David Lender's Blog

I write thrillers based on my over 25 years experience on Wall Street about shady financiers, crooked lawyers and megalomaniacal CEOs who cheat on their taxes, use offshore shell corporations to hide their assets, and launder money.
Sound familiar based on current events?   Andrea Kudacki for the New York TimesYesterday, Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, did a plea bargain acknowledging guilt for campaign-finance violations and bank and tax fraud, and Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, was convicted of tax and bank fraud and failure to report a foreign bank account. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
When someone is surrounded by slimeballs, it's not guilt by association, just the old adage that where there's smoke there's fire. And our current president is proving to be surrounded.
When the FBI stormed Cohen’s office and hotel room by surprise in April, Rudy Giuliani, former U.S. Attorney who honed his hardball tactics in bringing down many of the 1980s insider traders—decades before he became Trump's attorney—said something very telling: “Is this surprising? Yes. Is it extraordinary? No. This is the way prosecutors get information…”
Giuliani spoke from experience; he knows how prosecutors like Mueller work. They throw lines in the water where they smell something stinky, then reel them in and see who they catch. Then use those peripheral crooks to turn States’ evidence, or just get early convictions and then squeeze the convicted for cooperation in exchange for short sentences. All as part of going after their ultimate prey.
So for Robert Mueller & Co., here's the score so far. Guilty pleas from Michael Flynn, (Trump’s first national security advisor), Rick Gates (Manafort’s longtime associate), and George Papadopoulos (a Trump campaign foreign policy advisor), 32 indicted individuals, and 187 charges regarding evidence of Russian tampering with our 2016 election.
And yesterday, Cohen and Manafort. More significantly, Cohen, in the process of copping his plea, implicated the president on the record in open court in baldly specific terms. He said he made payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal to keep them from talking about affairs they had with Trump “in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office,” and, “I participated in this conduct, which on my part took place in Manhattan, for the principal purpose of influencing the election” for president in 2016.
Does anybody really think this is going away?
So where do we go from here? Or where does Mueller go?
All I can say is if I were writing this story as a novel it wouldn’t turn out well for the president. Stay tuned.

Rep. Chris Collins from an upstate New York district near Buffalo is in major hot water, according to a recently unsealed 10-count, 30-page indictment from the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Allegedly, he tipped off his son to inside information before it was publicly disclosed about the failed drug trial of an Australian biotech company’s only drug with any prospects of success.
Ironically, or sadly, or pathetically, or outrageously, or all of the aforementioned, Collins was at the time the largest shareholder and a board member of the company, Innate Immunotheraputics Limited. He was also on a subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee that oversees the healthcare and drug industries and had been under investigation for months by the Congressional Ethics Office as a result of serving on the company’s board and promoting its prospects. To make matters worse, he allegedly lied to the FBI about the whole thing.
Whew. If all this is true, Collins is about the biggest nincompoop in Washington. (Well, maybe the second biggest.) That’s a photo of Collins at left from his Facebook page, showing him at a recent constituent event holding a plate of fried dough. Fried dough is exactly what he’ll be if the U.S. Attorney has the goods on him. And it sounds like it does.
The indictment says that after Collins’ tip his son, Cameron, sold almost 1.4 million shares of Innate in 54 trades starting the next morning, avoiding some $570,000 of losses he otherwise would have incurred when the stock tanked over 92% the day the failed drug trial was announced. Cameron is also under indictment for passing on the insider info to his fiancé’s father, Stephen Zarsky, his fiancé and other of their relatives and friends, who also sold their stock and avoided close to $200,000 in losses.
All that is documented in the indictment by emails, texts, phone records and stock trading data. That includes the email Collins got from Innate’s CEO saying the drug failed the trial while Collins was on the South Lawn of the White House attending the annual Congressional Picnic. It includes Collins’ email back saying, “Wow. How are these results even possible???” It also includes records of Collins’ frantic seven phone calls to Cameron, in the last of which he finally got through to him. Ditto a press release Collins had his staff release, stating that Cameron sold his stock only after a halt on its trading had been lifted, and at “substantial financial loss.”
Collins & Son and Zarsky are all named in the indictment that alludes to six other unindicted co-conspirators (Zarsky’s wife, daughter, two brothers and a friend, and a friend of Cameron and his fiancé). I stress unindicted, because if the U.S. Attorney’s previous modus operandi—and that of any other methodical prosecutor—is any guide, it started at the bottom and got the six minnows to flip by squeezing them into ratting out the bigger fish.
One of my first novels, Bull Street , is about an insider trading ring, and I never would have put a character in it who behaved as idiotically as Collins is alleged to because nobody would believe it.
A few years ago I wrote a blog entitled You Can’t Make This Stuff Up on the psychology of insider traders based on my experience on Wall Street. They seem to have no shame or no memory of previous convictions for the crime. The practice will go on forever.
And they’ll keep getting caught. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern district of New York has a winning record in getting convictions for insider trading. They’re the guys who sent Ivan Boesky, Marty Siegel, Dennis Levine and Mike Milken to jail in the 1980s. Preet Bharara, the previous U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, won over 85 insider trading cases in a row at one point. They don’t go to a grand jury unless they’ve got the goods. Collins’ tip to his son occurred over a year ago, the FBI took until April of this year to interview Collins & Son and Zarsky, and the U.S. Attorney until now to indict them. They’re efficient, systematic and relentless. Usually when they surface, where there’s smoke there’s fire.
In the few days since his indictment, Collins has been kicked off the Energy and Commerce Committee and suspended his re-election campaign for his House seat in November. “Meritless,” is what Collins has called the charges. We’ll see. Unless Collins has redefined the word.
He may also have redefined the word “nincompoopery.”

Sometimes a pitbull just needs to take charge. 

Last winter, Styles felt that way when we drove out to Long Island for the day to go to a doctor’s office. I guess he didn’t appreciate my staying in the right lane on the Throgs Neck Bridge and getting passed like we were standing still by commuters rushing to work.
So while I was upstairs at the doc’s, he acted. I came down and saw him in the driver’s seat, paused and then decided it seemed only natural to climb in back. When I did he turned and gave me his look, like, “Where to, Poppi?”


That’s his black watch plaid coat he’s wearing. It’s his favorite; he gets excited when I pull it out, and he sticks his head into the neck opening and waits for me to wrap the Velcro strap around his chest in anticipation of a trip or a walk.
He’s less excited about his Thunder Shirt. It’s an open question as to whether it will solve his jitters with thunder, but the last time he seemed antsy, I put it on him and he went right to sleep, thud, on the hardwood floor.
But forget about driving: Styles is at his take-charge best when we go for walks, particularly when we’re at the Milford house in PA. He pins his ears back and puts those muscular pitbull shoulders into it like he’s Buck in The Call of the Wild pulling a sled across the Alaskan tundra.
And in the process he’s a babe magnet. If I were younger (lots younger), I’d be picking up twenty-something girls like magic. They flock to him. “Oh, he’s so handsome, can we pet him?”
Who could say no? Not Sty. He lets them get in a few strokes to his head, then goes for the crotch with his nose, the old doggie greeting. “Oooh,” they say and giggle.
Good boy, I’m thinking. What a guy.
That's what pitbulls do; take charge and get babes.

Last weekend I had the pleasure of introducing Lee Child on stage and rubbing elbows with him (he’s a Yankees fan) as I chaperoned him for the day at our Milford Readers & Writers Festival in Milford, Pennsylvania.

Prior to the festival, when I was going over final arrangements with his associate, I noticed that Lee had requested his driver pick him up before our dinner for festival speakers and organizers, so I said I’d get him something to eat for dinner. She described Lee as the very definition of the word “chill” (he is)—content with a place to have a cigarette and a cup of black coffee—and suggested he'd be happy with a piece of lemon pound cake for the car ride home.
Manette got a chuckle out of that story and the day before the festival she saw slices of lemon pound cake as impulse purchase items on the checkout line at the grocery store. She bought one for Lee.
When I met Lee the morning of the festival at the Hotel Fauchère, we were going over the schedule for the day and I mentioned that I would arrange something for him to eat before the car picked him up. I told him the story of the lemon pound cake. He smiled and asked me to thank Manette.
After the first event I went home to walk Styles and when I looked for Lee's lemon pound cake it was gone. We call my stepson, Zac, Bear Claw, because he has a habit of wandering downstairs in the middle of the night and eating whatever is around, most times mauling it in the process and leaving a trail of crumbs and wrappers behind. In this case there was no evidence that Lee's lemon pound cake had ever existed.
I was sitting next to Lee during the next presentation at the festival and someone on stage mentioned food. I leaned over to Lee and explained to him who Bear Claw was and that he had eaten Lee’s lemon pound cake. He laughed.
I had told Manette about Bear Claw’s indiscretion before I returned to the festival, and when it came time for me to introduce Lee on stage, we were sitting in the front row, waiting to go on. Manette walked up and I introduced her. She handed Lee a paper bag and leaned over to speak to him. I heard Lee say something to her about Bear Claw and they both laughed.
After the festival, Manette told me she had given Lee a lemon meltaway cookie—the only substitute she could find at the Patisserie Fauchère.In the process she said she was a fan, too. She said Lee smiled appreciatively. Then Manette said, “Of lemon pound cake.”

Elmore Leonard, one of America’s recognized masters of thriller/suspense fiction, primarily in the crime genre, wrote a piece for a New York Times column, “Writers on Writing,” in July 2001.

Click to Buy on AmazonHe since published it in book form as Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, which you can get here on Amazon.
Leonard got his start by scraping out a living writing short stories and westerns (one of which, Valdez is Coming, is now considered a classic of the genre). He grew up in the Detroit area, and it’s only natural that he transitioned to writing crime fiction, where he displayed an unmatched virtuosity in capturing authentic street characters and slang in his novels.
Over 20 of his stories have been made into movies or TV shows. Westerns: Hombre and Joe Kidd, starring Paul Newman and Clint Eastwood, respectively, and more recently 3:10 to Yuma starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. Crime: Get Shorty starring John Travolta and Gene Hackman; Out of Sight starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez; Killshotstarring Mickey Rourke and Diane Lane; the FX series Justified starring Timothy Olyphant; and so on.
Leonard didn’t achieve that kind of success because he was lucky; he earned his chops the hard way, from the ground up, and as he says about his little book: “These are the rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story.”
Anyone who writes fiction, or aspires to, will benefit from the advice based on his experience.
Here it is in summary form:
1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . .5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.I encourage you to read what he has to say about each of those rules, sparing as it is.I keep a hardcover copy in my living room so I can read it from time to time. I find it always helps keep me on track.

My novel, The Gravy Train, is the story of a novice banker who tries to help an aging chairman buy his company back before the Wall Street sharks who drove it into bankruptcy can carve it up for themselves.
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Finn Keane is a starry-eyed, freshly-minted MBA who lands a job at Abercrombie, Wirth & Co., the hottest firm on Wall Street in a red-hot market. He’s assigned to work on his first deal under the firm’s biggest producer, Jack Shane. Finn is thrilled. The deal is an ambitious acquisition by northeast regional department store chain Kristos & Co. of the high-end retailer, Milstein Brothers Stores, that will create a nationwide retail department store juggernaut. Finn immediately bonds with Nick Christanapoulas, the chairman of Kristos & Co., who has handed the day-to-day reins of the 160-store chain he built to his idiot son-in-law, Stanley, who Shane talked into the ill-conceived deal.
Shortly after the deal closes, the economy tanks and the markets crash. The merged company defaults on the junk bonds that Shane orchestrated to finance the deal even before it makes its first interest payment.
It’s at that point that Finn learns that Shane isn’t only ABC’s biggest producer; he’s also its biggest SOB.
Immediately after the company is forced to file for bankruptcy, the Wall Street sharks close in, led by Shane, and things move quickly after that. Finn gets fired by Shane and he aligns himself with Nick. Finn and Nick team up with a streetwise old bankruptcy lawyer in an effort to help Nick buy the company back out of bankruptcy.
Finn and his rag-tag group face off against Shane, the creditors and their battery of numbers crunchers, led by one of the most sophisticated and brazen bankruptcy lawyers on Wall Street, who knows all the dirty tricks of the trade and then some.
As in all minnow-versus-whale stories, you wonder how the good guys can possibly win because the odds are so stacked against them. But even if they can’t, half the fun is seeing if they can at least land a few solid punches against the bad guys before they go down swinging.
The book is based in part on the first bankruptcy deal I worked on early in my career, with some colorful characters based on a number of the oddballs and SOBs I encountered in the course of it.
And the name of the book is taken from real life as well: it’s the nickname of the Amtrak train from New York to Wilmington, Delaware, the site of the court where many of the main bankruptcy cases are decided. It’s on the cars of The Gravy Train on the way to court where the lawyers, bankers and creditors committees who populate the bankruptcy world huddle together. They posture, haggle and yell at each other to cut the deals they present to the judges.
I hope you’ll give The Gravy Train a try. It’s a fast-paced read that will give you some insight into how the bankruptcy game works, and hopefully entertain you.


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Bull Street is on sale for $1.99 for a limited time. It's a good chance to get into the series at the beginning.
Bull Street is the story of Richard Blum, a freshly-minted MBA who goes to Wall Street as a naive, novice investment banker and soon discovers he’s landed smack in the middle of an insider-trading ring. As Richard peels away the layers of the illegal activities he's uncovered, he finds out that all the insider trading surrounds the deals of his firm’s largest client, Harold Milner. Milner is the takeover maven of his generation who Richard has idolized for years. In fact, on Richard’s first big deal on the Street, Milner has taken him under his wing. So Richard can’t believe Milner is involved in the insider trading, but stops short when he thinks of telling Milner what he’s discovered.
What if Milner ispart of the ring? What if he isn’t but if Richard’s disclosure to Milner leaks to the traders and triggers them to come after him because he knows too much? And then what of the Feds he finds out are sniffing around? Will the footprints he’s left with his own digging cause the Feds to think he’s a participant in the ring and put him in their crosshairs?
Not only does Bull Street have those thriller elements, it's a coming of age story about Wall Street told from an insider's perspective. That's because I wrote the first draft of it when I was a freshly-minted MBA who landed on Wall Street as a naive, novice investment banker. As such, the novel includes my painful learning experiences and hard-earned lessons as I cut my teeth in Wall Street's sharp-elbowed world. I started my career there in an era that saw major insider trading and securities fraud scandals: the likes of Ivan Boesky, Marty Siegel, Dennis Levine and Mike Milken paid huge fines and went to jail in those days.

And so among the usual outsized personalities, misfits and oddballs I encountered in my early days on Wall Street, I also met a number of crooks from that era, a few of them high-profile. Bull Street is fiction, but the grandiose egos, the bare-knuckles negotiating tactics and the questionable ethics of many of the men and women of Wall Street portrayed in the book are true to life.
I hope you’ll give Bull Street a try. It's the first in of my White-Collar Crime Thrillers, and like all of the books in the series, it offers a window into the world of Wall Street’s financial gamesmanship from the perspective of one who’s been there.
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Saudi Arabia recently announced that it had stripped its religious police of its power to arrest people when carrying out its duties to enforce sharia, Islamic law. It's a subject I've researched and written about throughout my Sasha Del Mira espionage series—Trojan Horse, Sasha Returns, Arab Summerand my most recent novel, On Home Soil . The Saudi religious police, known variously by the names the Mutawwa’in, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (I’m not kidding), and Haia, enforce the strict rules of the Islamic code of behavior as outlined in sharia.
For example, the religious police will arrest women who are not "properly" clothed. That means not wearing an abaya—a formless black robe concealing any aspect of her anatomy—or a hijab—a head scarf covering her hair. Or caught driving a car. Or not accompanied by a male family member or husband; male friends or boyfriends won’t do. Or anyone, man or woman, caught drinking alcohol, using drugs or smoking tobacco in public. That’s not an exhaustive list.
What the new Saudi directive means is that the religious police will have to report those violating sharia to the police or the drug police instead of making the arrests themselves. It's not clear what that means in practical terms, but it doesn't sound like much of a change.
The Saudi regime, which has been led on and off by the Al Saud family for centuries, and which passes down its leadership exclusively through members of its royal family, was founded and is still firmly rooted in the Wahhabi sect of the Sunni Muslim faith. Wahhabism is an especially strict and reactionary interpretation of the Muslim religion, very similar to that of ISIS’ interpretation of it.
That's a scary concept, although the Saudi regime learned decades ago to pacify the Saudi masses with generous social welfare programs to keep the peace and tamp down any potential uprisings that could unseat them. That's also a fundamental element of my Sasha Del Mira series.
Lately, with the collapse of oil prices from over $100 a barrel in 2014 to the mid-20s per barrel in the first quarter of 2016, recently recovering only to the $40 per barrel level, the Saudi regime is under increasing pressure. It’s consuming its financial reserves to maintain funding of its social programs. That is it’s only means of keeping the average Saudi schlub from rising up against the Saudi royal family billionaires who live in the gilded Royal Palace and spend indiscriminately on anything and everything they want.
Think the Saudi 1% trying to placate Bernie Sanders by stuffing billions of dollars worth of caviar and fine French pate down his gullet.
So rather than looking at this recent curtailment of the powers of the Saudi religious police as a major social change, see it only as another means of the Saudi royals placating a restive Saudi public. A Saudi public that feels ever more oppressed by its elitist regime that’s been dominating the Saudi economy and culture for generations.
The situation isn’t stable.
It makes a good backdrop for thrillers.
Stay tuned.

Styles, our pitbull, has a high school friend, Jesse, who comes to play ball with him in the afternoons. Manette and I started hiring kids a few years ago from the Babysitters/Dog Walkers listing in a local newspaper. It’s worked out well, and over time we’ve had about a dozen come to the house after school a few days a week. At least that’s how it started.
For those of you who don’t know pitbulls, they’re working dogs who are incredibly energetic and athletic. They need to burn off energy or they come at you with their favorite form of working dog “work,” which in the case of Styles is balls. He’s obsessed with them. Somebody needs to throw them, play tug of war over them or say “What about that one,” and point to another to send him off to pounce on it after dropping the one in his mouth.
Styles quickly became accustomed to having captive playmates and so we needed to organize on it a daily basis. As I said earlier, we’ve had a dozen or so, but Jesse is his champion and he adores her like no other. She doesn’t talk on the phone, watch YouTubes or text with her friends; Styles gets her unqualified attention while she’s here. She strokes his head when she arrives, talks sweetly to him while they play, and blows kisses to him as she leaves.
Now it’s her job exclusively.
That’s Styles in the photo at left, waiting for Jesse at the front door.

I call him Mr. Clairvoyant, because he knows when it’s approaching 3:00 pm and he starts his vigil. Since Jesse recently got her driver’s license, she generally pulls into the driveway, opens the electric gate with the remote we gave her and comes in the back door. When Styles hears the gate opening he starts yelping and crying like he hasn’t seen her in weeks. The yard is fenced in because of the pool, so when Jesse pulls to a stop in the back we let him out to take a victory lap around the yard and greet her as she’s getting out of her car. On days we aren’t home because of appointments, she lets herself in with the key we gave her.
That’s her setup in the other photo at left. She prefers Earl Grey tea with sugar and cream and we usually leave her a cookie for herself and a treat to give Styles.

We know that eventually, like Nikki, Tina, Nico, Megan and the others before her, Jesse will get a job at the mall or go off to college. 

I have no idea what we’ll do when that happens, because Styles will be inconsolable. Maybe, like Manette says, we should just adopt her.

Click on cover to buy on AmazonI just released the fourth installment of my Sasha Del Mira thriller series, On Home Soil. CIA assassin Sasha Del Mira and her agency cohort, Tom Goddard, have become involved in a steamy romance, and both begin questioning their motivation to continue in the spying game. Then ISIS sends its top battlefield commander in Syria, Omar the Albino, to the States to train and mobilize its underground cells to bring its jihad to the U.S. As a result, Sasha and Tom are thrust into an all-out effort to thwart ISIS’ terror.
Omar quickly organizes a series of kidnappings, and ISIS videos begin surfacing on the Internet of American hostages in orange jumpsuits. A CIA plan to enlist the American public in a grass-roots effort to help prevent ISIS terror by reporting on any suspicious activities and supporting agents in the field, begins to complicate Sasha and Tom’s work. Part of the program—termed the Patriot Program—gives rise to an armed nationwide group bent on vigilante justice that threatens to target anyone fitting a Muslim profile.
So not only do Sasha and Tom have to track down Omar before he unleashes a wave of beheadings and terrorist attacks on home soil, but they have to stop the rogue Patriots before social chaos erupts.
I started the novel over a year ago after ISIS surfaced as regional terrorist force in Syria and Iraq. I did most of my research from daily news reports, much the same as I did in researching and writing Arab Summer, the third Sasha Del Mira thriller, based on the Arab Spring uprising a few years ago. I believed that by basing On Home Soil on the idea that ISIS would bring its terror to the West, I was creating a fictional story by extrapolating from the news. As I continued writing I saw ISIS unfold from a regional Middle-Eastern menace to a group with global terrorist activities. I finished the novel in August and have been working with my editor since then. Little did I know what would actually happen in Paris last month, and that we would need to gird ourselves for the possibility of similar attacks here in the States.
I hope you’ll read On Home Soil for what it’s intended to be—a fast-paced action thriller based on current events—and not my attempt to predict what might occur here at home.
The Sasha Del Mira Thriller series (click on cover to buy on Amazon):




CIA assassin Sasha Del Mira and Tom Goddard, her CIA cohort, are involved in a steamy romance, and are questioning their motivation to continue in the spying game, when they’re thrust into an all-out effort to thwart ISIS’ plans to bring their jihad and terror to the U.S.

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Former CIA spy Sasha Del Mira comes out of retirement to avenge her husband’s murder by Islamic terrorists and stop their Arab Spring uprising to topple the Saudi government.
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A young Sasha Del Mira must stop multiple attempts to topple the Saudi regime by murdering a Saudi prince, who is like a father to her, and replacing him with one of his sons as a puppet of a Muslim terrorist group.
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Daniel Youngblood, a world-weary investment banker falls in love with an exotic spy and then teams up with her to stop a Muslim terrorist plot to cripple the world’s oil capacity.
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