Q: What was the inspiration for Money Wanders?

ED: Two things collided for me in the mid-1990s. First, in my business, I was dealing with a surge of media-hyped attacks against my clients that were anchored in disinformation. I became obsessed with the destructive power of disinformation and how oblivious the public is to its insidious influence. Second, was my ongoing fascination with the rogues I grew up around in South Jersey, the ones with cool nicknames who talked to each other on the Boardwalk with cigars in their mouths. For Money Wanders, I decided to take some of the wiseguys of my childhood and match them up with the spin-doctors of my adulthood.

Q: Money Wanders’ protagonist Jonah Eastman was raised by his grandfather, an Atlantic City gangster. Should the reader assume this book is somewhat autobiographical?

ED: I’m convinced that every novelist is writing a version of his life story, even if he’s making much of it up. If the writer does his job, the reader will want to believe he’s written his autobiography. There were certain images from my childhood that I did include in the book. For example, Irving Berlin being pushed down the Boardwalk in a rolling chair, and Lucy the Elephant, a giant, steel-plated pachyderm located in Margate that always scared the heck out of me, which I turned into a mob hideout in the book.

For Money Wanders, I took a few hard kernels of truth and fabricated many layers of fantasy around them. In South Jersey, it wasn’t unusual to have a grandparent, an uncle, a family friend, or a neighbor who was tied to the rackets in some way. I was certainly raised around such "colorful personalities." When you’re a little kid it’s hard to tell the difference between a guy who talks tough and a real mobster. To this day, I’m not really sure what some of these men did.

Regardless, I think that the popular culture ascribes talents and powers to them that they never had. They were gamblers, bootleggers and thieves, but not Machiavellian masterminds.

Q: In your novel, you show how easy it is to manipulate the Internet and mass media to alter the news and influence the public perception. Are people really influencing these information sources to the degree you portray?

ED: The amount of media and Internet manipulation that goes on every day is staggering. There’s an old saying in diplomatic circles: In a Third World country, whoever takes over the radio station first is the President. The same is true in modern communication. Whoever gets to the media first with a resonant message, even if it’s untrue, wins. Much of what the public sees and reads is agenda-driven hype issued by businesses, activists, politicians, lawyers, and journalists themselves. In the book, the way I deconstruct how propaganda campaigns work is very realistic. The harm that Jonah wreaks on behalf of the mob with his disinformation campaign is analogous to the way groups that claim to be fighting for the public good can lie, cheat, maim, and ruin, just by shouting the words, "right to know."

Q: Has the real mob ever engaged in spin control?

ED: It has, but on a much cruder level than what’s portrayed in Money Wanders. My favorite example was a Philadelphia wise guy, who, when questioned after his arrest about the large of amount of cash and drugs in his pants pockets said, "These aren’t my pants." Recently, the current mob boss in Philly, Joey Merlino, held a community fundraiser for his legal defense. In the early 1990s, John Gotti orchestrated public protests against his arrest. He also threw big Fourth of July parties for his Queens neighborhood to rally support. In the early ‘70s, Joe Columbo staged a huge march on Columbus Day against prejudice, alleging that government prosecution of the mob was nothing more than an anti-Italian plot. In the 1950s, Frank Costello gave out money to homeless people, although always within camera range. Bugsy Siegel held anti-Nazi fundraisers during the ‘40s. The truth is, most of these guys were killed, deposed or imprisoned, despite the spin. So I’m not convinced that it works.

Q: You’ve said that in Money Wanders, spin governs modern life the same way doublethink ruled in Orwell’s 1984. Would you talk about that comparison?

ED: In Orwell’s 1984, doublethink was a lie that, if repeated enough times, became the truth. It was the control of rhetoric, so that speech that threatened the system would be stopped and only party doctrine would be promoted. Popular culture today is saturated with sanitized rhetoric and imagery. Downsizing is a code word for getting fired. Conflict really means war. Activist groups are guaranteed airtime if they use the code word "carcinogen." Industrial polluters develop soft focus ads featuring little girls with daisies in their hair. At the airport, a brief delay means, "this plane isn’t going anywhere." We have grown so accustomed to lying that we’re not offended by it anymore. It’s as if the public begs to be deceived, provided that it’s done artfully.

Q: What do you see as the advantages and dangers of spin control? How are spin-doctors and mobsters alike?

ED: PR campaigns have been used to achieve positive goals, sell safe products, raise awareness of health issues, elect good leaders, and defend the wrongly accused. The danger arises when a special interest becomes so adept at feeding the media the pre-fabricated stories they thrive on – good guys, bad guys, easy answers – that manufactured news becomes the only reality people know.

A good spin-doctor, like a good mobster, makes his living exploiting human nature as it is, not as people want to it to be. To that end, they both operate in the shadows. Mobsters often plot physical assassinations. Some spin-doctors orchestrate character assassinations, with the intent of ending people’s livelihoods rather than their lives.

Q: You coin a few Information Age terms in the novel. Who are "electric snipers" and "evanjournalists"?

ED: Electric snipers are people who use the Internet to fire disinformation and hate into the culture. They inevitably find others who share their views and generate so much online traffic, that their version of the truth is eventually embraced by the broader culture as solid fact. For example, a few years ago, someone spread a rumor online that the fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger made racist remarks on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Not only did he not make the comments, he never even appeared on Oprah. Since one of Hilfiger’s most lucrative markets is African-Americans, what better way to hurt him than to allege that he had betrayed this particular audience?

An evanjournalist is a reporter who combines evangelism and journalism to crucify or deify a target based on his own agenda, either for ideological or career advancement reasons. Because ego is involved, evanjournalists are very susceptible to disinformation and fraudulent sources.

Q: Is there any way for the public to protect themselves from these disinformation campaigns?

ED: It’s said that the public has become too cynical, too skeptical. I think that the public isn’t skeptical enough. We know that politicians lie, businessmen steal, and aging athletes get away with murder. Yet we still believe that the world is run by a set cast of characters; that anybody who claims to be trying to help us is worthy of our trust. If we hear, say, that apples cause cancer, maybe we should be questioning if the orange growers want us to believe this, so we’ll buy more of their produce. Maybe a reporter wants apples to cause cancer in order to win a Pulitzer. Maybe there’s a lawyer out there looking to sue the apple growers, but he needs to get a good rumor going to poison the jury pool. So the best self-protection mechanism against disinformation is skepticism.

Q: You are known in the national media for your expertise on Internet-generated attacks or "flaming." Tell us about one of your experiences.

ED: The proliferation of media and the Internet have become catalysts in what is known as viral marketing, using word of mouth to either promote or attack a product or a person. In one case, we had a client that made a very popular consumer product. A rumor started on the Internet that the product was poisoning people. Thousands of emails were shooting into newsrooms all over the country and the media began to report on the product’s hazards. We brought in a computer forensics team to analyze the emails, eventually tracing them back to one person who worked for a competing company. Ultimately, this flaming campaign was exposed as a hoax.

The oddest thing about flaming is that cyber attackers deeply resent getting caught. People believe that destroying somebody they don’t like is a right guaranteed them by the Constitution. I think that people must be confusing the First Amendment with a hunting license; just because you’re free to speak doesn’t mean that you are free to destroy someone or something with words.

Q: What’s the relationship between the Internet and the regular news media?

ED: It is both symbiotic and competitive. The Internet and the media feed on each other in a very fast, never-ending cycle, so that the public doesn’t know where the news begins and ends. Reporters used to serve as watchdogs of truth. The speed of the Internet has made this harder. Now, it seems that the object of modern journalism is to get the story first, not get it right. The news media is so desperate to deliver the types of stories that the public wants that they are not as critical as they should be about what they pull from cyberspace. Much of the vicious coverage about Richard Jewell, the Atlanta Olympics bombing suspect who was later vindicated, was spread over the Internet. Unfortunately, we just accept propaganda, assuming that, if it’s online, in the newspaper, or on TV, it has been vetted for accuracy.

Q: How is the Internet democratizing society?

ED: The Internet makes anybody with a modem a reporter, anybody with a grievance an expert, and anybody with a video chip, a celebrity. There are no referees, no screeners, as there are with traditional media. The Internet has equalized power, so that the little guy can take a whack at the big guy more easily. Some of this is good, but I take the unpopular position that the little guy isn’t necessarily such a sweetheart and shouldn’t always be embraced as being virtuous.

Q: You make a distinction between racketeers and gangsters. Would you explain the difference?

ED: A racketeer is a criminal entrepreneur. It’s about money; about making your living illegally. Gangsters, on the other hand, are about the social unit. They’re about getting served fast in a restaurant, avenging insults, hanging out with the boys. On the popular cable TV show, Tony Soprano is a racketeer. His nephew, Christopher, is a gangster. Tony will kill you if he has to; Christopher will kill you because he wants to. That’s what I see as the difference.