"This memoir is the story of how curiosity led me to investigate some of the greatest political mysteries of our time, including the JFK assassination in Dallas, the Vatican banking scandal in Rome and the diamond cartel in South Africa. To learn about them, I often found myself a fly-on-the-wall at the highest reaches of the establishment where I saw how presidents, tycoons, bankers and media moguls secretly greased the wheels of power. Some accuse me of being a conspiracist, but that is not correct. I am essentially a puzzle solver. Instead of accepting the received wisdom of the media, I search for a puzzle's missing pieces, such as the autopsy photographs of President John F. Kennedy that were kept from the investigation conducted by the Warren Commission Finding suppressed or overlooked evidence often has the result of overturning the established narrative, as happened when I published my book Inquest on the Commission, but that is very different from seeking a conspiracy. Sometimes, it is true. my work results in uncovering a deep conspiracy, as happened in my investigation of the world diamond cartel; other times, however, it results in discrediting belief in a conspiracy, as happened in my investigation of the murders of numerous Black Panthers (which caused the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and other newspapers, whose reporting had suggested the existence of an FBI conspiracy, to issue editorial apologies following the publication of my investigation in The New Yorker.) My prime interest has always been in finding gaps in the conventional wisdom about an event. How I came to be a pursuer of lost truths is a curious story of self-actualization"--

DANNY SCHECHTER, "The News Dissector" has spent decades as a truth teller in the media, with leading media companies and as an independent filmmaker with the award-winning independent company Globalvision. A graduate of Cornell and the London School of Economics, Schechter was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a multiple Emmy Award winner at ABC News, where he was among the first to cover the S&L crisis. In 2007, his film IN DEBT WE TRUST was the first to expose Wall Street's connection to subprime loans, predicting the economic crisis that this book investigates. Schechter is a blogger, editor of Mediachannel.org, and author of nine books. He has reported from 53 countries, and lives in Gotham. He owns no derivatives or tranches.