The MythMakers is a series of novels about the greatest white-collar crime in US history. This is a sample of the writing. Visit www.themythmakers.com

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PREFACE
OR A FLEETING moment in time, nestled between the dream of world peace and the
nightmare of nuclear destruction, the kingdom of Camelot flourished in America. It was an
enchanted age of innocence and idealism, grace and good will, romance and rapture. Lionhearted
men embraced lofty ideals, dreamt magnificent dreams, and sowed the seeds of great expectations
in the hearts and minds of The Affluent Society. People believed in the American dream and stood
united behind their leaders, energized by the promise of The Great Society and the challenges of
The New Frontier.
The stirring words of a courageous American pioneer who made an historic journey to the
new frontier inspired us all. . . .
“Houston . . . Tranquility Base here.
The Eagle has landed.”
In one of mankind’s greatest achievements, American astronauts landed on the Moon on
July 20, 1969. America had won the Cold War race to conquer space, and the Star-Spangled
Banner stood proudly on the surface of the Moon. Man had taken his first steps on a distant,
celestial body, and a giant leap forward in his quest to explore the mysteries of the universe.
At home, however, the golden promise of Camelot had been broken. A deep-rooted
maelstrom of socio-political upheaval was sweeping the nation. Powerful forces were at work
transforming America, and young people were rebelling with a passionate hue-and-cry for change.
They were rising against the Establishment, rejecting its values, and breaking away from the
conservative traditions and social conformity of the postwar 1950s.
A new order of social, political, and economic reality was dawning. The convergence and
clash of new realities had brought about sweeping cultural shifts. A national tapestry of idealistic
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purpose, pride, and patriotism was unraveling into a tangled heap of blighted hopes and bitter
disappointments.
*
APOLLO 11 LUNAR LANDING MODULE – THE EAGLE
“THE EAGLE HAS LANDED!”
On July 20, 1969, in one of mankind’s greatest achievements,
three American astronauts journeyed to the Moon,
and Man took his first, extraterrestrial steps on another celestial body.
PLATE – 11 SOURCE: COURTESY OF JPL/NASA

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Astronaut Buzz Aldrin unloads experiment equipment pack from Lunar Module, “Spider”
Two linchpin events polarized the nation and ignited the generational revolution: the
presidential mandate to enforce civil rights, and the escalation of the unpopular war in Southeast
Asia.
America plunged into one of its darkest hours. In the wake of the conspiracy-cloaked
assassinations of political leaders and ideological champions, the American dream ended and the
nightmare began. Turmoil, doubt, and disorder gripped the nation. Unprecedented insurrection
exploded in streets and college campuses all across America. Antiwar activists, freedom marchers,
and militant students rose against the old order and stormed the gates of the Establishment. Their
violent clashes with police and the National Guard escalated into a national crisis that cost
hundreds of lives and decimated neighborhoods and cities all across the country.
Disenchanted Hippies, Yippies, and Flower Children turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.
Acid rock, communal living, free love, and psychedelic drugs disenfranchised a growing
counterculture from straight society. Democracy itself went on trial, branded by the shame of a
senseless war, racial segregation, oppression of women, and infamous assassinations and murders.
Many Americans believed our country had lost its way and was on a path to self-
destruction. The movement proclaiming God was dead made the cover of Time magazine, and
every cherished institution in the nation came under attack. From the puritanical orthodoxy of
premarital chastity to the import of the nuclear family . . . From the relevance of the Protestant
work ethic to the questionable values of a corporate culture dedicated to profit . . . From the
filibuster of civil rights to the morality of war . . . From the personal integrity of the president of
the United States to the very existence of God.
Nothing was sacred anymore. Everything was fair game. The winds of change were razing

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all vestiges of the old order and ushering in a new, iconoclastic youth culture.
Norman Rockwell’s America was no more.
*
The Sixties were a watershed moment in the history of America. No one who lived through
the tumultuous decade will ever forget it. It was one of the most tempestuous passages of
dissension and disunity in the contemporary American experience.
In a star-crossed crusade to change the world and make it better, young people rose against
the bastions of the Establishment. What started out as an idealistic quest for a new, utopian world
of peace, love, and fellowship led to protest marches, riots, and bloodshed in the streets. The era
was a seminal turning point—a fateful crossroad where liberalism collided with conservatism,
triggering the volcanic Cultural Revolution that spawned the drugs-sex-and-rock-‘n’-roll
counterculture. The unprecedented uprisings of The Sixties transformed the ideals and values of
America more profoundly than any other event of the 20th
Century.
*
Corporate America, like every other facet of American culture, was charged with the
turbulent, restless energy of the time. It mirrored the whimsy and volatility of the social upheavals
sweeping the land. The Whiz Kids, a new breed of technocratic gunslingers, had arrived on the
scene. They were young, ambitious, brash, and brilliant. Armed with MBAs and brazen chutzpah,
they traded in their slide rules for the latest computers, and their off-the-rack gray flannel suits for
custom-tailored black gabardines. Then they blitzed the traditional corporate establishment with

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an unstoppable fury.
Scoffing at the Marquis of Queensberry rules, the young rogues embarked on
unprecedented crusades of rapacious, corporate expansionism, hell-bent on achieving power and
wealth quickly. Their cutthroat, acquisition campaigns targeted undervalued companies, which
they ruthlessly butchered for prime cuts and then liquidated the odds and ends to turn a quick
profit.
Their piratical strategy was simple and brutal: build mass and clout through wholesale
corporate acquisitions; bolster purchasing power through highly-leveraged stock prices; pump up
stock prices through well-engineered, compounded, commingled earnings; fuel positive market
momentum with continuing good-news PR campaigns; maximize profits through creative
accounting and aggressive use of computers.
With imagination and boldness, the colorful, modern-day pirates used the highly leveraged
stock of their conglomerates to acquire undervalued companies. As long as an acquisition target’s
earnings exceeded the cost of the loan to acquire it; or the price/earnings ratio of its stock was less
than that of the conglomerateurs’ stock, they acquired it. They systematically racked up one
acquisition after another, forging billion-dollar, synergistically integrated concept conglomerates
overnight.
The die for a new order of predatory enterprise, which derived its profits from corporate
piracy and the sale of intangible products, had been cast.
The new generation of flamboyant, corporate bad boys sparked the public’s imagination
and ignited the national greed. Their highly publicized corporate shootouts, wildcat mergers and
acquisitions, and innovative investment offerings unleashed a speculation frenzy. The
Establishment voices rose loudly against the maverick newcomers, denouncing their enterprises

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as flashes in the pan, and vilifying their business tactics as reckless, slipshod, and haphazard.
The criticisms and name-calling, however, fell on deaf ears. The explosive growth, thriving
bottom lines, and soaring stock prices of the new corporate juggernauts spoke louder than all
insults and condemnations.
People quickly became disenchanted with the conservative, slow-and-steady gains of
traditional enterprise. No one could resist the powerful allure of the new, corporate gold rush.
Everyone investing in the new conglomerates seemed to strike it rich overnight. Visions of instant
wealth kept investors on their phones pleading with their brokers to get them a piece of the latest
investment offering. Subscriptions to new issues were doled out as special favors, because
offerings were oversubscribed within days of their release—often before they were released. The
dazzling investments promised quick, easy profits, plus two bonus kickers: First, they finessed
their way through every loophole in the Internal Revenue Code to cancel the income taxes on all
gains generated by the investment; second—in the case of Tax Shelters—they generated additional
“paper losses” to provide investors with additional deductions they could use to offset income
taxes on other earnings and windfalls. Between investment income, leveraged tax savings, capital
gains, and income deferrals, investors in the top income brackets could generate gains of 500
percent or more.
The public’s intoxication with dreams of instant prosperity spiraled to a fevered pitch. The
concept conglomerates ruled, and no one cared that their business was intangible services; their
game, grand manipulation; and their specialty, high-leverage, brute corporate growth and quick
paper profits. As long as the profits kept rolling in, and stock prices kept climbing, everyone was
on board.
In a few ticks of the ticker tape, the traditional, fruit-bearing integrity that had been the

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mainstay of American business for more than a century went bust.
The synergistically integrated concept conglomerate was now the new star of the Wall
Street cavalcade. In no time at all, it captured center stage and rose to the pinnacle of financial
power. Concept conglomerates were the new cult of the Street, and everyone worshipped at their
altars. Their corporate high priests commanded astronomical salaries and received more media
adulation than the reigning Hollywood luminaries. The legendary exploits of Bernie Cornfeld,
Bobby Vesco, Billie Sol Estes, John M. King, Stanley Goldblum, Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka,
Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, and Ben Heller kept Dow Jones, AP, UPI, and Reuters buzzing
24 hours a day, reporting the latest scoop from the corporate battlefronts.
Wild rumors, feverish excitement, and rampant speculation whipped the raging bull market
into a frenzy. The onslaught of frenetic stock trading overwhelmed brokerage houses and jammed
the computers of the New York Stock Exchange. The Dow Jones soared to dizzying new highs.
Greed had become a virtue.
The point is, ladies and gentlemen,
that greed—for lack of a better word—is good.
Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies,
cuts through, and captures the essence
of the evolutionary spirit.
Greed, in all of its forms—greed for life,
for money, for love, knowledge—
has marked the upward surge of mankind.
— Gordon Gekko, Wall Street, 1987

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INTRODUCTION
THE MYTHMAKERS SERIES©
HE MYTHMAKERS SERIES©
is a no-holds-barred, full-throttle account of an epic criminal
odyssey inspired by the greatest white-collar crime in U.S. history. The five-novel series--
which took more than twenty-five years to write, brings to life the fascinating gallery of marauding
young rogues who electrified Wall Street in the Sixties and Seventies with their unstoppable,
synergistically integrated concept conglomerates.
The audacious, piratical enterprises razed the traditional, fruit-bearing companies which
had been the mainstay of America’s industry for more than a century, and replaced them with
corporate juggernauts that specialized in the fabrication of paper profits, instead of actual products.
LEVERAGE was their battle cry—a hawkish instant-profit imperative that spawned a new age of
swashbuckling mergers, acquisitions, leveraged buyouts (LBOs), hostile takeovers, greenmail, and
myriad financial sharp practices.
The paradigm shift—from the Industrial Revolution’s traditional, production-line
mentality, steeped in the manufacture of tangible goods to the Digital Revolution that brought
about computers and the fabrication of intangible (virtual) products and services—sowed fertile
ground for widespread business manipulation, deception, and grand-scale white-collar crime in
America.
Through the skillful narrative of an insider who survived a catastrophic career
miscalculation that landed him in the eye of the storm of the most infamous Digital-Age, business
embezzlement ever, the reader will experience life aboard a supercharged, go-go, corporate man-
o’-war of the Sixties and Seventies—Security Assurance Corporation.
Amidst fierce competition, interchangeable allegiances, and violent turf wars, Team
SEACOR goes all out to achieve their grand design. Schemes, stratagems, fraud, plots,
counterplots, power plays, mahogany-row shootouts, vicious boardroom confrontations, dirty
tricks, duplicity, subterfuge, treachery, blackmail, deadly intrigue, and even murder become the
order of the day, as the executive factions battle each other, competitors, corporate raiders, money
lenders, drug cartels, gangsters, ex-employees, auditors, regulators, law enforcement, wives,
mistresses, girlfriends, and a growing host of enemies determined to take their money, or take them
down.
As they scramble to regain the ground they’re losing to a recessive economy and volatile
bear market, they resort to increasingly crooked and desperate measures to satisfy the CEO’s profit
demands meet Wall Street’s expectations, sustain their luxurious lifestyles—and win the bottom-
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line race that will score the victor a presidential corner office and ultimate power.
True to their pirate code, Team SEACOR’s pack of cutthroat, young marauders embark on
ruthless campaigns to systematically pillage and plunder the Establishment. Ruled by fear,
energized by greed, and galvanized into common purpose by their insatiable lust for power, money,
sex, and compulsion to succeed at any cost and by any means, they unleash an unprecedented
scourge of corruption, lawlessness, and mind-boggling white-collar crimes unsurpassed in the
annals of American business.
THE MYTHMAKERS provides a visceral, insider’s view into the underbelly of corporate
corruption. Through the discerning eyes of key insiders—and the dramatic filter of fiction—the
novels present an unexpurgated anatomy of a colossal crime, exposing in never-before-seen detail
the arcane world of white-collar mega-crimes.
The author painstakingly reveals how some of the most ingenious and shocking business
crimes ever perpetrated were conceived, executed, and pulled off. The clever schemes are
described in topographical detail so readers can understand how and why these enormous swindles
fooled everyone—and enabled the perpetrators to fool everyone and steal billions of dollars.
THE MYTHMAKERS does what no other work on white-collar crime has done before: It
delves deep into the human drama that rages behind the scenes of a monumental fraud. The story
presents an intimate portrait of men and women consumed by power, greed, hubris, lust, envy,
rage—and explores the tempestuous passions and compulsions that drive them to commit
outrageous crimes in a desperate race to build an empire on a foundation of rampant corruption.
The MythMakers can be observed—as never before—in their natural habitats: opulent
mansions, sumptuous offices, cathedral-like boardrooms, extravagant dinner parties, fractious
bedrooms, and outrageous sex, drugs, rock-‘n-roll, and fraud orgies.
The reader can watch their every move, listen to their private conversations, sit in on their
closed meetings, learn their darkest secrets, witness their fierce power struggles, spy on their most
intimate encounters, and accompany them on ruthless campaigns to sack investors, banks,
competitors, and everyone who crosses their path.
The saga of THE MYTHMAKERS takes place in the Sixties; but the drama of men, money, and
madness is timeless—and as current as today’s headlines. Stripped of their Fifth Amendment Rights, the
audacious Mythmakers must answer the questions everyone asks after a shocking white-collar crime
scandal explodes in the news. . . .
How could this happen? . . . Who are these people? . . .
Why did they do this? . . . How did they do it? . . .
Where did all the money go?