Fredric Dannen is a journalist and author who writes about crime, legal affairs, culture and business.
In 1990, Hit Men, his book about the American music industry and the influence of organized crime, spent a month on the New York Times bestseller list. Billboard awarded it second place in its 2016 list of “The 100 Greatest Music Books of All Time.”
Dannen became a staff writer for Vanity Fair in 1990, and developed a reputation for securing interviews with elusive subjects, including crime boss Lorenzo Nichols, the crack kingpin of New York City; Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates, on the heels of the infamous Rodney King beating; Michèle Duvalier, Haiti’s former First Lady, who had settled in Paris with her embezzled millions; and Colombo crime family caporegime Michael Franzese, the so-called “Yuppie Don.”
Dannen’s final Vanity Fair article, “How Terrible Is Ivan?,” concerned the case of Cleveland auto worker John Demjanjuk, who was extradited to Israel and convicted and sentenced to hang as the Nazi war-criminal “Ivan the Terrible.” His article was the direct catalyst for the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals to reopen the Demjanjuk case sua sponte and reverse the order of extradition, on findings that the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations had committed fraud on the court by withholding evidence. “How Terrible Is Ivan?” was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing.
In 1992, when Vanity Fair chief editor Tina Brown was appointed chief editor of The New Yorker, she took only a handful of VF writers with her; Dannen was one of them. His first New Yorker article, “Revenge of the Green Dragons,” about an Asian youth gang in Queens, New York, became a feature film co-produced by Martin Scorsese.
Meanwhile, Dannen developed a highly regarded seminar on interviewing for print, which by invitation he gave to the editorial staff of the Baltimore Sun, and at Columbia Journalism School, among other places.
In 1998, Dannen temporarily relocated to Texas to conduct research on a possible wrongful execution and three possible wrongful life sentences, all resulting from alleged rogue law enforcement. In due course, Dannen uncovered lost biological evidence in the case of Calvin Washington, then serving a life sentence for homicide, and arranged for DNA testing. Washington’s conviction was reversed and he was set free with a full pardon.
Dannen was lured back into magazine journalism in 2020 by Billboard, with an offer to report and write investigative features. His first effort was an in-depth profile of Madison Square Garden CEO James Dolan, which Billboard’s editorial director deemed “surely the best article this magazine has published in its 125-year history.” ♦