conference, Steve Screen said, “An organization never doubled because it made its case better.”

You may only have a couple of minutes to capture your listeners’ attention. Just as in a movie, the story should be a roller coaster of disasters to small successes to disappointments to crucial lessons. Then a victory with a message that can inspire other people. These stories can come from staff, donors, volunteers, or customers.

Compare these two starts to a story:

1. We’ve helped homeless throughout the city since 2001. The number of people using our services has grown by more than 50% in the last three years.

Or

1. James was sitting on a piece of cardboard when we saw him. It was his third night down town, and he could barely stop shaking.

Which one grabs your feelings?

But what about data? Numbers that flow from the narrative convince listeners that the story is more than anecdote.

Here are some wonderful examples of experiences that some nonprofits created.

Civilla is a design-focused nonprofit studio based in Detroit. They took on a major problem in Michigan. The principal public-benefits application for the Department of Health and Human Services had grown to 18,000 words and 1,000 questions. The form was criticized as “bureaucracy run amok.” To illustrate how frustrating, repetitive, and overwhelming it was, Civilla made a presentation that visiting government officials will always remember. They printed out all the pages and pasted them together into a long scroll that was more than 40 feet long. Here is a picture of it.

Civilla interviewed customers and staff, stripped out redundancy, and simplified needed information. The new form shrank by 80% and could be completed in 20 minutes.

The Franklin Factory in Tennessee focuses on clean water in Africa. To illustrate what it is like to trudge for miles carrying jerry cans, they created an immersive experience called The Water Walk. They arranged for people to walk on a treadmill with a 3-D visual of the countryside in Uganda. Participants saw and heard the environment around them. Then they listened to a Ugandan woman tell them about her daily quest for water.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving fitted participants with goggles that impaired their vision in the same why mild alcohol impairment would. It was impossible to walk a straight line.

Leader Dogs for the Blind sponsored a special dinner to help donors empathize with those who are blind. The Dinner in the Dark organizers blindfolded all participants and led them to their tables in a dark gala hall. With the blindfolds on, they were instructed how to eat their dinners.

Events

Beyond Belief Podcast

I did my first interview dealing with religion. I spoke to Shalom Shore on his Beyond Belief podcast. Shalom interviews people who have left their religions. For me it was Christian Science. We had a wide discussion on Christian Science’s history and precepts as well as my growing up under its influence. I had some stories to tell about parents quietly taking children to doctors while insisting sickness wasn’t real, as well as how negative thoughts were repressed.

To hear the interview, copy and paste this link:
https://freidomfighter.com/podcast/

Pizza and Proceco for Cesar Chavez Service Clubs

It was great to see old friends at the Proceco and Pizza fundraiser that the Cesar Chavez Service Clubs held at the Meraki restaurant. The clubs raised $17k to help kids in elementary through high school discover themselves, get into college, and help their communities.

Snow Day in Pacific Beach

It’s hard to believe but kids in San Diego don’t get much of a chance to see snow. The annual Pacific Beach snow day was brought to us by Gary Kent and Brian Caine. They trucked in snow for the kids.

A Free Primer on How to Tell a Story

Would you like a free training manual on how to tell a story? Picking the right story and telling it well are keys to making a sale or inspiring a donation. The primer in the link below divides elements of storytelling into 28 short sections. As a subscriber you can get it for free to download from this link: https://carlvonderau.com/thank-you-for-subscribing/

Saving Myles

How about a good read for the Season?

Give The Gift of Reading

All the Best,
Carl

The Day of the Dead is a wonderful celebration that, despite the name, is a number of days in which the dead are honored. It is both a happy and sad occasion with dancing and music. It starts one day after Halloween on November 1. This is the Day of the Innocents, when legend says that deceased children can return to talk with their families for 24 hours. The next day the Day of the Dead celebration begins. Families remember other members who are gone by preparing meals and elaborate altars containing the favorite foods, photos, and other possessions of the departed. Marigolds are everywhere and children and adults paint their faces and dress up like ghouls. The Day of the Dead begins early in San Diego. In October, several cities around San Diego had festivals with food, decorations, music, costumes and all kinds of things for sale. On this side of the border, the altars are often arranged in the trunks of cars.

Here are some photos from the celebration in El Cajon.

The Biggest Fraud in History?

Suppose your grandfather and then your father made a fortune in a company they founded and built. You’ve been living well on the dividends from the stock you own for your whole life. The money is so vast you can hire someone to manage it for you, which allows you to follow your passion for horses. You live alone in a small hamlet in the Swiss Alps and don’t need to trouble yourself about money. What a fat target you are to scammers.

That was what happened to Nicolas Puech, one of the heirs of the Hermès fortune. Hermès is a French luxury clothes producer best known for its scarves and handbags. Puech had the largest individual holding of the company’s shares. He left management of his fortune to Éric Freymond, a money manager his family had introduced him to. Their relationship grew so close that Freymond claimed they were lovers.

Freymond was the son of a prestigious private banker in Geneva. What Puech didn’t know was that he was accused of stealing client funds and was forced to leave his father’s bank and start his own firm. He was then fined for insider trading and sued for breach of trust by actress, Ursula Andress.

The secret sales of the Hermès stock evidently began in 1999. Puech had signed a sweeping agreement to allow Freymond to manage and dispose of assets. Freymond surrounded Puech with a coterie of advisors and lawyers closely connected to himself. Freymond and one of his lawyers convinced Puech that his family was out to get him and advised him not to talk to relatives or the press, not to use cellphones, and not to tell anyone his whereabouts. One memo said, “Remember the most harmless questions are the most dangerous.” Evidently Freymond sold the Hermès stock to its arch competitor, LVMH. It was done through a number of difficult-to-trace companies. Puech said he never authorized sale of his shares. The owner of LVMH claims not to have known that the shares he bought originated from Puech. The value of the shares has almost tripled since the sale occurred.

So what are some of the things Freymond evidently did with the proceeds? He transferred money to investments of people close to him, bought stocks and art he speculated on, and gave money to himself. Puech got wind of the embezzlement when he asked Freymond to transfer a million Swiss Francs to his longtime housekeeper and the housekeeper’s wife. The housekeeper never received the money.

Puech may have been a rube, but he also knew how to dig up a paper trail. He commissioned an audit that revealed all the secret sales. He sued Freymond. As the audit and the authorities closed in, Puech discovered that Freymond had sold the house he lived in to a foundation. He is 82 and apparently has nothing left, a loss that is estimated at $15B. And Freymond? He apparently jumped in front of a train. Sounds like a good premise for a crime novel, doesn’t it?

No matter how much money you have, it won’t protect you from your own ignorance and the world’s cruelty.

My Events

I was delighted to be featured in a new app for book readers called BookBase. The virtual book-club & social reading app aims to take the traditional in-person book club experience into a smartphone app. This seems great for younger people who don’t use laptops as much as us old people do. The three founders of BookBase were students who came up with the idea while in college at Long Beach State. They are Elias Babaalian‑Morales, Jaelyn Gutierrez, and Nathen Deo. The objective is to facilitate reading together, discussion, recommendations, and moderated book-club style interactions. By downloading the app, readers can comment and interact with an author of a book featured each month by the creators of BookBase.

My first crime novel, Murderabilia, is being featured as BookBase Gold in November. The BookBase team met me in in Balboa Park and Nathen Deo conducted an interview about Murderabilia. His interview is featured on the site for subscribers. Each week the virtual readers will read 16 chapters from the book. They then can pose questions on the chat and I will answer them.

Here’s a picture of the team and me together.

Check out BookBase. All you need is an iOS or Android phone. It’s a very novel (pun intended) concept. The website is

https://bookbaseapp.com/

I had a fun audio interview with Adam Greenfield on his podcast, The Written Scene. It seems like we talked about everything. Here’s what Adam said we covered.

Here is what Adam said we covered:

“In this episode of The Written Scene, Carl opens up about revisiting hard scenes that are part truthful, having the willingness to fail as a poet on public stage, understanding the minds of criminals, making up ghost stories as a kid, learning fast how good people can be at their craft, not being ready to put in the effort into being a writer, finding poetry in fiction, reading books that require interpretations, writing the hero’s arc and giving morality to villains, craving empathy and connection with a character, being impacted as the writer as much as the reader is, preferring to write longer stories over short stories, why the first draft of his first scene is always written by hand, and much more.”

Tune it in on the following:

Online: https://thewrittenscene.transistor.fm/.../episode-97-carl...

Spotify:

YouTube (audio only):

A Free Primer on How to Tell a Story

Would you like a free training manual on how to tell a story? Picking the right story and telling it well are keys to making a sale or inspiring a donation. The primer in the link below divides elements of storytelling into 28 short sections. As a subscriber you can get it for free to download from this link:

https://carlvonderau.com/thank-you-for-subscribing/

Saving Myles

How about a good read for the Fall?

Grab Saving Myles

All the Best,
Carl

The Money Launderer

In 1988 Martin Suarez was accepted at Quantico to become an FBI agent. He was fluent in Spanish and, with his Navy experience, knew ships and aircraft. So the FBI sent him undercover to infiltrate Latin American drug cartels. One of the amazing things to me was that he was undercover for more than twenty years and only worked out of Miami and Puerto Rico.

So how did he get into the cartels? No one at the FBI had been able to do it before because the cartels were very selective. Martin had to meet with 70 cartel representatives before they trusted him enough to let him in. He also got essential tips from other cartel members whom the FBI had recruited. For instance, at any meeting he should stay quiet and never be cheap. Never wear cheap, unpolished shoes, or re-soled ones. Don’t ask where colleagues grew up or specifics about their operations. Use crude humor. The representatives he met with would test him by asking if he wanted beer. Cartel people always drank Black Label whiskey. And very importantly, when something goes bad, don’t skip the meeting where members analyze what went wrong. Who were the most dangerous people in a cartel meeting? The wives of the other cartel members. They were the most perceptive in sniffing out a rat.

He started by retrieving bales of drugs in Puerto Rico and in the Caribbean waters. He’d transport the drugs to the U.S., and the FBI would make a bust and seize them without anyone suspecting him. By 1991 he’d smuggled $1B of cocaine into the US for the Medellín Cartel.

He soon wanted to graduate into a side of the business where he didn’t have to harpoon bales of drugs out of the ocean. Money laundering was perfect. The task required a financier’s knowledge of banking, a spy’s handling of meetings, and ruthless disregard of the law. Many launderers were highly educated. For instance, the Cali Cartel’s chief money launderer studied economics at Harvard. Somehow Martin and his colleagues managed to go under the radar for many years. Even the DEA didn’t know what they were doing. His FBI unit seized enough money to fund all their operations.

Martin said the most dangerous part of being undercover wasn’t retrieving and transporting drugs. It was carrying around millions of dollars in the trunk of his car. He worried that someone in Puerto Rico or Miami would stop the car, take the money, and kill him.

What surprised me was the level of interconnection money launderers had with corporations and big business. I knew that politicians in Colombia were involved. But I didn’t know that the owners of a large bank in the Dutch territory of Curacao were intimately connected with moving contraband into free trade zones and laundering the proceeds. Cigarette companies like Marlboro, British American Tobacco, and Philip Morris also sold product to money launderers, who then sold it in Colombia to repatriate the funds from their drug sales.

Having a family and maintaining those relationships was a major challenge. Martin didn’t tell them anything. His wife and two sons must have known that he was in danger, but they never knew the specifics. Martin would be gone for weeks and his wife had to hold down the house in Puerto Rico or Miami…without demanding he do his share in raising his sons. That wouldn’t happen in most families these days. Martin regrets how much of his sons growing up that he missed. He couldn’t go to their school or sporting events and had to forego birthdays. He had to constantly lie to his wife and tell her that his work was safe. He must have done all right. One son went into the DEA and the other into the FBI.

Martin somehow survived for more than twenty years of undercover work—even an attempted hit on him in Puerto Rico. In 1996-97 the FBI arrested more than 50 people as a result of the evidence he’d found. He eventually retired from undercover to continue with the FBI in Miami. He won Outstanding Law Enforcement Officer of the Year awards 4 times, as well as a lifetime achievement award.

Martin came down with ALS a few years ago. He speaks slowly but still clearly. He decided to get his story out while the disease permitted him to tell it. Ian Frisch helped him write this impressive book. I highly recommend it.

If you would like to hear my interview with Martin, here’s the link:
youtube.com/watch?v=TAlplh_quQg

Inside the Cartel: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/inside-the-cartel-martin-suarezian-frisch?variant=42859015208994

Lightning

Matt Coyle, Marjorie McCown, and I had a wonderful time at Lightning Brewery. We talked about our books writing and the publishing industry and had many laughs. Thanks so much to Suzanne Delzio and Jim Crute for organizing and sponsoring this fun event. Here are some pictures.

Noir at the Bar

I participated in a great event at the Book Jewel in Westchester. Eric Beetner organized a Noir at the Bar. I was one of several authors who got to read work.

A Free Primer on How to Tell a Story

Would you like a free training manual on how to tell a story? Picking the right story and telling it well are keys to making a sale or inspiring a donation. The primer in the link below divides elements of storytelling into 28 short sections. As a subscriber you can get it for free to download from this link:

https://carlvonderau.com/thank-you-for-subscribing/

Saving Myles

How about a good read for the Fall?

Grab Your Copy!

All the Best,
Carl

I was lucky enough this month to be interviewed for two podcasts and to contribute to another author’s blog. But something else exciting is coming up. I and three other authors are trying something I’ve never done before. We’re doing an event at the Lightning Brewery. See more about it below.

But the key and most inspiring bit of this newsletter is my interview of Mehalet Shibre. It all started with Nonprofit Radio

Podcast interview with Nonprofit Radio

Storytelling is one of the key skills people in nonprofits must have. I’d never talked about technique in anything but book and writer venues. So it was great fun to talk with Tony Martignetti and his listeners in the nonprofit industry. Whether you’re a fiction writer or telling about the wonderful work your organization does, you must be compelling and reach the listener’s heart. See the interview on his podcast with the link below:

My Interview with Tony Matignetti

Afterward I told Tony that I had a newsletter. In each issue I related a story of a financial scam. I suggested that the next one describe a scam that had happened with a nonprofit.

“Please don’t do that,” he said. “Please.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Put something uplifting about a nonprofit in your newsletter.”

So, in this issue that’s what I’m doing.

I did a good deal of work with the Cesar Chavez Service Clubs and contacted Linda Legerrette, one of the two founders. I asked if she knew of someone I could write about whom the Club had influenced to do great work. She had just the person—Mehalet Shibre, a young woman who had just graduated from college. I had the pleasure of talking with Mehalet at Linda’s house. Here is her amazing story.

Mehalet Shibre: Immigrant Children Can Turn Into Heroes

Mehalet moved to San Francisco from Ethiopia when she was four years old. She thought everyone in her new home would speak Amharic and couldn’t understand why they didn’t. She was used to the grains and stews of Ethiopia and hated American food. When she went to kindergarten she had to spend all her time on the computer learning English and couldn’t play with the other kids. No wonder she thought that this country was not built for her.

Her family moved to the City Heights part of San Diego in 2006. By that time she spoke English as if she’d been born here but was still in a class of immigrant kids. There were hardly any Black kids in the school. One of the teachers was Black and went to bat for her. Mehalet was transferred to a class that would more fully nourish her capabilities. Advocacy became a key principle that Mehalet believes in.

Her parents worked so Mehalet always was involved with an after-school activity. In fourth grade she and her friends checked out the Cesar Chavez Service Club. The Club ended up being an activity that changed her life. The leader was Natalie LeGerrette. Natalie was Black like she was and seemed to understand her.

The Club was so different than what she expected. For the first time the group asked her opinion and reflected on it. She learned how to examine the many sides of an issue to try to get to the real truth. Mehalet was so happy with the Club that she wrote a letter praising how it had helped her. The letter was very thoughtful and Linda LeGerrette, one of the Club founders, forwarded it to the board and the superintendent of schools. Already the Club was helping Mehalet see her potential.

In middle school the students had darker, more critical opinions. The way they highlighted student differences made Mehalet feel alienated. But she could relax at the Chavez Club, where she was accepted for what she was. No negative energy. She found her view of the world expanding and her curiosity taking off. She even tried robotics and loved it. The club sponsored a trip to Washington DC and, for the first time, she traveled in the U.S. outside of California. Mehalet fell in love with the city and what it stood for. Rather than giving her a cynical view of politics, DC inspired her.

In high school Mehalet continued being part of the Cesar Chavez Service Club. It was a time when she and her friends explored who they were and what they wanted to be. They delved into what skills they needed in order to achieve those ambitions. These were life topics that school classes didn’t teach. The Club also sponsored cleaning up canyons, putting on food drives, and erasing graffiti. She learned the dangers of climate change and wrote a paper that was passed on to the entire community about avoiding plastic straws. She now had the confidence to express her opinions and to incite change.

College at UC Davis was a whole other challenge. Here she was part of a Black community that had its own needs. Mehalet joined student government. Because of all the things she’d done as a teenager, she was put in charge of Ethnicity and Cultural Affairs for the student body. The Chavez Clubs had taught her to listen to all sides of problems, so she organized events to gather opinions. A key problem was that students couldn’t use food stamps to buy food. The university administration and the vendors told her it wasn’t possible, so she mobilized. She knew that most problems could be solved with the right advocacy. She wrote a resolution, got it passed by student government, and disbursed it throughout the university. Soon students could use food stamps to purchase food. To help the Black community, she recruited Black students to serve in student government, won government grants for Black initiatives, and organized events for Black pre-law students.

I think it’s amazing how much a young person can accomplish when they seize the tools that a nonprofit like the Cesar Chavez Service Clubs can give them. Especially when they start at an early age. So what is twenty-three-year-old Mehalet doing now that she’s graduated? She knew Richard Barrera from his work with the Cesar Chavez Clubs and in the City Heights Community. He asked her to help as his deputy campaign manager in running to be the Superintendent of California Schools. Then it’s on to law school.

I asked her what big lesson she has learned since she was that four-year-old child who didn’t speak English. She says she thinks what helps economically disadvantaged communities prosper is advocacy. A diverse community like City Heights has different ideologies, languages, and insecurities. People living there don’t realize that the government can help them. That’s where an advocate comes in. The motto she likes best from Cesar Chavez is: “Knowledge is power. Share it.”

When I see this, I wonder how in the world this country could stop welcoming immigrants. What they need is opportunity and someone to speak up for them and their children. What happens then? A child who thought her country was not built for her learns to help build her country.

Here is a picture of Mehalet and Carlos LeGerrette. Carlos and his wife Linda founded the Cesar Chavez Service Clubs.

BookBase

I had a great time with a new book-sharing group called BookBase. BookBase was founded by three Cal State Long Beach MBA students as a startup almost a year ago. Their idea was so good that they won the Sunstone Innovation Challenge pitch contest and received funding. The mission of the organization is to virtually engage readers. With a subscription, readers can tune into book clubs, interviews with authors (like me), and book chats. All on their phones. I’ll let you know when the interview is posted. In the meantime, check them out at:

BookBase

Lightning Brewery

This is going to be fun. On September 25, Matt Coyle, Marjorie McCown, Deborah Holt Larkin, and myself will be at the Lightning Brewery at 13200 Poway Road in Poway. The event starts at 5:00 and we will speak at around 6:00. Come and have a free bratwurst, some beer, and chat with us.

Guest Blog

I was honored to contribute to Debra Goldstein’s blog. I wrote: “Writing What You Know, Or Writing What You Want to Know.”

Find it on this link:

Guest Blog

A Free Primer on How to Tell a Story

Would you like a free training manual on how to tell a story? Picking the right story and telling it well are keys to making a sale or inspiring a donation. The primer in the link below divides elements of storytelling into 28 short sections. As a subscriber you can get it for free to download from this link:

Check out the Free Primer

Saving Myles

We’re still hanging on to the end of summer. How about a good read to end the season?

End Summer the Right Way!

All the Best,
Carl

It’s hard to believe summer is winding to an end.

In this issue you have a chance for a free book and to get a free primer on how to tell a story. See details in the newsletter below.

A Scammer’s Best Friend: Your Spouse

Suppose your spouse has wonderfully managed your finances for most of your life together. You’re retired now and don’t need to worry about money. That’s what Anamarie Hurt, a retired wife in Oklahoma, thought.

Her husband Craig had always efficiently overseen their finances. Then he found a wonderful investment opportunity through an online ad. A woman named Tiffany sold him on a scheme to make piles of money. All he had to do was wire his investment overseas. He went to his bank and they tried to persuade him not do it. Craig did it anyway. Several wires later his bank was so worried abut what he insisted on doing that they closed his account. Undeterred, Craig opened an account at another bank and started sending more money. He liquidated their retirement funds and also took out a home equity loan. No one at his new bank alerted his wife.

The brokerage handling his investments repeatedly tried to convince him that his “opportunity” was a fraud, but Craig wouldn’t listen. Eventually the brokerage restricted his use of his accounts and alerted Oklahoma’s Adult Protection Services. Protection Services apparently never reached out to his wife. Then Craig grew dissatisfied with his brokerage’s service and moved his accounts to another brokerage that would allow him to freely cash out investments.

By now you know where this is going.

Craig’s wife Anamarie learned that their money was gone when her credit card was declined. She confronted her husband and forced him to have a psychiatric evaluation. That revealed that he had vascular dementia. Someone suffering from this disease can appear normal to friends and family, but is unable to assess risk and make rational decisions. My father had this type of dementia. He could have a great conversation with you and was still unable to pay bills.

The couple went to the police but the scammers wouldn’t let go. They had infiltrated Craig and Amamarie’s devices and knew their exact locations. The scammer started emailing that he would kill both of them unless Craig immediately transferred funds to a cryptocurrency wallet. But they had almost no money by then. Of the almost $5 million they’d once had in savings, all was gone but a few hundred dollars.

Banks in some states must try to protect their senior clients from these scams. But in Oklahoma there was no requirement. There were laws to prevent money laundering, but these scams were not classified that way because the vicim had authorized the transfers. Still, Anamarie and Craig are suing their bank. What else can they do to recover some of their money when the scammers are somewhere on the far side of the world?

Craig is now prohibited from having a phone and sleeps 18 hours a day. He has never apologized.

So, as you and your spouse get older, keep an eye on your investments and bank accounts. Dementia is both sneaky and cruel.

Free Copy of The Resistance Daughter

I met Joanne Kormylo, the author, at a writer’s seminar late last year in Tennessee. She lives in Calgary and has written an excellent historical thriller that Robert Dugoni called “a stunning debut.”

Joanne’s novel is about the resistance against the Nazis in WWII in Poland. This is a part of history I knew little about. I appreciated learning how the Polish people fought against the occupiers. Kormylo primarily takes two points of view—a young polish woman whose father and brother are in the resistance, and a Canadian pilot who is shot down and must survive with his fellow soldiers in a prison camp. Kormylo has heavily researched the book. I was so impressed at the detail that she brings into the narrative about the Polish resistance, the Allied planes, and the conditions in the prison camps. The inmates did incredibly creative things to escape and foil the Germans—all based on what, in fact, happened. The characters are very sympathetic. They are driven to escape and to punish the Germans who abused, tortured and killed them. They also must survive so they can fall in love. The book is both a historical thriller and a romance. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I have one book to give away.

To enter the drawing simply reply to this email or contact me at CarlVonderauAuthor@gmail.com. I can only send it to those in the continental U.S.

Everyone Needs a Story

Here’s something I’ve worked on for a couple of years with help from some of my friends at the nonprofit, Amplified Impact Partners (formerly San Diego Social Venture Partners), as well as others. This is a training manual for anyone in a company or a nonprofit who needs to brush up their storytelling skills. Picking the right story and telling it well are keys to making a sale or inspiring a donation.

The primer divides elements of storytelling into 28 short sections. As a subscriber you can get it for free to download from this link:

https://carlvonderau.com/thank-you-for-subscribing/

Summer Book Activities

I will be with fellow author, Jim Foley, at the KPBS San Diego Book Festival on Saturday, August 23, at University of San Diego with a whole bunch of authors We will have a booth and hope to see you there.

On Thursday, September 25, Matt Coyle, Marjorie McCown, Deborah Larkin, and I will be partnering with the Lightning Brewery to talk about our books. Free brats and bites.

Book Clubs & Book Talks

Do you have a book club? If you would like me to talk at your club or some other event about Saving Myles or the writing life, please respond to this email or simply email me at carlvonderauauthor@gmail.com.

If you are close by, I can come to your meeting. If not, we can talk virtually. I really love to do these, so don’t hesitate to ask.

Saving Myles

It’s still summer, so if you or your friends want a good read, press this button:

Grab Saving Myles

Until next time,
Carl

Crypto for a Dictator

Can cryptocurrency be the instrument to save a country? Gabriel Jiménez thought it could save Venezuela. Boy was he wrong. Here is his story.

In 2018 the prices of oil and the local Venezuelan currency, the Bolívar, were collapsing. Most citizens were trying to protect their wealth by illegally buying dollars. Nicolás Maduro, the dictator of Venezuela, thought a new cryptocurrency could evade U.S. sanctions by operating outside the traditional U.S. banking system.

Gabriel Jiménez was a local tech entrepreneur. He’d campaigned against Maduro but was intrigued enough to talk to him about a new currency. A van took Jiménez and some American colleagues to a military installation to speak with the president. Jiménez was expecting impressive surroundings when speaking with the president. In the office where they met, the air conditioner barely functioned and the vice president wore a tracksuit. Outside, an old Camaro was parked in the courtyard next to a child’s trampoline.

Still, Jiménez liked the idea because the currency would not be controlled by the government and would float freely like Bitcoin. By being part of the launch team he would have some control over how it was launched and used. He jumped onboard. His startup company devoted all its resources to creating the currency.

But this was Venezuela, and Maduro wanted to control everything. He used all Jiménez’s work to create own Petro cryptocurrency. Against Jiménez’s wishes, it was backed by oil reserves. That made it look like a bond, and US companies and investors were forbidden to invest in Venezuelan bonds. When Jiménez resisted sharing information with the Ministry of Finance, the vice president called him a traitor and Jiménez thought he might be dragged to the infamous Helicoide, a mall that had been converted into a prison.

Maduro's government made Jiménez’s company do all the work and hired a Russian firm to manage the launch. Then Jiménez had to publicly sign an agreement that limited him to just being a sales agent instead of an owner of the technology. It was all done in a ceremonial room in the presidential palace in front of the cabinet and TV cameras. Maduro had publicly stolen all of his work.

The new currency was supposed to allow the government to pay for supplies, and to be freely transferrable. President Trump got wind of it and prohibited any U.S. company from accepting the Petro. A congresswoman asked that Treasury Dept. to investigate Jiménez. It was worse in Venezuela. The Venezuelan National Constituent Assembly asked that Jiménez be charged with treason. He was in danger of being arrested and had to flee to the U.S.

Where once he had owned a small company, Jiménez had no work authorization and no money in the U.S. He lived with his father, then on the couch of a chief executive for a crypto start-up in San Francisco. So much for his dream of helping Venezuela.

So what happened to the Petro? It had none of the properties that Jiménez had designed and is little used.

What I’m Working on Now

My next crime novel takes place in Cleveland in 1969. I grew up in Rocky River, a western suburb. To write it I’m going back to my memories and researching images of what Rocky River and downtown Cleveland looked like. I’m also reading up on the anti-war protests that gripped the country. If anyone would like to help me with impressions of Cleveland protests and Cleveland crime at that time, or what some of the areas and buildings looked like, I’d love it.

Please respond to this email if you’d like to work with me on this book.

Summer Book Clubs

Speaking of Rocky River, I had a terrific time at Jill Armstrong’s book club. She and I went to high school together there and she now lives in Chelsea, Michigan. The library in Chelsea was voted the best small library in the country in 2008 and has my book on its shelves. What an honor! Her book club asked some great questions and we had a great time.

Do you have a book club? If you would like me to talk at your club or some other event about Saving Myles or the writing life, please respond to this email or simply email me at carlvonderauauthor@gmail.com. If you are close by, I can come to your meeting. If not, we can talk virtually. I really love to do these, so don’t hesitate to ask.

TV Shows

My wife and I are always looking for a good TV series to watch. We’ve discovered two in the last few weeks.

The Pitt is about a hospital in Pittsburgh. I don’t normally like hospital dramas, but this one pulled no punches. It takes place in a single day at a crowded hospital in Pittsburgh. All right, no hospital has as many things go wrong as this one does in one day. Nevertheless, the outcomes and personalities are realistic and compelling. And many of the outcomes were not happy. My wife and I both had tears in our eyes at during of the episodes. It has been renewed for another season starting in January.

I was surprised that I liked the PBS series, Patience. The star is a woman on the autism spectrum. That seems to be very popular character trait these days. In this one she has unique concentration and an ability to connect seemingly unrelated pieces of puzzles and events. The detective who works with her is extremely sensitive to her vulnerable personality. This series has also been renewed for another year.

A Great Deal on Saving Myles

There is a special on the Kindle version on Amazon. It is available for $1.99 through July.

Grab A Copy

Until next time,
Carl

Somehow this cartoon seems relevant today.

I was originally going to write a piece related to a scam, but changed my mind based on the events around the country this weekend. On Saturday I participated in the No Kings rally in San Diego. It was the first protest I’ve gone to in twenty years. I don’t usually get political in these newsletters, but what happened this week is too much—military in the LA streets, a US senator brought to the floor and handcuffed, two democratic lawmakers shot in Minnesota, and on and on. This has to stop.

Protests were held in two locations in San Diego and in other smaller cities close by. I went to the one that started at the Waterfront Park. There were thousands of people of all ages and races there—even small kids and older people with walkers.

Allison Gill, a Navy veteran and host of the “Mueller She Wrote” podcast, started with a short speech. Then we marched. Actually it was more a crawl. It took almost an hour to get out of the park and onto the street. Police were on hand but didn’t interfere in any way. There was no violence or property destruction. Mostly people shouted off slogans like: ”Tell me what democracy is. This is what democracy is.” Or: “Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go.” A few drums and whistles. The best things were the creative signs.

Here are some pictures:

The major cities seem to be rising up in demonstration. I’m not sure about the center of the country or the less populist states out west. Tell me what happened where you are and what you think.

Here are some books you might enjoy:

The Last Dance of Mary Kelly

E. David Brown, a Canadian writer, has written a terrific book that his publishers have now made available in the U.S. It is an historical novel taking place in London during the time of Jack the Ripper in the late 1880s. It follows Mary Kelly from Ireland to her brutal employment in a textile factory in London. She gets caught up in the worker’s movement. An American journalist, Bryson Ward, investigates the movement and wonders if there is a connection to Jack the Ripper. Some of the female leaders in the protest movement are his victims. The book includes many famous figures of the time like Bret Harte and Oscar Wilde. The characters are well shaped and distinctive with voices that match the period. The violence and terrible city conditions are realistically drawn. It is a very fine piece of work. A compelling read for those who like historical fiction!

Agents of Innocence.

David Ignatius published this book in 1987 and it established him as a master of espionage writing. It is still a primer on the enormous complications of the Middle East. Which makes it very interesting reading now. Set primarily in Lebanon in 1969-84, it follows one CIA agent, Tom Rogers, as he negotiates the shifting alliances of Arab governments and the terrorists that they both fight and work with. Everyone is a friend and a foe. You get a real idea of the complexity of this morass of violence. It has some great characters who are torn between doing what is right for their friends, and what is best for their country. I got an education reading it. The book will help you understand the Palestinian and Israeli problem as well as the challenges the U.S. has in the region.

Do you have a book club?

If you would like me to talk at your club or some other event about Saving Myles or the writing life, please respond to this email or simply email me at carlvonderauauthor@gmail.com. If you are close by, I can come to your meeting. If not, we can talk virtually. I really love to do these, so don’t hesitate to ask.

Finally, if you know someone who would enjoy my book, please buy it. Here is a link.

Until next time,
Carl

Subscribe now

You Thought Bernie Madoff Was Audacious

When Bernie Madoff was arrested, most thought he was the most audacious Ponzi-scheme fraudster in U.S. history. But just nine days earlier another Ponzi fraudster was arrested. I thought this man was even more brazen. I first learned about him in a Vanity Fair article in 2009 by Nigel Parry.

Marc Dreier grew up as the star child of an affluent family in Long Island. Much was expected from him. Dreier went to Yale and then to Harvard Law School. Then he joined a law firm and became a great litigator by working 100-hour weeks. He seemed to be fulfilling everyone’s expectations of him.

But he wasn’t satisfied with his financial success or the recognition he got. He joined other law firms and had the same complaints, so he struck out on his own. But he was not achieving the success of other Harvard classmates who were ringing in multi-million dollar judgments. 9-11 happened and he regarded the collapsing towers as a metaphor for his failure. Nevertheless, he said he never doubted his destiny to do great things.

During a walk on the beach he realized his life goal was to become so successful he could have an oceanfront house. That would make him happy. He could do it by greatly expanding his firm. To do that he borrowed and cheated on taxes to have enough funds to hire star lawyers. They worked in a prestigious office that he spent $1 million renovating.

But he needed more funding to sustain the firm’s growth. Why not use his old client, Sheldon Solow? Solow was a well-known and litigious real estate mogul in New York City. Dreier had represented him in court and the two of them resorted to quasi-legal dirty tricks to try to win cases. The cases had gone badly and Dreier resented how Solow had ruined his reputation. So he betrayed him.

Dreier forged financial statements and promissory notes for Solow’s company. The documentation indicated that Solow had borrowed funds and would pay then off years later. Dreier sold those notes to hedge funds and used the cash to build his law firm. Each time a note came due he’d manufacture another fake one and sell it to a hedge fund. Eventually the total was more than $350 million. All money that Solow was supposed to owe but was used by Dreier. By 2007 the firm had 175 lawyers.

He also spent part of those funds to buy the accoutrements he thought would tell the world how successful he was.

His spoils included two waterfront homes in the Hamptons, condos in the Caribbean and Santa Monica, and a $200K Aston Martin. Plus multimillion dollar paintings from Picasso and Matisse. Here’s picture of his 120-foot yacht in St Martin.

Dreier’s new attorneys treated him like God.

The hedge funds liked their fictitious earnings and kept rolling over their investments. They never asked for principal to be returned.

But all Ponzi schemes eventually fail. By 2008 the housing market had crashed and the hedge funds wanted their money back. One fund consented to an extension. But they demanded to meet with executives at Solow Realty first. Solow had no idea that Dreier was peddling fake debt with their name on it. This is when Dreier really got creative.

He scheduled a meeting in a conference room at the Solow headquarters and brought in a paid imposter. The imposter pretended to be part of Solow Realty. The hedge fund met there and fell for it. They approved the extension. The deception worked until another hedge fund called Solow’s auditors and learned that the debt didn’t exist.

Dreier thought he could escape from being prosecuted. He fabricated more documents with the name of an old client — the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan. But the new investor insisted on meeting the borrower’s executives in Toronto. If his con worked once, why not try it again?

Dreier flew to Toronto. He met with an executive from the pension plan at their office. After exchanging cards and conducting a meeting, he asked if he could use a spare conference room. The executive went back to his desk, and Dreier’s prospective investor’s attorney arrived at the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan offices. Dreier pretended to be the man whose card he’d just finagled. The deception went smoothly until the lawyer wanted to talk to someone he knew at the firm.

Dreier was arrested there and extradited back to New York. He was thrown in jail at the Manhattan Correctional Center and shared a cell with a stopped-up toilet and a triple murderer.

He was sentenced to 20 years and claimed to have great remorse. His lawyer said that he took responsibility and went to prison in “a state of grace.” Really?

So what happened to him? In 2025 Joe Biden commuted his sentence and he was released. No information is available about where he is now or what he is doing. I wonder if he has gone straight or is deep into another scheme.

One of the things Dreier said to his interviewer resonates with me. “You know, I discovered that once you cross a grey line it’s much easier to cross a black line.” How many others, having grown up with entitlement and exaggerated expectations, end up crossing the same lines?

John DeDakis

Partners in Crime (the San Diego chapter of Sisters in Crime) was pleased to host John DeDakis to talk about how he went from journalist to thriller writer. He spent 25 years with CNN and interviewed both Ronald Regan and Jimmy Carter. He also was the editor of CNN's "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer." John was amazingly open about how he not only used his journalism background, but the tragedies in his person life, in his books. Writing helped him deal with his grief at the loss of his sister and his son.

In his most recent novel, Enemies Domestic, DeDakis’s protagonist is a White House press secretary forced to make her extremely personal abort-or-not-to-abort decision in a highly toxic and polarized political fishbowl—all while dealing with an attack on the presidency itself. It's a terrific thriller and very timely.

What I’ve been Up To

I’ve stuck close to home this month. I’ll do the same next month, as my wife is having knee replacement surgery.

I had a great time with Wynne Leon and Vicki Atkinson on the their podcast, Sharing the Heart of the Matter. Tune in to this link to hear it:

https://sharingtheheartofthematter.com/2025/04/25/episode-113-from-banking-to-thrillers-with-author-carl-vonderau/

Or go to YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@SharingtheHeartoftheMatter

I’ve done a couple of other podcasts with Dan White and James L’Etoile, but they won’t be out until next month’s newsletter.

Do you have a book club?

If you would like me to talk at your club or some other event about Saving Myles or the writing life, please respond to this email or simply email me at carlvonderauauthor@gmail.com. If you are close by, I can come to your meeting. If not, we can talk virtually. I really love to do these, so don’t hesitate to ask.

Finally, if you know someone who would enjoy my book, please buy it. Here is a link.

Until next month,
Carl

Subscribe now

Imagine that your whole family knew that your great uncle, Heshy, was a hitman who’d killed 20 people. Now that is a family secret. Then one day your great uncle calls you. From prison. He knows you’re a journalist and wants you to write a book about his life. It would be called From the Ashes to Hell to the Power of Heaven. Even hitmen want to get to heaven. Heshy’s daughter and your whole family are totally against the project. Your father is so upright he won’t accept a free cup of coffee and won’t speak of his brother. But Heshy is just so damn interesting.

This is what happened to Eric Konigsberg more than twenty years ago. He ended up writing an article for The New Yorker and a book about his uncle called Blood Relation.

His great uncle’s real name was Harold Konigsberg. Born in 1925, he was always in trouble. He and his gang were soon mixed up in crime. By the time he was in his thirties, his primary business was lending money, but he also was into bookmaking, hijacking, and trucking. Plus a side business selling arms to Cuban revolutionaries.

An imposing man, Harold once ripped a metal leg off a barstool to beat a couple of men at a night club. He is said to have survived 17 gun battles. When one of his borrowers asked about signing a promissory note, Harold took out a revolver from his desk and said he didn’t like to use it to collect money. Then he picked up a rubber hose filled with lead, whacked the borrower on the knee, and said he would much rather use that. When the man couldn’t pay on time, Harold took away his family’s home. Mercy was not a weakness for him.

But he was more than just a brute thugs—he was clever. No matter where he was, Harold found a way to manipulate the situation. When he was convicted and placed in jail in Jersey City, he negotiated privileges by buying off the warden. That got Harold a private apartment in the jail library with his own TV, telephone, radio, refrigerator, hot plate, and sofa. Plus unlimited visitors, including prostitutes. Some afternoons he and the warden went to the racetrack together.

In 1967 Harold was tried for extortion in New York, and the court ordered psychiatric evaluations. While pre-trial motions were being held, Harold was carried into the courtroom on a stretcher and positioned in a wheelchair. He wore a bathrobe with blankets on top and wrapped a towel around his head. While the lawyers argued before the judge, Harold sagged as if he were catatonic. But once away from court he conferred with lawyers, read the Times, and played pinochle with the inmates.

At the trial he chose to represent himself and wore the same mismatched suit every day. He accused the judge of hiding information and called the D.A. a “bigot, sadist, low-life, fork-tongue talker.” When one of the expert psychologists testified about his sanity, Harold asked him whether the prosecutor was nuts.

He was found guilty of extortion and conspiracy, but Harold still managed to disrupt the trial. The day after sentencing he refused to admit that he was the same Harold Konigsberg who’d been convicted. The judge had to form a new jury to establish his identity. Those who saw the spectacle thought he didn’t care about the sentence. He just wanted to show that he was smarter than everyone else.

His demise was due to a killing he did in 1961. Harold helped strangle Anthony Castellito in Anthony’s own kitchen. But no one could find the body so Harold wasn’t prosecuted until 1978, when one of his fellow murderers implicated him. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Just because you’re in prison for life doesn’t mean you don’t want to publish a book. Every writer knows that. Harold’s great nephew worked diligently, but even he couldn’t side-step Harold’s anger. Eric had published something that Harold thought would hurt his chances at the next parole hearing. “I’m going to chop you up a hundred different ways, and you can put that in your magazine,” Harold said to his great nephew. With 20 killings, he was probably highly skilled at what he promised. Eric published Blood Relation in 2005, anyway.

But even Harold got paroled in 2012. He eventually ended up in a Florida retirement home. The people there said he broke the rules, bullied other residents, and paid off the staff for special privileges—like cooking in his room or additional access to the kitchen. He didn’t get along with anyone. Once a bully, always a bully. He died in 2014 at the age of 89. Did the good Lord keep him alive so long so he wouldn’t have to deal with him?

Justin Brooks of the Innocence Project

Partners in Crime, the San Diego chapter of Sisters in Crime, was pleased to host Justin Brooks. He started the Innocence Project. This nonprofit works to free innocent people who have been incarcerated. He started with a twenty-one-year-old woman in Illinois who had pled guilty and still received a death sentence. Brooks didn’t think that made any sense and investigated the case with students from the university where he taught. The woman had an incompetent lawyer and an incompetent judge. Furthermore, she was innocent. When Brooks looked at the crime site, he saw that the witness couldn’t possibly have seen who the murderer was. He appealed to state and federal courts and asked the Illinois governor for clemency. He even presented a petition to the United Nations. After 29 years he was able to free her. He also presided over her wedding when she got out.

Brooks has been able to exonerate 40 people. Most had been in jail for at least fifteen years. Brooks always treats them to their first dinner, no matter what restaurant. One man had been in prison for 36 years and wanted Carl’s Junior. Brooks persuaded the corporation to give him free food for the next year.

Justin Brooks has written a book called You Might Go to Prison Even Though You’re Innocent. In it he lists the main reasons. These are because 1) you are confused, 2) you have the wrong lawyer, 3) you were charged because you happened to be in the wrong place where a crime occurred, 4) you lived with someone who was murdered, 5) someone mistakenly identified you as the perpetrator, 6) you were questioned into exhaustion and made a false confession, 7) you cared for a sick child who died, 8) the jury was blinded by false science (very common because of all the TV shows), 9) you work with children and/or let them into your home, 10) you’re poor and/or a person of color, 11) someone lied about you. It’s such a big list because it’s very common.

Brooks has started innocence projects all over the country and the world. It was a very moving presentation.

Don’t miss our next virtual meeting when John DeDakis talks about how his work at CNN influenced his thriller writing. Wolf Blitzer used to report to him. The title of the talk is: “From Journalist to Novelist (Or How I Learned to Start Making it Up)” Register at: https://sistersincrimesd.org/events/

Where I’ve Been Lately

I had a great time in Denver with my colleague, Kathleen Donnelly, at the Tattered Cover Bookstore. We got to talk about Killer Secrets, the latest in her K-9 series, as well as my Saving Myles.

The Left Coast Crime conference took place right after. I got to meet many of my author friends. I also got to be part of a panel about Family Dynamics with Donna Evans, Lee Matthew Goldberg, Kate Jackson, and Margaret Mizushima moderating. We had a very enthusiastic discussion.

It was nice to have lunch with several of my Blackbird Writers group. We promote one another’s books. As we live all around the country this is the only chance we get to physically spend time with each other,

Here I am standing next to Wendall Thomas, Tracy Clark, the famous Sara Paretsky, and Priscilla Paton.

Then there was the San Diego Writers’ Festival. I got to moderate a panel on what sustains a book series with T. Jefferson Parker, Joe Ide, Allison Brennan, and Matt Coyle.

I had a marvelous time with Delmar Community Connections where I interviewed Sheila Sharpe about her new novel, Artist, Lover, Forger, Thief. It is a terrific thriller set in the art world among master forgers. A former painter, Sharpe knows a great deal about forgery and its history and I learned a lot while reading the novel. She is also a PhD therapist and brought psychological analysis to what makes a forger and those who are attracted to them.

Terry Shepherd was lots of fun to talk to on his podcast about my career and my books. Here is the link:

https://terryshepherd.com/carl-vonderau-saving-myles/

Do you have a book club?

If you would like me to talk at your club or some other event about Saving Myles or the writing life, please respond to this email or simply email me at carlvonderauauthor@gmail.com. If you are close by, I can come to your meeting. If not, we can talk virtually. I really love to do these, so don’t hesitate to ask.

Finally, if you know someone who would enjoy my book, please buy it. Here is a link.

Until next month,
Carl

Speaking of scams, my friend, Kathleen Donnelly, wrote a special piece this issue on bags that fool narcotics-sniffing dogs. She is an expert on this because she used to have a drug-sniffing dog business. Here she is with four of her dogs.

Dog Proof Baggies to Hide Your Drugs

By Kathleen Donnelly

Being a K-9 handler for nineteen years for a private narcotics dog business that worked in schools, I heard many myths about ways to “trick” the dogs. There were the usual ideas of hiding drugs in coffee, wrapping the contraband with dryer sheets and using items such as Ziploc bags. My least favorite as a handler was when a student put something in a baggie on the inside or outside of a toilet.

I hate to break it to you, but none of that works. Not even the baggie in the toilet water. So, how do you trick a drug dog? My answer? Trick the handler. Humans are much easier to fool than dogs which is why the number one saying in K-9 work is “trust your dog.”

As part of my K-9 handler education, I subscribed to the magazine High Times. I found the publication interesting and informative. I also studied the ads for stash containers or clothing such as the best stash hats. That way, when one of my dogs alerted on a cap, I would understand why they might have indicated on that item. One weekend, catching up on my reading, I was flipping through the magazine and an advertisement caught my eye. The blurb claimed to have baggies that were K-9 proof. The consumer could hide their drugs in these bags and drug dogs wouldn’t be able to smell what was in them.

Well, that seemed like a challenge. My business partner agreed and we placed an order. We both thought this had to be a scam, but I was curious to see what would arrive.

When the baggies came, the first clue that this ad was a total scam was the fact they looked just like the Ziploc sandwich bags sitting in my pantry. I was still intrigued to see if they would work. I decided to test out all the odors my dogs were trained to find. I placed marijuana, pseudo meth, pseudo heroin, pseudo cocaine, a cotton ball with a couple drops of Vodka, and one spent cartridge all in separate bags. Then I hid the bags in different locations such as a vehicle, school locker, backpack and in a good stash spot on a building perimeter.

The dogs were excited. I worked four dogs that day. Each dog easily found the hidden training items. The bags were far from K-9 proof which didn’t surprise me. But it was a great way to make money on your average sandwich bag. I noticed over time that the ad no longer appeared in High Times. If you see something advertising that a K-9 won’t be able to smell through it, think twice before ordering.

What a great story. Kathleen’s dogs are incredible. Here’s a picture of Boomer doing a passive alert on some kid’s locker at a school. Maybe he was using the dog-proof baggies.

Kathleen has written a terrific K-9 series where Maya and her dog, Juniper, investigate crimes in the forests and towns of Colorado. The latest is called Hunting the Truth.

She also has a new book called Colorado K-9 Rescue that will be coming out in May. Here’s the tagline: A kidnapper’s twisted game is on. And a trusty K-9 won’t let him succeed.

Get your pre-order here.

The Strangest (And Most Dangerous) Place I’ve researched a Book

On February 7 my post for Valerie Biel’s newsletter came out. I wrote about the strangest place I’d gone to for research on a thriller. It’s Colombia. Here’s picture of one area I walked through in Bogotá.

Find the full story with this link.

Where I’ve Been Lately

On February 16, I had a great time at the Southern CA Writer’s Conference. I led a seminar on how to put heart in a thriller. Ann Bancroft, Linda Moore, and I also did a panel later that day on Getting Published after 50. None of us had an easy time getting our first books published. But perseverance paid off. Here are some pictures.

On February 27, I spoke to the Del Mar Community Connections book club, Page Turners. They had some terrific questions about my novel, Saving Myles. Here I am with the organizer, Sheila Sharpe, whose own book will be coming out in May.

Kathleen Donnelly and I had a fun time at Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver on March 12. We saw both new and old friends there and talked about Thrills, Chills, and Killer Love. Here we are with Kat, who organized the event at a the store, and some enthusiastic participants.

Partners in Crime

We had a great presentation from Dr. Candace Schoppe about what she does as a forensic pathologist and medical examiner for San Diego. She is one of the experts who do autopsies and had a great quote about what they mean to society. “We are the family physicians to the bereaved.” Did you know that it takes 14-15 years of study to be qualified for this job? There is a huge shortage of medical examiners, and many locales use unqualified people. Another thing I learned is that TV gets it wrong when they so accurately determine the time of a victim’s death. There are many factors that affect the body and it is one of the hardest things to determine.

Don’t miss our next virtual meeting when Justin Brooks will talk about the California Innocence Project. It will be on April 12. The event will soon be listed on our website. Register here.

Do you have a book club?

If you would like me to talk at your club or some other event about Saving Myles or the writing life, please respond to this email or simply email me at carlvonderauauthor@gmail.com. If you are close by, I can come to your meeting. If not, we can talk virtually. I really love to do these, so don’t hesitate to ask.

Finally, if you know someone who would enjoy my book, please buy it. Here is a link:

Get Saving Myles

Until next month,
Carl

Well, Valentine’s Day just happened on Friday so here’s something that most males say at one time or another.

I’ve got a free book from Linda Moore and some announcements to make. And then something special. This is a personal account from a friend in Chicago who fell in love with a conman who was so skilled he was profiled in The New Yorker magazine. This man shattered many people’s lives.

Book Giveaway with Linda Moore

First the potential free book. Reply to this email, and I will enter you in the lottery to win it. The author, Linda Moore, will mail you a copy as long as you are in the continental U.S.

Five Days In Bogota is a high paced-thriller about a gallery owner trying to save her family by selling paintings at an art fair in Bogotá. It’s Colombia, so you know that guerrillas, art thieves, and sketchy foreign diplomats are involved. Plus Nobel laureate García Márquez. It’s a fun, well-written book that has won awards and that you will really enjoy. I sure did and recommend it.

Some Awards for Me

I’m very pleased that Saving Myles won the Independent Press award for Best Thriller. It is also a finalist in the Clue awards for Thriller and Suspense. The Clue award winner will be announced in April.

Imagine Falling Love with Someone Whose Life Was All Lies

Many years ago when I lived in Chicago, I became friends with Dan Dever. We were in a poetry class together, and Dan was far better at it than I was. Dan had this brilliant boyfriend named Herman who was studying with Saul Bellow and was also an aspiring concert pianist. Herman wrote a very-well-received book called Loosing My Espanish. He later taught writing at George Washington University and organized the judging for the Pen/Faulkner fiction prize. Dan thought Herman would be his partner for life. The picture shows them together.

Dan has courageously written about how devastating Herman's life of lies was to him and others.

Herman's Story — By Daniel Dever

When you discover someone you love and trust has been lying about who they are, you begin questioning everything that person ever told you.

Two years ago, I came across an article in The New Yorker about an author who built a career on his experiences as an Afro-Cuban immigrant. H.G. “Hache” Carrillo wrote a prize-winning novel, Loosing My Espanish (2004), based on his childhood escape from the Castro regime in the 1960s and his life growing up in Chicago’s Cuban immigrant community.

But, as The New Yorker piece detailed, it was all invented. Following his death in 2020 from COVID, it was revealed that the author’s life story was a fabrication. He was not born in Cuba, nor did his family escape from Cuba or have any connection to Cuba. He actually grew up in Detroit and his real name was not Carrillo, it was Carroll. Herman Glenn Caroll.

For years Carroll presented this false Afro-Cuban biography in his personal and professional life. This included his appointment as an assistant professor at George Washington University, where he taught writing for several years, and as chair of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, a literary group. When news of the late author’s fraud came to light, his friends and colleagues were shocked. He had kept the facts of his true identity hidden, even from those closest to him – including his husband, whom he married in 2015.

After reading the article, my heart went out to those close to Herman. They had not only lost someone they cared about, they’d also suffered a loss of trust in the person they thought they knew. Thirty-five years earlier I experienced that loss of trust myself – with the same man. Herman Carroll and I were in a relationship… and it was my discovery he had lied about almost everything he’d told me that led to our breakup.

I met Herman in Detroit, where both of us were born and grew up. It was 1980 and we were in our 20s. Handsome, intelligent, and charming, Herman was an aspiring fiction writer. (I read several of his short stories and thought they were very good.) I was a writer, too. I created poetry at home and, for a living, wrote copy about cars at a downtown ad agency. To pay his rent, Herman tended bar at an upscale restaurant called The Money Tree, located in the basement of a bank in Detroit’s financial district.

Soon after our first date, I began spending nearly every night at his apartment in the Palmer Park neighborhood. Within a few weeks, I had fallen in love. I’d been in love once before, but the relationship was short lived. I really wanted this one to work.

Herman was very open about his sexuality, and I admired that. He also seemed very knowledgeable about the world. He spoke French and told me he received his Bachelor’s degree from Sorbonne University in Paris. While living there, he also studied to be a pâtissier, he said. (French food was among his many interests.) Besides Paris, he’d lived in New York City for a time, he said – in a relationship with an older gay man who was an editor at Random House. All of this impressed me, of course. I was a Midwest kid who attended a local university. I’d visited New York only once and had never been to France.

Besides his interest in writing and literature (he read voraciously), Herman was also a classical pianist. There was a piano in his apartment and he practiced almost every day. He told me he’d been a child prodigy on the violin and had attended the National Music Camp at Interlochen. As for his family, he said his mother was a professor at Wayne State University and his father was a physician. Also, he let me know early on that his father was of Armenian descent. He even told me that his family’s Armenian name was Carrollian, before it was shortened. At the time, I had no reason to doubt any of this.

Our relationship progressed through summer and into autumn. As the first leaves began dropping, Herman told me we needed to talk about something important. We were walking through the park near his apartment and stopped at an empty playground. As we sat on the swings and turned to face each other, he told me he had been accepted to graduate school at University of Chicago, to study writing with Nobel laureate Saul Bellow. He said he would be moving to Chicago, probably in the spring. I paused a few seconds to comprehend what he was telling me. Then I asked, “Can I come with you?”

And so, in May of 1981 I quit my job and said goodbye to family and friends. We packed a U-Haul truck and made the 300-mile drive to Chicago. Our new home was the first floor of a greystone on the city’s Northside. I was nervous about the big change, but also very excited. For the first time I would be able to lead my life as an openly gay man, something I did not feel comfortable doing in my hometown.

After settling in at our new home, both of us looked for work. I had no luck getting hired at advertising agencies, so I accepted a job with a software company, training steel mill workers on how to use computers. Herman found work as a waiter – first at the Hamburger Hamlet in the Gold Coast, and later at The Pump Room, Chicago’s famed dining spot for celebrities. I worked days and he worked nights, so we didn’t have much time together except on days off. But we were content in our relationship. We even exchanged rings and had a commitment ceremony, officiated by one of my Detroit friends. (Marriage for same-sex couples was not legalized in Illinois until 2014.)

What I did not know at the time – and would not learn until nearly four years later – was that most of what Herman told me about his education and his reason for moving to Chicago were lies. In reality, Herman was not enrolled in a graduate program at University of Chicago, because he had no bachelor's degree. There was no BA from Sorbonne University in Paris… or from any other college or university.

It didn’t occur to me to check on my partner’s educational background or credentials. Herman was extremely intelligent and more conversant than many college grads I knew. (He eventually did earn a BA several years after we broke up, from DePaul University. He later received a Master’s degree from Cornell.)

In hindsight, I should have recognized clues that something was not right. For example, he would talk about fellow students at U of C, but I never had an opportunity to meet them. Herman carefully choreographed his social life so that I was left out of situations where I could interact with his friends.

This was, no doubt, an attempt to keep people from comparing conflicting biographies he had spun. For instance, I learned late in our relationship that Herman told coworkers he was an heir to the Cartier Jewelry fortune. He said his African American father served in the US military in France, where he met Ms. Cartier. His full name, he told them, was Herman Cartier Carroll. The fact that he spoke French probably helped make the story plausible.

Connections with famous people were a common focus of Herman’s stories. He once told people that he’d waited on singer Paul Simon at the restaurant. Simon struck up a conversation and then invited Herman to join him when his shift was over. They spent an entire evening hanging out together, Herman said, and attended a performance by the Dead Kennedys rock band.

But his lies didn’t just promote his self-importance… some had a more nefarious intent. I discovered Herman routinely presented himself as single, even though we were supposed to be in a committed, monogamous relationship. And he also told people he lived with an “apartment mate” (me). This deceit certainly wasn’t because he was embarrassed about being gay – he was the most “out” person I knew. This was classic behavior of someone cheating on their spouse.

My discovery of Herman’s pattern of lies, manipulation, and cheating happened over an extended period of time. Ultimately, I made the decision to get out of the relationship, for the sake of my own emotional health. But the impact of his dishonesty did not end with our breakup.

About three years later, I heard from a mutual acquaintance that Herman had landed a prestigious position as Creative Director at a downtown marketing firm. A couple of months later, he was abruptly fired. It turned out the professional qualifications and work history Herman presented were stolen verbatim from my resume – including my work at the Detroit advertising agency. The HR department at his new job routinely checked on work histories and credentials. They discovered Herman never worked at the ad agency… and that he did not hold a Master’s degree from University of Chicago, as claimed.

In The New Yorker article, one of his ex-boyfriends made this observation about Herman: “Most people might tell a little lie, but, generally speaking, you walk the planet telling people the truth. Herman walked the planet lying, and he might occasionally tell the truth. It wasn’t malicious—it was a compulsion.”

I disagree with the last sentence of that quotation. Herman’s grandeur of deceit was more than a compulsion. In my opinion, it was pathological. The difference between compulsive and pathological lying is that people who are pathological liars use elaborate stories to manipulate others and show no guilt or remorse. Often, they actually believe their own lies.

The irony here is that Herman didn’t need to create false personas or lie about his heritage or life experiences. He was a very talented writer. And, from what I’ve read, he was an inspiring teacher beloved by his students. But by choosing deception and manipulation, he hurt people who cared about him… and he damaged the reputation of the institutions who believed in him, including George Washington University and the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.

Carl’s note: If you want to read the full New Yorker article, find it is called “The Novelist Whose Inventions Went Too Far.”

For email readers: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/20/h-g-carrillo-the-novelist-whose-inventions-went-too-far

Where I’ve Been and Where I’ll Be

February 1-2.
Birmingham and Wetumpka, Alabama for Murder in the Magic City and Murder on the Menu. I had a fabulous time with other authors and many readers at these two conferences. Above is a photo of all us authors. The second photo is the house in Wetumpka that appeared in the movie Big Fish.

February 14-`16.

The Southern California Writers’ Conference in San Diego. I am teaching Putting a Heart Into Thrillers and on a panel about publishing after 50.

Thursday, February 27.

I will be featured at the Del Mar Community Connections Page Turners event at St. Peters Episcopal Church Parish Hall. Anyone can come and they are giving out some free copies of Saving Myles. You just have to register here: https://dsnp.co/IWTZhN

March 8 at 2:00.

Don’t miss our Partners in Crime virtual event with Dr. Candace Schoppe, Medical Examiner. Register here: https://sistersincrimesd.org/events/

Do you have a book club?

If you would like me to talk at your club or some other event about Saving Myles or the writing life, please respond to this email or simply email me at carlvonderauauthor@gmail.com. If you are close by, I can come to your meeting. If not, we can talk virtually. I really love to do these, so don’t hesitate to ask.

Finally, if you know someone who would enjoy my book, please buy it.

Purchase Saving Myles

Until next time,
Carl

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The fires happening in LA are unbelievable. The property decimated has a larger area than Manhattan, and the fire is still not contained. One expert estimated that it would take more than 20K firetrucks just to stop the blazes in all the houses. More Santa Ana winds are projected to spread embers into other areas so this could get worse. I only know of one person who lost their house, but I’m sure I’ll hear of others soon.

I am glad that our friends in Canada are helping. They have sent firefighters, as has Mexico. The Canadian water bombers produced by Bombardier have proven essential. Can’t they just douse the flames with water from the Pacific Ocean? Yes, but there are limits. Salt water is terrible for the soil; plants hate it. (There was a reason that the Romans salted the fields after they destroyed Carthage.) Dropping water from the air is also imprecise. The Santa Ana winds make it even more difficult. Thousands of pounds of water dumped on buildings can severely damage or destroy them. It also corrodes metal equipment.

We in San Diego are holding our breaths. We have not had rain for a long time and the Santa Ana winds also hit us. There have been some fires in outlying areas but none close to where I live near the ocean. However, once they start, fires can easily spread all the way to the beach. Just look at what happened with Malibu. None of us in San Diego are prepared enough. We need to collect key documents like passports and titles in order to prepare for any insurance claim. One insurance expert recommended that people document every item in their houses and take videos of every room. Our family isn’t close to having that accomplished.

Enough about the fires. Here’s another description of a crazy scammer to distract you.

From Copy Machines to Oil and Gas Scams

What makes a successful scam artist? Of course a lack of empathy helps. But I think being a good story teller is key. The scam artist has to be totally committed to the fantasy, be entertaining, and have the audacity to convincingly tell the fiction to the right people.

Take the case of the Texas oilman described in a New Yorker article by Charles Bethea in the July 3, 2024 issue. Todd May was born to a father who worked at a copy machine repair and rental shop. His mother sold flowers, but taught him there were other ways to make money. He was only twenty when he and she were arrested for passing bad checks. Apparently May avoided prison because of a great story he told to the judge. He was gay and promised to go to church, marry a woman, and make an honest living. He committed another check fraud and went to prison anyway.

He got out and actually did marry. Briefly. He told everyone that he had oil money and wore high-prestige clothes and gave expensive gifts to his friends. He often had people over for champagne and caviar. So where did he get the income? He used false identities to sell convention-booth rentals and then disappeared with the money.

May went to prison again, but that didn’t stop him. Even inside he had the use of a phone and scammed people with more fake expo and convention spaces. When he got out he bought a PhD to build up his resume and opened more businesses. He also bought lavish gifts with his new boyfriend’s credit card. But the authorities were on to him and he had to keep moving all over the South. They eventually traced him to a building and found him hiding in a bathtub.

Prison never seemed to sway him from conning. After he was released again, he started Prosper Oil and Gas. Its wells were duds but, like any good flimflam man he made up fantastic histories of profits. His stories lured in over a hundred investors, including the president of a small bank. As for his staff, he used his tried-and-true method for keeping them quiet—gifts of cars, vacations, and jewelry. Even his parole agent got $5K for looking the other way. Then federal agents showed up, and the SEC learned that the company was a giant Ponzi scheme. May had spent over a million dollars on meals, travel, an airplane, and houses, and condos. It was as if he knew that he would eventually be caught, so he spent the money as quickly as it came in.

May gave his boyfriend a Range Rover and treated him to luxurious vacations. When his office was raided, the boyfriend helped him escape. But then the couple had a fight. Never trust a spurned lover. The boyfriend immediately gave up May to the authorities.

What’s a conman to do when he’s sent to prison for 20 years? He updated his Facebook page as if he were still on the outside going to charity fund-raisers. He even created a YouTube channel and somehow drove a car on the prison property so that it looked like he was heading to a lake and a golf course. Authorities believe he made more than $700K from prison by claiming to represent businesses that were owed unclaimed oil and gas royalties. But the real money was outside prison, so he escaped in a prison truck.

He made his way to Palm Beach, Florida, where the truly gifted scam artists lived. Now known as Jacob Turner, he struck up with people at the croquet club and attended charity events. Could there be a better place to identify future wealthy victims? (For a wonderful expose on Palm Beach, see Holly Peterson’s article in The Wall Street Journal on January 11-12, 2025.) May and his boyfriend had twin Mercedes Benzes and an apartment just down the road from Mar-a-Lago. But his rising stature had its costs. Someone spotted him on the Palm Beach Daily News society-page and the U.S. Marshalls caught him again. And how did the community respond? The Palm Beach Daily News society page columnist said he’d never belonged. Just look at the way he dressed in a Glen plaid sport coat for an evening event.

He was supposed to on on trial in late 2024, but apparently that didn’t happen. No trace of the verdict can be found on the internet. His lover is talking with Hollywood about a movie. His brother runs the family business, a copy-machine store.

Learn about Linda Moore

Linda Moore has written two terrific books—Attribution and Five Days in Bogotá. Five Days came out last year and is a high paced-thriller about a gallery owner trying to save her family by selling paintings at an art fair in Bogotá. It’s Colombia, so you know that guerrillas, art thieves, and sketchy foreign diplomats are involved. Plus Nobel laureate García Márquez. It’s a fun, well-written book that you will really enjoy.

I asked Linda about her life and work and here are some short answers you will find interesting.

1) What genre do you think you write in and why did you choose that?

I write the book that is in my head to write and don't worry about genre. As my friend author Ron Currie told me—“Genre is for booksellers and librarians to know where to shelve the book and not a worry for the author.”

2) How does your writing relate to your past career and travels? Do you use those settings in your book?

Setting establishes the stage set for the narrative to unfold. Sometimes it becomes a factor that determines the story. I have traveled a lot (over 100 countries) and lived abroad. I see places vividly and when a critic calls my book 'immersive' I am pleased I was able to create that environment with words for the reader to be there.

3) How do you find the time to write, and what schedule do you use?

I need to be alone with no interruptions or distractions. Because of promoting Five Days in Bogotá, I am not able to find the time to write or rewrite existing chapters.

4) What is a book you recommend and why?

Hmmm need to think about this.

5) What do you enjoy doing outside of writing?

I love meeting people and talking with people. Every person has an interesting story to tell, and I am fascinated by them. It's also why I enjoy traveling.

Free copy of her book

Please reply to this email (or click here for my online readers) if you would like to be in a random drawing to get a free paperback of Five Days in Bogotá.

Another good book

Terry Ades, a friend of mine, lives in Montreal and is visually impaired. Nevertheless, she is a very skilled author. Tumbleweed Press just published her book: How People See. It is a very interesting take on Quebec culture. How does a woman who can barely see help her delinquent nephew when his parents both die? It is set in 1994, the year Quebec voted on sovereignty, so the whole Quebec sovereignty question further complicates the lives of all the characters. To what extent is someone French or English, and to what extent is Quebec a separate land or part of Canada? The boy has a francophone mother and and English father so he is pulled into both cultures. Terry writes in third person but has a a very good literary voice. I was so pleased to read her book and really enjoy it.

Where I’ll be in the next month

January 31. I will be at the Murder in the Magic City reader’s festival. If you are in the Birmingham, Alabama, area, I hope to see you.

February 8. Don’t miss our Partners in Crime virtual event on Feb. 8 with Supervising Deputy Attorney General Tiffany Susz, who will speak on human trafficking. Just register here.

Do you have a book club?

If you would like me to talk at your club about Saving Myles, please respond to this email or simply email me at carlvonderauauthor@gmail.com. If you are close by, I can come to your meeting. If not, we can talk virtually. I really love to do these, so don’t hesitate to ask.

Finally, if you know someone who would enjoy my book, please buy it.

Thank you for reading.

Until next time,
Carl

One of the centers seems to be the Dongmei Zone in Myanmar (formerly Burma). A crime boss named Wan Kuo-koi (“Broken tooth) set up a compound there. He trafficked thousands of people to work for him and keeps them prisoner. Their sole jobs are to scam others out of money. The best place to find victims seems to be the U.S.

What about Myanmar’s government. They seem to condone the activity and are probably paid off. The Wall Street Journal asked for comment and the government refused to respond. Even China only pursues those who defraud Chinese, not those who steal from American victims.

Wan Kuok-koi seems to be the biggest operator in pig butchering. He has extensive connections with Chinese Triads and apparently is involved with all kinds of illegal goods. Kuok-koi appears on videos but no one can find out where he is. The Wall Street Journal tried to locate him in Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, and Cambodia without success. Fraudsters now have worldwide reach through the internet, but no law enforcement can find the perpetrators to prosecute them.

I’d love to hear any stories you have about someone you know who has been approached by a pig butcherer.

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