The Story Behind the Story: “The Dread Line,” by Bruce DeSilva

(Editor’s note: This is the third piece The Rap Sheet has posted by New Jersey novelist Bruce DeSilva, following backgrounders on two of his previous yarns, Providence Rag [2014] and A Scourge of Vipers [2015]. DeSilva’s crime fiction has won the Edgar and Macavity awards, and he’s been listed as a finalist for the Shamus, Anthony, and Barry awards. His short stories have appeared in Akashic Press’ well-respected noir anthologies. DeSilva has critiqued books for The New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, and the Associated Press. Prior to his novel-writing success, he spent 40 years as a journalist, most recently as worldwide writing coach for the AP. His new, fifth book, The Dread Line [Forge], will be published on September 6 in hardcover and e-book editions. You can enjoy an excerpt from that novel here.)

In the end, the New England Patriots should consider themselves lucky. What if Aaron Hernandez had felt disrespected at practice one day, stalked out to the parking lot, fetched a handgun, and shot quarterback Tom Brady? Or head coach Bill Belichick? Or maybe both?

After all, he was capable of such violence according to Massachusetts authorities, who will try him later this year for shooting two men to death following a bar brawl in Boston’s South End in 2012. Not that a conviction will change Hernandez’s life all that much. At age 26, the former Patriots tight end is already serving life without parole for the 2013 murder of his wife’s sister’s fiancé, a guy he used to party hearty with.

To the casual football fan, this has been a shocking turn of events in the life of a once goofy, well-liked Bristol, Connecticut, kid who shattered state receiving records in high school, earned All-American honors at the University of Florida, got drafted by the Patriots after his junior year, and promptly formed the most prolific tight-end receiving combination in NFL history with teammate Rob Gronkowski.

It is worth pausing to remember what a remarkable athlete Hernandez was. As a rabid Patriots fan, I spent many a Sunday afternoon marveling at his talent. Sometimes squatting beside an offensive tackle, sometimes splitting out wide, and sometimes even lining up as a running back, he was too fast for linebackers to cover and too powerful for safeties and cornerbacks to handle. And in both the passing and running game, he was a ferocious blocker.

But by the time the Patriots drafted him in 2010, those in the know understood that Hernandez was troubled. That’s why several teams removed him from their draft board, and why, despite being one of the greatest talents available, he fell to the Patriots in the fourth round. Knowing little about Hernandez’s past and a good deal about his abilities, I was initially thrilled by the pick, imagining the havoc Tom Brady would wreak with both him and Gronkowski as targets for his laser-like passes.

(Right) Aaron Hernandez

But surely the Patriots had an inkling about the kind of man they were about to set loose in their locker room. Perhaps they thought that success, money, and being surrounded by “character” players such as Brady, Matt Light, and Logan Mankins would tame Hernandez. If so, they were tragically mistaken.

Hernandez’s story was very much in my mind as I sat at my computer nearly two years ago and began writing The Dread Line, the fifth entry in my New England-based series of crime novels. I considered fictionalizing Hernandez’s story but soon dismissed the idea. There were too many loose ends left, and with the double-murder case yet pending, there still are. Besides, I wanted to write an original tale. So I asked myself, what if?

What if the Patriots, still reeling from the Hernandez saga, decided that their scouting department needed a professional investigator to help them vet a college star they were considering drafting?

So I invented Conner Bowditch, a defensive lineman with the speed of J.J. Watt and the strength of Ndamukong Suh, who had starred at Central High in Providence, Rhode Island, and gone on to disrupt offenses at Boston College. I had the Patriots turn to McCracken & Associates Investigative Services, Providence’s best private detective agency, where the hero of my crime novels, Liam Mulligan, had just started working part-time.

Unlike Bowditch, a Providence son of privilege who was, to all appearances, a choirboy, Hernandez grew up in central Connecticut, where, according to multiple reports, he started hanging out with a bad crowd at age 16 after his father died. At the University of Florida, where Hernandez played for Urban Meyer and with Tim Tebow, there were reports of drug use and a bar fight in which he slugged an employee, puncturing his eardrum. And he was questioned about a 2007 shooting in which two men were wounded outside a Gainesville, Florida, club following an altercation with Hernandez and two of his teammates. Although local police wanted to charge Hernandez, prosecution was deferred after the player settled with the victims out of court.

(Left) Author DeSilva with his dogs, Rondo and Brady.

The Patriots may have figured they were minimizing their risk by giving Hernandez a modest rookie contract. However, after he emerged as a superstar, they rewarded him two years later with a five-year, $40 million deal that included a $12.5 million signing bonus—at the time the largest bonus ever given to a tight end.

But after the first murder charge was filed against him, the team cut him loose, costing him nearly $20 million in salary along with several endorsement deals.

In the aftermath, authorities began re-examining Hernandez’s role in the Gainesville shooting and asking what part, if any, he played in the 2013 Florida shooting of a man named Alexander Bradley, who was suing the player for the loss of his right eye. Last year, Hernandez was indicted for witness intimidation in connection with that incident. Bradley, according to published reports, had been a witness to the 2012 Boston double-murder with which Hernandez is charged.

Compared to Hernandez, the fictional Conner Bowditch seemed to be a great guy—an exceptional scholar and student leader who defended the weak against bullies, was beloved by his coaches, and planned to marry his high-school sweetheart.

At first, my man Mulligan thought of him as Saint Conner, assuming the investigative assignment would be routine. But as soon as Mulligan started asking questions, he got push-back. Bowditch, Mulligan discovered, had something to hide, and someone was willing to kill to make sure it remained secret.

And that’s all I’m going to say about that. To find out what the secret is, what it has to do with a sleazy sports agent named Morris Dunst, and whether the Patriots draft Bowditch anyway, you’ll just have to read the book.

READ MORE: “Obituary for the Newspaper Business” (The Cockeyed Pessimist), “An Interview About My New Crime Novel, The Dread Line,” “What’s a Mystery Writer to Do When His Hero Loses His Crime-Fighting Job?” and “How I Made the Transition from Journalist to Crime Novelist,” all by Bruce DeSilva.

The Story Behind the Story: “A Scourge of Vipers,” by Bruce DeSilva

(Editor’s note: This is the second piece The Rap Sheet has posted by novelist Bruce DeSilva, following a 2014 backgrounder on his previous yarn, Providence Rag. DeSilva’s crime fiction has won the Edgar and Macavity awards, and he’s been listed as a finalist for the Shamus, Anthony, and Barry awards. His short stories have appeared in Akashic Press’ well-respected noir anthologies. DeSilva has reviewed books for The New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, and The Associated Press. Prior to his novel-writing success, he spent 40 years as a journalist, and most recently served as worldwide writing coach for the AP. His fourth book, A Scourge of Vipers [Forge], is just out this week in hardcover and e-book editions.)

One morning a couple of years ago, I poured myself a cup of coffee, opened my New York Times, and spotted a story about sports gambling. It wasn’t about the odds on the New England Patriots winning the Super Bowl, or an exposé on point-shaving, or a breathless account of a raid on a bookie joint. Instead, it was a dry-as-dust bit of government reporting on a bill Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey was planning to introduce.

Republican Christie, eager for ways to balance the state budget without raising taxes, wanted to legalize sports gambling so he could tax the profits. I could see right off that the idea was bound to generate some heat.

For one thing, it meant Christie would have to take on the U.S. government, because federal law outlaws sports gambling everywhere but in Nevada and three other states where it was grandfathered in.

For another thing, it pitted the governor against the men who ran the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the professional sports leagues, all of whom had long opposed legalization, claiming it would threaten the integrity of their games.

Sure enough, the NCAA was especially apoplectic, threatening to blackball New Jersey arenas from the annual March Madness basketball tournament unless Christie backed down.

And the way I saw it, organized crime figures, aghast at the prospect of seeing their bookmaking profits disappear, wouldn’t much like Christie’s plan, either.

But the governor’s proposal also had powerful supporters. Some public employee unions saw it as a way to protect their threatened pensions. And the Atlantic City gambling kingpins were eager to tap this new source of revenue. Once, they had run the only games east of the Mississippi; but they’d seen their profits cut in half by the explosion of casino gambling in nearby states over the last couple of decades, and they were growing desperate.

What all this portended was conflict--not such a good thing for the legislative process, perhaps, but solid gold for a crime novelist.

I clipped the story from the paper and started keeping a file on developments. As soon as I finished writing Providence Rag, the third book in my Edgar Award-winning series of crime novels set in Providence, Rhode Island, I started researching sports gambling in earnest. I thought I already knew quite a bit about the subject, but I was startled by some of what I learned.

I knew a lot of Americans liked to bet on sports, but I had no idea how many. According to surveys, 85 percent of us gamble on sporting events at least once in a while.

I also knew a lot of money was changing hands, but I had no idea how much. It turns out that the total amount Americans gamble on sports, most of it bet illegally, is estimated at three hundred and eighty billion dollars a year. To put that figure in perspective, it’s six times greater than the annual budget of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Clearly, both the proponents and opponents of Christie’s plan had deep pockets, millions at their disposal to try to influence the outcome. And before long, a number of other governors with hard-pressed state budgets started thinking about following Christie’s lead.

So I asked myself, “what if”--the question that has launched every novel I’ve written.

What if the colorful fictional governor I’d introduced in my previous novels proposed legalizing sports gambling in Rhode Island? Fiona McNerney, a former religious sister nicknamed Attila the Nun for her take-no-prisoners style of politics, wasn’t much like Christie, but she did resemble him in one respect. She wasn’t one to back down in the face of pressure.

With that, my new novel, A Scourge of Vipers, began to take shape.

The action begins when powerful organizations that have a lot to lose--or gain--if gambling is made legal, flood Rhode Island with millions of dollars to buy the votes of state legislators. All that money in a little state where the average campaign for a seat in the state legislature normally costs just $10,000.

Naturally, all hell breaks loose. First, a powerful state legislator turns up dead. Then a mobbed-up bagman gets shot down, and his briefcase full of cash goes missing.

My protagonist, Liam Mulligan, an investigative reporter for the fictional Providence Dispatch, wants to investigate, but the bottom-feeding conglomerate that recently purchased the struggling newspaper has no interest in serious public-interest reporting. So Mulligan goes rogue, digging into the story on his own. Soon, shadowy forces try to derail his investigation by destroying his career, his reputation, and perhaps his life.

The result is at once a suspenseful murder mystery and a serious exploration of the hypocrisy surrounding sports betting and the corrupting influence of big money on politics.

As I was working on the novel, Governor Christie pressed forward with his plan, pushing his legalization bill through the state legislature in defiance of the federal law. He declared that the sports betting would be launched at the Monmouth Park racetrack, and that it would soon spread to the Atlantic City casinos.

The professional sports leagues sued to stop him, and last fall a federal judge blocked Christie’s plan. Now, the issue is headed to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia--and quite likely, eventually to the U.S. Supreme Court.

READ MORE: “A Scourge of Vipers: New Excerpt,” by Bruce DeSilva (Criminal Element).

The Story Behind the Story: “Providence Rag,” by Bruce DeSilva

(Editor’s note: Below you will find the 48th entry in our “Story Behind the Story” series. It was sent our way by Bruce DeSilva, who put in four decades as a journalist, working as an editor and national writer at The Hartford Courant and as an investigative reporter for The Providence Journal. More recently, he’s served as a writing coach for The Associated Press. His first novel, 2010’s Rogue Island introduced Liam Mulligan, a Rhode Island newspaper veteran, who reappeared in 2012’s Cliff Walk. DeSilva’s latest Mulligan outing, Providence Rag--about which he writes here--is being released this week by Forge.)

I’ve certainly never thought of myself as delicate, but novels, movies, and TV shows about serial killers often make me squirm. It’s been that way ever since my real-life brush with one.

Not that I was ever in any danger. The killer in question was already behind bars before I spent several weeks of my life researching and writing a magazine story about him. It was the kind of article journalists call a hell of a good story, but my god, it was an ugly one.

The killer’s weapon of choice was butcher knives, and he used them to stab his victims over and over again, long after he knew they were gone. The dead included two sweet little girls. As a father, I couldn’t help but imagine their terror, and it sickened me. I know this sounds melodramatic, but sometimes, in my dreams, I can still hear them scream.

So two decades later, when I retired from a 40-year-long journalism career to write crime novels, I was sure I would never write one about a serial killer. I didn’t want to get that close to pure evil again.

Yet, those long-ago murders never stopped working on my subconscious, the place where novels are born.

For several years, I resisted the impulse to fictionalize the story. I told myself we’ve already got all the make-believe serial killers we need. Ever since Thomas Harris upped the ante with Hannibal Lecter, novelists and screenwriters have been tripping all over themselves trying to make each new psychotic butcher more twisted than the last. We’ve been treated to Jigsaw (who cuts his victims into puzzle pieces), The Grave Digger (who buries them alive in automobiles), Red John (who paints smiley faces on walls with human blood), Floyd Feylin Ferrell (who serves investigators chili made from his victims’ flesh) … I could go on, but I trust I’ve made my point.

When the compulsion to fictionalize the real-life case became too great to resist, I knew I would have to write a different kind of serial-killer book, one in which the focus would be on something other than brutal murder and criminal detection.

The result is Providence Rag, the third novel in my Edgar Award-winning series featuring Liam Mulligan, an investigative reporter for a dying newspaper in Providence, Rhode Island. The murders are committed and the killer is imprisoned in the first 75 pages. The rest of the book is dedicated to exploring an impossible moral dilemma: What are decent people supposed to do when a legal loophole requires that an unrepentant serial killer be released--and when the only way to keep him locked up is to fabricate new charges against him?


Convicted murderer Craig Price, aka “the Warwick Slasher”

The real criminal who inspired the novel is Craig Price, the most notorious murderer in Rhode Island history. He slaughtered two women and two children before he was old enough to drive. Just 13 years old when he began killing, and 15 when he was caught, he was the youngest serial killer in U.S. history. But that’s not the interesting part.

When Price was arrested in 1989, the state’s antiquated juvenile justice statutes had not been updated for decades, and when they were written, no one had ever imagined a child like him. So the law required that all juveniles, regardless of their crimes, be released and given a fresh start at age 21.

The state legislature promptly rewrote the law so this wouldn’t happen again, but in America, you can’t change the rules retroactively. So the authorities were faced with the chilling prospect of releasing Price after he’d served only six years for his crimes. Robert K. Ressler, one of the first FBI profilers, and the man credited with coining the term “serial killer,” was horrified. If Price gets out, he told me, “you’ll be piling up the bodies.”

But Price did not get out. Today, 25 years later, he remains behind bars, convicted of a series of assaults and offenses he supposedly committed while in prison. I have long suspected that some of these charges were fabricated, but at the very least it is obvious that Price has been absurdly over-sentenced. For example, the state gave him additional prison time for breaking a rule against swearing at correctional officers. Prisoners do that all the time, of course, but Price was the first to have his sentence extended for it. Later, he was given 30 years for contempt because he declined to submit to a court-ordered psychiatric examination.

Have the authorities abused their power to prevent Price’s release? Quite possibly. Should he ever be set free and given the chance to prey on the innocent again? I don’t think so. The ethical dilemma the case poses fascinates me. No matter which side you come down on, you are condoning something that is reprehensible. I wrote the novel to explore the implications of all this.

In real life, this conundrum hasn’t caused any soul-searching in Rhode Island--at least not publicly. Everyone seems content to let Price rot in prison. And who can blame them?

(Right) Author Bruce DeSilva

But a novel is fiction, after all, and Providence Rag is in no way intended to accurately depict real events. In the book, the ethical issue at the heart of the story haunts Mulligan and his colleagues at the Providence Dispatch.

Some people argue that authorities who are faking charges against the killer are perverting the criminal justice system. And if they are allowed to get away with it, what’s to stop them from framing someone else? Besides, it’s the journalist’s mission to report the truth.

Others argue that if the Dispatch breaks the story and the killer is released, he’s bound to kill again. And when that happens, the newspaper will have blood on its hands.

The dilemma eventually embroils Mulligan, his fellow reporters, his editors, and the entire state in a heated confrontation over where justice lies.

READ MORE: “Writer Interviews--Bruce DeSilva,” by Kristi Belcamino; “Bruce DeSilva,” by Gerald Bartell (Kirkus Reviews).

Going for “Rogue”

One of the reasons I switched from reading science fiction to mysteries in my teens was that crime fiction allowed me to visit real places I might not otherwise get to see.

For instance, Jonathan Valin’s private eye Harry Stoner books (The Lime Pit) showed me a Cincinnati I never visited, even as a devout baseball fan. Robert Irvine, who in the 1980s and ’90s wrote a great series featuring Moroni Traveler, a Mormon detective in Salt Lake City, was another excellent guide. So was Miriam Grace Monfredo, as she sent her librarian heroine, Glynis Tryon, out from Seneca Falls, New York, on Civil War-era adventures--one involving abolitionist John Brown. And Dianne Day’s lovely books about intrepid typist Fremont Jones, who became an early female (and feminist) sleuth in San Francisco right after the 1906 earthquake, whetted my appetite for Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell historical thrillers, as well as the wonderful series about a midwife in post-Revolutionary War Maine written by Margaret Lawrence, who more recently delivered Roanoke.

But Providence, the capital city of little Rhode Island, was never really a part of my crime education. The closest I came were a couple of Mark Arsenault’s books (Gravewriter), in which journalist Billy Povich left his pitiful post with a Providence broadsheet to solve crimes and unearth corruption for another paper in Charlestown, to the south.

More recently, though, I stumbled (albeit late) onto a debut gem called Rogue Island, which was published last October by Forge. All of the usual suspects--and some surprisingly unusual ones--were buzzing madly about this book in ads and jacket blurbs. “A tense, terrific thriller and a remarkably assured debut from Bruce DeSilva, an author to watch,” said Dennis Lehane. “Rogue Island is a stunning debut in the noir tradition,” gushed Harlan Coben. And Michael Connelly, arguably the best modern writer of mysteries involving newspaper reporters, added this cherry: “Writing with genuine authority, a dose of cynical humor, and a squinting eye on the world, Bruce DeSilva delivers a newspaper story that ranks with the best of them.”

Rogue Island lives up to those plaudits, and even exceeds them. Its protagonist is L.S.T. Mulligan (only a few childhood friends know that his first name is Liam), a studly, just-turned-40 reporter and troublemaker working for the only newspaper in town, The Providence Journal. Born and reared in Providence’s Mount Hope neighborhood, he’s an old-school newsy with a clever patter and curious romantic draw. When one of the several women who’ve fallen for him asks Mulligan how his tiny, Mob-infected state got its name, he tells her, “Rhode Island is a bastardization of Rogue Island, a name the sturdy farmers of colonial Massachusetts bestowed upon the swarm of heretics, smugglers, and cutthroats who first settled the shores of Narragansett Bay.” Who knew?

In this fast-moving introductory tale (nominated recently for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel), we find Mulligan investigating a series of arsons that are destroying his old neighborhood and killing his lifelong friends. It becomes harder and harder for the reporter to take a dispassionate view of events. “While I waited, I looked over at what was left of 188 Doyle Avenue, where I’d played cops and robbers with the Jenkins twins when I was a kid,” Mulligan tells us at the scene of a particularly sad and nasty blaze. “Now half the roof was gone ... I stared at the unblinking third-story window on the southeast corner where old Mr. McCready, the teacher who’d first introduced me to Ray Bradbury and John Steinbeck, had been strangled by the smoke. The arsonist was reducing my childhood to ashes.”

Before he’s able to put this horrific story to bed, Mulligan will receive a bruising, weather threats from the Mob, be arrested, and face disciplinary action by his newspaper employer. In his pursuit of justice, he’ll ultimately win help from some unlikely sources.

Mulligan, a reformed drunk with an ulcer, drips ink from his veins the way all lifelong newspaper people do. He muses at one point: “Seems like I’m always hustling for something--a lead, a quote, a free parking space, space above the fold ...” And he has obviously been at a lot of fire scenes, which he describes with frightening perfection: “A sheet of flame climbed the front of the duplex. Black smoke boiled from cheap asphalt siding, mixing with gray smoke that curled from the eaves ...”

I could go on for page after page, quoting from Rogue Island. Then I’d probably spend almost equal time extolling author DeSilva’s skill at creating memorable characters with a tap on his keyboard. One of those fictional players is a young reporter (the son of the Journal’s owner), who chooses Mulligan to be his mentor. The older man responds by calling his new protégé Thanks, Dad.

Oddly enough, DeSilva appears to be harboring a grudge against a criminal defense attorney named Brady Coyle, who he casts as the prime villain in this entertaining yarn. Those of us who remember with affection the late William G. Tapply’s Boston-based series about a lawyer and fisherman named Brady Coyne can only laugh and shake our heads. Surely there’s an inside joke here, that DeSilva may let us in on one day.

READ MORE: “The Fascinating, Edgar-nominated Bruce DeSilva,” by Toni McGee Causey (Murderati).