Dave Copeland
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Dave Copeland (born March 10, 1973 in Malden, Mass.) is an American author and the first journalist to gain inside access to the Israeli Mafia, which operated in New York City in the 1980's. He is the author of Blood & Volume: Inside New York's Israeli Mafia, as well as hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles.
Copeland writes nonfiction in a narrative style, thoroughly reporting his subject and digging out details that make his long-form nonfiction read like fiction. He is a 2006 graduate of Goucher College's MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing Program and a 1996 graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
[edit] Early career
Copeland was raised in Melrose, MA and in his early teens published Pinfall, which covered sports and sports entertainment. In college Copeland developed his writing voice, becoming a controversial columnist for the The Daily Collegian. He worked briefly as a sports writer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette but then settled into political and business coverage in his first job out of college as a weekly newspaper reporter at MPG Newspapers in Plymouth, Mass.
After a brief stint at the Rutland (Vermont) Herald in late 1998, Copeland became a National Copy Reader at the Dow Jones News Service in 1999. Copeland spent nine months at Dow Jones in Jersey City, NJ before being recruited by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review to become the paper's economic development reporter.
Copeland broke several significant stories at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review but frequently clashed with management and was eventually reassigned from city hall coverage to the paper's business desk. Since leaving the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in 2004, Copeland has been outspoken about his time spent there, penning a 2005 article for the Pittsburgh City Paper in which he bashed the paper's management and the direction of the paper under its owner and publisher, the conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.
In 2002 Copeland began blogging as an outlet from what he felt were the restrictive style rules placed on newspaper reporters. Copeland credits the blog with helping him further hone his voice and begin exploring career options for a life after newspapers. In the ensuing years the blog's focus has shifted and garnered a regular readership of approximately 200 unique visitors per day. The blog is currently available at [http://www.davecopeland.com/index.php/blog ]
Copeland won several awards at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Most notably, in 2004 he was one of three American journalists to receive the Ruhr Grant. Copeland joined reporters from BBC-America and The New York Times Magazine for a six-week fellowship in the Ruhr Region of Germany.
[edit] Blood & Volume
Copeland left the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in July 2004 to enroll in Goucher and soon stumbled on a Craigslist ad from a woman who said that she and her husband were living in the federal witness protection program and looking for a writer to tell their story to.
Copeland was soon in contact with Honey Tesman and her husband, Ron Gonen. Through Gonen Copeland learned about the Israeli Mafia, a vicious drug cartel that operated in New York City during the 1980's. While the gang was brutal, few writers had written about the Israeli Mafia, which engaged in drug smuggling, contract murder, loan sharking and extortion. The gang is also credited with being behind the largest gold heist in the history of New York's Diamond District.
Copeland spent two years tracking down documents to verify Gonen's account of the gang's activities. The book is scheduled to be released by Barricade Books in March 2007.
Noah Forrest, a documentary filmmaker, has begun work on a film chronicling the process of releasing a book and is using Copeland as his primary source. The publicity, however, has had consequences: in February 2007 Gonen was terminated from the Witness Protection Program and now faces deportation back to Israel, where many of the men he testified against in the 1990's are believed to be major figures in Tel Aviv's criminal underworld.
