Suspense novelist tells how housewives helped him unearth a Senator's CIA-related investment

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) July 2, 2009 -- A well-regarded U.S. senator, once a Kennedy Administration cabinet member, held a $20,000 secret investment in a CIA-occupied building in Arlington, VA, across the Potomac River from Washington.
Now David Rothman, whose journalistic digging uncovered the hidden stake, is out with a suspense novel inspired by the apparent illegality. "The Solomon Scandals" also fictionalizes a deadly building collapse that killed 14 people.

Rothman's novel is a city-room tale as well, and discussing it he says: "Journalism is too important to be left just to the pros--however useful they can be.
"Citizen activists were a godsend when I was investigating the government office leasing program," said the author, based in Alexandria, Virginia. "I was a freelance reporter, and among my allies were housewives in the environmental movement. Boy, did they know their way around the local courthouses.
"So I'm delighted when news organizations encourage citizens to aid their investigations. In Florida, for example, retired engineers and accountants helped a Gannett newspaper determine why sewer hookups cost so much.

"We need all kinds of models out there--traditional investigative journalism, the pure citizens kind and mixes of the two. The idea shouldn't be to replace pros with amateurs but rather to tap people's specialized knowledge. There's enough corruption to keep everyone busy."
Rothman's own inquiries into federal leasing practices led to stories on the NBC Nightly News and in the New Republic by James Polk, a Pulitzer Prize winner for Watergate reporting for the old Washington Star. Rothman broke the news about the senator, the late Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT), via States News Service, no longer in operation. Ribicoff earlier had served as governor of Connecticut and as President John F. Kennedy's secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.

In Rothman's debut novel, an investigative journalist not only must deal with a President's past secret investment in a CIA-occupied building but also with a threatened collapse at the same complex.
"Vulture's Point, Sy's building, is fictitious just like Solomon himself. But the inspiration was the Skyline high-rise collapse in Northern Virginia in 1973 where 14 workers died in a construction accident. Today debates rage on about the causes of Skyline and who was responsible--I won't take sides. For Scandals, I relocated my building to a riverside location near a fictitious sewage plant and consulted with two construction experts to create a collapse risk while the high-rise was occupied.

"The actual Skyline collapse didn't involve GSA, but in real life, under the Bush Administration, the agency made headlines by coming out against greater safety precautions in high-rises in the wake of 9/11."
( http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/08/washington/08codes.html )

The Solomon Scandals by David Rothman. Media review copies, book cover photo and author available for interview.

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