The Best American Crime Writing 2003

CONTRIBUTORS

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a newspaper editor/publisher, ROBERT SAM ANSON was educated at the University of Notre Dame. He began working for Time while still a college student and served as correspondent in the Chicago, Los Angeles, Saigon, and New York bureaus. Taken captive by North Vietnamese/Khmer Rouge forces while on assignment in Cambodia in August 1970, he was released after several weeks.

He served as chief anchorman/executive producer for special events at WNET/13 and was a senior writer for New Times magazine, a special correspondent for Life, a contributing editor for Esquire, and editor in chief of Los Angeles Magazine. At present a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he is the author of six books and has written for, among others, The New York Times, New York, the London Sunday Times, U.S. News & World Report, and the Los Angeles Times.

Regarded as an investigative specialist, he covered Bosnia, organized crime, race riots, national politics, the New Left, the civil rights movement, and the sixties. He thinks of himself as the Susan Lucci of the National Magazine Awards.

MARIE BRENNER is writer at large of Vanity Fair and the author of five books, including the best-selling Great Dames: What I Learned from Older Women (Crown 2001) and House of Dreams: The Bingham Family of Louisville (1988).

“The Man Who Knew Too Much,” her investigation of the life of Big Tobacco whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand, inspired the Michael Mann movie, The Insider, starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe, which was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture. She is the winner of three Front Page Awards and her articles have appeared in The New Yorker, New York, Vogue, and The New York Times Magazine. Her reporting on the Enron case was used as the basis for questioning during the Senate hearings on the matter.

RENE CHUN is a New York-based writer who has written for numerous publications including The New York Times, Esquire, GQ, and New York. He is currently working on a book about the former World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer, which is based on an article of his that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.

GARY COHEN lives in Washington, D.C., and writes for The Atlantic Monthly and Vanity Fair magazines.

DEVIN FRIEDMAN is a senior writer at GQ magazine. He has also been on staff at Men’s Journal and Esquire. He would appreciate your not making any men’s magazine jokes. He’s written for Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, among others, and he was nominated for a National Magazine Award and was a finalist for the Livingston Award. He was raised by a criminal defense attorney and used to work for the public defender’s office; it’s not surprising that he often has somewhat more compassion for criminals than normal people do.

JOSHUA HAMMER has been Newsweek’s Jerusalem bureau chief since January 2001. Before that, he was the magazine’s bureau chief in Nairobi, Buenos Aires, and Berlin. He is the author of Chosen by God: A Brothers Journey, a finalist for the 2000 Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the forthcoming A Season in Bethlehem: Unholy War in a Sacred Place.

SKIP HOLLANDSWORTH has been writing crime stories for Texas Monthly for fifteen years. He has been nominated for the National Magazine Award four times and several of his articles have been optioned by film producers. He is now working on a nonfiction book for HarperCollins on the mysterious murders of seven women in Austin, Texas, in the late nineteenth century.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER, the author of the international bestseller The Perfect Storm and Fire, has been awarded a National Magazine Award and an SAIS-Novartis Prize for his journalism. He lives in New York.

TOM JUNOD is a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award. He is a writer at large for Esquire, and lives in Marietta, Georgia.

JESSE KATZ is a senior writer for The Los Angeles Magazine. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Texas Monthly. He received a 2002 gold medal in reporting from the national City and Regional Magazine Association for his investigation into the murder of former Los Angeles police chief Bernard Parks’s granddaughter. As a Los Angeles Times reporter from 1985 to 2000, he was a member of the Metro staff that twice won Pulitzer Prizes in the spot news category, for the 1992 LA riots and for the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

JAY KIRK has written for Harpers Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, the Chicago Reader, Nerve.com, and other publications. This story was nominated for a National Magazine Award.

ROBERT KURSON is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and Harvard Law School. He is a senior editor at Chicago magazine, a frequent contributor to Esquire, and has written for Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications.

PETER LANDESMAN is a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. His nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. His first novel, The Raven, was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters prize for best first fiction in 1996. He lives in Los Angeles and New York with his wife, photographer and journalist Kimberlee Acquaro.

DOUG MOST is a senior editor at Boston Magazine and a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Sports Illustrated and The New York Times Magazine. He’s had pieces chosen to appear in Best American Sports Writing and the first edition of Best American Crime Writing. He’s the author of Always in Our Hearts: Amy Grossberg, Brian Peterson, and the Baby They Didn’t Want

Award-winning journalist MAXIMILLIAN POTTER has been on staff at GQ since 2000, covering sports, business, politics, and crime. He’s written for Outside, Premiere, Details, and Philadelphia Magazine. He lives with his wife and two sons in Pennsylvania.

PETER RICHMOND is a staff writer for GQ magazine, a commentator for NPR’s Morning Edition, and the author of three books. His fourth, a biography of the late singer Peggy Lee, will be published by Henry Holt in 2005. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Rolling Stone.

JEFF TIETZ has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and Rolling Stone. He lives in Texas.

PAIGE WILLIAMS is a native of Tupelo, Mississippi, and has written for The New York Times Magazine, Men’s Journal, Playboy, and Atlanta, and before that wrote for The Charlotte Observer. Now she lives in New York and is a first-year MFA candidate in fiction at Columbia University.

EVAN WRIGHT is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, where he has been dubbed “ambassador to the underbelly” for his coverage of the West Coast’s peculiar underworld of porn magnates, celebrity drug addicts, anarchist environmentalists, Internet scam artists, punk skateboarder gangs, and unrepentant murderers. He previously worked for Larry Flynt as the entertainment editor at Hustler magazine. He has also contributed to Time Asia, Men’s Journal, ESPN magazine, and LA Weekly. During the past eighteen months he has reported from the Middle East on the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Evan Wright lives in Southern California.

LAWRENCE WRIGHT is a writer of books, magazine articles, and screenplays, both fiction and nonfiction. His screenplay, Siege, coauthored with Menno Meyjes and its director, Edward Zwick, based on Wright’s original story, was called by Panorama “the most chillingly prescient terrorism film of them all.” He lives in Austin, Texas.