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After graduation from Yale University in 1972 (with a B.S. in Engineering and Applied Science), I spent a couple of years trying to launch an engineering career. Well, it didn’t take long for me to change direction. In 1974, I enrolled at the University of Miami School of Law, where my career in Florida’s courtrooms began. I have been a civil trial attorney since 1977, with more than a hundred cases tried to verdict and dozens of appeals. My first attempts at storytelling came in the President’s Columns I wrote for the Martin County Bar Association’s monthly newsletter. I described cases and situations I witnessed that illustrated some of the good to be found in the American legal system. My first community-wide publication was a short piece I wrote for the Palm Beach Post’s Accent section in 2007. It concerned a humble man who came to the United States from Chile and began a successful floral business by selling generous bunches of flowers out of the back of a beat-up van. The story of how the man had enabled his family to realize the American Dream ended in heart-warming fashion when the man’s daughter graduated law school and became an attorney herself.
In The Flower Man’s Daughter, published three years later, the lead character, Anthony “Tony” Gannon, is recruited by the CIA after graduating from Yale in 1972. While the American intelligence community had been focused on the Cold War and Russian and East German threats, the establishment of Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba, and his growing relationship with the Soviet Union, best illustrated by the Cuban Missile Crisis, became a growing concern. When Chile elected a socialist President who promptly nationalized several American-owned businesses, including Kennecott’s and Anaconda’s copper mines, President Nixon authorized the CIA to take covert action. The Company hurriedly sent Gannon and another Yalie, both lacking military experience and in-depth training, to the capital of Chile as part of its effort to help destabilize President Salvador Allende’s socialist government. The book details their experiences at Yale and then in Chile, including many accurate historical details later revealed by the Church Committee’s Senate investigation. Included in the story is a climactic situation that requires Tony to make a difficult and dangerous decision.
My second novel, The Judge’s Lawyer, follows Gannon, no longer a CIA agent, as a lawyer in 1981 Miami, one year after the Mariel Boatlift. I included quite a bit of carefully researched history about the city and its Cuban exile component. Ultimately, Gannon must defend a previously respected judge who refuses to cooperate in his defense against a charge of murdering a prominent Cuban exile. Together with his old Yale buddy and a lady he met in Chile, Tony must work to uncover the judge’s motive. The mystery includes courtroom drama, romance, politics and intrigue set against a background of actual events involving Chile, Cuba and Miami.
I’m very pleased to be able to share these stories with you. Thanks so much for reading!
Jack
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