Confessions of a Guerrilla Writer: Adventures in the Jungles of Crime, Politics, and Journalism - Paperback

by Dan E. Moldea (Author)

From the Preface of Confessions of a Guerrilla Writer, 3rd Edition:

For most of my adult life, I have worked as a fiercely independent investigative journalist, specializing on investigations of organized crime.

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

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

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

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

I later wrote equally solid books, concluding that O.J. Simpson had also acted alone when he allegedly killed his ex-wife and a friend of hers 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 addition, in 2018, I published a book about the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping scandal in Hollywood. And, in 2020, I released my tenth book, featuring the stories of whistleblowers and their heroic work while fighting corruption in higher education.

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 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.

Specifically, my work for Flynt led to the dramatic resignation of U.S. House Speaker-designate Bob Livingston on December 19, 1998--the climactic moment that derailed Republican dreams and schemes to remove the President from office.

Nine years later, I discovered the phone number of U.S. Senator David Vitter (R-Louisiana), another right-wing hypocrite, in the private telephone records of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called "D.C. Madam" with whom I had worked on a book about her life and times prior to her tragic suicide in 2008.

Meantime, as a favor to a friend, a former CIA case officer, I tried to help spring a KGB agent from a Russian prison. That KGB agent, whose life was in danger, was responsible for exposing Robert Hanssen, a top official in the FBI, as a Russian spy.

Yet, despite the chronic chaos and combat that has marked my career, I have worked hard to establish a solid reputation as an honest, careful, and thorough journalist, author, and investigator.