David Hirshey was sitting in his office one morning last month, looking a little nervous. The HarperCollins executive editor had Mike Finkel's True Story face-out on his crowded shelf—a placement he reserves for special triumphs—and was pondering the coming media reception. "Journalists like to eat their young," he says, his face showing hints of both a smirk and a grimace. "We know there will be plenty of them waiting in the weeds."
Then again, when it comes to Finkel, Hirshey's used to the pitfalls. It's practically been one big bet after another since the magazine veteran began pursuing the disgraced New York Times writer. When Finkel's book releases later this month, it will culminate a nearly three-year tangle with the thorniest of questions: How do you publish a book about a convicted liar, by a confessed liar... as credible nonfiction?
Finkel was once a high-flying writer for the Times magazine, penning flashy, sometimes stylized pieces from Afghanistan, Gaza and Haiti. In 2001, he wrote a story about young boys working in the cocoa fields in Africa. The piece focused on the plight of one sad-looking boy named Youssouf Malé. The magazine featured the youth on its opening spread, and Finkel had another compelling piece.
There was only one problem: the character was a composite. Youssouf Male existed, but much of what Finkel attributed to him had been stitched together from stories Finkel had heard from other children.
In early 2002, during a brutal meeting with Adam Moss, the magazine's then-editor-in-chief, Finkel was fired from his role as contributing editor. The Times then launched an investigation into all his previous stories. They didn't find any other serious errors, but by then Finkel had secluded himself in his Montana home, unable to work or communicate with friends.
That dark place is where Finkel was when he learned that an accused murderer named Chris Longo had been impersonating him while eluding authorities in Mexico. Longo, a skilled con man, apparently had noticed Finkel's byline and liked the idea of playing the globetrotting reporter.
Though the impersonation incident passed quickly, the sudden pairing of a depressed ex-journalist and a murder suspect offered a dramatic turning point—and an opportunity. After Longo's arrest for allegedly killing his wife and the couple's three children, Finkel initiated an intense phone and mail relationship with the Oregon inmate. He became the only journalist Longo would talk to.
Through their interactions a taut choreography unfolded, and in the book, Longo's story provides a neat parallel to Finkel's fibs. Both admit to a compulsive love of exaggeration, even if the form (and consequences) they took are starkly different. The story is a morality tale with the conventions of a thriller: a man who went too far too fast, learning a lesson as he watches someone else go further faster.
As Longo awaited trial, Finkel began touring publishers to sell the story. It was to be a three-braided affair—Finkel, Longo and the Longo-Finkel relationship. At first, houses jumped. They liked Finkel, and they liked the raw and unlikely power of the relationship. A heated auction brought roughly half a dozen bidders and sent the price well over $300,000, according to someone involved with the negotiations.
But cowed by the rising tag and the prospect that Longo might not even stand trial (robbing the book of its coda), the bidders began to drop out. Hirshey decided to go all in. "This is a story of a publisher taking a chance before all the information was there," said one competing bidder. "It was completely a moving target."
That movement was only beginning.
The Editor's Dilemma
 The journalist Finkel (left) looks for redemption in the story of a killer (Longo, right). |
Early indications suggested that the gamble had paid off. Longo pleaded guilty to two of the murders and stood trial for the other two, offering spellbinding (if likely false) testimony from the witness stand. One could imagine Hirshey's mustache, which tends to jump higher the more excited he gets, a kind of follicular mercury, really starting to move.
Yet as Harper began to get its hands dirty with the manuscript, a serious problem emerged: Finkel had included too much of his own story. Although Hirshey understood that the book was "about the combustion of Longo and Finkel," he wanted to downplay Finkel's own story, especially after the media's pillorying of Jayson Blair for his self-serving Burning Down My Master's House.
And so Harper began a grueling process of cutting, in intense meetings that required two editors, Hirshey and then-executive editor Mark Bryant. Some meetings were even attended, atypically, by Finkel agent Stuart Krichevsky. In the end, "there was a lot of dialing back," according to someone familiar with the edit. The house left in passages that served the theme, but cut much of the Times ins-and-outs. "Obviously, notoriety sells books," says Hirshey, "but that's not where the story is."
Hirshey had another problem: credibility. He liked to give his writers the benefit of the doubt, but he'd been around long enough, as a tabloid sportswriter and as deputy editor of Esquire, to know it wasn't that simple. So he hired an independent fact-checker, Esquire's Kevin McDonald. Even without Finkel's past, McDonald's detective job would be tricky—Longo, after all, was a man prone to endlessly telling new versions of his life. How do you fact-check that? But the verdict allowed Hirshey to exhale. "There were no dead-ends, no impossibilities," McDonald says. A true story appeared ready to be told.
The Longo Way Home
But it turned out that the real puzzle—how to market the book—was still to come. And it was a whopper: No matter how careful the editorial balance, it would be for nought if readers perceived Finkel as a liar not worth their time. One misstep would end the game and Harper's 50,000-copy first-printing gamble. "Our challenge was to move the conversation beyond what happened at the Times," Krichevsky says.
And so a plan was hatched: avoid the Finkel question where possible, confront it where necessary, and use it as a hook where logical.
The house scotched its subtitle, "Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa," because it didn't convey the book's complexity. Instead it printed an involved summary on the front jacket that made it ambiguous whether Finkel had been fired from the Times. But in a blurb on the back jacket—the book's only blurb—New Yorker legal writer Jeffrey Toobin was called in (for his "moral authority," says Hirshey) to confront the Finkel question directly. "Finkel's malfeasance at the New York Times Magazine made him a journalistic pariah," his comment begins, "and I wanted to hate this book."
When it came time to sell serial rights, the house got even bolder. It used the Times incident as bait for those who'd be most interested in a rise-and-fall story of a journalist: other journalists. "The thing about Vanity Fair," explains Harper associate publisher Carrie Kania, "is that it's something everyone in the mediareads."
The biggest dilemma came with TV. There was interest from several networks for prime-time coverage. Most publishers, faced with such a problem, make the call on the basis of ratings—whoever has the highest wins. But this was more delicate. Harper didn't want the biggest audience unless the show would also establish Finkel's trustworthiness. So the house went with 48 Hours, despite comparatively lower ratings, because it promised more airtime and because executive producer Susan Zirinsky has a reputation for rigor. (60 Minutes passed, perhaps unsurprisingly, given its own recent credibility issues.) At press time, sources also said 48 Hourshad landed a phone interview with Longo, taking the focus further off Finkel.
But there are signs that some outlets aren't buying into Harper's strategy. At New York magazine, where Moss is now editor, a source says the magazine will not review the book. (Moss declined to comment for this piece.) There are indications that the Times will focus on Finkel, if it reviews the book at all. (The paper did review Jayson Blair's book in TBR, but unflatteringly.) A skeptical New York Observer piece is said to be imminent.
In the end, the publishing story of Finkel's book could mirror the implicit themes of its pages—the fraught and sometimes unattainable desire for a second chance. Finkel's book tells a splendid story, but when it comes to disgraced journalists, the line between icon and footnote is precariously thin. For every Michael Daly—reborn after disgrace at the Daily News—there's a Stephen Glass. "I'm leaving myself vulnerable to a lot," Finkel concedes in an interview.
Looking back at his misdeed, Finkel says he holds no grudges. "If I were Adam Moss I would have done the same thing. I'd have been even harsher." Back then, Finkel says, he was driving a "runaway truck" of ambition that led to the falsifications.
Yet vestiges of the old bravado remain. True Story is a deeply ambitious work that attempts to re-establish both a career and a person. Finkel, like HarperCollins, is just trying to figure out how hard to step on the gas.
