For the great bulk of people, there was an inability to get their mind around how bad this person is, because he was occupying an office that we endow with all kinds of dignity and importance. The extraordinary thing was how quickly his extreme behaviour was normalised?
But something I was seeing was reminding me of scenes from my prosecutorial life. Yes, I saw it so early that I resisted that sense to begin with. In particular in the demand for loyalty above truth… You wrote in your memoir, A Higher Loyalty, of your immediate sense that President Trump shared characteristics with some of those mafia mob bosses you had prosecuted. I’m going to write novels until I’m old and foolish, and also try to be the world’s greatest grandfather I went home and called my girlfriend, now my wife, and said: I figured out what I want to do. And I thought: here’s a way of some of the biggest bullies in the world. It was like being struck by proverbial lightning sitting there in that old federal courtroom. When they didn’t know something, they said they didn’t know it.
As I watched the young prosecutors in court, I was struck by how they stood up straight. My life changed when I watched the bail hearing for the mafia boss “Fat Tony” Salerno and his co-defendant Vincent “the fish” Cafaro. The book also draws on your experience of prosecuting New York crime families. That made it easy to make Nora, the protagonist in my book, a woman, and to picture her in those places. But here’s the thing that made it both slightly strange and wonderful for me: when I was writing this, my oldest daughter was the chief of the violence and organised crime unit in Manhattan, and she was also literally standing in courtroom 318, prosecuting Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator. I could picture myself in courtroom 318, where a lot of the action in the book takes place. I enjoyed travelling back in my mind to those places. There must have been an element of nostalgia in locating this novel in the New York law courts where you once worked? Even as a kid, I was always someone who would try to remember details so I could go home and tell my family the story at our dinner table. I think that good journalists and good lawyers think and communicate in stories. Do investigators and writers share an eye for detail?
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