Bookshelf: Confessions of a Guerilla Writer

Dan Moldea and I don't agree on Vince Foster's death or Bill Clinton, but other than that, he was one of the niftiest and most independent people I met in my years in Washington. I guess covering the mob teaches you to watch your back instead of just republishing press statements - Sam Smith

An excerpt from Confessions of a Guerilla Writer by Dan Moldea

My dad and my great-grandfather both died at 64. And my grandfather died just one month into his 65th year. I am now midway through 63, and I have a lot of explaining to do. . .

For most of my adult life, I worked as a fiercely independent investigative journalist who concentrated on investigations of organized crime--a really stupid way to make a living. . . .

Although my career-long obsession revolves around the 1975 disappearance of former Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, I was the first reporter to present the case that Hoffa-along with Carlos Marcello, the boss of the New Orleans Mafia, and Santo Trafficante, the Mafia boss of Tampa-had arranged and executed the murder of President John Kennedy in 1963, "a straight mob hit."

A year after I revealed this in my 1978 book, The Hoffa Wars, the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations released its final report, insisting that Hoffa, Marcello and Trafficante had the "motive, means and opportunity" to kill the President. The chief counsel of the committee flatly stated, "The mob did it. It's a historical fact."

My subsequent news-breaking books about the contract killing of an Ohio businessman (1983), the Mafia's penetration of Hollywood (1986), and the influence of organized crime in professional football (1989) were equally controversial but also led to wider investigations.

With regard to my 1995 book about the 1968 murder of Senator Robert Kennedy, I did conclude that the LAPD had arrested the right man. But, because of all the police errors, the existing evidence gave critics of the official investigation ample opportunity to claim that the senator had been killed by a conspiracy. In the end, twenty-seven years later, I solved that case-because, for the first time, I explained what the LAPD could not: Why the crime-scene evidence had given the illusion that two guns had been fired-when, in fact, Sirhan Sirhan, whom I interviewed extensively, had acted alone.

I later wrote  books concluding that football star O. J. Simpson had also acted alone when he allegedly killed his ex-wife in 1994 and that Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster had acted alone when he committed suicide in 1993. I published those books in 1997 and 1998, respectively.

In what many considered an act of journalistic heresy--apart from my 1990-1994 landmark libel suit against the New York Times, the newspaper that created, destroyed, and then resurrected me--I served as Larry Flynt's lead investigator for eight weeks during his highly publicized crusade to expose President Bill Clinton's enemies who had conflicting standards of private behavior for public officials: one for those they like, and another for those they don't like.

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