After my internship, Southeast Mental Health Network offered me a job on the crisis team. I took it, even though I preferred doing longer...

My dress shoes were uncomfortable and so I wore funky old sneakers. This may seem like an irrelevant detail but stick with me. My plan...

I still remember the crushing feeling when a novel I had worked on was rejected by my agent. I didn’t cry but felt like it. The news had...

My Red Diamond books were optioned multiple times. Options, except for big name properties, are usually a small amount, a few thousand at...

Nowadays, it’s clear that authors must do their own publicity. When you submit a book to an agent, many will actually ask about how big a...

Realizing that journalism was never really going to satisfy the writer in me, I had begun working on a novel back in my Herex days. As...

Ultimately, in 1982, I left the Herald to work for the Los Angeles CBS affiliate, then called KNXT. Network owned and operated. Connie...

After about nine months, I was assigned to federal court. Frank Candida had state court, where there was a lot of activity, but most of...

In my less than two years at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, I wrote several hundred articles, sometimes with more than one story in the...

I forgot exactly how I was introduced to him, but Ed Caffrey was a retired New York Police Department sergeant who had been undercover...

So I had become a New York Magazine writer, with multiple stories published. I did the cover story that was, at that time, their biggest...

Back in the 70s as I was writing for Courier-Life, I did a couple of stories on Joseph Lauria, a bright and dedicated prosecutor who went...

When Dave Greenberg decided to run to be a NY State assemblyman, I took the unpaid job of being his press assistant. Writing up releases...

The brief orientation was basically, “Everyone is here to have fun, be polite, be respectful, and don’t let any trouble happen.” I was...

At Courier-Life I met two interesting subjects who would change my life. One was Dave Greenberg, aka Batman, a hero cop who helped...

So I went from being a photojournalist to a reporter who took pictures. This sometimes stood me in good stead, with a presumption that...

I applied for a freelance job with Courier-Life, a syndicate of four local newspapers: Kings Courier; Flatbush Life; Canarsie Digest; and...

My first by-lines were in the James Madison Moment, a high school newspaper in a typical public school in Brooklyn, New York. In my...

Red Diamond: Private Eye book jacket, 1983 These are the stories that my family and friends have heard, the high points and low points...